Rowan Mangan:
Hello there, members of our beautiful Bewildered Kahoot. How are you? Tell me right now. We’ve got a fun episode coming up for you today. We’re going to be talking about all the ways we can trick ourselves into going against our own joy, even when we think we’re going with that joy.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, we’ll talk about the difference between doing the things we love and the love of doing things which are not the same.

Rowan Mangan:
And all the pitfalls that we create for ourselves in trying to love what we do and do what we love. So we hope you enjoy it and we’ll see you on the other side.

Martha Beck:
Hi, I am Martha Beck.

Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan. And this is another episode of Bewildered, the podcast for people who are trying to figure it out.

Martha Beck:
Yes, like us. What are you trying to figure out?

Rowan Mangan:
Marty, I am trying to figure out the endless kaleidoscopic workings of my own mind, and I just feel like lately I’ve been way more in the culture than usual. I think I’m trying, and this will go to what we’re talking about later, but I think I’ve been trying to streamline things too much. And so lately I feel like I haven’t been getting enough vegetables. I haven’t been eating enough veggies and I’m like, “Oh my God, I’m going to die of scurvy!” And so I saw an ad on social media where they were like, “We’ll give you 19 carrots, five heads of broccoli, a barrel full of kale, all in this little pouch and you just slurp it down, Bob’s your uncle, you’ve got more vegetables than a whole crew would need out on the ocean.”

Martha Beck:
“You’ll live forever!”

Rowan Mangan:
“You’ll live forever. You’ll be so healthy.” And I was like, shut up and take my money. And then they sent me these things. I love vegetables.

Martha Beck:
I know you do.

Rowan Mangan:
I am such a fan of vegetables and I have to tell you, this was possibly one of the most revolting tastes ever to have hit my mouth. It was like I had almost a retch reaction to it. And so it’s so interesting because it’s a great lesson for me in how to be less of the culture and less “If it’s vegetables you need, have 19 in a little package thing.” It’s like maybe just enjoy the odd salad, maybe just steam some broccoli and put it on the side of your plate at dinner, you absolute moron, I said to myself, which wasn’t kind. So yeah. So anyway, I’m going back to the old-fashioned way of eating vegetables as eating.

Martha Beck:
I’m glad! You let me sniff that thing and it was not a good experience.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, yeah. So anyway, that’s what I’m trying to figure out. What about you?

Martha Beck:
Well, I’m glad you’ve moved on because I am still trying to deal with the shame we accrued while zip-lining and it haunts me. It haunts my dreams. We just went on vacation.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes, we did. We did. Imagine!

Martha Beck:
Costa Rica, a beautiful country, and we went zip-lining in the Cloud Forest. And if you don’t know what that is, they hook you up with a little mechanism to a very, very long metal string thing. And I thought it would just be lightly gliding through the Cloud Forest. No, it’s like 18 miles, I’m exaggerating, of very, very rapid descent down these lines. So they put, I’m like, “Okay, I can do it. I’ve got no fear of heights.” Then they put us in all our equipment and started giving us instructions. Remember that?

Rowan Mangan:
I was terrified– for before we go there–I don’t like rollercoasters, and I was scared that it was going to be that. And so Marty was trying to talk me, it’s funny, I shouldn’t– not talk me down from a ledge because it was a ledge that we were actually heading towards– but she was trying to calm me down. And then we reached the point that you refer to where they started giving us instructions. It’s like the instructions should be just gravity, right?

Martha Beck:
Right! And I started to get very tense because they were like, “Okay, if we wave at you like this, it means open your legs. If we wave, if we jiggle the line, you’ll feel vibration. You must then brake. The procedure for braking is this.” And they’re doing all these things and I’m like, “Wait, wait, I need to take notes!”

Rowan Mangan:
And I still think, why open your legs? What’s that going to? I think that was just them having a laugh at our expense. They’re like, let’s see if we can get them to open their legs wide.

Martha Beck:
All these American tourists. It was like two, a bunch of 19-year-old men, young men doing this. So Ro bravely went first down the first zip line, then I went next, and as I was zipping along looking at the pad, the platform where you land, Ro thought it would be nice for her to just be cheerful and reassuring. So she started waving her arms wildly, which was the signal to open your legs. I couldn’t tell who was waving. I just saw two arms waving. And by God, I followed the instructions.

Rowan Mangan:
She opens her legs wide. Meanwhile the young 19-year-old Costa Rican guys are saying to me, “Stop, stop! You are confusing her.”

Martha Beck:
And all I heard him saying was “Stop! Stop!” And I was trying. And you know what? I stopped. I stopped in the middle of it and had to hand-over-hand myself back to the platform, and they were just disgusted with us. Then we get to the next one and we have to go in tandem. Now the more mass you have, the harder it is to brake, they informed us, and then they put us both together. I had to clamp my knees around Ro’s torso, which was a lovely experience.

Rowan Mangan:
She had to clench her legs around my torso like an acrobat.

Martha Beck:
That’s a good thing. Yes. Or a boa constrictor. But this doubled our mass.

Rowan Mangan:
Such a nerd. That sure doubled our mass.

Martha Beck:
We were so traumatized by the braking too hard on the first one and I started to feel the line quiver and I’m thinking, I don’t know if that’s just a natural quiver, if a bird hit the line or if we’re really supposed to brake. So Ro’s trying to brake, we come screaming down at like 4,000 miles an hour and the 19-year-old guy is going, “No! No!”And I remember–

Rowan Mangan:
I did open my legs.

Martha Beck:
I didn’t, I wasn’t allowed to, but I screamed. I think I said a bad word. I’m pretty sure I said a bad word. And we hit that thing–BAH!–at 4,000 miles an hour and he goes, “Why didn’t you brake?” And we said, “We really tried.” And he looked at us and he said, “No.”

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God. All of us in our group were so scared of this one guy. He was just like, I have rarely felt so judged.

Martha Beck:
Oh so judged.

Rowan Mangan:
As by this guy who just had an opinion on how well we were zip-lining. We were zip-lining!

Rowan Mangan:
It was the first time. I was like, dude, do you remember the literal first time you ever did this? I don’t know what the hell this is. Stop criticizing me.

Rowan Mangan:
And I just didn’t think there were going to be skills.

Martha Beck:
I know, right?

Rowan Mangan:
To amass.

Martha Beck:
I thought you just hung on and zipped, but no. All kinds of rules, regulations, and cultural baggage from a whole different culture.

Rowan Mangan:
We tried to stop. “No.”

Martha Beck:
“No. You did not.”

Rowan Mangan:
So did try.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, it was traumatizing and I have no resolution for it. I just probably need therapy and medication.

Rowan Mangan:
Therapy and medication, medication and therapy.

Martha Beck:
And zip-lining. And together.

Rowan Mangan:
We’ll be right back with more Bewildered. We don’t say this enough. We are so glad you’re a Bewildered listener and we’re hoping you might want to go to the next level with us. By which I mean if you rate and review the podcast, it helps new people find us so we can keep bewildering new souls. And you know how much we love that. Ratings are very much appreciated. Obviously the more stars you give us, the more appreciation is forthcoming. Reviews are quite simply heaven and we read everyone and exclaim over them and we just love you all.

Rowan Mangan:
Today on the podcast we are going to discuss the idea as I believe once spoken by Christian mystic Saint Catherine of Sienna back in the day, back in her day, which is an idea that she said as “All the way to heaven is heaven.” And we believe that this is kind of a revolutionary concept that goes against the culture, and maybe we need to remember it a little bit more in our lives.

Martha Beck:
Yes. What it actually means is that the moment you turn in the direction of what is right for you, what will make you happy, you immediately feel some level of happiness. So that’s how, if you’re headed toward heaven, you feel a little bit like you’re in heaven. And that is the opposite of the way most people are socialized.

Rowan Mangan:
Right? Because what we’re used to, and everyone will recognize this, is the idea that if you suffer first, then you will get rewarded for your suffering. Then that reward is happiness. It’s like eat your vegetables, then you can have dessert. Or your paycheck is–

Martha Beck:
Eat the pouch, it’s disgusting. Oh no, don’t!

Rowan Mangan:
Or work hard and hate your life, hate your job, and then you get a little paycheck to make you feel better about it.

Martha Beck:
It’s funny, I think maybe that’s why they feel justified in putting out a vegetable pouch that is not really palatable, to say the least. But I remember I really bought into this “Do the hard thing, then you’ll get a reward.” It’s very Mormon and I used to fantasize about running marathons because I figured if I ran 26.2 miles, after I crossed the finish line, everyone would agree with me that I deserved to rest. What I really, really wanted was to rest, but to get there, I had to start running marathons because in my personal theology at the time, all the way to heaven is torture, but heaven feels good.

Rowan Mangan:
So you’ve got to run for countless miles in order to be allowed to lie down. You are a puzzle, Marty Moo.

Martha Beck:
And then I started doing it and nobody cared. They’re like, so do something else. When you said Catherine of Sienna, I was like, how did you get such a disparate viewpoint in medieval Catholicism? Because on the other side of Catherine of Sienna is, for example, that guy in The Da Vinci Code who wears a spiked collar with the spikes turned inward so that it gouges his neck all the time. People that wore horse hair shirts so that they itched and imprisoned their fleas in there to bite them more. It’s all supposed to make you more righteous and make you–but it doesn’t.

Rowan Mangan:
Can I just say hair shirts and spiky collars and stuff? Like what the fuck? Actually, God, we are such strange beasts, aren’t we? What an absolutely bizarre little logical loop to create. It’s so weird and it’s also weird, and I should say because we’re talking about weird Christianity, that Christianity is the context for the idea of the hairshirt and the idea of “all the way to heaven is heaven.” So it’s just people. It’s just we all contain multitudes and some of us contain multitudes of fleas so that we’ll be ever so not itchy in the next life.

Martha Beck:
Oh, the relief from itching will transport you to bliss. Maybe that’s it. Just lowering the bar. Anyway, I can see it’s not going to be this bad.

Rowan Mangan:
Right?

Martha Beck:
But I can see that it works to the advantage of the powerful. So when you have a system like the one that dominates most of the world right now, you’ve got the systematic application of authority from above and you have to make your underlings feel good about suffering and working hard for as little as you can possibly pay them and just keep telling them, just keep reinforcing the idea that all this suffering makes them more righteous and it will be better for them in the end somehow. So do it more.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s sort of clever. They’re not denying, there’s no denying that this sucks. “We are not saying it doesn’t suck. We’re just saying the more it sucks, the more it might not later, huh?” And we fall for it. So yeah. So we’re kind of proposing that sort of radical St. Catherine of Sienna vibe that the opposite of that is true. If you’re suffering, you’re probably headed in the wrong direction. And so if we can turn towards not suffering, stay with me here, then eventually actual joy, then it’s just, look, it’s you all, it’s Martha Beck 101 as I like to say: If something feels good, do more of it. If something feels bad, do less of it. That’s sort of where we end up. Right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah, and I have been preaching this for a long time and yet sometimes I still don’t practice it. I’ve been, today, I got up and I was painting. I was painting watercolor. That’s what I was doing.

Rowan Mangan:
Should we say that this is a new thing that you do in the mornings? You now paint in the mornings.

Martha Beck:
Yes. I get up and I have time to paint and I hear everybody doing hard things in the rest of the house and I’m like, “Heh, heh, I’m painting.” Anyway. It is transports of delight, I promise. But I got up and painted the other morning and usually it’s so intoxicating. It is like taking some kind of wonder drug that makes you happy.

Rowan Mangan:
You really should stop tasting the paint as much as you do. I worry that it’s literally toxic.

Martha Beck:
You know what I realized? I bought all these really good brushes, really good ones. I’ve gotten to the point where I can tell the difference between crappy brushes and real ones and the real ones are made out of squirrel hair. So I used to tap the brush to my lip to see how wet it was because your lips are so, the part of you that can feel what’s moist, and I just have to say something.

Rowan Mangan:
Do you? Let’s just– will it improve upon silence? Just say it.

Martha Beck:
Well, I don’t think squirrels are very tasty, at least not on the outside because they don’t taste, these brushes do not taste good at all. And it finally broke me of that childhood habit of, and even Lila, when she saw me, she was two, she was like, ‘Muffy, don’t put the brushes in your mouth!” When a 2-year-old is–

Rowan Mangan:
She does stick kitchen implements up her bottom or whatever she was doing.

Martha Beck:
Today she said to me, “Will you be back in a few days?” I said, “No, I’ll be back in a couple of hours.” And she said, “In that case, I will kiss you on the bottom.” She went around behind me and gave me a kiss on the bottom–clothed.

Rowan Mangan:
God knows where you would’ve got kissed if you had been going for weeks.

Martha Beck:
I know. She was just like, “Well, in that case…” Anyway, I was painting away, which is my happy drug, and I didn’t feel right. I kept missing you. I would get–yes you. I kept texting you and I didn’t get an answer. And then I would kind of get up and wander around the house and go, “Hello Roey? Are you here?” And you didn’t answer. And I thought, okay, I think she’s asleep and God knows she needs to sleep. So I went back to painting, but I would’ve happily stopped if I could have just been with you. And I thought, “Oh no, my joy is gone. Painting doesn’t work for me anymore.” It was terrible.

Rowan Mangan:
So this is interesting, though. This is a very good thing to unpack because I do think that as much as we got a little bit lost on the whole squirrels don’t taste good section of the story, we’re back. We’re back on track. And I think that the very human thing in what you did is you did something wonderful, which was identify that painting in the morning makes you happy. And then immediately, and actually we all did this to support you, but we immediately turned it into this rigid rule. and it became culture, then, that Marty must paint in the mornings and that will make you happy. And let’s not stop to wonder whether this morning the painting is actually causing you happiness. “Paint! You will paint for happiness even if you are not happy! The less happy you are now, the more happy you’ll be later. Think!”

Martha Beck:
Right. Give me a whip to flagellate myself while I paint and taste squirrel fur.

Rowan Mangan:
— the brushes.

Martha Beck:
There you go, squirrel for beating. So yeah. And then here’s the thing though, you finally woke up and even though it’s still painting time, I was like, you’re up. And you came in and we started doing things actually we started prepping podcasts and things, and I literally felt– you know when you’re so thirsty that when you drink a drink of water, you feel it go all the way down and then the contentment rise up?

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my god, yes.

Martha Beck:
Does this happen to other people?

Rowan Mangan:
It actually just makes me thirsty just a minute.

Martha Beck:
That was what it felt like. It felt like happiness just flooded into me and then started building up again until it filled me. And I thought, oh, well, I was just getting more all the way to heaven is heaven data. And now I turn toward the thing that I longed for and it’s working again and I’m very happy.

Rowan Mangan:
Right, because we can put the brain in the place of our heart sometimes. And the brain says in the mornings– this is like one of our little Spanish exercises: Las mananas… No, no… We’re very early. We’re in early in our Spanish.

Martha Beck:
I would not call us native fluent.

Rowan Mangan:
So we put our brain starts just saying, this is what I do in the mornings and we forget to check in. And it’s weird because we become servants to a false idea, an artificial idea of happiness.

Martha Beck:
That we made up!

Rowan Mangan:
That we made up ourselves. And so do you remember when I love, I love cooking, I love vegetables. I dunno if I’ve mentioned it, but I do love vegetables. And there’s one dish that I especially love doing, which is a big rich pasta sauce that’s just got a ton of veggies in there and they actually taste good. And the process of cooking it is something that, especially before Lila was born, I really, really loved it. And so there’d be a sort of ritual that I’d have probably once a week of going out to the store and making sure I had a couple of onions and some zucchinis and the bits and bobs, and then I would come and I would wash all the veggies and lay them out and dry them and cook them. And over time, and it was in really yummy food, delicious, and we all enjoyed it. And so then I’d freeze some and then very gradually I realized I was just making, like to have my pleasant cooking couple of hours that I liked and was my meditation and was my me time and everything, I had over time turned it into this massive undertaking where it was like there will be six onions and there will be a whole truck full of zucchini.

Rowan Mangan:
And I was just, there would be two, I would have two big cast iron Le Creuset pots on the stove full and then I’d have to, because I was doing both of them, I’d have to be balancing the spices between the two of them and the herbs. And I just turned absolutely berserk to the point that I was like, I can’t make– this dish is called mush– I can’t make mush because I don’t have a day and half to do it in. And so no one gets yummy food because I can’t right now make two months worth of food for a family of four. What is that?

Martha Beck:
Well, I think it’s another example of taking something delightful and pushing it to excess, even if it stops feeling like the way to heaven. And just following that way away from heaven because you’ve mutated the form of it. You’ve got the letter of the law– gonna make mush, it makes me happy– supplant the spirit of the law. Who wrote that? La Montagna wrote that. So you got to go with the spirit of the law.

Rowan Mangan:
A mountain wrote that?

Martha Beck:
Montaigne?I don’t remember. Anyway, a French philosopher. Anyway, he wrote the letter of the law, the spirit of the law, something.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s good shit.

Martha Beck:
Anyway, the point is, while you’re slamming away with vegetables or painting, sucking your squirrel or whatever, oh boy, that one God, okay, that sounds not only nasty, but impossible.

Rowan Mangan:
This is the first time I’ve ever blushed while we’ve been making this podcast and I’m just having a moment. All right.

Martha Beck:
Look, look, here’s the brush. It’s not anything sexual, it’s just a paintbrush. Okay? Anyway, while you’re dealing with your stuff, you have to be really attentive to the part of you that senses joy. You have to be– shut up, shut right up. This has got to stop. This is not the way to heaven.

Rowan Mangan:
You know what it’s like you’re just going along, living your life, sucking your squirrel.

Martha Beck:
Catherine of Sienna did it. Do you know half my paints are called sienna? Burnt sienna, raw sienna, Catherine was all up in that stuff. Sorry, it’s getting really weird in here.

Rowan Mangan:
Listen.

Martha Beck:
My point is…

Rowan Mangan:
Please, yes, by all means.

Martha Beck:
The feeling of heaven is what you’re looking for, not whatever’s physically around you. So somebody asked me the other day, I was on a podcast and the host asked me, he said, “I read you bought this ranch in California,” which I did. And he said, “Then you just sold it again and moved after six years. What?” And I said, “Well, the feeling shifted and I knew that I had to go somewhere else. It was time, to quote Liz Gilbert, for something that was beautiful to turn into something else that was beautiful. And if I had stayed there knowing it was time to go, the joy of it would’ve decayed around me and disappeared.” And I know that because I’ve done it before many, many times, stuck with something that brought me joy even after I knew it was time to move on. And then the thing just disintegrated.

Rowan Mangan:
And so if you end up clinging to something, because once upon a time it felt like heaven, the clinging itself is going to at some point make you lose heaven, right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. It’s the clinging. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It wasn’t the ranch I was supposed to follow. It was the feeling that made me buy that ranch. So when that feeling said, now move, I had to move to stay in the feeling. It was never about the ranch. It was about the feeling that took me there. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. It’s not the thing itself, even though that’s what our brains want to fixate on. What we need to stay in back behind that is the feeling that made us push towards, made us gravitate towards the thing.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, and the effortless joy that I think is the heaven thing. When you came into the room after I’d been painting and my happiness came back, it was so effortless. It was like spring coming. I didn’t have to do anything. It just happened.

Rowan Mangan:
And there was me, hadn’t even had a cup of coffee. Talk about effortless.

Martha Beck:
Well, it reminded me of this quote from The Upanishads, which I love, and it goes through a whole litany of all the senses, but it basically goes: “Not that which the eye sees, but that whereby the eye can see, know this to be Brahman the Eternal and not what people here adore. Not that which the ear hears, but that by which the ear can hear…” and then it finishes with “Not that which the mind thinks, but that whereby the mind can think, know that to be Brahman the Eternal and not what people here adore.” Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
That is freaking fantastic, isn’t it? I love how slippery it is even there. It’s what we’re talking about is that whereby the mind can think, that whereby the eye can see, and that I guess it’s not something you can name, you can only–go on.

Martha Beck:
I think that’s why we got that quote “All the way to heaven is heaven” from a mystic. Because when you say that whereby the mind can think, the cognitive mind, at least the way we’re trained to use our minds is like, “What? What do you mean?”

Rowan Mangan:
The culture is just like, “That doesn’t look like anything to me.”

Martha Beck:
Right? Because it’s about consciousness, it’s about whatever’s different, looking out through the eyes when a body is alive that is not looking out when that same body is dead. It’s about the essence that causes us to be aware. It’s about awareness, which is beyond thought. And that is, you’re right, it’s a slippery fish for someone trained in modern culture.

Martha Beck:
But I was thinking about that when I painted today. It’s not about the painting I’m working on. I could throw that away in a minute. It’s not even about painting itself. It’s about finding and tracking the thing that makes me love to paint. And one day it made me go look for you, but it was the same awareness, the same consciousness. So if I define something as heaven and stop paying attention to the awareness whereby my mind can think and my eyes can see and my ears can hear, I stop paying attention to the essence of everything and I lose heaven right then.

Rowan Mangan:
And it’s almost like there’s a subject/object problem where we fixate on the thing we’re looking at at the time. This is like a correlation/causation or something. If I have an amazing feeling while looking at this candle, I’m like the candle. It’s the candle. And so everything flows into the object that happened to be there. And we forget to step back into that much more amorphous sense that again, our culture, our language, won’t name except “All the way to heaven is heaven.” So the attachment, and it’s that attachment, it’s not even the candle, it’s the attachment to the candle.

Martha Beck:
Exactly.

Rowan Mangan:
Or the attachment to the painting or attachment to sucking squirrels.

Martha Beck:
Or a person. Yes, that’s right. My great love of sucking squirrels has lost its essence for me.

Rowan Mangan:
But you can see how our minds do this, how there’s this very human tendency where the clinging and attachment, what it actually can look like from the outside is just a sort of habitual mindlessness like loss. Oh God can’t, it’s just so embarrassing that I’m even trying to say this, but las mananas, yo dibujo.

Martha Beck:
Maybe there’s another one for paint. Dibujar means to draw.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, there is. And it sounds more like painting, but I won’t say “painto” because someone’s going to write a letter. Sometimes Marty and I try to speak Spanish and we speak so little Spanish, but we just start saying English with O on the end of the words. We don’t mean to.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, it’s what I say-o.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh God.

Martha Beck:
We’ll be better, I promise!

Rowan Mangan:
We’ll do better, guys. So when something becomes habitual, I think that there’s something built in that is a lie that the culture tells us about efficiency. So when you turn something into a habit, you’re streamlining it. You no longer have to think about it. “In the mornings I paint.” And so you create your procedure document around it, and then you do it mindlessly and become a robot about it. And that happens really quickly, I think. And I’m sure in an evolutionary way it’s a smart thing to take up less RAM. You know?

Martha Beck:
Yeah, it literally does that.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
It goes deeper, deeper, deeper into the brain.

Rowan Mangan:
And you don’t make mistakes because you’ve got your checklist that you’re just running through and then you stop checking in to see whether it’s still giving you the feeling that made you want to do it in the first place. And it’s interesting for me to think about this because I love creating systems. It’s like this very strange kind of passion that I have, and yet systems are the very thing that can be the enemy if you aren’t present in your body within the system. If you check out and the system is running you rather than you participating with the system. Does that make sense?

Martha Beck:
Present in your body. I love that.

Rowan Mangan:
I think that present in your body is probably the closest that we can find language for that stepping back from the object into that by which, how does it go in The Upanishads, that by which…?

Martha Beck:
That whereby the eye can see.

Rowan Mangan:
That whereby the eye can see.

Martha Beck:
That whereby the body can feel, I guess.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And so yeah, it’s tempting to create a process document, a procedure document for your whole life and just repeat things over and over and be living in maximum efficiency and forget to check if you’re having fun anymore. You know what I mean? So we’ve got to figure it out.

Martha Beck:
Figure it out. How do we, Ro?

Rowan Mangan:
I will tell you in just a minute.

Martha Beck:
So here’s the thing, I think, you get to have processes, processes, as you say across the pond. I’m not going to stop getting up to paint in the morning. I really love it and I have my life all set up to accommodate that. But within the systems you create, you have to be very relaxed and fluid and know that it’s not the thing you’re doing, you’re doing what you love or you’re not going to have it. But it’s the love that is the point, not the thing. So the center of it all is that, as you said, staying present in your body and sensitive to the sensation of joy. So never take your eyes off that, never take your heart off that it always feels to me like I’m literally physically being pulled by the heart.

Rowan Mangan:
And yet what we grapple with is at the same time we are being pulled in another way by the mind and especially the part of the mind which tends to form culture. And so it’s almost like where we need to stay is in a sort of heart-centered vigilance, a heart vigilance, not the sort of vigilance that we think of when we think about staying hypervigilant or any of those sort of fear-based ideas. But just keeping your heart present and vigilant to where you are in your day, in your process.

Martha Beck:
It’s so interesting because you think about the guard on the wall and that kind of vigilance, and it’s almost bellacose, there’s a war-like imagery to it. But an alert, a vigilant heart is a soft creature. It’s like you’re holding a baby or an animal and you’re being very sensitive to whether or not it’s asleep or awake.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s like a felt alertness sort of thing.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, but it’s very gentle and very soft and very kind to the self. And the thing about this, in a book I just wrote, it talks about how the parts of the brain that get anxious also are not kind. They’re not gentle. So when you go into that gentle frame of mind, you are working with your whole brain, which includes systems. So you can have a very, very exacting system. You can be doing scientific experiments, biological engineering, whatever you’re doing, and it has to be incredibly well– that’s what I do in the mornings after I paint.

Rowan Mangan:
Sucking squirrels.

Martha Beck:
It can be– you have a procedure document and you’re checking the boxes and it’s incredibly rigid and you can still pay attention to your heart to know when it’s time to put things away and go play with your children or take a bath or laugh with your friends or whatever it is. The heart vigilance can include all the systems, whereas when we have the systems alone in our cultural context, they tend to exclude the heart.

Rowan Mangan:
And part of that is remembering that all the way to heaven is heaven, but that way is constantly changing. The mind will want the way to be exactly the same and a straight line. And it’s about using that heart vigilance to continuously adapt and change course according to where the joy is in the body. And I always think about, I dunno if this is a good example or not, but I always think about the moment when I was trying to decide if I finished school and if I was going to study law or not at university. And there’s this sort of assumption that if you get good enough results and you’re not a math/science person, that you’ll go and study law because that will earn money. That’s the path that will earn you the most money, which is such a problematic assumption, but it’s really present there, I should say.

Martha Beck:
And prestige too.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Yeah, I guess so. It’s just in the hierarchy. It’s the top of the hierarchy, which is very random, like lawyer in the array of possible futures seems quite arbitrary to me. But anyway, I had to make that decision really quickly. Law is or was an undergraduate degree in Australia, so I was 18 and had to sort of make the decision on the day when the results came out. And I’m just so grateful that at 18 I had the clarity of mind to sort of say, look, if the idea of studying it, if the idea of going to school and learning about it makes me feel like death, then the thing that I’m going to end up doing with my day is going to feel like death, not life. And so thank God because I have friends who went down that road for the exact cultural reason that I considered it and ended up having breakdowns and having really, really rough times because that’s not the road, that’s the culture, that’s not the way to heaven. That’s the way to hell. Yeah. So it was sort of interesting because it was one of those moments where I could feel the pressure saying, “No, it won’t be much fun, but it’ll be fine because in the end, you’ll make money, which is almost like feeling good.”

Martha Beck:
Oh that’s so true. Almost like joy, almost. Just not quite.

Rowan Mangan:
Not quite.

Martha Beck:
Not quite the cigar. And as you said, you’ve had friends, I’ve had clients who have thrown their lives into doing the highest prestige, highest money thing, whatever it was. And they just kept doing it even though they hated it because societally they were being given so much pressure to see that as success and they were absolutely miserable as you said. If it’s hell now, it’ll be hell later. And by the way, thank you Past Ro.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes, thanks, Past Ro.

Martha Beck:
For giving us this life.

Rowan Mangan:
I reckon I’d still be here. I just would be here with more messed up, horrible days in my past. I’d still have ended up here. So there’s two things we’re talking about. It seems to me like there’s the things that are purely a cultural import where it’s just like Be a lawyer equals the right thing to do. And then the other thing is when you start doing something because it feels good and then stop checking in. And I just have this weird thing. Regular listeners will know that I get into these strange little enthusiasms that are quite bizarre. And at the moment, my strange little bizarre enthusiasm is not sucking squirrels. But actually I know I let you take care of the squirrel sucking department in our household. So my thing is so embarrassing: electronic planners, like planners that you buy on Etsy and you import into your iPad and you draw on them and then you can put little stickers, little electronic washi tape.

Martha Beck:
I thought you were going to say something like really, really , like watching porno or something. No, it’s electronic planners. You are such a nerd.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m so lame. It’s so lame I’m genuinely embarrassed to talk about it, but it is sort of apropos because I enjoy it so much. And I like doing my writing on me, and if I make a mistake, I can just erase it and I plan out my day and it makes me feel like my day is really under control and also beautiful. But then sometimes the day is finished and I’m all done. And so I’m like, I’ll do tomorrow. It’s not tomorrow yet, but I’m over there making fake electronic washi tape and putting my little plan for the day and highlighting things in purple and yellow and green. So then I go to bed and I wake up in the morning and it’s like, I haven’t slept. I’m sick. I don’t have the energy for all of this crap that my yesterday person thought would be a good idea. And so it’s so strange. It’s such a strange thing to get caught in because my planner says really confidently that I should do it, but I don’t feel like it.

Martha Beck:
And it’s pretty, they really are pretty. They’re beautiful. And that doesn’t mean it’s okay.

Rowan Mangan:
That doesn’t mean it’s okay. That’s no excuse.

Martha Beck:
Even if it’s alluring, even if it’s pretty, if you stay in the heart vigilance and you keep that at the center, you’ll look at that pretty plan and say, that is a very pretty thing. And I may print it out and frame it, but I will not follow it because all the way to heaven is heaven and I am going to go back to sleep now, or I’m going to go find– go find Marty– or I am going to go outside for a walk or whatever it is, because then we’re always in touch with that whereby our lives can run, and that is how we stay happy and that’s how we…stay wild.

Rowan Mangan: 
We hope you’re enjoying Bewildered. If you’re in the USA and want to be notified when a new episode comes out, text the word ‘WILD’ to 570-873-0144.

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For more of us, Martha’s on Instagram, themarthabeck. She’s on Facebook, The Martha Beck, and she’s on Twitter, marthabeck. Her website is, MarthaBeck.com. And me, I too am on Instagram. Rowan_Mangan. I’m on Facebook as Rowan Mangan. And I’m on Twitter as RowanMangan. Bewildered is produced by Scott Forster with support from the brilliant team at MBI.