Language of Love with Dr. Laura Berman - Martha Beck and the Way of Integrity

Episode Date: May 26, 2021

On today's episode of the "Language of Love," Dr. Berman sits down with the acclaimed author, coach, and speaker Martha Beck. Known as "Oprah's life coach," Beck's thought-provoking wisdom has helped thousands of people learn how to lean into their self-worth and carve out a life that is meaningful and joy-inducing.  Martha Beck (who authored "The Way of Integrity" and "Finding Your Own North Star") is one of Dr. Berman's personal favorites. On this episode, Beck talks to Dr. Berman about how to "get into integrity," and what integrity means when it comes to love, sex, and relationships.  Beck also talks with Dr. Berman about the Dark Wood of Error, which is a place many of us might be right now, without even realizing it. How can you tell when you are in the Dark Wood of Error, and how can you get out of it?  Listen in to find out what Martha Beck has to say and how her wisdom can help you to fulfill your life's purpose and find the love you deserve.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, I'm Dr. Laura Berman, a sex and relationship therapist. And for the past three decades, I've been helping people learn how to love and be loved better. That's what we're doing here on The Language of Love, where I get to answer calls and emails from people just like you. My goal with The Language of Love is to help you discover more meaningful emotional and physical intimacy and to help you build more awareness of how precious and sacred your sexuality really is. Be sure to email me or reach out with your very own love-sex relationship questions, and I might just answer them live on the air. It's time we all become fluent in the language of love. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the Language of Love. I'm really excited about our guest for this

episode. Martha Beck is with us. She's a Harvard-trained sociologist and a world-renowned life coach, New York Times bestselling author, author of, I believe, nine books, right, Martha? I think so. Yeah, nine books. You're like me. I don't know how many books I've written either. Yeah. I love how you describe yourself on Instagram as a pajama enthusiast because I'm one too. Oh, yeah. Oh, I changed out. I was wearing pajama bottoms. I am. I'm wearing pajama bottoms right now.

Really? I should run and change. It's so much more fun that way. It's been a while since we talked, but I share this one story. I know I've told you this before, but I remember when I was, I guess it was not long after my mom had passed away and I had been in a really dark night of the soul. And I was sort of slowly coming out of it and connecting to something that wanted to be created, which ultimately became my book, Quantum Love. And you and I talked and you were so generous with your time and you talked to me several times. And I remember you saying to me, which I've never forgotten and I've done ever since and

I'm doing again now or starting to now that I can start to breathe again, is you said just because I was really overwhelmed and it was this really, you know, when you're first starting to create, I don't know if I think it happens to everyone. There's just sort of it's very abstract and, you know, it's like it's it's not tangible and it's hard to kind of, and you said, just write one true thing a day. And I, that totally, that felt so manageable and so spot on. And that is really what led me to start writing and again, and write Quantum Love, which is. Yeah, how fun, I did not know that. I'm so honored. It is. And I think I even put that in the, you know, in the acknowledgements in Quantum Love.

that you had said that to me, because that really got me started. And I feel a lot of gratitude. I'm so excited to talk about your new book, which, of course, immediately hit the New York Times bestseller list, The Way of Integrity, Finding Your Path to Your True Self, right? Is that the subtitle? And, you know, you've talked about integrity for years, I know. For years, I've been obsessed with it. Yes. And so let's just start with the definition as you define it. What is integrity? Yeah, most people, it's kind of like, oh, do you have integrity? It's a little bit of a politicized or religious word, but it actually comes from the Latin integer, which just means

one thing whole and undivided. So when you are your whole self, your true self and nothing but yourself, you are in integrity. But if you betray yourself and like split off to please someone else. You're not in integrity. You're in duplicity. You're two things, not one. And an airplane that's not in structural integrity cannot fly. And that's how our lives work. Oh, and I just learned from a minister that the word shalom, if you look at the root of it, actually means inner wholeness. It's not an external piece. It's being able to find this unshakable piece within oneself. And that is exactly, I could have called it the way of shalom, but I didn't know that. And it also, you know, it gels with the more political or social terms about integrity.

But I think what's really powerful about this idea, and we'll talk about this, obviously, we'll get into this, is that there's so many ways in which we have no idea we're not in integrity. And those of us, like myself, who are codependent, or in my case, recovering codependence, every single day is a struggle to stay wholly in yourself, not giving your truth away, not pleasing everybody else. by not speaking your truth at best or kind of giving away your truth. Or trying to control someone so that their lives will be better.

Give them enough advice that they'll feel happy finally. And I love how you structured the book around the four stages that Dante talks about in the Divine Comedy. I mean, only you would do that. I read the Divine Comedy at 18 as a self-help book because I was just like, help, help. and it worked a thousand years later. I'm like, I'm going to write this up for other people. Yeah. Yeah. And you did, and you divided into the same four stages, right? So there's the dark wood of error, the inferno, purgatory, and paradise. So I thought we could sort of follow the same

structure because this is the way of integrity is a process, right? And so let's start with the first one, the dark wood of error, right? That's where we're, that's what we might, I would call an AFGE, another fucking growth experience. You know, these dark nights of the soul. Yeah. And some of us have had a lot more than others. I've had a big, big old, I don't even feel like I can call it an AFGE. It was so huge, but all of us have these dark nights of the soul in these dark times. So explain what the symptoms are for folks. But before we do that, I just want to take a little segue here and talk about an important issue that I find really affects women's lives and the people who love them. And it's something not talked about nearly enough. Millions

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American person or you know anybody any alive today I think is often in the dark wood of error we don't know how we got here we don't know where we're going we don't particularly like it and we don't understand how to get out there are six things that people come to me with that typify like if you're lost in this place in your mind and by the way I think Dante was writing completely about a psychological journey I think he roamed the map from being lost to being enlightened essentially. So the six things that I've noticed is first, overwhelmingly, there's a loss of a sense of purpose. And you wouldn't think that would be the most painful thing to people. But it absolutely is. I mean, Viktor Frankl talked in Man's Search for Meaning about if you have

someone to love or something meaningful to do, that's what keeps you alive through hell, you know. So people feel like they don't know their purpose. And it's a sharp pain. And yet the culture doesn't have like a, there's no purpose coach, but they just feel like we're all going to die. Life is suffering. Why should I stick around? There's that. And then the next thing is bad moods, some variety of mad, sad, or scared. They're either irritable or anxious or depressed or whatever. Third thing is physical symptoms. When we're not being true to ourselves, when we even tell the slightest little lie, like saying I'm fine when I'm not, our entire bodies react so like drastically, our immune system drops, our muscle strength drops, everything. The body hates

to lie. And so if you're say going to a job you don't love and pretending you like it, you will start to get sick if you keep at it long enough. Or you must, you might just go into the next symptom, which is, you know, over and over failing at something you want to achieve in your career, or number five, relationships breakdown, which is where your work comes in. You have to be in integrity for the relationship to really work. And finally, some people form a kind of addiction to something. It could be an actual drug addiction, or it could be addiction to online shopping or whatever, but it's something that you go to to bear this burden because you don't know your way out. And I love, you know, I talk a lot, especially as I've been going through

this, this, uh, dark night of the soul, you know, when I've been here before, never as deeply and widely as I've been since losing my son. Um, you know, this whole idea of dis ease, right. Disease coming from not being in integrity with what you're feeling, trying to push through it or distract from it or not honor it or whatever. Um, so that you don't have to feel it. Uh, because it's so freaking huge for a lot of us. And I think that's why many of us maybe get stuck in this dark woods is because we, we stay with those dysfunctional coping mechanisms until everything breaks down enough that you kind of, I guess, move on to the next thing. But before we do that, you touch on the role of kind of teachers, of soul teachers and how they can help us identify

when we're in the dark woods will you talk about that for a minute how to recognize one what are they you know um if you look at dante as a typical example of a hero's saga joseph campbell the anthropologist described the stages of a hero's saga and the first thing that happens to the hero is that he or she is pulled into an experience that they don't want right and are confused and troubled and then the student is ready because there is a desperate need to find the way out and And then in the typical hero saga from around the planet, a teacher appears. And in Dante's case, it's in the Divine Comedy, it's the ghost of the poet Virgil. But of course, he never met Virgil.

He read Virgil. So often a teacher will come for me in the form of a book. So many of my teachers, my soul teachers have been books. And then there are other soul teachers like you show up in someone's life when they need help with their love life. they may come to me when they're struggling with something else so we hope to make ourselves available as soul teachers sometimes and it's interesting when you can feel I don't know if you've had this experience but there are times when you're working with someone and you can feel

that there is a profound teaching coming through you that is not coming from you and I was talking to Oprah about the feeling when something comes through and lands for someone and this this kind of that you get and it's really that's kind of addictive in a positive way I have to pray. So yeah, you start looking for that person, that book, that idea, that movie, that thing online. I mean, when you're primed and asking, teachers do appear and they are teachers of the soul. And they will always tell you something you really don't want to hear, which is the only way out of the dark wood of error is to go through the inferno, to go through the gates of hell and down which seems like the worst possible the opposite of what you

want to do right exactly virgil takes dante to a gate that says abandon all hope ye who enter here he's like let's go and donna's like what it literally he pats him on the hand and says you'll understand later let's go in yeah um which is what's happening to you i'm sure oh yeah pulled into hell and as you say you can't you can't keep running from it um people do they can stay if they've suffered a huge loss you could just start drinking heavily and do it for the rest of your life you know and be in the dark wood of error you'll never climb out of the dark wood of error with any of the coping mechanisms you have to feel you have to let the horrible experience land. Yeah. And I've noticed that also is just like thousands and thousands and

thousands of parents have reached out to me over the past several months who have also lost their children. And some of them, you know, are years out and still in the dark woods, you know, still stuck there. And I think part of it is that they don't have a path like this. They don't, you know, They and also they're so, you know, it's like that little story about the bear. We used to read our kids. You can't go over it. You can't go under it. You got to go through it.

You know, it's it's the one thing I think in part because we're afraid. That we're going to just lose it completely, you know, like people that I talk to. The thing is, Laura, we do lose it completely. like caterpillar you could also compare it to a metamorphosis the caterpillar does not come out alive the butterfly does the creature we are going into the inferno is not the being will be we will be coming out the other side and i really believe that's the function of the inferno is to shatter the ego progressively at deeper and deeper levels until there is nothing left but pure clear integrity well so let's talk about the inferno because that's when we really that's the next

stage or the next, you know, phase, which is really painful. You're identifying everything you thought you knew was true, isn't true about yourself. And you have to take a really honest look in the mirror and look at your shadows. As you mentioned, most of us don't even know we've lost our integrity. The reason we split from ourselves is that our true nature is to be whole and cohesive, but it runs into culture, by which I mean any social setting whatsoever. Couples have cultures, families have cultures, ethnicities, religions, nations. All those cultures are pushing us to try to mold our behavior. And some of us, like school culture, really agreed with my true nature. I'm bookish and introverted and I was in heaven. But I have

many clients and my own children who were, their true selves were not meant to fit into that culture and they didn't and they suffered enormously as a result and had to split apart just to sit in those chairs when we now know that a child's best way of learning is outside five senses working solving problems they come up with themselves that have usefulness in their lives right right which education isn't set up for for the most part no no the culture is set up the educational system is literally set up to create factory workers that's why we put kids at the same size in rows of desks make them all do the same task it's meaningless it's a factory and it was designed to be a factory and so nature being

forced into a factory there are only two ways to go you either totally rebel or you split yourself you abandon your nature and you go with the culture and we overwhelmingly are conditioned to do that because everybody around us wants us to do that yeah and we want to be loved right in our families in our lives and school in life there's this constant pressure to fit in and in being an integrity rarely gels with fitting into some social structure at least so far i mean if all of us could move into integrity maybe that would create a new social structure but so far you have to kind of bump up against potential rejection or judgment. So it makes sense to me that in order to move into integrity, you have to fall apart, right? Because then your personality

doesn't have such a hold on you because you're in crisis and you're willing to do whatever it takes to heal. And I think it's so powerful that in the book, you talk about how there was a New Year's Eve where you decided not to tell a lie, a single lie for an entire year. And it led you to some powerful realization. So what happened? Yeah, I had already done one thing that was that kind of put me on the outs with my culture. I was getting my doctorate at Harvard and I my son was prenatally diagnosed with Down syndrome. and the overwhelming advice of the doctors of my advisors of everybody was you should terminate and it was very late in the pregnancy and I'm very pro-choice but I my nature wanted to keep the

baby my culture said don't but I did and so I knew there was something in me that had already pulled away from culture and said no there's some there's a truth inside me that says something different so I can't it kept dogging me like that I was aware of the split and that's why I made that new year's resolution because the split to be split from yourself is is so agonizing it I believe now it's the source of all psychological suffering is to divide from our truth and pretend that something is true when we don't believe it in our deepest cells so yeah I made this resolution and And within the next year, I got healthier than I'd ever been, came out of depression, found my life's purpose and calling. And that's what happened on the inside.

On the outside, I left my religion, which meant losing relationships with everyone in my family of origin, which was huge. I had seven siblings. Losing all my friends from before the age of 17 or so. I was raised in this very Mormon community. left my job as a professor, left my industry as an academic. So the whole thing I trained for figured out I was gay, which meant the end of my marriage. Like it just, losses were fairly significant. And it was horrific. And I grieved mightily. And yet in the middle of all that sorrow, my soul healed. And it healed the rest of me.

And so what did that feel like in action? Because obviously your life is falling apart. There's chaos. There's loss. I'm sure there was fear, you know, as all of these changes were happening and into the unknown. And yet, what did it feel? You know, you say your soul was singing. How did that manifest in experience? Well, two things happened. One was fairly ordinary. And that was that I had felt connected to everyone but myself. I wasn't even aware of a core self. I was so tuned in to pleasing everybody else and helping everybody else. I had three kids under five. And I was like trying to be a good Mormon girl and get a Harvard PhD at the same time. And like, I was running from role to roll. And it was very fragmenting, looked okay from the outside, looked like I was achieving, but from the inside, it was complete chaos. Halfway through that year, I had a surgery because I was remembering, I was getting very strong physical flashbacks of being sexually

abused as a child. And one of them was so bad that I ended up in surgery. And during the surgery, I regained consciousness even though I was still anesthetized I sat up and looked at the doctors operating on me and then I saw that my body was still lying down and I was really confused and I lay back and as I lay there between the surgical lights another light appeared small like a sphere of light that was so much brighter than the surgical lights it was like holding a candle against the sun. But it didn't hurt my eyes. It was exquisite. It was so beautiful. And it started to grow. And as it grew, it touched my body. And this feeling of physical warmth, but this incredible peace and love and connection and home just poured into my body. I was like, I felt home

for the first time in my life that I could ever remember and and I just was communing with the light and it said you know you're going to go through some hard things this year uh and in your life but I'm going to be here I've always been here um I'll never leave you you're going to be fine and I woke up just sobbing with pure happiness there was this janitor mopping the floor in the recovery room the first thing I did was I looked at him and I just said I love you so and um i asked to see the anesthesiologist because i thought obviously it could be a drug effect he came in and he said um he was freaked out he said what what happened in there because what happened what happened to him was that when the light touched me i started to cry and they could

see tears coming out of my face lying there on the surgical table and they thought i was feeling the surgery so they said freak that and he was like oh my god oh my god that's the worst thing that can happen right to an anesthesiologist and he said i went to increase the anesthesia and a voice said to me don't do that she's crying because she's happy and he said i just believed it and i did what it said and he looked so frightened he was so pale he said did i do the wrong thing and i told him what had happened to me and he said do you know how many times this has happened me in 33 years of practice? I said, no. And he said, once. Wow. That's an amazing story. Yeah. And it changed everything. I came out and one thing the light told me as I was in this

complete and absolute state of bliss, like absolute. Like what people say who have near death experiences. Oh yeah. But I wasn't. I know, but it's the same idea. You touched God's love. You had a direct experience of the light. And what it said was, don't think you have to wait until death to experience this feeling again. You're supposed to, the whole point of human existence is to learn to feel this way while you're alive. So how do you do that?

Do you still feel that way? How do you, how often out of the day do you, do you feel, well, I guess the more you're in integrity, the more you feel that way. That's exactly what happened. I just, I came out of that surgery and anything that separated me from that feeling had to go without a second thought. And even though it was horrifically painful emotionally, there was a spiritual core now that was identified with that light, but also as that light, because we are all, I believe

that is what gives us consciousness, right? I'm not religious, but I really believe that. it remained with me every time I got truthful. And I got more and more and more truthful over the years because I didn't want to be away from it. And now I'd say I experienced it about 95%. Wow. Well, you know, that's amazing. And, you know, I would say that for me, since, you know, I'm living this in a way right now, I'm not, I'm not, I wouldn't say that I'm at in an integrity 95% of the time, but I'm a lot more than most people who are recovering codependence. But I can see the difference that I'm living right now because having the pain of

having lost my son and the degree to which the grief drains, like, and is all encompassing. I've started this thing, which I kind of jokingly call my no cleanse, where in my head, anything anyone asked me, I've started to say no in my head first, because my inclination has always been to say yes and then regret it. So I start to say, and I say no all the time. And then there's all of this pressure or guilt or questioning, even if it doesn't come from outside, because most people wouldn't dare question my no right now, you know, but inside me, I, you know, I'm only doing things that I really want to do that my body says yes to listening to my body in a way that I more intimately ever have before and only what

feels good. But then there's always this little voice in my head that, are you sure this is a good decision? What if, you know, whatever that, that former codependent makes or that quieter codependent. And so what are some tricks? Because, you know, I think I have an easier time than a lot of people doing this. So what are some tricks to kind of quiet those voices that tempt us to move out of integrity or not really speak our truth or act on it?

Once again, Dante gives us a metaphor that that feeling, that intense feeling of grief that pulls you inward and infinitely inward to the just through an ocean of sadness, anger, all those emotions, it'll pull you all the way down to your deepest self. It strips away everything else. And when he goes into the inferno, it's this huge pit and it's filled with people who are being tortured in various ways and they're all screaming. And I see each of these as a representation of part of the self that is suffering. And what a lot of people don't know is the demons in Diogenes Inferno could leave if they were willing to change, but they're not. New from Nespresso. Blend wellness into your coffee routine with the Coffee Plus range,

infused with functional benefits. Choose the coffee you love with added B vitamins, like Coffee Plus B12 to help support immune function and Coffee Plus B6 to keep your day moving. Or go with the flow and choose Ginseng Delight, our new double espresso with ginseng extract. Whatever lies ahead, don't change your morning. Let your morning change you. Discover Coffee Plus on Nespresso.com. And they're all, I see them chained to wherever they are, and they're chained by beliefs. So inside each of us is a part of us that we internalized, usually through socialization, sometimes occasionally trauma, but mainly it's socialization that says, but you must say yes, Laura, you must. That's a little,

and the demon is like, everything will go to hell if you don't say yes. And it's screaming this and it's caused you to say yes when you didn't want to over and over and over. And there are thousands of them. One for every moment you abandon yourself. And Dharma goes through and he questions them. He's like, why are you here?

So that's what I recommend is that we just simply question the beliefs that cause suffering. And this is a job where the, the heart, the mind, the heart, the body, and the soul always tell the truth. And the mind does not. The mind is always the last one to the party because it's an agent of socialization, right? So you go and you say, I have to say yes to this person. They're important. And you say, are you sure? Like they told me when I was pregnant with my son that I would never get over the grieving. It would be like losing a child, but never leaving the grief stage. And I was like, I believed them and I was in hell. And then I was sitting there

rocking my older child to sleep one night. And I thought, am I sure? Am I sure that's true? You know? And so I, and I was like, it doesn't feel true. I don't, I don't think that's true. And I started to liberate myself from believing what I'd been taught. And that's when I realized that if I just really went full in and didn't lie at all, maybe I could find out how to get free of hell once and for all. And I think that's so powerful because one of the things for me, and I think all of us, I mean, you say we have all these parts of ourselves that are kind of split off of our, from us through socialization and some of us through trauma. But I think all of us, you know, if we, if you, if you think about trauma as having a big T and a little T

trauma, you know, little T trauma, we all have trauma. And I know for myself and for most people that there's a real, depending on the kind of trauma you had, there's for me that, you know, it's like this lack of discernment at times that can come up in this part of me that doesn't really trust that I know the truth. And so part of me is, well, so like, I'll give you an example. Let's just do some coaching on me for a second. But like, so I just created this PSA about my son and what happened to him to educate other parents and kids about the dangers of fentanyl poisoning and social media. And the fact that these certain social media sites that all the kids use don't allow parenting monitoring software. And, you know, and so trying to bring

awareness. And of course I want the whole world to see this PSA, you know, the whole purpose of doing it and is to save lives. Right. And to raise awareness and to hold accountable the social media companies that aren't protecting our children and making gajillions off of them. And, um, and so I said to my husband, OK, because he's also a publicist. And I said, OK, just so you know, you know, he knows how painful this is. And it's draining every time I do a media appearance on it. But I do it because I know each one will save at least one life. And so I said, I'm just warning you, I do not want to do this all at once when I go out and announce the PSA. I want to spread it out. And I want to just really take it slow. And I, and I forget what happened. I think someone

had asked me to come on and I, their show, and I just really wasn't ready. And he, you know, in his way gave voice in a sweet way. I mean, he's very supportive, but he was like, are you sure? Because we really want this PSA to get out. And I'm like, I know, but I just don't have it in me to do that right now. And then immediately I was like, but another life could be saved. What if you regret not doing this? You know, what if you, you know, and then there's another part of me that says, okay, if it's meant to go out, there's a million and one ways that this can be spread around the world. This doesn't have to all come from me. You know, it can, it can go to someone else who passes it on or passes it on. And so I have this little battle inside myself. And so how

do you stop the battle and really move into integrity with the true voice? Yeah, wonderful question. So one of the things I talk about in the book is the inner teacher, which I also call our sense of truth. And it's what allows us when we wake up from a dream to understand that that was a dream and this is not a dream. It feels more real. It makes more cogent sense. So we feel the reality of something after we wake up from a dream the body the heart and the minds the emotions the body and the sorry the soul if you believe in the soul they all react to the truth in a very specific way so the mind can just get blown all around by the winds of culture but when you say something that is deeply true for you your your physical muscles relax and I know

so much of your work is about trusting the body and getting into the body sensing like minutely every single sensation of the body is giving us information. It's phenomenal. Your body is the most trustworthy thing you have. So your muscles will physically relax. They'll also grow stronger, which you can test. Your emotions, you'll have a sense of opening instead of being clamped. So you'll feel less tense and more open. You may also feel deep grief or anger if that's appropriate for the situation, but there's an opening sensation that you're not fighting. the emotion. And then if you believe in the soul, it's just, to me, it's the sense of freedom. The Buddha used to say, wherever you find the ocean, you can always recognize that it's the

ocean because it always tastes of salt. And wherever you find enlightenment, you can recognize it because it always tastes of freedom. So even as you go into the pain, the truth brings you into more freedom. That's beautiful. Yes. I know exactly what you're talking about. Freedom. Yeah. New from Nespresso. Blend wellness into your coffee routine with the Coffee Plus range, infused with functional benefits. Choose the coffee you love with added B vitamins, like Coffee Plus B12 to help support immune function and Coffee Plus B6 to keep your day moving. Or go with the flow and choose Ginseng Delight, our new double espresso with ginseng extract.

Whatever lies ahead, don't change your morning. Let your morning change you. Discover Coffee Plus on Nespresso.com. And then the mind goes, all right, well, the body, the soul, and the heart are in agreement. Could this be true? And the math worked. You know, like I was raised Mormon. I came out of my no-life thing.

And I'm being told all these odd things. You know, every man gets his own planet with a bunch of wives. And I'm like, that doesn't feel very true to me. I don't know. I've been told that since I was in the cradle and it's just not making sense to my brain. So, and when you say there's one statement that I've used in coaching because I've been all over the world. I've worked with war refugees. I've worked with heroin addicts on the street. I've worked with billionaires. I've worked with convicted murderers and every single person

responds with the sense of proof to the sentence, I am meant to live in peace. And if you say out loud, I am meant to live in peace. I am meant to live in peace. And if you let yourself believe it for just a moment, there's this moan, like it strikes a bell almost. And your body definitely releases. That's the feeling of coming home to the truth. And when you're in pain, you can always come home to that.

And you will feel the emotions of the grieving cycle. That is part of life. It's like everything is up and down in the human experience. There's birth and there's death and there's birth and there's death, but death is not the opposite of life. It's the opposite of birth. Life is the field through which it all travels.

There is no opposite to life. So it goes birth, death, birth, death, all of it moving in and out of life in that wave pattern that makes the material world. Dante gets into that once he gets to paradise. Yeah. Let's talk about paradise being what I would call in quantum love, home frequency. It's where the miracles occur. It's where you feel that delicious yumminess,

but it's also scary because you're often pissing people off. Well, you skipped the key stage of purgatory. Oh, purgatory. Sorry. Tell me about purgatory. And you know, this is something Dante, I mean, there were some people talking about it, but he actually added this to Catholicism before, before like the 1300s. It's just, you were either perfect and went to heaven or you went to hell, end of story, which must have been really a horrible thing to believe. And Dante said, well, what about if a demon really wants to be a good person,

it can get out of the inferno by telling the truth. And there's a really key point here. This is what made me think of Dante as self-help, even when I was 18 years old. They keep going down, Dante and Virgil, till they reach the absolute pit of hell. And it gets worse the further they go. And in the center of hell is the monster Lucifer. And he's frozen into a lake of ice. And it's just frightening beyond belief. And Virgil says, keep going.

And Dante's like, there is no going down. And he says, keep going. and he has to climb on the body of lucifer and lower himself on this moldy hair and then he passes the center of the earth right around lucifer's hip level so now what was going down is going up he's headed away from the center of the earth so by going down far enough you end up going up and then almost in just a few lines he says it was the path was easy and it was clear and we just walked out and once again, came to the place where we could behold the stars.

So it's by going all the way through hell, as Winston Churchill said, when you're going through hell, keep going. You come out the other side. Well, then Dante pops out, but there's a mountain that he has to climb to get to paradise. And he called it purgatory.

And I see it as when you've found your inner truth, but now you have to walk the talk. Now you're not just in your therapist's office. You are out there with your family at Thanksgiving and, you know, the racist talk comes up and you have to make a choice. Do I say something about this? Do I walk out of the room? Do I make a statement against it or do I go silent and abandon my truth? Whatever it is for your particular family.

and there will be a moment in that exchange where you will feel whether it's appropriate to speak your truth to act in some way to stay silent if you're in a speaking of racism if i've talked to a lot of african-american people who are uh who have told me it is a privilege to speak your truth without being slapped down in this culture and it's a privilege white people don't even know they have which was really it was stunning and horrifying for me to realize that they don't have that freedom so you can decide to be silent there is privacy in integrity but if you abandon yourself again you're going to go back to hell so and a lot of people just walk around and around the mountain they can't they don't dare go up because as you go up you will

not can but will go against your culture your family culture your ethnic culture whatever it is there's going to be a moment when you break the rules because no culture is perfect for everyone. And then you have to deal, it's hard, it's a hard climb and it's scary at the beginning. And the more you do it, the easier it gets. So you're talking about a level of purgatory that's very high where you've been saying no

and you've spent your whole life studying human psychology and how to be true to yourself and how to be true in relationships specifically. And that's where the rubber hits the road. That's where. And for me, that's, yeah, that's, you know, from the, it's that abandonment thing, you know, of, and so that's one of the terrible, beautiful gifts out of this,

that when the worst thing happens and the greatest loss occurs, there's very little to fear. And so I just don't give a crap. I mean, I care, but ultimately I don't really care because I'm surrendered. And so if it pisses you off and you don't want to be my friend or you don't want to work with me or you don't want to hire me or you don't want to, you know, OK, the worst thing has happened. What could be worse than that?

You know, so it's writing a book. I think it was a couple of books ago, but I was writing about my son who is frankly, he has Down syndrome and he's also psychic and he just is. and I got so tired of dancing around that and not just saying it I actually wrote it down and then I went back I said you know I the way I see it I live with this angel I went back to rewrite it so it would be more palatable to the culture like I feel that my son is is very spiritual and what you know but and I understand if you don't believe in spirituality it's okay but instead I just went back and I said if you don't believe me I respectfully do not care

Yeah, right. That's where I am. I'm sort of like, okay, he's talking to me and you can think I'm crazy, but he is, you know. Yeah, I just don't care. That is a place of freedom, right? And enlightenment always tastes of freedom. Yeah, that's right. I'm going to remember that because I know what freedom feels like. Even when you're scared, that's the key. You can be scared poopless, You can be sad, but you're also free. And if you know what that baseline of freedom feels like, then you don't get lost in the mire of the fear or sadness or anger or whatever is coming up. Yeah.

And the true emotions, the true emotional response, there's an anger that sets us free and there's an anger that becomes violence and destroys things. And Dante's very clear about which is which. Like it's a real primer, that poem. Anyway, as you get closer to the top, it becomes easier and easier to say no to people, to go against your family culture, whatever, because you're starting to feel stronger. He gets stronger and stronger as he goes toward the top. And finally, he gets to a place at the very top where he's completely at one with himself, and he finds himself in another forest, only this time it's so

beautiful and harmonious that the wind and the birds sing in harmony with each other. And there he is dunked twice in a river. And this is the most beautiful image. I'd never heard it. The first side makes him forget everything he's ever done wrong. And the second side makes him remember everything he's ever done right. And at that point, he is told you are now free from shame and fear that you no longer speak as one who dreams. So shame and fear are the last things he has to completely release. And then he's pure. He's back to his nature. And again, there's so much of that in what you do. Yes. Yeah. There's so much fear and shame around sexuality and any culture really. But like, it's, it's very powerful to me that that's.

And that's the lowest frequency. You're talking about quantum love, you know, those of the lowest frequency, shame and guilt are the lowest frequency on the quantum love map or on the map of consciousness. Yeah. And speaking of quantum, I mean, Dante, then he's, he just rises upward and he's, he's in a place where he's filled with joy. He sees beings of light around him and they all love him and they all connect with him, even if they've never met him. And it's this beautiful image when they want to talk to him, they glow brighter. He describes actually several of

the attributes of quantum physics that are now known to be true. He doesn't really have a location. He's somehow everywhere and in one place at once. He's traveling, but he's not moving at all. He's in a space that seems like all the universes, but it's only one thing. There appear to be many things,

but they're all one, and he's describing this in 1320, and I read it when I was in grade school, we still learned Newtonian physics, and now we know that everything he's making up in the 13th and 14th century is actually physically true. If you look at quantum physics, and I believe that this is a brain state that, and they now know this is measurable,

So he's reached what in Asia they would call enlightenment, where you begin to perceive the world as a quantum phenomenon. Not imaginary, not, I've read it that way, but I see it, I experience it, I know it as my deepest truth, I observe it. And they've done enough neuroscience on this now, on like Tibetan monks who've meditated for four years,

and they're the happiest people in the world. And one really great neurologist that I love says we are not, not only is this state a biological reality, but it is one to which we are biologically inclined. We are meant to pursue this and the brain actually changes when we get there so that the enlightenment becomes irreversible. Becomes a brain set. Yeah. And that means you're at a place where you experience emotions, but you are not suffering, not like you used to. It's phenomenal. And he says at the beginning of the parody, he says, don't even try to come here. Stop reading. You're not going to get this. I'm going to write it down and you'll not understand it. And I respectfully do not care. But he's in integrity with it. Yep. Yeah.

And it probably really is, you know, wasn't just an imaginary idealized journey for him. It was a metaphorical representation of the truth of what he experienced. Absolutely. And I noticed you had a need more Johnny on the podcast. She's one of the people that I mentioned in this book, one person that I've met who lives in that reality and perceived that reality and cured herself from cancer like criminal she dies of cancer and then nine days later she's cancer free right and she went to that same light that you experienced you know and i think the goal is that for those of us who haven't experienced the

light to that way to know that it's there i mean i think about that all the time you know that the that it's there. It's always there. We, you know, like most of us can just touch into it if we're lucky, like a little visit, you know, to connect with that light. And I love the idea. And I think you're absolutely right that the more out of integrity we are, the less, it's not that the light goes away, it's always there, but the less able to touch it and feel it and experience it, we are because we're further from ourselves. I say in the book, it's so interesting because I did my obsession with integrity because I wanted to feel the way I felt without light. And I wanted to feel it all the time. You never forget those experiences, like near-death experiences. They

never fade. They never fade in memory. They're like always there. So I was really, really trying to just be that. And I didn't like the way a lot of people would read my stuff and come with new things like, yes, I've monetized my, you know, my magical manifesting powers. And I've, you know, I've done direct marketing to a million people for false things or something. I'm just like, I don't think you're getting it. But as I got deeper into integrity in order to write this book, and I was living in the forest, so I didn't really have culture to deal with. and what happened is magical and miraculous things just went nuts around me like stuff that was completely inexplicable and one of them had to do with Anita Morjani and I want to tell this story

yeah of course so the most marked thing that happened for me as I got closer and closer to integrity was that I was my relationship with wild animals wild animals seem to be less afraid of me and would come to me sometimes if I like, because I have that sense. I've been meditating in Africa, South Africa, where I go or something. And I can feel the presence of other beings around me. And my son, Adam has this too.

He doesn't talk much, but he can feel the presence of animals. And if I ask them to come, they do. They come to visit. I don't usually admit this, But so I went, I met Anita Morjani in Sedona. I was going to interview her, but it was the last minute addition.

And so they flew me in late the night before, and then I was interviewing her at eight in the morning and I loved her book and wanted to meet her. And then I was flying right out again. And as we drove through the dark desert, I thought, I wish I could see a javelina while I'm here. Now javelinas are little furry pig-like creatures that live in the deserts of Arizona.

They're like the size of maybe, I don't know, a Labrador retriever. And they're very furry and adorable, and I love them. And I'd seen them before, but running away, right? And maybe I'll see the tracks. And I was like, oh, well, it's late at night. I have no time. I'm not going to see a javelina. So I get up in the morning.

I get dressed. I go over to Anita's hotel suite. And we're getting all set up, and the lights are on, and there's a knock at the door. and the an assistant went to get the door and the assistant yells it's a pig and we all like ripped off our microphones and rushed to the window and there's this javelina standing at the door and then we opened the door and it didn't run away and we went out and stood next to it and like 30 more javelinas came like a huge number of javelinas with little striped piglets and and they were so calm and they were munching cactus like feet away from us.

I think it was, I have that effect on things, but Anita is like. The two of you together brought in a gaggle of how, what is it called? A group of javelinas. I was actually interviewed by the woman who invited me to that and she was there and she was like, you guys, it's true. This really happened. Yeah. So things like that start to happen when you get to the paradise stage. miracles what we think of as miracles are become commonplace in every day and I could go on talking about that forever and possibly will yeah well I mean the miracles never cease and and I guess

once you've gotten a taste of that piece you know I I definitely like I said don't live there 24 7 or 95 percent of the time like you do but I know exactly what you're talking about I know that when I am, you know, in that flow, all sorts of miracles are happening and serendipities and really cool, amazing things. But at the same time, I clearly am not there all the time because I get pulled back and forth. And I think for most of us, that's more, you know, if we get there, that's more the reality, right? That we're in and out of integrity. And I have to tell you, 95% means during the COVID shutdown. When you're out in the woods.

And I'm connecting with people, there's much more cultural pressure, right? Jill Bolte-Taylor is a woman who did this magnificent TED talk and she lost the verbal part of her brain and had to build it back over eight years, but she gained this enlightenment experiment experience which is a neurological experience and she called me a couple months ago just to say hi we didn't know each other at all and she said i live on a boat in the middle of a lake because without it there's too much cultural pressure i can't be my whole self and we had just a delicious talk about this very same thing that it happens it's a neural neurological reality and here's my explanation for it okay so when you said i meant to live in peace and your body goes

and then you think okay well i can accept that i believe that peace is the state of complete integrity and and not in a moralizing sense but just wholeness complete shalom right that is our home and the moment we go there we start to receive things that we've asked for since we were babies and the reason is i now believe that every time we send out a yearning plea into the universe whether we believe in anything or not that plea that yearning is always answered and the answer is always yes you get what you want but it's always delivered to your home address which is peace if the universe sent what you want to desperation you'd be motivated to just stay in desperation. And that is not where you're meant to live. You're meant to live in

peace. So you get home and the more you stay in peace, the more deliveries arrive. Here's what you asked for when you were five. Here's what you asked for when you were 13. Here's what you asked for when you're 23. Here's what you asked for last week or five seconds ago. Bang, bang, bang. All these packages arrive. And it motivates you to stay in peace so that you keep getting. I love that image that that's where you're home. And it also makes sense because that's what I call home frequency for me in my mind, right? That when I'm in, when you're in peace, that's when you're in the vein where the miracles happen and being in integrity is how you live in peace. Yeah. The sentence, maybe my favorite sentence in my whole book is this,

peace is your home. Integrity is the way to it. And everything you have ever longed for will meet you there. Oh, that's beautiful. Yes. And I know that that's true. Well, I'm recommitting. I mean, I don't have a fricking choice right now, but I'm recommitting to integrity and hopefully I don't need any more dark nights of the soul and AFGEs to get there. And the thing is we go through the infernal over and over. And I think it just batters down the ego, which is the part of us that is not truly us. And we are ourselves, our whole selves and nothing but ourselves. I mean, shit, I thought I was there, but evidently I've got a lot more to do. I know. It's just like, I wait till the other shoe drops. I'll call you and I say,

I'm down to 5% again. Well, my prayer, I have a feeling you won't, you won't lose touch with this when you, when, uh, as the world reopens and you come out of the woods and here you are doing, um, you know, talking to the world about integrity in integrity. So you're off to a swimming start. Well, thank you so, so, so much for, this has just been a delightful conversation. And you're at that place where I think you give people so much help because you're in the inferno and yet you are daunting instead of a demon's chain to the wall. You're, you're someone of of truth and integrity who's walking through hell yeah and down to the deepest levels and that means coming out into the most beautiful realities yeah i hope so i feel that i've

experienced it before with deep pain i call it the vortex where you go you almost go down a drain and you come out the other side yeah it's literally a vortex in dante they're all vortexes so yeah we're all one being and at the end of the of the divine comedy he switches from past to present tense and he says i now become the love that moves the sun and the other stars and as i read that for the umpteenth time i had this image of a man who was looking away and he turned and looked at me it was dante and i thought holy shit he sees me yeah in that moment in 1300 he probably did yeah because he was in eternity which is not all time but outside of time yeah and we can connect with everything we love there oh mind-blowing thank you so much for your beautiful ongoing

work in the world definitely check out the book the way of integrity finding the path to your true self which is where heaven on earth basically is found right and um to learn more about you martha they go to www.marthaback.com and on social media martha back at martha back right anything else we need to be martha back on instagram because there were a bunch of other martha backs well there's only one martha back it's so not true so the martha back on instagram but martha back and on facebook the martha back right well yeah that was my friend made that i didn't make that i don't think i'm the only martha beck i think you are you're my only martha beck and i adore you and i'm so grateful to you for coming on we will see you next time on the language

of love I went to the doctor Said I'm crazy for your love Wrote me a prescription But there's no cure for a crush All I wanna do, I wanna do is take you home with me I wanna make a move, I wanna make a move But I'm too shy

But I'm not for you, just for you