Rowan Mangan:
So we’ve got an interesting one for the peeps today, Marty. We’re going to be talking about choosing the right navigation system to guide our course through life.

Martha Beck:
Right, because sometimes we wake up knowing we’re off course. I did that recently. So how can we be sure we’re navigating by our true nature and not by those cultural rules we never chose?

Rowan Mangan:
You’ll find out if you keep listening.

Martha Beck:
Hi, I’m Martha Beck.

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

Martha Beck:
Figure it out. Figure it out. Figure it out. Yes. What are you figuring out right now in your life, Rowan Mangan?

Rowan Mangan:
I am trying to figure out how you, Martha Beck have such a strange deep sense of FOMO, fear of missing out, that anytime I am looking at my phone and make any noise that might be construed as a laugh, you will immediately say, “What? What’s funny? What is it?” And sometimes, so we’ll be sitting in silence in a room looking at our phones because this is the 21st century and this is our marriage. Or we’ll be sitting on a plane and I’ll be listening to a podcast.
And if I do this, you’ll immediately go, “What? What?” And so even, I’m listening to a podcast on a plane, and you go, “What? What?” And I have to pause the podcast, take out my headphones and say, “Well, I was listening to this podcast and this person said this, and then that person said that.” And then you’ll be like, “Oh, that’s not that funny.” And I have to say to you, Marty, it wasn’t, I never claimed, I would’ve been quite happy to just let it go by in time and space, but you sort of police my laughter. And so sometimes it’s like we’re in the room, I go—and you go, “What? What’s funny, what’s funny?” And you try to look at my phone sometimes if there’s a possibility.

Martha Beck:
I cannot deny it.

Rowan Mangan:
And sometimes, literally all I can say is, “I think there was a bit of dust in my nostril and I went—”

Martha Beck:
I want some. I want some.

Rowan Mangan:
What is that? What’s going on with that?

Martha Beck:
You don’t understand what it’s like to be so bad at the internet. I am horrible at the internet, not in that I can never figure anything out. If I get in and tinker around, I can figure things out sometimes, but if I do that, my soul gets sucked into the internet because anything I see makes me go, “What? What?” and then I’m down a rabbit hole. What did this person say? Oh, they said that because another person said, and then it goes into this infinite expanding chain of connections that ultimately crazes me. So Roey, I have made you the one and only link I have with the internet. I can’t let it swallow my soul, so I have imprinted on you as a digital Mother Goose, and I must learn everything about the world by watching your nostrils move. And I think that shows great devotion and maybe doesn’t need a lot of therapy.

Rowan Mangan:
I wouldn’t like to speculate, but I think that, look, it’s a lot of pressure on me to monitor my nostrils is all I’m saying. And my nostrils can’t take it.

Martha Beck:
I love your nostrils.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, thank you.

Martha Beck:
I could stare at them all day.

Rowan Mangan:
I think they’re good nostrils as nostrils go.

Martha Beck:
You’ve got good nostrils. So yeah, I understand it’s a heavy burden, but if you’re born with a sense of discernment and good nostrils, people are going to pay attention.

Rowan Mangan:
All right, I’m just going to have to live with it. I see.

Martha Beck:
I think so. Yeah. Unless you want me, my soul sucked into the interwebs in other ways.

Rowan Mangan:
No, I do not.

Martha Beck:
Because you know how that goes.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes. Yeah. All too well.

Martha Beck:
It’s bad because I make you watch everything. It’s not just that I get into it, it’s that I carry it around and make other people watch it. Oh, it’s awful.

Rowan Mangan:
She has an evangelical streak.

Martha Beck:
Yes, it’s true. Okay.

Rowan Mangan:
So what are you trying to figure out?

Martha Beck:
I am trying to figure out, and again, this has to do with technology because that is what, it’s such a big part of our lives these days, right?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Every time I look at my phone, well, not every time, just at random intervals, it has up on the screen, which is sort of turned off, “The Spit of Love” by Bonnie Raitt. It wants to play me a YouTube version of the song “Spit of Love” by Bonnie Raitt. I don’t know why. I don’t know what setting is making this come up, why it doesn’t do it all the time. It just does it at irregular intervals, which is, what do they call that, random reinforcement? It makes it a very big part of my psychological life. And then I thought, well, maybe I’m getting guidance from the universe. Have you ever heard “Spit of Love” by Bonnie Raitt?

Rowan Mangan:
Not until this began, this saga in your life began.

Martha Beck:
I gotta say, I’m a huge Bonnie Raitt fan.

Rowan Mangan:
As am I.

Martha Beck:
Love. Hey, she’s my girl. She went to the same college I did. I won’t say which one that is, but let’s just say that people always say, “Really? Bonnie Raitt went to Harvard?” Oops, there it came out. You’ll have to have a drink of water, everybody. Okay? So I love anybody who goes to my school and then goes and does something that makes people say, “What, you? You went?”

Rowan Mangan:
I think I’m going to try not to say that Jared Kushner went to Harvard.

Martha Beck:
Oh God. All right. Forget I said anything. Anyway, I love Bonnie Raitt. Love her music. There was a time when “I Will Not Be Broken” practically kept me alive. But Bonnie, there’s nothing, there’s nothing edifying about “Spit of Love.”

Rowan Mangan:
You are upset because you want there to be a message from the universe in this. And even with your gargantuan brain, you cannot turn the lyrics of this song into a message for you. No matter how hard you try.

Martha Beck:
I will give you a fragment. And this is one of the nicer fragments. It goes like this: “Well, it’s got me slowly turning and I’m basting on the bone. I’m skewered like some drunken fool in juices all my own.” No, don’t sing about your juices. No one, male or female, should sing about their juices.

Rowan Mangan:
Unless it’s a children’s thing. And I like the fact that this specifying “juices all my own.” So in case we think there might be some marinade mixed in there or something.

Martha Beck:
The entire song, yes, it’s very graphic and it’s just a long barbecue metaphor. Love, a hateful, spiteful, wrathful, revengeful love as a sort of cannibalistic barbecue. And why does my phone keep giving it to me? Why, Ro, why? Somebody tell me why.

Rowan Mangan:
Maybe you need more protein. I dunno.

Martha Beck:
Okay, well, we’re going to have to buy some juices because—

Rowan Mangan:
Oh!

Martha Beck:
Oh!

Rowan Mangan:
No, we don’t buy them.

Martha Beck:
God, just don’t.

Rowan Mangan:
They’re supposed to be all your own.

Martha Beck:
Don’t sing about that.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. No one should sing about juices. No one should sing about anyone’s juices.

Martha Beck:
No. I was going to say if it’s a children’s show and it’s “Juice is full of sugar, you probably shouldn’t drink it,” but no, no. I refuse to think that “Spit of Love” is the lyrical total message of my life. It’s just got to be random.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m skewered. I’m skewered like some drunken fool. So they’re departing—

Martha Beck:
In juices all my own.

Rowan Mangan:
So they’re departing from the metaphor for long enough to say drunken fool. But why would a drunken fool be skewered?

Martha Beck:
It’s a question.

Rowan Mangan:
What’s the connection there?

Martha Beck:
Well, I don’t know. I’ve been walking around all day thinking, why would a drunken fool be assumed to be skewered? Yeah, it fills the mind with images one would rather not entertain, quite frankly,

Rowan Mangan:
Vile, just vile. Bonnie.

Martha Beck:
Bonnie, I love you. I love you, Bonnie. But really, is this what they taught us at Harvard where Jared Kushner also went?

Rowan Mangan:
If you are enjoying Bewildered, there are a few ways you can express your support for us. You can subscribe to the pod or follow it depending on your app. It’s a great way to get us in front of more people. And as always, we love a little rate and review action, especially when the reviews are kind and the ratings are high strangely. And finally, if you really want to go to the next level with Bewildered, check out our online community, WilderCommunity.com. We’ll see you there.

So what shall we talk about today on our poddy pod, Marty Moo?

Martha Beck:
Well, I wanted to talk about, I had quite a wake-up call this morning, and it was literal wake up, but it was also like a mental wake up.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, a metaphorical wake-up call.

Martha Beck:
Mm-hm. Because we talk on the podcast always about where we’re following cultural patterns and we’re not following our true nature. And I woke up this morning and realized I was following a cultural pattern way past the place where I should have stopped.

Rowan Mangan:
In juices all your own.

Martha Beck:
In juices all my own. I felt skewered like a drunken fool, honestly.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I bet you did.

Martha Beck:
No, what I’d done is, and you know this, I got obsessed after writing my last book about creativity, got obsessed with learning to do transparent watercolor better.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I think our listeners are pretty familiar with that now too.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, I think people have heard about it. It’s something of an obsession. I also had taken my surgically reconstructed foot out on the road and was starting to be able to walk long distances and I’d begun to sleep better. So I started getting up at sunrise and going for long walks and then coming back and painting. And it was idyllic, Roey. It really was and is. But for the last week or so I’ve been waking up and going, “Ugh, again?” and trudging out there. And my knees hurt and my feet hurt. And by yesterday, by last night, everything was hurting. My hands were hurting, my wrists were hurting. I tried to grab a pillow.

Rowan Mangan:
Good God, woman.

Martha Beck:
Yes, good God, I must say. They diagnosed it as fibromyalgia at one point. Now I’m thinking it might be, what is that thing? Mast cell, mast cell activation syndrome.

Yeah. Anyway, there’s something wrong with me. And I was fully sick by last night. I was joyless, I was tired. And I woke up this morning and everything hurt and I had no desire to paint or draw, much less go for a walk. And I thought, “Holy crap, I missed the exit.” I had stopped following the sort of guidance from inside that we always talk about here, my true nature. I was so convinced that my artistic rambling, fabulous, arty life was the answer to all my dreams. And it is, it was, but I hadn’t been listening. Something was telling me, “No, stop, don’t do that.” And I had to do that thing where you start looking for the next exit so you can take a long detour back to the exit you should have taken.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So we were talking about this and it’s kind of interesting. I think we’ve touched on this sort of thing before on Bewildered because it’s almost like there’s this very stubborn programming in the human psyche that has a tendency towards this thing, which is we take what is our true nature and we turn it into culture. So what I mean by that is we take what is right for us right now and turn it into the Henry Ford factory line of: “This is what my life shall be ever after.” And it is fascinating to see how often this happens and it’s worthy, it’s worth reminding ourselves that it’s so damn stubborn.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, I have to remind myself all the time, and I do kind of see it as different brain sides. The right hemisphere is always in the present moment, loves art, but is also responsive to every sensation in the body and in the heart. And then I toss it over to my left hemisphere, which says, “Good, we’ll make a rule. It will continue forever, ad infinitum.” And I am back in the cultural factory model, which I have to say, in my defense, my entire society programmed me to do. And it programmed you too. So while we’re sharing, when does this happen to you, going past your exit, get past the place you should have changed course?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Oh, constantly. And it’s interesting, just before I answer that, there’s a sort of tension I think, that is part of us doing this, us collectively doing this, which is the tension between how useful it is to build habits and how that does take a lot of that day-to-day decision-making mental load off us. And then at a certain point that’s switching into shutting down the parts of us, the part that listens to what is needed right now in this moment. And so it happens to me constantly. Sleep patterns become unquestioned, like sleeping in or staying up late. I’ll get into a thing and it’ll be way past when I needed that particular thing.

Martha Beck:
Mm-hm.

Rowan Mangan:
And I’m still doing it and I’m not questioning it. Morning routines, I think I’ve talked on here before about I’m always coming up with the “perfect morning routine—now I shall always…” Just the ways I work, what I prioritize, it happens all the time. And the horrible one, the one that is always, my Substack, my newsletter, I’ve talked about it before on here. I really want to do it, but it’s not always something I can do. And so then there’s just that terrible feeling of being inconsistent or breaking promises, that sort of thing. So that’s fun to talk about.

Martha Beck:
Not. At all. But we do it. And I do think that you have a kind of idealism and I have a kind of drivenness, but it sort of takes us down that same road. But as you’re speaking, I just realized you were the one who gave me the permission. And after all 30 years of talking like this, I still needed permission from a loved one to say, “No, spend your mornings painting, you don’t have to help anybody, you don’t have to write. You get to draw if that’s what you want to do or go for walks.” And I thought when you had Lila, who is three years old at this point, I thought, “Oh, here we go again. Life with a little baby.” And you said, “No, you did that with your first three. I’m on.” Karen and you have done all the work. So I’m at a time in my life where I am free to pass my exit and create all these, you know chart a course to all these wonderful places I wanted to go, but you are on— So my download from the universe is: Stop what you’re doing, take a different exit. You can continue on this later if you want, but there’s something else for you. You’re in that part of life where you’ve committed to a three-year-old child, and that is nature. And from the moment you got pregnant and before, you were basically putting that above your other needs. And I see you with that Substack just sort of burning a hole in your mind. We talk about your writing and your cooking and your gardening, and I remember having little kids and every time you go past an exit that says “Writing” because I was there, you say, “No, I can’t take that. I’m on the course that says motherhood.” And there’s a genuine heartbreak.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Every time you make yourself not take the exit, but it’s still right for you.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, yeah. So I think with that, it’s not the true-nature-versus-culture dichotomy. I think that’s like there’s different levels of my true nature and there’s writing and cooking, whatever, but also being a parent is also intrinsically, for me, part of that. And I think, I guess it comes back to seasons again. It’s like this season of my life has this very strong theme and I can take these tiny little paths off the main super highway here and there, but the highway is about parenthood in this season. So that’s just how it goes.

Martha Beck:
And it’s hard. And yet it is the natural way. I mean, I think sometimes we run the danger of making all anything that you do with your true nature sound blissful and easy.

Rowan Mangan:
Good point.

Martha Beck:
And your true nature will take you— it’s like David Foster Wallace said about the truth, it will set you free, but only after it’s finished with you or after it’s had its way with you. That was actually not the quote, but I like that better. After it’s had its way with you. I looked that up and it was not David Foster Wallace and I was bummed. Okay, anyway, see, this is why I have to watch you for news of the internet because I go down these rabbit holes. So what you’re saying, I like what you said about how there are different levels of commitment to staying the course you’re on. So sometimes we need to stop going in a straight line and take another road. And that’s what happened to me this morning. I woke up and my whole body and my whole psyche were saying, “Take an exit, damn it, go back to the exit you missed.” And I needed to listen to that. But sometimes you’re on a road and you’re driving past exits you wish you could take, and there’s a deeper level, I think you said it’s a deeper level of nature that says, “Stay the course, keep going on this road. This is your deepest nature.” Which is really interesting to me because how do we know which to choose, which thing to choose on any given day or at any given moment?
When do we stay the course no matter how much we want to exit? And when do we exit, even though in our minds we think we have to stay the course?

Rowan Mangan:
And even to remember to ask that question, how do we know to do that? I think often when culture overtakes nature inside us, when turn your walking and your art into some sort of forced rigorous march. Forced march. Yeah. That’s culture inside you. And you were so certain that this was the thing that you didn’t even stop to ask yourself, and that’s why you missed the exit that would’ve made it a gentler reconfiguration, right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Because culture always wants to raise a zealot that will just commit to one thing. And I was born among a zealous people and I can get, I have to keep telling myself to listen to my true nature because I am so inwardly programmed to drive myself forward. And it comes up all the time. It’s kind of like, they call it driving hypnosis when you’re driving along and your body knows the way and you either zip past your exit because you’re so focused on something completely separate, you’re not even present, and your body just takes the controls and drives either onto the exit you usually take or away from the exit, along the road that, so either you stay on a road when you should go elsewhere or we leave the road that takes genuine first priority. So when you get driving hypnosis, it’s the opposite of your GPS. Like if you’re in driving hypnosis, just going through life detached from this present moment, this precise moment mindfulness experience, the GPS is turned off. And you can’t know.

Rowan Mangan:
Someone was telling me recently that she chose one type of map, GPS map, one brand of it over another because one of them has a little haptic thing that it does on your watch when your exit is coming up. And she’s so accustomed to being in driving hypnosis that she’s not glancing down at the map on her little car screen. And so if she doesn’t have something actually zing on her body, she knows she’ll miss those exits. And I thought, that’s so interesting. It makes me think, okay, so we’ve got this situation where for whatever reason we might miss our exits. And then, so here are my two questions. One: How do we remember to check in? What’s the equivalent of getting the little haptic that says, is this your exit? That’s my first question. How do we know to check in? Because if you had been checking in with yourself, you would have gone, “Oh, I’m tired. My knee hurts, huh, maybe I’ll skip the walk today.” And you would’ve done that three days earlier.

Martha Beck:
It’s not rocket surgery.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s not rocket surgery. So that’s my first question, is remembering to do that in the first place. Then the other question, which is in some ways more interesting, is how do we know then when we do check in, if the thing that doesn’t feel right is actually the culture harshing our true nature in the moment, or if it’s just a different level, a different layer of our true nature. Like say it is your true nature to be an architect, but you don’t enjoy going to architect school, and it’s still in your true nature to do that long term. So it’s not wrong. So how do we distinguish between those two things? But let’s get back to those questions right after this.

Martha Beck:
Let’s take your first question first. I know that’s a wild idea and it is the simpler idea. How do you know to check in? And as I always say, your faithful ally is going to be some form of suffering.

And for me, it’s ridiculous what my body has to do, my whole self, my emotions, everything has to say, “Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop” for days on end. It’s like this happened to me once when I was with someone, a brilliant guy who was planning to win a Nobel Prize and he was driving along this highway and there was a red light up. There was a red light ahead of us, and he was cruising along at like 50 miles an hour and he kept cruising and he kept cruising. And I was like, “Um, stop? Stop! Stop!” I was like screaming “Stop!” And then he finally went, “Oh, oh!” and noticed it and hit the brake. He may have won a Nobel Prize, but let me tell you, that was one absentminded dude. So I’m not far behind that in terms of being completely impervious to messages. Let me just tell you this morning, I wake up to go for my long morning walk. My knee feels like someone has been at it with an electric drill in the night. I almost cry at the thought of having to go outside. I think about going over to my art area and painting, and I do start to cry because I don’t want to. And now everyone’s going to be mad at me because they’ve given me all this room to be an artist, and now I’m not using it. So I’m lying in bed and every part of me still hurt, but especially my knee was just like, woooo. And I was like, I have to listen to my knee. The first time I did this, my back had been hurting for about five or six years.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh God, Marty.

Martha Beck:
And I remember I read Joan Borysenko’s Minding the Body, Mending the Mind, and she had the radical idea of not just trying to not think about your pain, but of turning your attention directly toward it and going inside it, put all your attention into the pain and offer it compassion.
And I was like, what? And I remember doing it and just the first time I turned my attention to that back spasm and it just opened the floodgates. I cried and cried and cried and I realized I had to stop so many things in my life and that the pain had been trying to stop me from any number of actions I was taking. Now years later, I know how to go inside and bless my knee, bless my heart, bless my knee. It was when all my attention went into my knee and it said, “Why are you doing this with your mind? Let us in.” And it was talking about my emotions, my physical sensations, my intuition. It was like, “Let us into your attention.” So I sort of allowed myself to go into the most painful spot. And out of that, almost like a flower blooming, comes this set of instructions: “Stop now. What’s important is your family.” And this wave of just longing to get up and be with you and Adam and Karen and Lila. The whole universe seemed to unfold itself to me in this huge bloom of love. And wouldn’t you know it, my knee started feeling better immediately.

Rowan Mangan:
Because you got the message.

Martha Beck:
Mm-hm, but I didn’t go for a walk. I went downstairs to play with you guys and watch your nostrils and go, “What? What?”

Rowan Mangan:
What’s this thing? I know there’s this brilliant thing, but I can never remember what it is. So I always just have to use you as my remote control and go, “Marty, what’s the thing that Oprah said about the message?”

Martha Beck:
Oprah. Yeah, gosh, this was so great. She said if there’s a change of exit or yeah, you’ve gone past your exit and you need—

Rowan Mangan:
That’s not what Oprah said. You’re adjusting.

Martha Beck:
No, no. That metaphor is our metaphor for the day, metaphor du jour. But she said, if there’s something you need to learn, and your spirit, or whatever is trying to talk to you, first it speaks in a whisper. And if you don’t hear the whisper, it starts to give you a message like, “Hello, hello.” It’s like the haptic on your wrist. I have those haptics and I consider them tiny massages and blast right past my exit. I’m like, “How fun. My watch is quivering. Cool.” Yeah, it’s not good.

Rowan Mangan:
And so if I flare one nostril on a plane.

Martha Beck:
Well that’s a very different level of my true nature that we’ll have to talk about in another podcast. It probably has to do with the spit of love. I’m not sure.

Rowan Mangan:
So a whisper, and then it comes as a message.

Martha Beck:
Message, then a lesson, something happens. Somebody comes up and says to you, “That knee looks rough. You should take a few days off.” There’s no hiding it. It just comes right at you. If you still don’t follow the advice of these messages and lessons, you get a problem.

Rowan Mangan:
Hm.

Martha Beck:
Like a back spasm that lasts five years. And if you don’t pay attention at the problem stage, you end up in a crisis and some part or many parts of your life fall apart completely. And then you’ve got to drag yourself back to square one and start all over on the road again.

Rowan Mangan:
And so that’s like the whole thing of cave early that you talk about, which is why not? If it’s coming, let’s not wait until it’s a crisis. Let’s hear the whisper. Absolutely. Or the message.

Martha Beck:
I talk a good fight.

Rowan Mangan:
You do talk a good fight, but you know what? We’re all programmed the same way. So I think it’s interesting. It’s not like I have a very big drum to beat with all of this, which is that if we treat the things that we talk about on this podcast as aspects of self or life that can be perfected, we are in culture, we must not do that. So it’s like let’s allow ourselves to be messy and imperfect because that’s nature is messy and imperfect. So, all right, but I want to come back to the question of how to remember to check in and how to do it before your true nature is screaming, before it’s a problem or a crisis. And it’s so funny like, okay, so how would we do this? Well, let’s think of a way that we can automate it. And I will set an alarm every morning at 9:00 AM and you will… I was like, oh my God, get a nap. Oh, make a morning ritual that you do every day, no matter what. It’s like, holy shit. I create the pattern in trying to think about how to not dwell in the pattern, which is just like it shows how in plain sight these cultural patterns can hide, right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s so funny that I saw myself do that, but what I think it really is, how do we remind ourselves to check in with ourselves? It’s almost like we need to begin cultivating inside ourselves a culture that is kind to the self. You know? If we’re just— because in a way, any habit is culture, I’m going to say, because if it’s something that you’re doing without being responsive to the moment. So if we’re going to take advantage of that fact and that way that these bodies, these systems that we live in, how they work, then let’s use it to create kindness, to create this sort of relationship with ourself where we’re checking in, where we’re more likely to go, “Oh, is your knee hurt? What does it need?”

Martha Beck:
That is a very powerful insight because another thing we need to not do is to imply that you can exist without culture. You can only do that if you’re completely alone and moreover—

Rowan Mangan:
If you’re completely alone and have no inner monologue.

Martha Beck:
Exactly. You have no inner anything. No inner conflict.

Rowan Mangan:
Because the minute you’re going, “Oh, you okay?” then there’s two of you.

Martha Beck:
Terrence McKenna’s quote, “Wherever there are two people in the room, culture is the third guest.” What you just said, an inner culture of kindness, it matches with the whole Internal Family Systems theory that says we all have different parts that feel different ways. So I love the idea of saying, yes, there will be a kind of culture, but it will be explicit, it will be constructed mindfully and kindly and subjected to change when it goes off course, when it misses an exit, and it puts different inner people in charge.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
So when I woke up today, I mean I may have mentioned my former part, Fang. Fang was the part that used to take me running marathon distances and Fang would stay up for at one point, 5 nights in a row—and never do that, you can die. Fang is a brutal part of me, but it’s kind of like a wolf or something. It can run 50 miles, it’ll run itself to death. And it’s only when I put Fang in charge that the culture becomes dominated by that ferocity and cruelty. So when I woke up today, the reason I was able to think of my knee, the first thought was, “How do I ice this?”

Rowan Mangan:
Overcome. Yeah.

Martha Beck:
If I put something on it, would it be okay? And then I could go out and go walking and then I was like, wait, wait, wait. No, this is not a time for Fang. And I found the part of myself that had looked at my own back that many years ago, and that was when it was like the culture pattern of my internal life shifted and I let the kind ones be in charge instead of the ferocious, the obsessive, the productive, fear-based parts. And that’s a mirror of our culture too.

Rowan Mangan:
Absolutely. Absolutely. It’s so interesting. So you’re talking about having committed to something for going on these long walks. You commit to them, and this is going to sound a bit something, a bit funny, but to commit to something, is that actually a betrayal in advance of our true nature, to make a commitment, right? Because isn’t a commitment just a concept that your mind says, “Regardless of how my body feels and my heart feels and my soul feels on that day, I will drive myself to do the thing.”

Martha Beck:
Mm.

Rowan Mangan:
And I am kind of blowing my own mind thinking this because we’re so, the idea of commitment is held up so highly in the culture. It’s like a very great thing to commit to something and see it through, no matter what. Right? And I immediately think of relationships because that’s where the word commitment gets bandied about the most. And our friends, Katie and Steven, their marriage vows to each other, we might’ve mentioned this before, was they said to each other, “I promise to love you until I don’t.” And so, that’s, to me, a way of subverting the culture’s view of commitment is to be present in the moment that you’re in now and let the commitment be, “I commit to feeling the way I feel in all future moments.”

Martha Beck:
And I’ve had the most intense love story, Katie and Steven have such an intense love story, probably more loving than any other couple I know. And they saw, like the guy who was marrying them didn’t want to say it.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
And he said, he added some things to it. “No, I’ll love you forever.” And Steven said, “No.” He had to lecture him to say, “These are our vows and this is love. I promise to love you until I don’t.” Because that’s love of self and it’s an acknowledgement that we can’t control each other. And your question is commitment, a cultural phenomenon. That’s provocative precisely because we think we can use commitment and the ideal of commitment to control ourselves and probably for most of us, more importantly, control each other.

Rowan Mangan:
Mm.

Martha Beck:
If I can get a commitment from you, then I can be sure you’ll always be there for me.

Rowan Mangan:
Don’t you think that so many of these things, when you come right down to it, it’s “I’m scared to die.” You know?

Martha Beck:
Absolutely.

Rowan Mangan:
Like I want you to commit to something forever at some level is just like, don’t let it change. Don’t let me be mortal. Don’t let me rot in the ground and become worm food. It all has that as a really, really fundamental root.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. The fear of impermanence and death. In Tibet, they tell two-year-olds, “Yes, you love that toy, but it will rust and die like you.” When I first started reading about it, I was like, “Don’t tell that to your children,” but then they grow up to be happier than children here. So, but it’s true, it’s bizarre because commitment presupposes that we can know the future, and it’s an attempt, it’s this proud announcement that we are going to control our future lives, which is totally impossible. Right now I’m freaking out fantasizing that some listener is out there saying, “She’s giving my spouse permission to leave,” or, “I get permission to cheat on my spouse.” Well, uh, ee, ah, I can’t, I’m not saying yes to that, but I’m also not saying the answer is totally no. Because when I think about it, the only commitment I can make is to my true nature for precisely the reason you just gave, if nothing else: If I can make a commitment to be with you forever, and then I die, I’ve broken my commitment. Guess what? We’re all going to die.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, go on.

Martha Beck:
I mean, you can make a promise and you can be together and there can be so much love in it. I think trying to force or control a love relationship or an exercise pattern or a hobby or whatever, kills it on the spot.

Rowan Mangan:
And it’s not the commitment. I mean the “commitment,” the vow, the piece of paper, the thing that, I mean that’s not, that doesn’t change people’s behavior anyway. Everyone makes a commitment, everyone breaks it. So it’s all about trying to make yourself believe something that you know isn’t controllable anyway. Right?

Martha Beck:
Just driving down the highway and the exits come up and we don’t really, in the end, we have no complete control over which exits we take and which we drive past.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Okay. So I’m going to come back to my other question that I had for you earlier, which is if something doesn’t feel right, how do we figure out figuring it out? That moment when you remember what your podcast is supposed to be about. How do we figure out is this thing I don’t want to do or I don’t feel like doing or I don’t enjoy, is this the culture harshing my mellow, my true nature? Or is it just a different level of my true nature? I want to be an architect, but I don’t want to go to school to be an architect, or I want the experience of raising a child even though I feel tired and would prefer she were asleep right now at 4:00 AM.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, and you brought up this idea of the two levels, and I mean I went through that with my own bio kids when they were little, but I’ve tried to repress those nights.

Rowan Mangan:
Ugh.

Martha Beck:
So tell me, you’re right in the thick of it. She just went through a sleep regression where you didn’t sleep for two weeks, and you have all kinds of exits you want to take. You have writing and you have all kinds of adventures you want to go on. You want to live in a van, face it. You do. You say it all the time. So word picture.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
You work hard, work hard all day. You get her into bed, which is no small procedure. There’s hair washing and toothbrushing and book reading and cuddling and the whole thing. Finally get her to sleep. You’ve done your job, you’ve done both shifts. You finally get to relax, you fall asleep, and around midnight the screaming starts. She’s prone, our little one is a bit prone to nightmares at the moment. And you get up, I see you in the morning, you get up and you know that your work’s going to suffer. You know that your body’s going to suffer the next day and in the present moment, but you still go in to comfort her. So at that moment, my question is how is the guidance system working inside you?

Rowan Mangan:
It sucks and I hate it and I fucking don’t want to do it, and I want to go back to sleep and I don’t like this and I don’t remember signing up for this, and no one told me it would be this hard. And the reason that’s where I am is that I think that it’s normal to be living on the more surface level of the nature/culture, kind of that layer, that exoskeleton.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, do I do my art or do I sleep in? That kind of thing.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, like where there’s that impulsive like, “No, I want to do this. I’m excited to write, I’m going to cook a beautiful hearty meal.” There’s these sort of impulsive spasms of nature. And honestly, sleep is a really physical embodiment of that, right? It’s like, “Ugh, I need—”

Martha Beck:
“Impulsive spasm of nature.” Bonnie Raitt should write a song about it with that title, “Impulsive Spasms of Nature.” But go on.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m having a spasm in my juices.

Martha Beck:
Oh God, it’s bad.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s bad.

Martha Beck:
You went to Harvard for that? Go on.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay. But if I go deeper, if I’m there in that moment and I actually say, what if I said to myself, she’s crying in the night, and I say, okay, so if I slept well, I would be better at work, right? I’d be able to work more. So what if I set myself up that I want to earn X number of dollars extra a week with all my buoyant energy that I’ve got from sleeping eight hours and then hire someone with that extra money, hire someone to come and do the night shift? No. Oh God, no. I can feel that when I put that alternative scenario in front of me, there’s a definite no, there’s a definite guardrail against that. So then I know that there is a deeper level of nature that this is right for. And so it’s like I just need to ask myself the question, well, what if you changed things to realize that fundamentally in myself, I do want it. I want it all. I want to be that tired.

Martha Beck:
But yeah, don’t take any of the exit, stay on this road even though you’re so exhausted. That is, I think that level is something that people reach when—I mean, the movie Arthur, which was a movie made a million years ago, it’s about a guy who’s raised really rich and he’s just given everything he wants and he has a personal butler who treats him with some disdain but actually deep love. And then the butler gets sick, gets cancer, and the whole movie is about how he takes an exit off his rich life. And it becomes, instead of having this man take care of him all the time, it switches and he learns to take care of the old man. So as you’re talking, two things are coming into my mind. First is that I believe I’m consciousness frolicking in a physical human form, but consciousness exists outside of time or in the present moment, in the eternal present where there’s no linear time and wants to do everything at once. It wants to learn salsa dancing, it wants to cook a flan, it wants to do everything, it wants to follow you around and watch your nostrils all day.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God, it sure does.

Martha Beck:
And it will say, “Go off this exit, go off on that exit.” And if there’s joy in that and no opposition, great. Experience it all, do it all. You’re not going to be able to do it all at once. That’s the first thing. The second thing is that there is a deeper truth level to our nature. It’s not self-sacrifice. It’s not like I’m going to throw myself in front of a bus for the people I love, but it’s the love that leads people or moves people to exit the road they thought they wanted and care about something, care about, I mean, we have a friend right now who’s caring for a sibling and trashing her life to care for her sibling. And when you say, maybe you just shouldn’t, she’s like, no, I love this person. It could be your child, it could be a parent, it could be a dog who’s lost his owner. We’re meant to do many things. And I think we’re meant to be intensely ambitious to take every exit, but in the stillness at the very very heart of what’s moving down that road, there’s something that’s not moving at all. And it chooses things at a deep, deep level. And at the same time that you hate what you’re choosing, you love what you’re choosing, and you let yourself break. You let yourself break away from the path you thought you would take so that you can feel this connection. Yesterday after I’d done my little knee review and gotten myself back to—

Rowan Mangan:
I reviewed my knee. I found it wanting.

Martha Beck:
I did. I carefully reviewed my knee, my other knee, and my thumb, and all of them said, not just take a break today, but be present for your family. I could hear Karen with Lila downstairs and Lila was giving her a hard time. And I’m like, Karen needs a break right now. Lila needs a hug right now. I need a Lila hug right now. And suddenly I was back in the right, I was driving my life the way my deepest true nature wants to drive again. So it’s tricky because you’re also encouraged to sacrifice yourself for culture, but this was in no way a sacrifice. It was, it’s an honor to care for one person or many people when the road, when your GPS takes you that way.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s interesting that you say honor because I was thinking about that word when we were talking about the vows and the commitment thing and the idea of honoring the reality of change and honoring the reality of love as something that changes in nature and honoring the way you feel in the day. And when there is that call to sort of serve, I don’t want that to sound yucky, but kind of—

Martha Beck:
Not self-sacrifice, but serve because there’s something pushing you to serve.

Rowan Mangan:
But don’t you think that that’s because in the continuum, kindness to self and kindness to others are the same thing. It’s the same. And so if you’re cultivating that kindness to yourself, it’s just going to spill over. And in the same way. Outside of the cultural, because it’s a cultural idea that says that’s self-sacrifice.

Martha Beck:
Right. So the kindness you bring that says, which exit shall I take? Shall I get up and take this road that is so damn hard? Shall I lie in bed and break the commitment I made to myself to do hard exercise every day? The moment you would approach this with kindness, and you elevate the kind parts of yourself to the government of the culture inside you and the other parts have a vote, but they’re all being treated with kindness. So ultimately they relax and they return the kindness. And there’s a little engine of kindness that starts when you’re at a very, very self-nurturing level, which then spills over into the love of others and to the connection between you so that when you get up with your screaming child for the hundredth night and you hold her in her arms till she calms down, you are also calming yourself. And that’s the only exit you can take if your life is ruled and your path is charted by kindness, by compassion.

Rowan Mangan:
And it can be tricky to tell the one from the other. And it’s like I think about exercise is ultimately not to the extent that you’ve been doing it, but your deeper truth is that it’s good for your body to do a certain amount. And I’m a naturally quite lazy human being physically. And so I have to recognize the kindness that it is to my body to go and do that strength training. And it hurts on leg day, but it’s going to feel really good getting out of bed on my 83rd birthday, hopefully, touch wood. So holding the two truths of the impulsive surface part of your spirit and the deeper truth that is very still.

Martha Beck:
We get up every day thinking we know what journey we want to take through the day, through the week, through our lives, and then we end up either taking exits we didn’t think we’d want or staying on roads that feel long and hard. But if that stillness you just talked about is the ultimate guide, and if we follow it, if we remember to check it often, that’s where our deepest true nature forges these life experiences that are deeper. Like in Arthur, the movie, he ends up at the end when his butler dies and it was his father dying, he walks out into the world as a whole person, a mature person, a deeper person. And I think that’s what our consciousness is ultimately here for. It loves the fun times, but it’s at the times when love becomes something unusual, something we never thought we’d do, a path we never thought we’d take, that it forges something new, something we actually can’t imagine until we’ve become it.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s always going to be full of messiness and compromise and imperfection. I have this very strong sense that we mustn’t make this into the culture of perfection-ability. Perfectibility, there it is.

Martha Beck:
There you go.

Rowan Mangan:
I just made my own point.

Martha Beck:
Or self-sacrifice.

Rowan Mangan:
No, no, because that’s what life is too. It’s like, yeah, it can suck to get up and I’m tired and there’s sand under my eyelids and I feel crappy, and it’s still the right thing for me. A hundred percent. I have some Ani words, the poet laureate of our show. Can I?

Martha Beck:
Of course, because you long ago took an exit labeled Ani DiFranco, and you have never stopped driving.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh boy, that is so true. So it’s about to me, the connection, because sometimes that can seem quite tenuous, is about looking for that deeper truth in yourself, the deeper true nature, and also how life is sort of jagged and imperfect at the same time. So this is actually a poem she wrote, and this part of it says “to search for the downbeat in a tabla symphony, to search in the darkness for someone who looks like me, though I’m not really who I said I was or who I thought I’d be. Just a collection of recollections, conversations consisting of the kind of marks we make when we’re trying to make a pen work again, a whole lifetime of them.” So we’ll do all the things of listening and kindness, and in that kindness, we’ll try not to perfect everything and optimize everything, and just accept that sometimes we’ll get the right exit and we’ll get it at the right time. Sometimes we’ll miss it, and it’s ultimately, it’s all nature, right? Because it’s glorious imperfection in the face of really true and wonderful intentions.

Martha Beck:
Yes. So stay on that road to your deep true nature, the one it chooses when you can. And when you can’t, that’s fine too. But the whole way, you can always….

Martha and Rowan:
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. We’re also on Instagram. Our handle is @bewilderedpodcast. You can follow us to get updates, hear funny snippets and outtakes, and chat with other fans of the show. Bewildered is produced by Scott Forster with support from the brilliant team at MBI. And remember, if you’re having fun, please rate and review and stay wild.