The One You Feed - How to Live Without a Script with Martha Beck and Rowan Mangan

Episode Date: April 25, 2023

Get ready to dive into a conversation with Martha Beck and Rowan Mangan, two inspiring individuals known for their incredible ability to guide others towards living an unscripted life. Together, they make a dynamic duo that will leave you feeling inspired and ready to embrace your own unscripted life. In This Episode, You'll Learn: How to distinguish between intuitive and habitual responses that lead to making more informed decisions in your life. Understanding what it means to be living in a left-brain dominant culture and how you can adapt to thrive. How to develop a stronger sense of embodied presence that enhances your overall well-being and success. What the role of improvisation is in this age of constant change? The importance of embracing a “don’t know” mind and rejecting shame To learn more, click here!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I was born a total people pleaser in a culture that was completely against my true nature. And I tried really hard to embody it and it made me so miserable and suicidal that when I left, I left with the force of somebody who has just jumped onto a trampoline. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear.

We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast

is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really Know Really podcast.

Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. This episode is a special collaboration episode. So we have Eric and Jenny talking to Dr. Martha Beck and Rowan Mangan. Dr. Martha Beck is a New York Times bestselling author, life coach, and speaker. She holds three Harvard degrees in social science, and Oprah Winfrey has called her one of the smartest women I know. Martha is a passionate and engaging teacher known for her unique combination of science, humor, and spirituality. Her newest book, The Way of Integrity, Finding the Path to Your True Self, was an instant New York Times bestseller. Rowan is a writer, podcaster,

and mom to a vivacious toddler. She runs the Wild Adventures newsletter and community on Substack. Roe, as she is called, is currently pursuing publication for her first novel. Hi, Martha. Hi, Roe. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Yeah, we're really excited to have you on. This is kind of a special episode where we're going to just, the four of us, Ginny's here with me, by the way. Hi, Ginny. Hello, everybody.

Hi, Ginny. Hi, Ginny. Hey. We're just going to have a conversation among the four of us, and we thought that that would be more fun than, you know, one person interviewing another person, and we would just kind of talk. So we're going to do that in a second, but we'd like to start like we always do on our show,

which is with the wolf parable, and I'd like to ask Ro, you to respond to it this time, because Martha has had a chance before. So in the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say in life, there's two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second and they look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins?

And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you, what does that parable mean to you in your life and in the work that you do? It's such a great question. And I think about this a lot because I have loved that parable for so long. And I feel as though when you're feeding the right wolf, there is an ease and a flow and a pull towards. So for me, I'm very motivated by stories and storytelling and the power of that in our

lives, in our spiritual lives, in our imaginative and creative lives. And I think we all know the feeling of being magnetically pulled towards something. And I also think we can all relate to the feeling of taking a path that feels avoidant of truth in whatever form it takes. And so that could be however we're trying to avoid what needs to be done, whether it's substances or wasting time or zoning out or whatever it is. And so for me, it's about recognising those two different states and the way that they feel for me in my body. And just trying to always be edging back towards feeding the right wolf. Because, you know, the right wolf is hungry all the time.

I'm interested to know how you feel through that. you feel through that. I mean, I spent the better part of my life thus far, actually, especially my adult life up until about, I don't know, 10 years ago, kind of orienting towards going with what felt easy and good and kind of whatever I was drawn to. And I did that without the fine attunement towards if potentially that might be an avoidant path to something I really need to pay attention to. And it got me into a place of addiction and burnout and just not so great. Turns out by avoiding all the hard stuff, you actually don't end up in a great place. So how do you kind of discern within yourself if you are like moving towards something that feels really supportive

and good for you versus something that maybe just feels good in the moment. Right. And it's so true because they can feel similar, can't they? And I think there's something about, you know, that phrase, the path of least resistance, like there's like a place where it's just easier to turn on the television than to do the work on your creative project. And that's a path of least resistance. And it can feel like sort of sliding downhill very easily. But for me, it never has that gravitational pull. It never feels like a magnet. It just, it feels like a downhill slope on a little toboggan. I love that because they're both forces that move you forward, but there's a very subtle difference between the feeling of being pulled down subtle difference between the feeling of being pulled

down by gravity and the feeling of being pulled into a magnet, which can actually pull you up. Right. And so it may actually be hard to do something, but there's a pull up into the energy of it. And that is missing when you're just flopping, just sliding along, slip sliding away. Yeah, I think this is such an interesting question because, Martha, I know you do a lot of talking about intuition, right? And, you know, trusting that inner knowing. And yet it is difficult because sometimes our deepest, most habitual conditioned patterns have that same almost instant sense of knowing. Maybe knowing is the wrong word, but they just arise immediately without any real thought. And so I'm kind of curious, you know, Ro,

you've talked a little bit about it. Martha, how do you think about discerning those two energies? They don't feel the same at all to me anymore. And part of it is that during the pandemic lockdown, we were all like in our little house. And we talked a lot about what to do next and how to move forward. And Ro is incredibly intuitive and also very bright. So we would go the intellectual route and then we'd go the intuitive route. And the socialization of immediate reaction was sort of shut down by the pandemic. And that really brought me to an abrupt halt. by the pandemic. And that really brought me to an abrupt halt. And I learned that when there's an immediacy of socialized reaction, it is not at all the same feeling of I'm going deep into my

intuition, into my body, and body, heart, and mind, and soul are lining up. And there's a sense of solidity. And that does not happen when I'm following socialization, even though the socialization may be really deep and intense. I don't know. How do you guys feel about it? I think you used a word there that I think is really important is those things aren't hard for you to tell apart at all now, right? So for me, in learning to work through my perhaps traumas, my addictions, and the work that I've done along the way has made that difference very clear to me also. It's just that I didn't have that discernment once upon a time.

Yeah. I feel like I now am better at discerning habitual response or socialized conditioning versus deep intuition, deep knowing, deep wisdom. I'm better at it. I mean, I'm certainly no Martha Beck at it, but I'm definitely better than I used to be. I think a lot of that for me has come, I don't want to say all, but I do actually want to say all, that all of it has come through cultivating more of that embodied presence, being in my body and having the center of my being. I'm really aware of it down in my belly somewhere. We're actually going to interview poet Maggie Smith soon. And so reading her upcoming memoir. She's so good.

She's so good. She says so many good things. I know. So there's something she said I read actually this morning that I was like, what a hilarious and like brilliant analogy. She talks about the body. says for years i joked that my body was basically a plant stand for my head and you know i knew that like i lived from the neck up essentially you know i knew my body was important it kind of just got me from point a to point b i watered it every now and then that was about it and i thought i was like i could so relate to that you know and when and when I'm not embodied, that's how it feels. It feels like the plant is up here and it's the whole show, you know, and the stand is

just left. I have to have a stand. And then I realized, so we have a plant stand over here by the window in the room we're in. And it's actually like a three tiered one. So you have like a high, like a top and a middle and a bottom place you can put the stand. And I was like, okay, so when I'm embodied, it's as if I move the plant down to the bottom stand. It's like my brain is down in my belly, you know? And I just think in a Buddhist tradition, they refer to this place as like your hara. It's like three fingers kind of down from your belly button and in. Yeah. When I'm really kind of able to contact that place, somehow, seriously, I can't give you the physiological reason here, but I'm connected to the knowing that is in my body. And it feels like that deep wisdom, you know?

And it's not hard to feel that, right? Like we've all had this experience, have we not? Or haven't we? Well, Martha has to teach it though. She teaches it in her trainings. It's always one of the first things she teaches because I think we do know it. We come in knowing it and we're trained to unlearn. You know, we talk a lot on Bewildered about the fact that we're always right in the feeling, but we often get it wrong in how we interpret and act on the

feeling because then it's like it has to come back up through the brain and the social filters and then we can get it so wrong. What I always tell people is that the cognitive brain can process about 40 bits of information per second, but the entire nervous system, including more nerves going from the heart to the brain than from the brain to the heart, and a massive amount of information going from the gut to the brain, that can process 11 million bits of information per second. And it's so much smarter. And you know what people always say at corporate groups and stuff? I say something like, so let's all just like, see if you can turn your attention to your belly.

And they're like, this is too woo-woo. This is just, that is just far out. I'm a scientist. I'm an empiricist. I'm like, your body is empirical. It's the most empirical thing you have. Sorry, I got to exercise. It's true though. You know, I was thinking the other day too, that like as a species and potentially we've always been those ways of species. I don't really know, but our balance is off. Like we're so oriented towards our brain and our intellectual orientation to the world and interpretation and filter that we've forgotten this other huge component of like how to move through the world. I was thinking like, you know, evolution is not an intellectual unfolding of life. You know, life got smarter and better adapted by just through doing

and then optimizing, doing and responding, doing and responding, not like thinking about it and analyzing it and then trying to find the right way. We're products of that. That experience is often, I think, the richest way to relate to things, you know? Totally. And it's so fascinating as we learn that that is even in the theoretical plane that, you know, this stuff about they're learning about the brain in the gut and, you know, all these crazy stories from people who've had organs transplanted and so much of the person comes through a heart or another organ. And it's like, it's not in here. It's not inside our skulls that all of this is happening. And if we tune out all these other parts of our brain, it's such a partial

glimpse of who we are and how we can relate to each other. Yeah, it's the whole nervous system. I just want to put it, emphasize that people who've had like heart-lung transplants literally start to have the memories of the person who donated the heart and lungs. I thought I just read one book about this weird experience this woman had. It turned out she was going to a support group because everybody she knew who had a heart-lung transplant started remembering the donor's life. I think I read something to that effect almost recently and told you about it.

That is mind-blowing. There was a really brilliant episode of This American Life years ago. And I feel like it started a whole snowball effect because it was all these different stories about this happening. Yeah. Cool. It is so cool. Well, I think the idea is we do tend to, or I should say I tend to, and I've gotten better at it, sort of view the world as if I'm up in my head. And I just imagine that has to have been sort of what happens when you're taught that everything important happens here, right? But it also happens to be where the eyes are, and they're very, you know, eyes and ears. But the idea that the brain is disconnected or different than the rest of the body makes no sense. And I mean,

even if you want to be as empirical and scientific about it as you want, like literally they are connected. Like there's a lot of nerves. And so, so yeah, I think it is learning to know in multiple ways. I think the thing that we're aiming at. Yeah. And the body is full of surprises, right? And wild and sort of untamed. And like, I remember the first time I sort of dropped into my body, I was like, whoa, this is, this feels out of control. This feels like things are happening that I'm not making happen. Sensations are happening. I wonder how much of us being cut off from our bodies is connected to sort of a puritanical, like the body is dirty, you know, and there's like a way to rise above it and beyond it. I mean, it's really interesting, because Roe always notices that American culture is much more puritanical than Australian culture. And they're both from British colonial things. So there's a strong similarity. But I really want to ask you, like,

the Puritans really were like super repressed about their bodies, super duper repressed, whereas not everyone who went to Australia maybe was quite. Is it the same now? I don't know. I mean, I think, I don't know, the body stuff, I feel like if you look through history, there were different times. There were times before the kind of Victorian era where everyone got super uptight, where people were much more chilled about their bodies. Like I think it sort of rises and falls. era where everyone got super uptight, where people were much more chilled about their bodies. Like,

I think it sort of rises and falls. And maybe here in American dominant culture right now, we're kind of coming back to a sort of more prissy kind of disconnected way. But you know, what is interesting to me thinking about this is that you can actually almost close the circle on the conversation coming back to the brain because Martha's doing this amazing research at the moment, which is all about how broadly the left brain and the right brain and what she's taught me, and you have to correct me if I'm getting this wrong, but like even the impulse to disconnect from our body is intensely left brain. And one of the things that I think she's arguing in her new book is our society has pushed us into our left hemisphere. And if we could actually learn to embrace both sides, that process that you're talking about, Ginny, would be almost automatic.

Is that a fair butchering? Speaking of butchering, the left side of the brain is more analytical. And analysis literally means to cut things into pieces. So it understands by chopping, dividing. It's more grasping. It's very intellectual. It's the primarily verbal hemisphere. And I think what we're seeing is not the suppression of sexuality, but the obsession of intellectualism. Yes.

And that is the left hemisphere. And the weird thing about it is that if somebody has a stroke on the left hemisphere, the right hemisphere is all they've got left, they may not be able to talk, but they see everything. When someone has a right hemisphere stroke, so the left hemisphere, which is the talking intellectual side, it insists that it's the only thing in existence. And in fact, the person who has that stroke may only put makeup on one side of their face. They pay no attention to one side of reality because the left hemisphere only wants to deal with what it knows and it chops things up. And that's the intellect functioning in our society, refusing to allow for the possibility of what our bodies can know of spirituality and spiritual truth and spiritual

knowledge and all the things that actually, you know, when the opposite sort of strokes happen, or however we can do the research, the right hemisphere knows this. It's inclusive. It's connected. Even the neurons in the left side of the brain are short. They chop things up. And on the right, there are longer neurons. And what they do is connect, connect, connect, connect. So Jill Bolte-Taylor, a friend of mine, she's a neuroanatomist who had a left hemisphere stroke. She couldn't talk for a long time, but she felt absolutely connected to everything in the universe. She was having a profoundly mystical experience. And all cultures have wise teachers in them who bring the intellect and that connection with everything together.

And it's in that whole brain, as Jill likes to say, that we become everything we're meant to be. So maybe the bad wolf is not one side of the brain or the other, but the part that wants to divide versus the part that wants to connect. Right. And I think we always have to know, like, what do we have to correct for or what direction do we want to go? And societally, we are way, way, way left brained or over intellectual, right? It's not that that's a bad part of the brain. It's not for years who had a right brain injury. Oh, yeah. And so you've got these two totally different injuries. They're sort of mirroring each other. And it was kind of a fascinating conversation to hear the two of them talk. And our listener, John, who's the one who had the opposite injury, talked about how it was particularly hard to recover from what he did, because most of the research goes to dealing with the other side, because when you can't talk,

you don't function in the way that we tend to think of. Your family's like, but I want him to be able to talk again. And so most of the research is driven that direction. And given that we're a left brain culture, it's been very difficult for him to find the support medically at all to rehabilitate the right side. Well, it's so interesting. Oliver Sacks writes about how through most of the history of brain science, the right hemisphere was not only ignored, but it was actually contemptuously dismissed. Isn't that weird? And it's because the left side is the one that does contemptuous dismissal. The right side is like, hey, we're all friends here. Oliver Sacks, Ian McGilchrist, all these great neurologists are like, the left side of the brain has been trying to pretend that it's the only thing that exists. Has been trying to pretend that it's the only thing that exists.

And it's dominating our culture to the extent that it has made neuroscientists disdain their own right hemispheres. It's bizarre. It's so bizarre and just hilarious and ironic in so many ways. But I think the other thing that this is making me think about is, yeah, like you said, we need to know what imbalance we're correcting for at any given point. It's that kind of self-awareness. So one of the things I've noticed is when I am not able to do kind of my morning routine, which involves a bit of some meditation, all the left brain characteristics get amplified and really to the degree to which they can cause some stumbling and suffering in my own life. Like it's too much left brain. But what I'm practicing, I think, in my meditation in the

morning is more right-brained being in my body and in the world. And so I'm correcting for the imbalance of the rest of my day, which is so left-brained. But if I'm not careful, everything around me supports left-bra brain activity all the time, right? So true. And I wonder if it would be fair to sort of even characterize if you were talking about the two wolves is that one wolf is the force that connects and the other is the force that divides. Because when you're looking at a force that connects, it includes the part that divides, right? And that's what Eric's saying is that there is, of course, there is a really important use for the left hemisphere

and that's why our society is so ridiculously successful in so many ways and dealing with such a massive deficit in so many others. But if we can be in the connection, like you say, Ginny, that can include that left hemisphere and all that comes with it, all the analysis and language. Oh, that's so beautiful and brilliant. Yeah.

I always think that if we feed the right wolf, if we create a shift in consciousness toward a better way of being, it won't be a revolution. It won't overthrow anything because that's been done over and over. It just replaces one violent set of people with another. But if we can change our consciousness, we can embrace dissonance and include it to death. Include patriarchy to death, include capitalism to death, you know, because... Include it all, bring it all in. Yes. Yeah, I think, I'm sorry to keep talking about my practice in the morning, but I'd begun

doing this thing where when I catch myself thinking thinking instead of going like, nope, don't think like put it out is to say yes. And like yes to the thinking and what else is here, right? So I'm not putting it out of my mind that I'm more just sort of enveloping it into whatever else is going on. You're including it. Yeah, I'm including it. I love this framework and broadening it like this. You're including it. Yeah, I'm including it. I love this framework and broadening it like this. Life is a game of improv. You always say yes and.

Somebody comes into the scene and says there's a rhinoceros on fire in the living room. You can't say no because that stops the scene. But you always have to say yes. And my mother-in-law is in the other room having a baby or whatever. Because that builds it. And I want to ask Eric something because I was just reading a book about boys and men and how the script for boys and men has been thrown away and how, actually, there's an article by Richard Reeves in Maria Shriver's Sunday paper, and he said that men don't have a script anymore, they have to improvise. And what you were just saying was

improvisation, at the beginning of the day, setting her mind to improvise is something that balances her and feeds the right wolf. And we talk a lot about getting bewildered or bewildered about putting yourself in a place where you have that improvisational mindset because you've let go of your culture and you're willing to find what your true nature wants to do. So how does that work for you these days, Eric? Because you seem to be an improvisational dude. I am actually, yes. I mean, my favorite way of playing music is improvising. It's the whole thing about music for me is that improvisation, making up something new or playing with somebody. And so I think in general, I am very comfortable with that and more comfortable with uncertainty and risk in general than a lot of people are. And I don't even think that's a male-female thing. I think that's just a thing,

that I'm much more that way. I do think that it's interesting to think about the scripts that men and women have been given. And I feel like for both genders, the scripts have undergone a lot of recent revision and a lot of change. And so I could certainly say in society, this point in life where you have to sort of find and make your own meaning. Because it doesn't exist in the ways that it used to in the places that it used to. And so I think that's kind of across the board for everyone. But I was thinking about my father. And my father passed recently. I was at his funeral last week, but I was thinking with my dad, it's easy for me to see that I feel like right in the middle of his life, the script got changed. Like here's how you are as a man. Here's how you parent your children. Here's the way you are towards them.

And so he did that. And then right somewhere around 45, 50, somewhere in there. And I think this happens to all of us to some degree, but maybe I just see it more sharply in his case, that whole script changed. And the way he was, was suddenly wrong. And my father was a person who very much wanted to do the right thing. He was very focused in that direction. To the point that you might say it's a shortcoming, you know, looking towards someone else to tell you what the right thing is. But I think he had that. And so I think when everything shifted about what a man should be, I think it caught a lot of

men, you know, sort of off guard like that, who had been thinking like, I'm doing the right thing. I've done everything I've been told to do. And now you're telling me that I've done it all wrong. And that's a difficult thing for anyone to go through. Right. Yeah. Particularly like you were saying with Jordan, your son, it was like, and they're doing it at an age often when psychological flexibility is not the strength anymore. Yeah. Yeah. I was sort of saying that I think this happens to everybody as we get older. The older we get, the more the rules are changing from when we were younger. And unfortunately, we are at an age where if we're not careful, our psychological flexibility, our cognitive ability,

our ability to adapt is going down. And so I see how people get stuck. Although we now know that the brain continues to develop and maintain its plasticity throughout life. And the famous nun study done in Canada, they followed these nuns because they were living in almost the same exact routine. So it was a great chance to look at a group of people who were basically having the same life. And then they donated their bodies to science. And they found that they were looking like at Alzheimer's. and they found that they were looking like at Alzheimer's and they found that some of the nuns who had not developed Alzheimer's,

who were sharp and clever to the end of their days, when they looked at their brains, they actually had Alzheimer's, but they were learning. They were the people who 20 years earlier had answered questions with the most complex sentences and said they liked to solve puzzles. So they were constantly challenging

their own brains. And I think maybe we can see this as an opportunity, the world shifting constantly around us and having to improvise everything as a gift to take us back to the wolf that connects, because that's the puzzle cracker, right? So maybe constant change and improvisation is a joyful thing that can help keep our brains young. And it's almost like a way that we can evolve in our own lifetimes to refuse that. And I can see from where your father in his generation and the way that changed him in his life, we have an opportunity that he and his generation didn't have to kind of grasp now the inevitability of the constant change and that social role, technology, all the stuff that, you know,

and say, okay, I'm not going to surrender my willingness to adapt and learn and embrace. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

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I think you go back several hundred years, things changed very slow. You could feel fairly confident that the life that you were living Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. got to be on your toes, you know? And so I agree. And I look at ways in which I often refer to it as like, I see older people ossifying is a term that I use. And so I watch that very much in myself because I'm like, that's what to watch for. Like I can see it. So how do I stay nimble, improvisational? How do I allow my brain to change? Even as I feel some of what happens in age, sort of feel it kind of creeping in, it's there, but I think there's ways to work with it skillfully and it feels important. You know, our friend Elizabeth Gilbert, I don't know if she's ever been on your show, but there was this wonderful talk that she gave a long time ago, at least 10 years ago. And it's funny, you were talking to Eric about men's know, men's experience with this, and she was speaking at a women's conference. And so it was actually

about women's experience. And she was making the exact point that you were making, Eric, about, you know, for the first time ever, we can't look to our mother's lives and our grandmother's lives and our great grandmother's lives to get the script of what we should do. And she said, it's like, and this totally applies across all genders. We're all just wandering around in our own little maze, trying to make decisions about what to do without any blueprint. And she said, this is why this is the age of memoir. She said, because reading someone's memoir is like getting to climb up and look over at her little maze and how's she making these decisions? How's she dealing with these impossible unscripted

journeys that we're all making? And I just always think of that because it is so true and it is in every aspect of our lives. It's even more true now than when she said it and it will be even more true 10 years from now. At that time, we didn't even have as much internet onboarding. I was there. I was actually in the room when she gave that. Oh, my God. Yeah. I watched it on the internet. And at that time, you know, Eat, Pray, Love was brand new, and it was just, you know, smoking off the shelves.

People were not spending as much time on their phones. So she gave this very candid, funny, brilliant look into her own life. But now you can find incredible candid, funny, brilliant people putting up TikToks. You know, some 12-year-old in Iowa, like, can make my day and show me how to live. It's like, how do we? There are so many scripts. There are so many scripts. They're not scripts. They're not scripts. I think maybe the biggest change is that it's not prescriptive.

It's reflective. It's like here's my reality and we're all in the place on the map where it says here be dragons, right, where they got to the end of the known world and it's here be dragons and we're all dealing with different dragons, dealing with them in different ways. But I love that we're all just saying, well, here's my corner. Yeah. Make of it what you will. A number of years ago, as the research around psychedelics and depression became very, very relevant, I thought, okay, that's something I want to investigate. And so I chose to. But I had a very disconcerting and yet at the same time,

which way you want to view it experience. And in that moment, what kept happening was in my body, in my brain, I wanted someone to tell me that things were okay and that I was doing it okay. And everywhere I turned, it just turned to smoke. Wow. Like everybody I looked at, every figure, every person, everybody I respected was like gone. Like, yes, they sort of see it, but not really. And they're going to be gone. And it's either completely liberating or terrifying, depending on the way you want to interpret it.

But it is to that point of other people can give us some vision into the way they're making decisions, what they're thinking about. But we've got to figure this out ourselves because we are unique creatures. Our values are ours. Our experiences are ours. I mean, there's so many things. And so that's why I think anything that gets overly prescriptive becomes limiting at a certain point. Like right away. You know, it always interests me because on Bewildered, when we're talking about, you know, liberating yourself from the rules of the culture, which are unlikely to coincide with your true nature, which for all of us will be completely different. I often think, but what about the people who happen to have a nature that completely goes along with, like,

happen to have a nature that completely goes along with like, my true nature really just wants to have 2.5 children and work nine to five under fluorescent lights. Like that's actually my, I reckon there's probably about three of them, right? Right. Out of 8 million people, three are going, this works well. Right. Well, you know what it makes me think of is right now I'll connect back to something I heard Martha, you described, which is like that time at the end of the day when we all like cuddle up on the couch and watch the flickering light tell us stories, you know. The series we're watching right now, it's me for the first time, me for the second, is Mad Men. Oh, yeah. Did you all watch that?

Not the whole thing. Okay. I found myself feeling suffocated. Understandable stuff. Yeah. feeling suffocated. Understandable. Yeah. And what I'm going to say is like, we're immersed in that time period right now. And I mean, it's just wrought with like jaw dropping unfairness and roles that are just so harmful and painful and limiting. But that was our parents generation. I mean, that was my parents generation. And then the ones before that, I mean, it highlights for me

kind of the way that that's always been is like, this is how we do it. And that's how our parents did it. But again, back to Maggie Smith's memoir, which you're just talking about, this is the age of memoirs, you know. She starts with this Emily Dickinson quote that says, I am out with lanterns looking for myself. Oh, Emily. I just love that beautiful idea. I'm out with lanterns looking for myself. When Eric was talking about finding a skillful way to deal with the age of nothing but improvisation, you know, as we've been talking about all of this,

I was thinking about the Asian philosophical tradition I was lucky enough to be exposed to when I was quite young. And in Asia, there's this idea that the state of highest intelligence is called don't know mind. And it's also called beginner's mind. And Suzuki Roshi says, in the beginner's mind, there are many possibilities. In the expert's mind, there are a few. I have a son with Down syndrome. He's your son, too. But I actually squirted him out.

Sorry. I assume it was a little more difficult than that. More like this. Like a kangaroo. Like in Australia. Anyway, there are two things that he will say so grandly. Like, I don't know. He'll say something, I don't know.

And the other thing he will say sometimes is, I haven't got a clue. And the zest with which he says that. People told me I should put him in an institution because that is so shameful, to have a child who doesn't know things and can't follow the thread and isn't intellectual. read and isn't intellectual. And the complete peace with which he wages his life is so of a peace with his not knowing. And he has had so many... I mean, every now and then he'll just rear up on his hind legs and say something absolutely magical and so deeply insightful and wise that I feel like we're living with a Zen master. Yeah. And it's all about not being ashamed to say to the left hemisphere, down, Wolfie, down. Yeah.

Here, have a steak. Yeah. Let's include you a little in the bigger piece. Don't know is a great phrase. What's fascinating, Martha, and I'm sure you've seen these as you're doing research in your book, is those split mind studies. Yes. Right? you're doing research in your book is those split mind studies. Yes. Right. And what's fascinating about the split mind studies, they basically find a way of separating the right brain from the left

brain. And I'm not going to go through all of it. But in essence, if the left brain doesn't know the answer to something that the only the right brain can see, it still makes up an answer. It makes it up instantly and it believes it 100%. And so that is the nature of that left brain is to know, is to have an answer. Certainty. You know, we saw this with Jenny's mom with Alzheimer's, right? It would be like, she would say something that was totally by objective reality standards, crazy, right? But there was no doubt in her mind. And there was not a second that it took her, that you could observe for her to like conjure it up.

Like the story she said or the idea or the solution, it was just like, bam. And it was absolutely cuckoo. And she was 100% certain it was true. Almost to the point that you were like, that's not right, right? Oh, yeah. I need to check my sanity here because she's really convincing. But you know, Martha, I think your son and Eric, I think you guys share that gift of being comfortable and not knowing, being comfortable in uncertainty. I think that is a gift you have. It allows you to stay there a little longer than maybe the rest of us that jump to certainty and knowing. It's a real

gift, isn't it? Liz always laughs at Marty because, you know, she'll ask, come to the expert who knows all these things and the Harvard PhD and she'll say, Martha, what's the answer to this question I've got? Martha goes, I don't know. Isn't that great? I don't know. That's wonderful. Instead of that being some sort of deficit. Yeah. Yeah, you're open to everything. And I think claiming the don't know, you know, what I was just saying about people telling me to institutionalize my son. I also had books that said, be prepared to be ashamed every time you're out with your child.

And I remember reading one of those books when I was still pregnant, and I threw it at the wall so hard. I was 25 years old and quite emotional and pregnant, and I threw the book at the wall and it exploded into just this massive shower of pages. And I thought, F you, I will never be ashamed of this child. And in doing that, I claimed something for the child in everyone, for the person wandering in every little maze going, I don't know. You need never be ashamed of that. And I think that's probably why I ended up doing self-help and everything,

which wasn't my intention, just being willing to embrace the I don't know kid. Thank you. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

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It's for the voters to decide. Follow the Big Take podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. I know a bit about your background and that you were born into like a Mormon culture that was very prescriptive and restrictive and yeah, all those things. Did you always have a sense of your own wild, open, free sort of self in this way that we're talking about, this don't know mind or this rejecting sort of these prescriptive ideas that just didn't fit? Or did that happen to you like over time or with a defining moment? Like,

how did you get to where you are based on where you started? Who was it? Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a great feminist said, women have been systematically disappointed in the law, the polity and the economy and my life's work. And I thought she was going to say is to make things better. And feminist said, women have been systematically disappointed in the law, the polity, and the economy. And my life's work, and I thought she was going to say, is to make things better. And she said, my life's work is to deepen this disappointment in the hearts of women until they will suffer it no longer. And what happened to me is I was born a total people pleaser in a culture that was completely against my true nature. culture that was completely against my true nature. And I tried really hard to embody it, and it made me so miserable and suicidal that when I left, I left with the force of somebody who has just jumped onto a trampoline. Whoa! I remember one defining moment when I was 29,

they announced that the three leading enemies of the Mormon church in the latter days, which is now, leading enemies of the Mormon church in the latter days, which is now, were feminists, intellectuals, and homosexuals. Oh, check, check. And I was like, okay, I'm out. I thought you were going to say they named you by name. And I was like, wow. They basically were reading from my resume at that point. Wow, that couldn't be clearer.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that reminds me of that. Is it Anais Nin quote of, and the day came when the risk to remain tight in the bud became greater than the risk it took to blossom? Which is kind of the same thing, but it's beautiful, right? It's beautiful to, you just finally can't stay there anymore. And hopefully you go to a place that's less painful, less restrictive. And maybe we all get there, you know, each in our own way. We're all socialized by family cultures, ethnic cultures, religious cultures, national cultures.

And none of them, as Rose said, is going to coincide with every detail of our true nature. So maybe there's a defining moment in Buddhism. They call it the squeeze, where you're being crushed between two cultural forces you can't answer, and you pop out like a watermelon seed between the squeezy fingers. That's not what the Buddha actually said, but I think he would have. Like, I'm interested, have you guys had a squeeze? I had that moment. What have you had? What blew you out of the cultural mode? I think my first version of that happened in high school.

And I can remember it. I remember the exact moment very clearly. I didn't realize that there was a pressure building. I didn't realize what was happening. But I was a pretty unhappy kid. And I worked very hard to be what I thought I was supposed to be. And then I heard the Sex Pistols on a church trip in Florida. And I remember, I have a terrible memory, but I remember this moment very clearly,

walking up the steps of this old school bus and the beginning of Holidays in the Sun came on. And I can sort of like, my life feels defined by before that and after that. Wow. Because all of a sudden it just opened my eyes and I went, is any of this real? Is any of this true? Is any, like, I suddenly felt like I could question everything that happened. Wow. So again, it didn't feel to me like I was getting ready to rebel.

It just emerged, but it apparently had a lot of fuel behind it because it took off fast. Yeah. When you asked the question, I immediately knew what it was. So I too was like the people pleaser. And I say was like, that was so Jenny Gay of, you know, 1990, but I mean, it's still something in me, but people pleaser and like the oldest child. So I was like, just tell me what the rules are and I'll do them and I'll do them great everyone will be happy and I'll live a happy life and so I was in a very fundamentalist branch of the the protestant church and in a school that was in the south and kind of the bible belt so it was like this like little bubble inside of a little bubble it was just so small and tight and the rules were so narrow and I I was like, okay, I think I still got it. I got it.

So I ended up dating a guy that fit what was the right guy, was on paper. And I was like, well, that's great. I got him. Okay. So stayed with him. Then we got married right out of college. And about a month after we got married, it was actually the Saturday night before we were joining the church on Sunday morning. And I just walked into the guest room and he was like looking at pornography, which whatever at the time that was just an enormous, whoa, who are you? What are you doing? Like I did not know that existed in him. Wow. So it opened this whole thing of then a year later filed for divorce. Just it opened up a whole Pandora's box of this other life he was living. Anyway, point is,

so when I filed for divorce, I remember it was on the phone with him and I was telling him like, that's it. You know, this is the decision I'm making. And he said that he had talked to the elders in the church. And of course, we're 12 white old men. No one in the church had asked me in the last year, how are you doing? Or what's your truth? What's your side of this? Right? It was all him. I needed to stay in the marriage and suffer so he could get better. That was what I was told. And so then he said, well, the elders have said that if you file for divorce without getting their blessing or approval, then you'll be excommunicated. And I was like, oh my God, you know what?

Excuse my language, but like, fuck them. You know, like they have no place in our marriage. This is not between them. I will not be told what to do. Like the gig is up. I thought this was about love and inclusivity and support. And I couldn't feel less of that right now. Like I am out. So I left the marriage. I left the church. I moved to New Orleans where things were very free, you know, and I was like

doing all these free things in New Orleans, but it shot me off into this other phase of life that was more like, well, let me find my rules, quote unquote, you know, like, I'm done with this. It was defining. I'm grateful for it. All I can think as I've been listening to you speak is I think mine happened in increments, but it was always moments when I could get away from people and into nature and moving my body. could get away from people and into nature and moving my body. And I remember this one moment I went to, actually the repressive environment I went to is I went to a very intensely like private school in high school, like it was, you know, ties and uniforms and all of that sort of thing.

And we went on a sort of like outward bound, is that the thing? Yeah. Yeah. And I never fit in there. I was the scholarship kid. I, you know, there was quite, you know, wealthy people there on the whole and I didn't relate to that very well and they didn't quite know what to make of me.

And there was just this moment we had been hiking for about six hours and I'd sprained my ankle about halfway through and just kept going and like I'd bound my ankle about halfway through and just kept going. And like I'd bound my ankle and kept going. I was 15. And I just remember this moment of slowly reaching into this state of almost euphoria, ecstasy, bliss. And this girl who I was at school with, who I didn't know very well, just she'd turned around or we stopped to have a drink of water or something. And she just looked at me and she just sort of, oh, she goes, what's going on? You look really pretty. And it was like, she was like, something's happened to you. Like it was the, you know,

it was the, it was the vocabulary she had, but I think I knew exactly what she meant because I was like huge and full of light in that moment. And it was just, I think the power of other people and cultures and systems that we create with that left brain are so powerful that sometimes you have to walk away from them for a really long time to be able to find yourself again. Oh yeah. I love that. That's what she said, because there is this thing. Another friend of mine, Stephen Mitchell, is one of my favorite spiritual poets and translators of our time. And he wrote a memoir that never, it hasn't been published yet, but he let me read it. And he talks about how he, as a young boy, found himself really infatuated with this nun. Here's this very, very Jewish boy.

And he meets this nun, and he's obsessed with her, and he thought, I guess I have to be Catholic. I don't know what's going on. And he said, I had not yet learned to understand radiance. That's cool. truly in don't know mind, who is truly experiencing everything in the moment and reacting with that whole 11 million bits of information per second, body, mind, heart, soul, everything online, everything present in its nature, it starts to shine. And I think that's the pulling force that Ro was talking about at the very beginning of the episode. When we see radiance, it pulls us, it will pull us up mountains with broken ankles, you know, we will just keep going.

Or radiance, and ironically, religion is meant to embody that. And instead, it just pins it to a board and kills it. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Oh, that's such a beautiful thought. You've been talking about don't know, mind, beginner's mind a lot. And it reminds me of one of my very favorite quotes of all time. And it's by Zen master Dogen. And he said, one is that enlightenment is intimacy with all things. The mystical experiences I've had, that feels very true.

It is this deep intimacy with everything. But the other Zen quote, and I think it's Dogen also, is that not knowing is most intimate. Ooh, I love that. And so it's that idea of, you know, don't know mind or beginner's mind, but not knowing is most intimate. Because when we think we know something, we stop looking. Ah, that's right. And knowing comes from the force that divides, right?

That cuts up. It's not from the force that connects. from the force that divides, right, that cuts up. It's not from the force that connects. And so if we're not in knowledge, then we're still in the part of ourselves that can be intimate with everything because it's everything. There are two different ways to know, right? There's the way that Ginny's mom knew absolutely about her, like why she had left the cat in the refrigerator or whatever it was.

There's that kind of knowing. And then there's the kind of knowing that is, my body does not exist, but I feel with every molecule in the universe, and there is no need to explain to me, I am it. You know, I am you. The wolves both claim to know, as Ian McGilchrist says, one says, one knows that there's nothing to know, and the other one knows that it never knows. It's so often both and. I mean, I think often people, myself included, get tripped up when in like Buddhist circles, they talk about like, everything is interconnected. Like there's no you, there's no me, there's just us. And that's true, but it's also incomplete because there is

also still like a you and a me. I mean, there's both. It's just that either alone, it's not the whole story, right? Right. It's when we connect, it's when we bring together that we find the truth. There's that incredible image of Indra's web where the structure of the entire universe is like a three-dimensional spider web and at each juncture of silk is a diamond, and it has infinite facets, and that would be you, me, us. In every facet of every diamond is reflected the entire web, every other diamond. So everything is reflecting everything else, but without a single one of those diamonds, it would be incomplete. Yes. Beautiful.

It's mind-blowing. That's good. Yeah. It's good to blow out my it would be incomplete. Yes. It's mind-blowing, and that's good. Yeah. It's good to blow out mind. It is. Yes. So I think we've figured it all out. Yeah. I think we've solved it.

Solved, yeah. I think the answer is just don't know anything. Yeah. That's the takeaway. We don't know. We have no idea. That's right. It's interesting.

It's the one thing we're sure of well it's so interesting because i often relate things back to being an addict and an alcoholic um i think back on that time and when i said at the very beginning like that sometimes it's hard to know this deep inner knowing versus our habitual conditioning and patterns because Because in a moment back then, it felt deeply true and right that like I had to do heroin. Like it seemed like 100. Right. It felt really real. But I was just thinking I had been having that thought.

But then the other thing that I just thought about is a lot of the words that we use for intoxication, plastered, hammered, ripped, right? They all point to this breaking of this small thing that constricts us. But it also, I thought you were gonna say they're all about building, hammered, plastered. They're about building something. And when I worked with heroin addicts

on the streets of Phoenix in the dopamine, or the dopamine clinic, the methadone clinic. They came in, and I would listen to them, and they'd say, I really, really want to be on heroin. And I'd say, how does it feel? And they would tell me, and I'd say, I agree with you 1,000%. Yeah. That's exactly how you're supposed to feel.

But it's supposed to last all the time, and you get to keep your teeth. We're meant to. I still have my teeth. I want to be clear. As a former heroin addict, I still have my teeth. I want to be clear. As a former heroin addict, I still have my teeth. I got out quick enough. As you were talking about plastering and hammering, I was thinking about a line from the Tao Te Ching, which says that we hammer wood to make a house, but it's a space inside that we live in. We work with being, but non-being is what we use. So it's the space inside that we're creating.

And even when you were getting high or whatever it's called with different drugs, you were still building constructions that were allowing you to know the space inside and to know ultimately that that wasn't working for you because there was misery. But you could build something out of your years as an alcoholic and addict that was still the space in which to become whole. Nothing is wasted. Nothing. I agree 100%. And that was what most of that was about. It was about me trying to figure out how to connect. I didn't know how to do it. I had not been equipped to do it. And I did this thing, and I suddenly felt connected. And I was like, well, all right, that works, right? Until it doesn't. If it kept working, I'd still be there, you know, if it kept doing what it would do. But

it was a very elegant solution to a problem for a long time and just until it wasn't. Interesting. We're given psychedelics as like the plant world gives us opioids and psychedelics and stimulants and all of them can make us feel really good for a while. Like we feel, oh, this is the easy way. I'm rolling downhill now. But the radiance is missing. And in the end, we end up in a very low place going, why can't I find my way back up? But we've all talked about places where we were broken, where the casing was broken on our minds, and where we opened up. And then the radiance comes in,, you know, the sex pistols take you away from the church and the sex stuff takes your husband away. It has to be sex.

There's a thread there. But the radiance comes in. And I loved what you said about music too, Eric, because the right side of the brain has music and the left side of the brain has music and the left side of the brain has language. And there are languages in the world that have music, but no words. And there are no languages that have words, but no music. Music can be part of what pulls us into the radiance. So it's also harmony. Every sense has its parallel that's trying to pull us body and soul toward what we need to be.

Sex, drugs, rock and roll is like what sort of kicked off that counterculture and it all went eastward. It all went to spirituality. Once the sex, drugs, and rock and roll had worn out, George Harrison was over there playing the sitar, you know, and meditating. Yeah, yeah. The Beatles went to, you know, stay with Maharishi. It's fascinating because we were talking about Mad Men earlier and we're at the part of Mad Men where it's just starting. You can just start to see. I have not, no spoilers.

No spoilers. Good stuff. I don't think it's a spoiler that the 60s happened. They spoiled everything. Don't know mine. I do not know. No. Yeah.

That's all I mean is that the countercultural. Just don't reveal a plot line. I know history happened. No, no, no. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. No plot line. Just you can, one of the things I love about that show is it does accurately reflect a historical period. And I agree with you, Martha.

The beginning of it is oppressive. It's one of the things I like about it. Back to your point earlier about the role of the feminist you mentioned's job was to make you uncomfortable. Mad Men never stops doing that. It refuses to look away. It refuses to give the easy storyline, the easy answer. And it is uncomfortable. Yeah. But that's what I find beautiful about it is that it doesn't come in and offer you like the easy answer. Like, well, it was really hard for women in the 50s, except for these two women who, you know, lived a happy life. Lucy and Ethel, they were great.

It's just relentless. But the 60s are coming to Mad Men. It's about to hit yes okay that is not a spoiler you're right now now that you've explained to us that the way we felt watching it was their intention she she said the same thing after like the first second or third episode she's like does it ever get better like do the women ever ever win Oh, gosh. Do they make a comeback? I know. Stay tuned.

We need spoilers on history for that. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think we are at a good wrapping up point. We talked about literally zero that we planned to talk about when we had a planning. I don't know.

Maybe a little bit. Maybe a little. But that's fine. We didn't know all the way through. This conversation just made me feel radiant. It made me feel open and bright and expansive inside. In fact, my current working definition of spirituality is anything that causes me to both simultaneously go deeper inside myself and feel more connected with everything around me. And this conversation just made me feel that way. Indeed.

Me too. Me too. Me too. Infinitely inward and infinitely outward at the same moment. Even better said. Yes, yes. I love it. Thank you. Thanks so much. Thank you both. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support. Now, we are so grateful for the members of our community.

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