The One You Feed - Martha Beck on The Path to Your True Self

Episode Date: July 5, 2022

Martha Beck is a bestselling author, life coach, and speaker who specializes in helping individuals and groups achieve greater levels of personal and professional success. She is the author of nine nonfiction books and one novel, and has been a longtime contributor to O, The Oprah Magazine.  Her most recent book is The Way of Integrity:  Finding the Path to Your True Self  Eric and Martha discuss how to live in integrity and find the path to your true self. But wait, there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you! Martha Beck and I Discuss The Path to Your True Self and … Her book, The Way of Integrity:  Finding the Path to Your True Self\ How what we often want is influenced by our culture Asking ourselves what we yearn for as opposed to what you want The repetitive cycle of thoughts that cause fear How our culture reinforces the fear  Learning to move from fear to curiosity How humor and using your senses can turn down our fear The dilemma of when our nature conflicts with our culture Psychological suffering comes from the thoughts we choose to believe Why suffering is needed to make us pay attention and can actually be our ally Understanding that we have different “internal parts” that make up our whole self (Ref. to Richard Schwartz’s Internal Family Systems Her New Year’s resolution to not lie for a year and the healing that she found Navigating her way out of the Mormon religion How switching our identity to a material self to a limitless state of being brings joy Learning to imagine the good that will come from facing our discomfort The power of small, incremental, and repetitive actions to change your life Martha Beck links: Martha’s website Instagam Twitter Facebook By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you! If you enjoyed this conversation with Martha Beck, check out these other episodes: Byron Katie on The Work Richard Schwartz on Internal Family SystemsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

When our nature goes one direction and our culture goes another, almost all of us will just sell out our nature hard and go after the culture. So now we're not one thing, integrity, we're two things, duplicity. There's what's true for us at a very deep level, and then there's what we're trying to adapt to. 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 No 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 reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Martha Beck, a bestselling author,

life coach, and speaker who specializes in helping individuals and groups achieve greater levels of personal and professional success. She's the author of nine nonfiction books and one novel, and has been a longtime contributor to O, the Oprah Magazine. Her most recent book is The Way of Integrity. Hi, Martha. Welcome to the show. Oh, thank you so much for having me. Yeah, it's such a pleasure to have you on. We're going to be talking about your book, The Way of Integrity, Finding the Path to Your True Self. But before we do that, let's start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent talking with their

grandchild and they say, in life, there are 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 fear. And the grandchild stops and thinks about it for a second, looks up at their grandparent and says, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Ah, it's such an interesting point. I know the parable well, but did not expect to have it thrown at me. And what comes back to my mind is one time when I was trying to publicize, I think my very first book, this was before podcasts, but I was in some guy's garage because

he did a blog thing that was video and everybody was very excited about it. And he turned on the cameras and we started talking about his life or something. And then he said, but let's get down to it. We're here to sell books. And I was like, no, I am not here to sell books. And he was like, what? And I said, if I were here to sell books, yeah, things would not go well. I am here to be present for whatever needs me right now because throughout my life, I had really sold myself. I'd fed the wrong wolf. I went after achievement and egoic sort of rewards and ended in disaster every single time.

So I'd become hypersensitive to feeding that wrong wolf. And I just said, you know, the reason I'm here is to help maybe one person who's out there on the other side of this broadcast. I'm never here just to sell books. So that just popped up when you asked me the question. Yeah. Well, it speaks to the reasons why we do things, which is so much of what I think this book is about is what is going on underneath things. And one of the things that I'm struck by when you were talking, it made me think about something that I've often thought about, which is like, why do I do what I do? And what's interesting is there's a big part of why I do what I do,

which is very much grounded in love and service and all of that. And I've been cultured in such a way to use a term that we'll talk about a lot in the book. I am in a culture that constantly sort of, I feel distracted and drawn towards downloads and money and like, you know, and so there's this constant for me having to sort of reorient back to my deeper meaning. And you talk in the book about discerning what you really want or what you think you want and what you actually yearn for. Could you speak a little bit about that? Because I think that can be such a confusing thing for many of us is because we feel like we want lots of different things that may very often seem to be in conflict with each other. Yeah. You know, I've coached hundreds of people one-on-one, thousands if you count groups, and

I found this little trick. If you ask people what they want, they will make you a list, you know, make a list of things you want. They will make you a list that's very much dominated by what they've learned from their culture. So it will be that particular culture's type of success, power wealth status, those things, of course, are huge in our particular culture. And they're always striving for these things. And they're maybe not getting them, maybe they're getting them at the cost of their own happiness, but things aren't going well. Then I ask them, when you wake up at night, and it's dark, dark and you're alone and you've got hours to do nothing but think, what is it you yearn for? And it always brings up a very different list.

When I put it that way, what comes up for you when I ask you what you yearn for? Well, I think what's interesting is the first thing that came to mind is sometimes in the dark of the night is where fear can get its greatest grips in to us. And so there's a certain type of being awake in the middle of the night that leads to deeper reflection on my deepest desires. And there's another type of being awake in the middle of the night, which is fueled by fear. So setting aside the fueled by fear, you know, I think what I yearn for is to do work that matters, that I love doing. And what's the outcome of that? Well, I guess the outcome is that I am, I guess for lack of a better word, excited by what I'm doing.

Beautiful. There's an excitement, an innate joy in doing what you're doing. Yeah. That's one of the things people yearn for. Others are peace, freedom, joy, belonging. That's kind of it. Like I've asked people all over the world from wildly different cultures what they want, and it's always very different. But what people yearn for are those few things they want to matter. They want purpose, joy, belonging, freedom, peace. That's pretty much it. And what we realize when we go into that is that we're selling out the things we yearn for to get the things we want. And the reason is exactly what

you just said, because we're driven by fear. And I'm actually writing another book right now. You mentioned this right before we went live. You said you're probably having new ideas and thoughts. And it's all about fear and about how there is in the human brain a particular cycle of thoughts that creates continuous fear, continuous growing fear. My friend, Jill Bolte-Taylor, who's a neuroanatomist, says that the left-hand side

just feels a fear impulse and then another part that tries to control everything. And those two can get locked up in this little duet where they're screaming at each other that things are very bad, and they get more and more frightened. On the right hemisphere, the corresponding parts create no fear but curiosity and fascination, and instead of control, a sense of giving up control to creativity and selflessness and connection with the universe. So it's literally inside the hemispheres of the brain are the two wolves. And fear literally feeds the dark wolf or the bad wolf.

The thing is that our culture so supports the fearful side of the brain. It's like we've created outside ourselves exactly what that part of the brain is doing internally. So it's, again, it reinforces itself. And it doesn't shift unless we deliberately shift it. You don't just fall into less fear. You fall into more fear. To get less fear, you have to do things that sort of push you toward the other side of your brain, like imagining the feeling of doing something that matters to you. That'll cause the circuit in the left side of the brain and pull it over, all your attention over to the right side where you can feed the wolf that is all about joy and belonging and frolicking and having good puppies and all of that.

So what are some other things that we can do that move us from that fear-based circuit over to the curiosity-based circuit, for lack of a better word for it. Yeah. I'm so glad you asked. None of this is in the book I just wrote. A little of it is, but it's in the book I'm writing now. The right side of the brain has very few verbal components. The places where it uses language are in poetry and jokes. So actually seeking humor is one of the things you can do to feed the wolf on the right side and to shift the energy. There's a great book called Deep Survival by Lawrence Gonzalez, where he talks about how people who survive unsurvivable situations are really funny about it.

Like they find a way to laugh at the darkest moments of their lives. So that's one way. Just drenching yourself in immediate sensory experience, like imagining three things you love to taste and three things you love to hear, and like any of the senses and going into that deeply will shift you. I've done that with huge groups, and you can actually feel the shift in the room

when people go into their senses instead of their thoughts. Thinking, yeah. Yeah. So you turn down thought, and you turn up presence and experience, and that allows you to stop feeding the bad wolf and going over, taking something over to the good wolf. Yeah. I think that humor piece is such an important one. I've often said, I think levity is a spiritual virtue, you know, it should be listed as one. And it is true that people oftentimes who've gone through the worst things have the best sense of humor about them. I mean, I know in AA, you know, there's a lot of laughter about things that are really pretty, pretty dark things, you know, but having gone through them,

we're able to laugh about them. And, you know, laughter is such a powerful tool, but I never really thought of it is moving that sort of left to right brain. Oh, it's so powerful. And again, the reason you don't value it like as this massive prize, which it really is, is that the culture downgrades it. Our particular culture, and that would be modern sociologists call it the weird cultures, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratized. Our culture is so materialistic and so based on the idea of scarcity and survival that it really, really focuses all its energy on exactly what you said frightens you in the night. You've got to have

enough money. You've got to survive. What about other people? Are you serving them well? Do they like you enough? There's this continuous frenzy of fear and the need to control situations so that we don't have to be afraid. And it never works. We just get more and more frightened. And then if you just sit around laughing with your friends, the culture goes, well, you're wasting time now. I don't think so. Yeah. I think that's the most value-added thing you could possibly do.

And I know what you mean about the laughter in those rooms. It is some of the most holy expression of spirit I've ever heard. Reinhold Neibar said, laughter is the beginning of prayer. And I think maybe that's true, that the first person who was really in deep crap and suddenly burst out laughing was telling the most powerful kind of prayer. Yeah. Yep. I have a couple people I know that I've done some work with and are listeners of the show who also really love your work, and I solicited a couple questions. So, I don't normally do this, but I happen to know that they love you, and I thought,

why not ask them? And so, one of the questions was, and they're great questions, otherwise I wouldn't ask them, which is, how do you continue to grow yourself? I know that changes over time. What's that look like for you now? What is continuing to move forward and grow in your life look like now? Well, fortunately, I was blessed with an extremely anxious brain and a very flimsy body. So it's like, I do all these self-help things. And they actually do. I said to my daughter one day, I've stopped reading self-help books. And she was like, well, mom, maybe you self-helped. And I think I have. But I have to self-help every single day. And that was like, well, mom, maybe you self-helped. And I think I have, but I have to self-help every single day. And that's why I'm interested in this, the fact that the brain

pushed by culture goes back into fear over and over and over again, because I've had that experience. I don't fall into joy naturally. I wake up in the morning and I deliberately put myself in a place of joy by looking at the parts of me that are frightened, that are depressed, that are discouraged, and then finding a way to connect with compassion and speak from a different self to those parts of me that are afraid. I don't want to freeze out the bad wolf. I want to scratch it under the chin and maybe give it some quaaludes. No, no, no, drugs, sorry. That's probably triggering for your audience. Nice. I love that word, by the way, though, quaaludes. No, no, no, drugs, sorry. That's probably triggering for your audience.

I love that word, by the way, though, quaaludes. It's such a funny word to me. The double vowels, they're fabulous. Anyway, just calm down, the wolf. And then he actually comes over and works for the good side as well. I don't believe that any part of us is evil. Right. But for me, there's always a project.

So I'm pushing my mind as hard as I can on this new idea of fear and the brain science around it. And then there's always my natural tendency toward slipping into negative mood states. And finally, there's the fact that I'm going to die, which, you know, they say, I know everybody dies, but I assume that in my case, there will be an exception. We all feel that way, but it's sort of looming, you know, death sort of looms over those of us who think about it. And it means you've got to keep your powder dry. You've got to tidy up. You've got to keep self-helping every day. Yeah, Yep. And so when you embark on a new project, writing wise, is it because you found something that really interests you? Is it because it's what you most need to learn in that moment? Or are those the same thing? That's such an interesting question.

Another writer was asking me the other day, what's your muse? And I was thinking, what is it? Because I've written wildly different things over the years. Like I wrote a feminist book to begin with, and people said, you're a feminist. And I'm like, no, I'm done with that. I'm writing about my son with Down syndrome. And they're like, oh, you're all about intellectual disability. And I was like, now I'm done with that. I'm going to write about, I don't know, food. Anyway, I thought, what is it that helps me choose topics? And it's really like there's kind of this very, very thin, but very bright little line, like a fish line that goes through my entire life. And I'm sort of pulling myself along it, and it goes straight through the center

of my heart. And I would have to say that that is a kind of spiritual identity, a spiritual destination, a spiritual state of being. If I don't keep it at the center of my life all the time, I just absolutely flame out. And when I do stay on it, it just pulls me into things I did not expect. But if it says go, I go. Yeah. And if it says don't go, I don't go. And that's just it.

Yep. Yep. My through line for guests on this show is, do I want to read their work? And if I don't, they're not a guest. You know, it's just, that's it. Because I try and engage deeply with each piece of work. And I'm just like, do I want to? And if I don't, then I'm just not going to. That served me fairly well, I think. Yeah, I think it has. It's so funny. People keep paying me to say this. I mean, I went through my own life adventures and I, you know, broke away from me to say this. I mean, I went through my own life adventures,

and I broke away from my own home culture and everything. And I was teaching business school in my early 30s, and I was teaching career development. And I would say to my students things like, you should probably get a job doing something you enjoy. And then they would line up outside my office at office hours, and they'd be like, wait, wait, wait, go back. What was that thing about enjoying my job? I've never heard that. And I'd be like, yeah, if you love something and it makes you happy, maybe do a little more. And if you hate something and it makes you miserable, maybe not so much. And they were like, here is some money, just say that again. And 30 years later, people keep paying me to say that. And it seems pretty obvious, like worms could learn it. But we people are too sophisticated, and we end up missing that

really simple thing. Does it interest us? Does it make us happy? Well, that leads right kind of into the heart of the book, The Way of Integrity, which is this idea that we often do what our culture has told us we should do, not what we want to do. And oftentimes, I think what's really difficult about this is we often don't even realize it till later. It's one thing to change when you're 21. It's another thing to change when you're 41. And it's not to say that we can't make changes. I mean, I left a pretty good career about, I don't know, has it been three or four years ago to do this? So you certainly can.

But I think if we knew that stuff earlier, it's why I sort of just keep with my son. I'm like, it's just worth thinking about really what you want to do because you're going to be doing it for a long time. God willing, you're going to be doing it for a long time. You know, God willing, you're going to be doing it for a long time, you know? Right. Absolutely. Or you're going to be doing something for a long time. You've got a lot of work years ahead. Yeah. So thank God you're creating that little microculture for him where your personal desires are the most important thing.

Yeah. And most people are not, you know, not. And by culture, it means any social pressure you encounter. So your family, your ethnicity, your community, your nationality, all of these have different levels of cultural pressure. And we're all born completely aware of our personal preferences. So we're in integrity. Integrity just means intact. We're just one thing. But before we even learn to talk, we start to encounter cultural pressures. Maybe our parents wish that we cried less or that we smiled more, or if we're a boy that we act tougher, and if we're a girl that we act nicer or whatever. And we start responding to that before we can even talk. And it's because

we're so dependent on other human beings. And that's a positive, that's a good quality that makes us compassionate, it helps us cooperate. But when our nature goes one direction, and our culture goes another, almost all of us will just sell out our nature hard and go after the culture. So now we're not one thing, integrity, we're two things, duplicity. There's what's true for us at a very deep level, and then there's what we're trying to adapt to. And I used to ask audiences, I'd stop right in the middle of a speech and say, is everyone comfortable? And they would say, yeah. And I'd say, no, no, no, tell me, are you really comfortable? And they would repeatedly say they were. And then I'd say, no, no, no, tell me, are you really comfortable? And they would repeatedly say they were. And then I'd say, how many of you, if you were home alone right now, would be sitting in the

exact position you're in at this moment? And no one would raise a hand. And I would say, why not? And they would sit there, like really brilliant people, CEOs, whatever. And then finally, after like a minute, somebody would say, it's not very comfortable. And I would say, yes, indeed. And the problem is not that you're mildly uncomfortable. And the problem is that 30 seconds ago, you looked at me and swore you were comfortable, while knowing you were uncomfortable. Your body knows you're uncomfortable and your mind was telling you you're totally comfortable. That split between what we perceive to be our experience and what we know at a deeper level to be our experience, that split is, I believe, what causes all psychological suffering. Yeah, you say our psychological suffering comes from thoughts that we genuinely believe while simultaneously knowing they aren't

true. Yep. That's a very, on its surface, confusing statement. No kidding. Right? Because if I genuinely believe it, but simultaneously know it not to be true, how do I even start to unwind this? Right? Because if I don't fully know, I do coaching work like you do. And a lot of times I'll ask clients, I love your reframing of not what do you want? What do you yearn for? But when you get people to think more deeply about what they want, they're often deeply confused. Yeah, yeah. And my follow on to that question, and I'll just make this even harder for you is that culturing process starts so young, that it's almost impossible to say that I am cultured.

Like what I'm interested in has been a sum of all the things that have happened to me. So which of those things do I sort of want to hang on to and go, oh, that's really me? And which of those things do I want to go, oh, that's culture, that's trauma. It's all woven together. You are the sum of what's happened to you plus what came in originally. Right. So it's the old nature-nurture debate, right? Yeah. So the sum of everything that happened to you is nurture, but you also have a true nature.

And you know your nature at the level you knew it as a newborn, which is wordless, sensory, based on your feelings, your emotions. So there are all these sophisticated sort of compasses inside our psyches and our bodies that are helping us know what's good for us at any given time. And when the culture around us pushes us in a direction that's away from our nature, it's like the compasses stop working. But the one ally we have that is with us from the moment of birth and will be with us to death is suffering. You know, and I used to spend a lot of time thinking, well, if there is a spiritual force that loves us, why do we suffer? And it's because without suffering, we would not have any way to readjust those compasses. Suffering is the one thing that really gets our attention. In Catch

22, which I read in second grade, I remember being quite confused by it. But I remember from being seven years old, some guy saying, well, why is suffering okay? How can you believe in God if there's suffering? And he said, well, suffering alerts us to pain. And another character says, well, why couldn't there just be a system of flashing lights or something? And I remember thinking, well, my family has a car with all these warning lights, and they're always on. We were not good at property maintenance, my family. And nobody pays any attention to them.

To make us pay attention, something has to break. We have to be inconvenienced. It has to be incredibly interruptive of our normal lives, and it has to be distressing. And I was like, well, now we're back with suffering again. So it really is this profound ally. And really, truly, no matter how cultured you are, no matter how socialized you are, oh my gosh, I've worked with people who were born into spotlights and never got out of them with so much attention on them their whole lives. And they still had suffering telling them, this is not me. This is not me. And you need to get by yourself

and relax and get really, really in touch with where things aren't comfortable. It's just that simple question, where am I uncomfortable? And your true self, your true nature will always tell you. And then you go from there. You start with the discomfort and then you start to say, okay, why am I sustaining these conditions that are making me uncomfortable? And then you start unwinding the cultural messages that have you all tied up. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really Know 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? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Placewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts?

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Bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We come into this world with a certain nature. If you follow certain spiritual traditions far enough, they get to the point where they talk about essentially this oneness, this impersonal, undifferentiated oneness, right? I think what you're saying, though, is a little bit different. You're saying that we come in here with what personality researchers might say are some dials on our personality. We're born that way. Yeah. So my nature is not the same as your nature in your

belief here, right? Actually, no. I believe that there is this incredible universal intelligence, I believe that there is this incredible universal intelligence, and it is integrated with, uninterrupted by our personal sense of self. So that if we go deep enough in meditation or whatever, we realize that we've been melded with it all along. It's like the old metaphor of waves in the ocean. I'm a wave. You are a wave. The ocean is going to take us back very soon. So there's no difference to me between that oneness that we feel in those deeply spiritual moments and the truest of our true selves. But the vast intelligence knows what it wants to do

with the individual wave. And so it guides us and pulls us along and allows us to have individual experiences for the variety of it, for the joy and compassion and wisdom of it. But it's always part of the whole. And when you feel that, it's so relaxing because you realize that the whole thing is benevolent. And it not only loves you, but it is you at some essential level. And it's having an adventure looking out through Eric's eyes, through Martha's eyes. And it's gaining this huge experience of what it means to be alive in these forms. Right. You use a phrase for that. You say that from this perspective, we're all intermingled drops in what Dante calls lo gran mar de la sere, or the great sea of being. Yeah, the great sea of being. Yeah, I was thinking about this. There's a line from Alexander Pope that really struck me. It goes, all forms that perish, other forms supply. By turns,

we catch the vital breath and die. Like bubbles on the sea of matter born, we rise, we break, and to that sea return. And that could sound really ghoulish and like we're just so bubbles and we pop and we don't exist anymore. Or it can bring you into a sense of awe. Yes. you into a sense of awe. Like, oh my God, I'm having this incredible experience. I wrote this whole book sort of guided by Dante's metaphors. And I had the weirdest experience of the wave that was me connecting with the wave that was Dante. Because I read like dozens of translations of the Divine Comedy, and I was always parsing them for meaning and everything. Don't worry, it's not a book about Dante. It's fun. You'll love it. But as I got into it, I thought, this man is a psychological and spiritual genius. And I started dreaming about Dante. And it was very much as though the life that was Dante encountered my life in a way that was deeply joyful and intimate. This was right during the pandemic. We just shut down. Everything was

scary as hell. And I was encountering on a daily basis another wave in the sea, another bubble in the sea that was so full of life still after 700 years. And I kind of lost the sense of time, which Dante himself does at the end of the Divine Comedy. And I think if we go deeply enough into our wholeness, if we align our social selves with our essential selves, we start to experience ourselves as brief but eternal. And eternal means outside of time, not a long time, but no time. And outside of time, we can meet everyone that's ever been, we can enjoy everything that's ever happened. And that sense of awe, it's impossible to convey in words, it's that right side of the brain experience. But once you've had it, I used to

work with heroin addicts on the streets in Phoenix. And that's what they all were looking for, I think. I mean, tell me where I'm wrong. No, you're not wrong. It is interesting to me as I think about sometimes, you know, my spiritual search, you know, I have to look at it sometimes and go, okay, in what ways is that similar to my addiction? In positive ways and in negative ways. There's both, right? Because I do think in my addiction all along was a deep yearning for connection and wholeness and oneness. And there was the occasional moment where drugs, they did that, you know, I intuited this deeper reality and then I would touch it and I would be like that. Now, of course, what I then did to keep

getting that burned my life down, right? And so I think it was Young who said to Bill Wilson in AA that really made the point of the word spiritist for alcohol and the word spirit. That's what alcoholics are looking for to a large extent. Yeah. And I used to tell the heroin addicts, I would go to this methadone clinic where people would come in because they couldn't get enough heroin. And they used to tell the heroin addicts, I would go to this methadone clinic where people would come in because they couldn't get enough heroin. And they had to sit through my thing to get methadone. So some of them would like fall asleep on the floor in front of me. And it was great.

But I used to tell them, and I was not popular among the other counselors there, because I'd say never, ever give up the search for that feeling. That feeling you had the first time it took you and you knew you were home, that is how you're meant to feel. And the reason I said that was that like Bill W., I had an experience, I was in surgery at the time, where I encountered this light. I was lying on the surgical table and I sat up and looked around and thought, well, that's odd. Why am I sitting up when I am strapped down? And then I lay back down into my body and saw this light and it was tiny at first. It was like the size of a golf ball. And then it began to expand. And when it touched me, I felt this incredible warmth and release and joy and homecoming and love beyond love. And I just

started to laugh and laugh and laugh and cry. I mean, my body was crying and the surgeons got very worried because there were tears coming out of my eyes and they thought that I was feeling pain. So the anesthesiologist almost increased the anesthesia. But then later he told me, as he was going to do that, a voice said to him, don't do that. She's crying because she's happy. I had asked to see him because I wanted to know if I'd had a drug induced hallucination. And instead, I got this really interesting story. And he was like, what happened in there? So I told him this light came, and it filled my entire being with joy. And then it said, don't think you have to die

to feel this way. You're meant to feel this way while you're alive. Now go out and do whatever it takes. And I think that's what heroin addicts are trying to find. I think that's what all addicts are trying to find. It's home. It's home base for us. And the search to get back to it and to feel that way all the time has been my singular goal ever since. That's it. That's all I'm into. Yeah. I think what's interesting though, is that desire to feel a certain way all the time is sometimes what does lead us away from what you've talked about that wholeness, right? This gets very interesting when you've done a lot of this, right? You talk with people who look at

and study and are enlightened and you start to talk about like, well, are we talking about an experience or are we talking about something else? Because experiences come and go. We are human beings. There's a tremendous amount of fluctuation in the experience that we have, right? I mean, you get hungry, you're not hungry. You know, you have a headache, you don't have a headache. And yet there is also something that seems to be deeper than that. And so like you, my thing has been about how do I find my way back there in a way that isn't all about finding my way back there. The Chinese talk about trying not to try, right? Yes. I've had a couple experiences.

They're different than what yours were with the light, but I've had some, in Zen, we'd call a Kensho experience, right? A dramatic opening, a dramatic enlightenment experience. And, of course, I'm like, more of that, please. And he's like, the most surefire way to make sure you don't experience that again is to keep expecting to experience it again. I'm like, okay, well, now what do I do with that? Yeah.

There's a Zen teacher. His name is, it's escaping me for a minute. It'll come right back to me. But Shinzen Yang. He talks about how we travel the surface of the globe looking for enlightenment, looking for peace. surface of the globe looking for enlightenment, looking for peace. And the way to it, and this is exactly what Dante did, is to turn and start going into the center of it. And as we go closer to the center, we have sometimes these very intense mystical experiences. And the mistake we can make is to then turn and start roaming around the world of the mystical experience that

we've had, And it's like a smaller sphere inside the bigger sphere, but it doesn't take us to the core. So it can be very distracting and very misleading to think that those experiences are the thing itself. I did go that path for a little while after I had that experience. I would do anything to get back to that. And I had a lot of mystical experiences. But they always, if I tried to push into getting more of them, they always sort of frittered out. And so I would end up going back, I would feel myself not comfortable. And what's interesting is that the sensation I had on that table was not emotional. It affected me emotionally. But the experience itself was not one of emotion,

and it wasn't one of sensation. It was one of absolute stillness, absolute peace. And what I've realized over the ensuing years is that I can sit with incredible levels of anxiety and be in total peace. So it's a field that contains the emotions. It's not the emotion itself. It's like Eckhart Tolle says, the opposite of death is not life.

The opposite of death is birth. Life has no opposite. Life is the field through which birth and death alternate. So the field of me that is life, the field of me death alternate. So the field of me that is life, the field of me that is presence, the field of me that is awareness can sit with me in my anguish, in my sorrow, in my alienation and love me completely without changing a thing. And it's that, it's the switch into the part that is holding and loving the emotional part, away from the emotional part itself as identity and into the field where the emotions are happening.

That switch, I think, is the enlightenment experience. So my experience with that is there are times that I am able to make something like the switch you're describing, where I'm able to go, okay, there's this very strong emotion. And now I become the space that that emotion is happening in, and I'm able to sort of step back. And then there are other times that that emotion feels utterly overwhelming, and I'm just lost in it. And I'm kind of curious for you, is there anything that you have found that makes it more likely you're able to make that switch into the container or the witness or whatever way you want to put that. Because I think that's a question a lot of people who are listening to the show or reading

your work are trying to figure out is like, yeah, I get that intellectually. Right. But boy, sometimes that's really hard to do. Yeah. One way that I'm writing about right now, it's kind of a new front in psychology right now. It's called part psychology. The sort of flagship is called internal family systems. I'm sure you know about it. The idea is that we all have various aspects of self that should be treated as full individuals. And if we treat them as full individuals and we have relationships

with them, they have this strange ability to cooperate with us. When I first started meditating really seriously, the anxiety nearly killed me and it would not subside in 90 seconds. It went on for hours and days and weeks. It was horrific. And it was me in anxiety. And I had experienced that light and why couldn't I get back to it? If you start to think of yourself instead as there was a part of me that had that experience with the light, there's another part of me that is running around and around, and start to visualize the different parts. For me, the anxiety became a horse that just ran and ran and ran. Horses do that when they're scared. They'll run round and round just

to get the adrenaline out. And I sat there in meditation. I watched the horse go round and round and round. And one thing horses do, if you don't approach them, they finally slow down. And finally, I watched the anxiety slowing down. I thought, oh, it's slowing down. And then I thought, wait, where am I? And I realized I was outside the pen the horse was in, and I'm like, okay, well, I am not the horse, so what am I? And I was the watcher, or the compassionate witness, as it's called in some traditions. And now, if I experience anxiety, anger, whatever, and I experience them every day, I stop and I say to the part that is upset, what's going on with you right now? What can I do for you?

And because I've practiced this for a long time, Jung called it self with a capital S, and Richard Schwartz, the guy who started internal family systems therapy, he calls it the same thing. He just wrote a book called No Bad Parts, which is really great. And what they both found was that there is this sort of overarching self, capital S, that is sort of the shepherd, to use a biblical metaphor, or the parent of this flock of frightened children. And if you can say, all right, all right, I'm anxious. If you can just get to some compassion for the part of you that is in anxiety or anger or whatever, and if you can wish it well, and I use a Tibetan loving kindness meditation, simple. May you be well. May you be happy. May you be free from all internal and external suffering. May you have ease of well-being, whatever, doesn't matter, as long as it's a good thought. As you continue to offer the benighted part of yourself this comfort,

you realize that the comforting part of you is still in the light, and it was always there. And that's what I keep coming to every time I pop out of a bad mood. It's like, the part of me that isn't in the presence of that light was always there through my childhood, through my adolescence, through every horrible thing that ever happened to me, it was always present. And that starts to feel very anchoring after a while. Yeah, it's interesting. I interviewed Dick recently about that book. He talks about, you know, there's different types of parts. And, you know, one thing he talks a lot about is asking a certain part if it might step aside, which I think is a really interesting thing. And then the other thing he talks about is that the most wounded parts of

you, the exiles, he describes as you may really need someone who's trained or a therapist or someone else to go there. And you talk about this also in the book, The Way of Integrity. You say, look, depending on what your trauma is, you may not want to wade into this on your own. So I think it speaks to the fact that there are certain experiences for us that are so overwhelming, so emotionally activating that we're not going to just sit there and switch out of them. And it may be a process, right? It may be a process of slowly over time, slowly bringing the volume on them down until we're able to work with them on our own more skillfully. Yeah. Another thing, this is turning into the Dick Schwartz show, which I love.

He's an awesome dude. But he says, you know, one thing you can ask them is, you know, you can let me know a little bit about what you're going through, but don't overwhelm me. I can't handle it right now. And weirdly, the part that is traumatized will say, all right, as long as you're listening to me, I won't give you a huge dose. I'll just drip it out a little bit. But that again is in the presence of a skilled therapist. So yeah, if you've been through something horrible, one of the things that happened to me that I wrote about in The Way of Integrity, after I had this light experience, I was so obsessed with getting back, I would do anything. So when I was 29 years old, I made a vow that I wouldn't lie in any way for one calendar year. It was a New Year's resolution. During that year, you get to your truth really quickly, and I would not recommend this as a strategy because I was not in therapy. I was not in a safe environment. And during that year, I basically walked away from or lost my religion, my family of origin, my marriage, my home,

my job, my industry, everything sort of went into the bonfire because it wasn't right for my true self. But one of the biggest things was that I started encountering, having really intrusive flashbacks of being sexually abused as a child in a pretty violent way. And it almost broke me. It really almost broke me. It happened right after I had the light experience, actually. And it was like I had been given enough comfort in that

experience to just barely keep me alive during the flashbacks. So I do want to say to people who are out there who aren't in therapy, but are miserable. I do believe there is a compassion to the universe and a symmetry to it where if you can just reach for the sense of feeling loved and comforted and contained, something reaches back for you. And that will help you get to therapy. That's what it did for me. And then the therapy got me much, much better. But even if you feel completely alone,

reach for it, wish yourself well, pretend that you are an almighty force wishing yourself well, and you begin to detect that it actually is what part of you is. 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? The astronaut who almost way to the floor? We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne

Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot

on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's move into some of that work you do around lies, because there's a fair amount in the way of integrity where you talk about, you know, one of the ways we get out of integrity is we tell lies to ourselves and others. So share a little bit more about lying. And then I would love to go a little deeper into some of what telling the truth cost you and gained you. Yeah. Yeah. During that whole horrible year, speaking of having a terrible time while having a wonderful time. Yes. I felt like it was hell. Everything was burning down around me. But I had regained a connection to the sense of peace at my core, and that continued to grow as everything else fell apart.

And I was happier and healthier in that year while everything was going wrong than I had ever been, than I ever remembered being. Because I was lying to myself about so many things, and there's really good research on lying. A group of people was asked very simply, try not to lie so much for a few weeks. They said, all right. There was no policing. There wasn't even a measure really of whether they were lying or not. But compared to a control group, when they came back a few weeks later, the ones who had decided not to lie as much had fewer doctor visits, they had fewer sore throats, they had better relationships, they were happier with their jobs. Like lying messes with us. And we don't just lie with our words. And by the way, most people lie at least three times within a 10 minute conversation. We don't do it because we're bad.

We do it because we're trying to be good. We're trying to fit in. We're trying to please people. We're trying to toe the line, whatever. And so we deviate from what's true for us. And if you can get in touch with what's true for you, and at least don't lie to yourself, with what's true for you and at least don't lie to yourself, you start to heal in this very, very deep way. And you can lie with your life, going to a job you hate week after week after week on the assumption that that is all you can do for a living is a kind of lie because you're suffering from it and you know you are and you keep making yourself do it. The same thing with just presenting yourself in a way that's not really you, in a way that's more pious or more stylish or whatever. If you start to live as yourself,

as well as speaking the truth, healing happens at a very deep level. I had three incurable progressive autoimmune diseases when I started that year of lying. And when I stopped lying, they all went away. So it healed everything from my body on out. Yeah, it was really rough, but it's better than living in the lie. And so one of the things that you stopped lying about was you grew up in the Mormon church. Yes. That's a pretty rough place to try and navigate your way out of. No kidding. I didn't really navigate my way out, so I just hack my way through with a sledgehammer. That might be, yeah. Yeah, it was very confining. And in a way, I wrote in another book that it was like that religion locked me in a dungeon and then threw in the key. The dungeon was, here is exactly how you have to behave in

every aspect of your life, and you will never vary from it. And by the way, it will make you extremely unhappy, but that doesn't matter. But the key was, and you have an individual responsibility to find your way back to God. It was by following the second directive that I blasted through the first. And it was actually ironically, because I had come to believe that there was some metaphysical reality in the universe. I hadn't believed that. I spent, from the time I was 17, I went off to Harvard from Provo, Utah, bit of a culture shock, but just went completely into the materialist rationalist model until during my PhD at Harvard, I had a son with Down syndrome. And while I was pregnant with him, began having experiences that were frankly

psychic. And that blew my mind. And it made me think, okay, whatever the Mormons told me about finding my way back to God, I'm doing that. That is what I'm going to do. And it ended up, I'm not saying that I am one with God, but damn, I feel like I can come closer now. And it led me right out of the religion that handed it to me. So there you go, paradox. One of the things I think that is very difficult about telling the truth in some of these situations is we want to be accepted, we want to be liked, we want to, you know, all these things. And there's also a genuine care sometimes for the people in our lives. So I know that your family was Mormon. And so talk to me about how you navigated your way through knowing that some of what you were doing, at least they would say was hurtful to them. We could debate

whether it was or wasn't, but they would say it was. How do you stay true to your path? And how do you know that you're not being selfish when part of what's holding you back is genuine care for the people around you? That's a wonderful question. And it was a huge, huge struggle for me. Our family wasn't just Mormon. My father was the foremost scholarly apologist in the history of the Mormon church. And an apologist is the guy who says, I have a scholar's credentials, and I'm telling you that what the prophet of this religion stated is the actual factual truth. And Mormonism makes a lot of interesting truth claims based on the sayings of and doings of their original prophet, Joseph Smith. So my father's whole job was to support Joseph Smith, who said things like all the American Indians are descended

from a group of Jews who sailed over from Israel in 600 BC, or an Egyptian mummy that Joseph Smith stumbled across in Illinois in 1840-something was actually the original book that Moses wrote, stuff like that. It was just, in the light of modern science, it's ridiculous. But my father was very brilliant, and he spent literally all day every day confabulating people's minds so that they felt stupid if they didn't agree with Mormonism. And I have seven brothers and sisters, and we all grew up in his glory. And so when I started remembering him being the perpetrator of the abuse, and it was sort of tied in with religious mania, when I made that statement, when I told them what I thought had happened, it was literally the most damaging thing I could do to them emotionally. And I am

a massive people pleaser. I want everybody to be happy. That's what my whole life is about. And I'd always been the biggest people pleaser in the family, and I was not pleasing them. But if I hadn't had that light experience, that would have been way too much. But given the experience of that light, and given my internal experience that what my father was doing had taken him into a kind of madness, and then helped him keep other people in that same madness, it was separating them from home, from that light. And so my desire for everyone to go home, really home, and to be there not when we die, but even when we're alive, that ultimately won. And I thought, well, at least I will slug my way out of this cage and maybe, maybe I'll make an opening that they can come through later, you know? And that's up to them. To love an alcoholic is to take away the bottle.

And that's the most hurtful thing you can do to an alcoholic, right? Yeah. And it really makes you scrutinize what the love is, which wolf really is the bad one and which is the one you want to feed. And the light was the only thing I wanted to feed to anyone. Yeah. You address that selfish thing and you say at one point, everything that truly makes us happy is limitless and multiplicative, not scarce and divisive. As we realize this, our fear of scarcity, the basis of greed, lessens. Yeah, this is in Dante. He's in the Purgatorio, which no one ever talks about. And an angel comes and he says, we're so happy that you got here.

Now everyone's going to be happier. Like, be happy. That makes us all happier. And he literally says, how could that be? Isn't happiness like a pie you divide up? And the angel says, no, no, no, no, no. That's a material way of looking at it. The essence of what we long for is a feeling state.

And to bring more love. Like if you're in love with someone and the two of you are like making love and each person knows that the other person is enjoying it, the circle of joy continues to increase. Bring a puppy into a family of five, it's not like they have to divide up the love so they can give some to the puppy. The puppy lifts all of them even higher than before. That's the miracle of switching your identity from the material self to this limitless state of being. In that state of being, everything, everything magnifies joy. So you talk about how in the beginning, let's start by stop lying to ourselves. You may not

be ready to stop telling lies externally, but at least stop with yourself. And then as you grow into more internal integrity, you may have the strength to start doing it externally. And you say that now once we've experimented with doing this, telling and acting on our truth for a limited period of time, we've got one of three options, right? One is we could continue forward into more integrity. The other would be to keep wandering around purgatory by staying at exactly the same level of self-disclosure you've reached, or go back to whatever secrets, lies, and habits you've abandoned. And you then go on to talk about, you say, I've had many clients who couldn't go through this gate, that they love going to therapy or counseling because they can blow off environments where they can be themselves without upsetting any apple carts.

They may wander around anti-purgatory, this is the Dante term, for years, not really in hell anymore, but definitely not in heaven. Yeah. Say more about that. So if somebody finds themselves in that spot, so okay, yeah, I hear a ring of truth in that. How do I choose to keep moving forward at that point? When it comes time for our, all right, I've recognized some internal truths. I've experimented telling them a little bit externally. Boy, the consequences of doing that externally look kind of grim. I'm feeling pretty afraid. I know I need to keep going,

but I'm stuck. I'm afraid. That's a great question. One of the exercises that I recommend in there comes from a psychoneuroimmunologist named Mario Martinez. And he suggests that when we look forward and we think about living in absolute integrity, like if I leave my church, if I leave my job, and my parents and wife won't approve of me. And like, if I leave the things that aren't working for me, and it seems to upset people on the outside, how do I tolerate that? How do I justify it? And we tend to only think about what the culture-related part of us expects, which is pressure to conform, other people's anger, other people's disappointment, suffering that, you know,

when we go all the way to, and then I won't be providing for my family and they'll all die on the street of starvation. That's really easy. That road, I've had so many clients, they just go right down that road. It is broad and it's flat and it would like, we roll right along it. What we don't do is what Mario Martinez says, which is to imagine what would happen if we made the changes and everything went well. So I did this when I was leaving Mormonism and sort of exiled from my family of origin. I happen to be doing Byron Katie, if you've had her on the show, I think you have. I happen to be doing her work, which involves questioning thoughts that create suffering and then turning them around to the opposite. So I would think something like, oh, I'm going to destroy my family if I do this. And then I would force myself to go through, is that really true?

It causes me suffering. Okay, what's the opposite? I'm going to create my family if I do this. Well, could that be true? And you start to think through things like that. The biggest shift for me was I wrote a book about this whole experience. And before the book came out, I got death threats, I got legal threats, people were threatening my children, my other people that had helped me. It was really, really intense. And I was on a plane and I was thinking over and over, something terrible is going to happen because I wrote that book. Something terrible is going to happen to me because I wrote that book over and over. And so I did the Byron Katie work and I turned it around and it came out, I'm going to happen to something terrible because I wrote that book.

And I just sat back and I went, wait, wait, what? But it felt like it was maybe true. And then I thought, oh, I could rock some people who are suffering now and get them out of suffering. I started to imagine the good that might come. I went to Utah and I was like hiding in a Starbucks because Mormons don't drink coffee. And I didn't want to be. Is that true? Well, they don't admit to drinking coffee. So I went over and I got a coffee and I was like, has anyone seen me?

And the barista handed me my change. And as she did, she said, thank you for writing that book. And I suddenly thought, oh, okay. The silver line that guides my life pulled me into writing that. And I thought about the terrible things, but I didn't think that maybe this woman's life would be improved if I dared to do that. If you can imagine the good that will come, which is as infinite and as likely as the bad, it can start to pull you in the direction of your truth. So Mario Martinez says,

rock backward into the feeling of I'm going to stay the way I am. And then imagine things going well and pull literally, physically rock forward into that. Everybody's responding well, all the good that can happen is happening. Then rock back into, I'm going to stay in my little cage. Then rock forward into, I'm going to get out and it's going to free other people as well. And as you literally physically go back and forth between the two, the pull of what is truer for you will get stronger and stronger. And then when you actually have the opportunity to make a choice about what to do, you will have already done the work necessary to give you the courage

to do what you think is the best option. Let's wrap up with talking about the power of one degree turns. Yeah. I use different phrases than this, but we talk about this on the show a lot, but I love that idea. Share with us what they are and why are they effective? Yeah, there's a reason that you talk about it in different terms. People who study change, they have this, the trans-theoretical model of change.

That's right. It shows that the most effective changes are the ones that are small, incremental, and repeated frequently. So I did this thing of, I'm not going to lie for a year. And that's because I'm the kind of person who is going to die right after saying, watch, this can't hurt. And then do something really stupid. For people that I'm coaching and people that read the book, what I would recommend is that you imagine yourself as an airplane. One of the things about airplanes is they have to be in structural integrity to fly. Same with your life. If you're in basic integrity, your life can start to take you to

the places you want to go. And what I suggest is that as you figure out what feels right for you, you turn by one degree every so often, just a little bit toward true north for you. And if you do that over a 10,000 mile trip, turn one degree north every half hour, you won't even notice the plane turning, but you'll end up at a completely different location. And that is the kind of change that is most likely to work. So by all means, do it, do it gently, be kind. There's certainly if we're talking about telling less lies, we could slowly tell a few less lies. If I'm looking at trying to build a practice of spending time in stillness, I could start with five minutes and I could build to six minutes and eight minutes.

And again, I'm a huge fan of that. My mind is going right this moment to someone I know right now who's trying to make a really big decision about a marriage. And that's a more difficult thing to do a one degree turn on. Yeah. Well, you take one step, one step, one tiny step, but eventually you come to the edge of a cliff and that next tiny step is going to be a big one. And that is where you need to have paved the way by continuously returning to a sense of wholeness, a sense of integrity. And as you get there for yourself, it expands into being one with the whole universe, as we've said. And it's so what psychologists would call reinforcing. It's so strengthening.

It made my body healthy. It makes your soul healthy. And it becomes habitual. So I think that courageous people are people who are in the habit of taking the next step forward toward what they believe is right. And usually that's just a little step along the path, no problem. But when it comes to a cliff, if you're absolutely familiar with the process of knowing what's right for you, you take the next step, even if you fall a thousand feet, because courage has become a habit.

Yeah. It's interesting. I was thinking about, you know, how did I get to where I'm at, where this show is what I do for a living? And like you said, it was, I started a podcast, you know, like, okay, no big deal. Chris and I, my producer and editor were working yesterday. This episode will have come out, I think before your episode comes out. But we are celebrating our 500th episode here soon. And we were putting that together. But it was just, you know, one episode at a time. But there eventually was a point where I edged along until, yeah, there was a point where I was like, okay, now I need to jump off the cliff. Yeah. If I want to do this for my living, I've got to jump off the cliff. I don't know what would be

the best analogy. I had got some ropes or I don't know what it was, but the jumping off the cliff at that point was less risky than it would have been a year before, two years before. Yeah. Anayas Min said, and then came the day when the courage it took to blossom became less than the courage it took to stay tight in a bud. And I think that's when I tell my clients to move forward, when it actually takes less courage to go toward your truth than to stay in any degree of lie. And I say, stay in the lie as long as you can, because pushing yourself forward is not what you wanna do. It's a form of violence to a very precious

and very sensitive being, your core self that is out there looking for its way home. And please be a gentle guide and guardian to that sensitive self. It deserves every kindness you can give it. That is as beautiful a place to end up as I can think of. You and I are going to talk a little bit more in the post-show conversation about the three things that Virgil keeps urging Dante to do while he's in the inferno. So we're going to talk about that because it's great. So listeners, if you'd like to get access to that, to other post-show conversations, ad-free episodes, and the joy of supporting The One You Feed, you can go to oneyoufeed.net slash join. Martha, thank you so much for coming on. I've been looking forward to this one and it's been a real pleasure. Thank you. For me too, Eric. Thank you

so much. 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. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support, and we don't take a single dollar for granted. To learn more, make a donation at any level, and become a member of the One You Feed community, go to oneyoufeed.net slash join.

The One You Feed podcast would like to sincerely thank our sponsors for supporting the show. 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

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