Image for Episode #95 You Have One Missed Call From Destiny for the Bewildered Podcast with Martha Beck and Rowan Mangan
About this episode

Intuition is like a call from destiny that we often miss because we're always "on the other line" with culture. In this episode of Bewildered, Martha and Ro explore the concept of intuition and how to connect with it amidst all the noise of our cultural conditioning. They talk about how to tell the difference between intuition and anxiety, the reasons we tend to ignore intuition, and how to hang up with culture so you can listen to the messages your intuition is trying to tell you. Don't miss it!

You Have One Missed Call From Destiny
Show Notes

Did you know your intuition is always speaking to you?

It’s true—but often we can’t hear what our intuition is trying to tell us because we’re on the other line with culture. In this episode of Bewildered, Martha and Ro explore how to “hang up on culture” so you can connect with your intuition and learn to trust the messages it has for you.

There are three main reasons we ignore our intuition: our over-reliance on cultural ideas of “reason” and logic; mistaking anxiety for intuition (what Ro calls the “Blair Witch phenomenon”); and disqualifying our personal insights with a sense of “Oh well, I guess it’s just me.”

The culture can be very dogmatic in dismissing any spiritual or intuitive experience—no matter how much empirical evidence is gathered. While Martha and Ro believe in science, they don’t think the culture’s brand of science understands most of the reality we experience every day.

“Insofar as our culture does allow that we have some kind of intuition,” Martha says, “it very often confuses it with anxiety… So people don’t think of intuition as a friendly, practical voice that tells you things that sound fun—but in my experience, it is!”

She and Ro emphasize that connecting with your intuition requires the courage to trust your own inner guidance rather than external cultural pressures. By creating space for silence and relaxation, you can better hear the subtle yet persistent “nudges” from your intuition and destiny.

To find out more about the differences between intuition and anxiety, how to tune out the voices of culture, and how to recognize and follow the guidance your intuition is sending you, join Martha and Ro for this inspiring (and amusing) conversation!

Also in this episode:

* Kicking off some droll comedy with a quote by Camus

* Martha walks 75 miles in 6 days. (Drink!)

* Ro sets inscrutable reminders for herself in ALL CAPS.

* Bourgeois telescopes and tortured metaphors

* Dead-salmon hats: the latest in orca fashion

TALK TO US

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Transcript

Please note: This is an unedited transcript, provided as a courtesy, and reflects the actual conversation as closely as possible. Please forgive any typographical or grammatical errors.

Martha Beck:
[Intro Music] Welcome to Bewildered. I’m Martha Beck, here with Rowan Mangan. At this crazy moment in history a lot of people are feelings bewildered, but that actually may be a sign we’re on track. Human culture teaches us to come to consensus, but nature — our own true nature — helps us come to our senses. Rowan and I believe that the best way to figure it all out is by going through bewilderment into be-wild-erment. That’s why we’re here. [Music fades] Hi, I’m Martha Beck!

Martha Beck:
Hello, Cahoot. Did you know your intuition is always speaking to you?

Rowan Mangan:
It’s true. It actually is. But you know what? You don’t take the call from intuition because you are on the other line with culture.

Martha Beck:
Mm-hm. And in this episode, we’re going to talk about connecting with our intuition and learning to trust the messages it has for us.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, and it’s also a surprising amount of discussion about wearing fish’s headwear.

Martha Beck:
Come listen.

Rowan Mangan:
See you on the other side.

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:
Trying so hard.

Rowan Mangan:
And yet never really getting there.

Martha Beck:
Never succeeding. But that’s okay. Stick with us because as Camus said, the struggle itself alone is enough to fill our hearts. We must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Rowan Mangan:
I was hoping you’d get to Camus at the very, very, very, very beginning of this podcast episode.

Martha Beck:
I always like to kick off an hour of droll comedy with an existentialist quote.

Rowan Mangan:
Droll comedy? You flatter us.

Martha Beck:
Well, you know. We have our aspirations. We haven’t figured it out.

Rowan Mangan:
But we have our moments.

Martha Beck:
We have our dreams. Is that so wrong?

Rowan Mangan:
What are you trying to figure out?

Martha Beck:
Oh, I was just going to ask you. So I’m really trying hard to figure out why orcas in the Northern Pacific for a while picked up a habit of wearing salmon on their heads, dead salmon. And then they stopped and now they’re doing it again. And I cannot for the life of me figure out why. Or how!

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I mean, I have to say it’s the how that stops me in my tracks.

Martha Beck:
Maybe they help each other because if all you had were two little flips, flipper flips, I mean, they’re not little, they’re pretty huge, and then you had this big old bulbous head, how are you going to stick a salmon to that noggin? It doesn’t make sense.

Rowan Mangan:
Is there a way that they could swim to keep the salmon in place?

Martha Beck:
They must. Because according—and I have seen pictures—according to scientists, it’s a thing that happens. And how in the water do you keep a salmon on your big bulbous head?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. You’ve seen—is this real? Hang on. Is this real?

Martha Beck:
No, it’s a real thing. It’s a real thing.

Rowan Mangan:
I like that they’re doing it.

Martha Beck:
I love that they’re doing it.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. I mean the salmon, I’m sorry for the salmon.

Martha Beck:
Well, they go and they reproduce and then they die anyway, so it’s kind of like in that area that’s where they go to die, and then they get worn as a hat.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s where they go to die. The water.

Martha Beck:
Sorry, people. I’m so sorry.

Rowan Mangan:
She’s whooping.

Martha Beck:
I’ve had the whooping cough the self-same week that I had eye surgery on both eyes. And let me tell you something, that is a frightening situation because you’re so afraid that one of your whooping coughs is going to pop your eyeballs. On account of they’re already compromised from the surgery.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s been a week.

Martha Beck:
It makes me want to wear a salmon on my head.

Rowan Mangan:
It makes me want to wear a salmon on my head.

Martha Beck:
Well, that’s what it is. An outbreak of whooping cough. Think what that would be if you were out with the orcas and you were kayaking there and it came up and then had a whooping cough attack through its blowhole.

Rowan Mangan:
I just like the idea of an orca swimming up to me with a salmon on its head.

Martha Beck:
That would be so tender and terrifying because they’re really big. So yeah, that’s what I’m trying to figure out. And I don’t expect to be successful, but the struggle, et cetera. Camus that. So what are you trying to figure out?

Rowan Mangan:
Maybe for the orcas it’s like a soul patch. Do you know what a soul patch is?

Martha Beck:
A little mustache? Like a little beardie thing?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. It’s like a little tiny beard that just sits right under your lip.

Martha Beck:
On your soul.

Rowan Mangan:
Maybe the equivalent. On your soul, yeah. Maybe that’s what the salmon is. Or like a little bow tie or something. I wish I knew what statement they were making.

Martha Beck:
I know. Because they’re thinking thoughts, those critters. Elaborate thoughts.

Rowan Mangan:
About us, no doubt.

Martha Beck:
We deserve it.

Rowan Mangan:
Judgmental thoughts.

Martha Beck:
We deserve their judgments. We do deserve their judgments.

Rowan Mangan:
God knows we do. Oh, Marty.

Martha Beck:
What are you trying to figure out, Roey?

Rowan Mangan:
I had a weird experience the other day of unexpectedly finding myself scrolling through my iPhone list of alarms. Have you ever done that?

Martha Beck:
No. I find it alarming.

Rowan Mangan:
Awww. You’re better than that, Marty. Come on.

Martha Beck:
No, I’m not. I’m really not.

Rowan Mangan:
Are you not?

Martha Beck:
No. I popped my eyeballs.

Rowan Mangan:
Now we know. Yeah. And you know how you can label your alarms and in fact, you should.

Martha Beck:
Oh, yes, you should.

Rowan Mangan:
In my view.

Martha Beck:
Mine usually just say things like Saturday repeats on Saturday.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. You have trouble telling Siri. You panic when you talk to Siri. You go, “Ah, Siri on the morrow, ah, please forbear upon me to, uh, just remind me that we must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Martha Beck:
Oh, no.

Rowan Mangan:
And then Siri goes, “All right. I will tell you to check your Sisyphus.”

Martha Beck:
Which when you say it sounds dirty.

Rowan Mangan:
It does actually.

Martha Beck:
It does.

Rowan Mangan:
I meant for like—

Martha Beck:
Lice?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
I said the other day, what was it? I said that people were trying to capture me and sell me. And you said, “For meat?”

Rowan Mangan:
For meat. And you said, “No, for traffic.” And I immediately saw you in a high-vis vest, like doing this directing traffic. Oh dear. Oh no. What’s to become of us?

Martha Beck:
Seriously now.

Rowan Mangan:
What’s to become of us? I love it how you always say seriously and then lead into something that’s by the nature of this show, not designed to be serious. Anyway, I’m talking about alarms and I’m talking about the deep insight that I had into my own psyche by watching how I’d labeled alarms over the years because I never reuse an alarm. I always just add a new one. So just for hours—

Martha Beck:
Are you serious? You never reuse them?

Rowan Mangan:
No, because I tell Siri to set them all. And so I just feel like I was doing this, I was looking at all the old alarm labels and thinking this is how my night person speaks to my morning person. Like this is how that conversation happens. And so there’s the obvious ones, like sweet potato in onion, I mean—onion—sweet potato in oven. Sweet potato and onion in oven.

Martha Beck:
Sweet potato in onion is less clear to me how that would happen.

Rowan Mangan:
Kind of a fun challenge.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, like a turducken.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, exactly.

Martha Beck:
On-yam-on or something.

Rowan Mangan:
An on-yam-on. Gravy, stovetop, all those ones that everyone has. But then there’s also these really, one of them says, and it says it in this tone of voice, “GET UP DERMATOLOGIST” in all caps. I always love it when I set my alarms in all caps because it shows that I’m trying to be really stern with my morning person.

Martha Beck:
Very committed.

Rowan Mangan:
And I don’t trust her. I do not trust her. But there are so, it’s so funny, Marty, like a lot of them use the term “last chance.” I have alarms that say, “Last chance shower.”

Martha Beck:
A last chance shower. Oh my God. It’s like you’re having a closeout sale on your life.

Rowan Mangan:
For really real. Because I’m like, in my mind, it’s like, “Okay, well, she’s going to be able to get out of the door, but not with a shower. So I’m going to have to set this up.” I saw one that just said, “Marty, shave my head.”

Martha Beck:
Sorry. I’ve got the whoops.

Rowan Mangan:
You’ve got the whoops. In Australia they’re hoops. And I don’t know why.

Martha Beck:
Whooping cough. Because you’re more constructive. You are more making hoops, things that can function, mending the hoop of the whoop, the cough.

Rowan Mangan:
We still spell it with the W anyway.

Martha Beck:
Really? You still spell it with the W?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Well, that’s just nonsense.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, it doesn’t make sense. I never claimed it did. I have one that in all caps, and I have no idea what this is about, but it must’ve been something medical. But for whatever mood or whatever, I have an alarm that’s set for 2:30 in the afternoon, and it’s all caps—my favorite ones are all caps—and it says, “WEIGH THYSELF.” Why did I need to weigh thyself at 2:00 PM on a Saturday?

Martha Beck:
At 2:00 PM on a Saturday. I think that is what the Oracle at Delphi said: “Weigh thyself.”

Rowan Mangan:
Weigh thyself.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
I had one that says, “Remember the teddy stuff.”

Martha Beck:
Remember the teddy stuff?

Rowan Mangan:
I had one that said—

Martha Beck:
Teddy Roosevelt?

Rowan Mangan:
“Lila and construction vehicle prize.”

Martha Beck:
Are you going to feed our child your construction vehicle?

Rowan Mangan:
It’s anyone’s guess, but I’ll leave the listener with my favorite alarm that I found in my list that says, in all caps with a lot of exclamation points after it, set for 7:15 AM.

Martha Beck:
Okay.

Rowan Mangan:
Says, all caps, exclamation points, “LOTION, ET CETERA!!!!!!” Lotion et cetera? What was the urgency and what was the et cetera?

Martha Beck:
I can’t—

Rowan Mangan:
What was the et cetera to lotion?

Martha Beck:
I can’t laugh, my whooping cough’s just too hard. Lotion, et cetera.

Rowan Mangan:
Lotion, et cetera, for the love of God!

Martha Beck:
At 7:15 in the morning.

Rowan Mangan:
Not just the lotion. Not just the lotion, but things that are like lotion, but I can’t go into what they’re specifically, just similar items.

Martha Beck:
At 7:15. Last chance!

Rowan Mangan:
Last chance. Last chance for lotion, et cetera. God almighty. It’s a strange thing to have a psyche and evidence of it.

Martha Beck:
I think that we just should get to the point where our phones do everything and our psyches are out the window. They’ll just sit around alarming each other. Lotion, et cetera.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s very much like how our psyches are though. We just sit around alarming each other.

Martha Beck:
Ohh. That’s a really good point. And actually an excellent segue into our topic.

Rowan Mangan:
I was hoping a segue was coming.

Martha Beck:
Did you do that on purpose, Roey?

Rowan Mangan:
Oh no, I totally didn’t.

Martha Beck:
Oh, cool. Well, it is.

Rowan Mangan:
But I’ll take credit.

Martha Beck:
Because we have a metaphor we intend to torture.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes, we do. As always. As always. I mean, would it really be Bewildered if we didn’t torture a metaphor?

Martha Beck:
Torture a damn metaphor. I’m against torture. I want to be clear about that. But when it comes to metaphors?

Rowan Mangan:
Fuck ’em.

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We are thinking today about, and we were talking about mobile phones, so this is all perfect. It’s perfect. It’s like we planned it. It’s like we did any professional preparation. It’s just amazing.

Martha Beck:
So much, almost like that.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s so similar to that. It’s like lotion etc.

Martha Beck:
I had an alarm.

Rowan Mangan:
Preparation etc.

Martha Beck:
You had an alarm that said “Professionalism, et cetera” at 8:15 PM on Wednesday. Okay, so explicate, missed calls.

Rowan Mangan:
Missed calls, call waiting. We haven’t quite decided what’s the perfect metaphor, but it’s something to do with your telephone. Missed calls from destiny. And what we want to talk about is our intuition.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Our intuition.

Martha Beck:
Yes because as I always say, our cell phones are electrical devices that communicate wirelessly. And our nervous systems are electrical systems made of meat. Why should they not also communicate wirelessly? And I think they do. I think intuition and calls from destiny are a thing. So there.

Rowan Mangan:
So speaking of meat, do you remember in Battlestar Galactica when she has to learn to pilot the cylon ship, but the cylon ship is made of meat?

Martha Beck:
Meat?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. It’s alive.

Martha Beck:
Okay, number one, I have no idea what you’re talking about because I never watched Battlestar Galactica. Number two, who the hell is “she”? Is it, like, I don’t know—

Rowan Mangan:
I’ve forgotten her name. I think she’s called Starbuck. She’s really, really hot.

Martha Beck:
Starbuck is good.

Rowan Mangan:
She looks like, I dunno, she looks like if Kate McKinnon wasn’t joking. If Kate McKinnon was serious. Oh, she’s so gorgeous, Marty.

Martha Beck:
Oh, so it’s not like Shirley Temple or somebody, just out there. And then the third thing I was going to say is what the F, a meat ship? That is the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard. Except for we are literal meat ships, so…

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. To your point, I was agreeing with you. I was expanding.

Martha Beck:
So she has to get on there and it’s made of meat. And what does it do? Does it try to bite her?

Rowan Mangan:
No, she—I think, I don’t know if she ends up doing it psychically, but I can remember her reaching out into the meatiness and sort of starting to figure it out.

Martha Beck:
Ew.

Rowan Mangan:
I dunno. Maybe Starbuck is the guy.

Martha Beck:
Starbuck is the guy on the Pequod in Moby Dick.

Rowan Mangan:
Really?

Martha Beck:
Didn’t you know that’s where it comes from?

Rowan Mangan:
I’d forgotten. I’d forgotten.

Martha Beck:
That’s why it’s got the emblem of the mermaid and everything. It was on the front of the Pequod in Moby Dick, and Starbuck was one of the—I think it was the ship’s mate or the cook or something.

Rowan Mangan:
We’ve got to educate our child.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
But that’s a great callback. It’s a great callback to the orcas with the salmon on their head.

Martha Beck:
That line of reasoning. I’m glad I know you well because as I recall, we went from Battlestar Galactica hands deep in the meat ship to—

Rowan Mangan:
Unfortunately for our listeners.

Martha Beck:
To Moby Dick and Starbucks to “We must educate our child.” Which part of that, like is it the meat squish? Is it Moby Dick? Does she go into a whale and try to run it? Yeah, I dunno.

Rowan Mangan:
Do you know what, Marty, the answer to that question is that I am so complex. I have such a complex mind that I don’t even know myself.

Martha Beck:
That is so deeply cunning of you.

Rowan Mangan:
So your intuition or your destiny is—all right, so okay, here’s the metaphor. Let me spell it out. You have a destiny. It speaks to you via your intuition. That’s the message.

Martha Beck:
Of course.

Rowan Mangan:
In line metaphorically, I want to say. But the thing is about our culture is that we’re not listening. We’re not picking up that call. We are missing the call Guys, we cannot, folks.

Martha Beck:
And here is why.

Rowan Mangan:
Go on.

Martha Beck:
Here’s the metaphor.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay, lay it me.

Martha Beck:
It’s still in pretty good shape at this point. So, we’re wireless devices, we’re getting signals that are telling us what might be best for us in a moment. Like “Don’t go down that dark alley” kind of intuition. And in a broader sense, like “You have a destiny! Maybe learn to drive a plane because it’s part of your destiny” or something, right? They’re big intuitions and little intuitions, and they’re wirelessly communicated like calls. But we are always already on a call with culture.

Rowan Mangan:
Ohhh.

Martha Beck:
Yes, we’re plugged in. It’s like we’re on a Zoom meeting with culture. Everybody like mom, dad, the siblings, the cousins, the teachers.

Rowan Mangan:
The whole Brady Bunch.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Everybody that ever conditioned us, their little voices are always coming at us. “Oh, don’t do that. Do this.” And we’re, we’re so plugged into that that we never even hear the call coming in, or we just kick it to call waiting or something.

Rowan Mangan:
No, that’s a bit of a nineties reference, I think. So, no, I think the thing is it’s a missed call. It’s a missed call.

Martha Beck:
Yes. It’s a missed call from destiny. So all right, fine, metaphor, stipulated. How does this work in real life in a non-metaphorical sense? Because there is a way that I believe your destiny or your true self or whatever it is actually is trying to get your attention and actually does offer you suggestions, instructions, sometimes some really useful planning advice for the future. So there is something coming in.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I think anyone who’s listening to this, I don’t think anyone’s going, no, there’s no such thing as intuition. I think we all know. We’ve all felt that feeling, right?

Martha Beck:
I have to say we went through a whole pre-discussion here going, “Okay, we won’t say that we believe in intuition because that would be so bourgeois. But we will say that we have had our own experiences with intuition and it’s a scientific possibility,” blah, blah, blah. And Ro said, “Nope. Anybody out there listen to us, already believes in intuition.”

Rowan Mangan:
It’s not something you believe in or not, it’s something in your body. It’s something that if you say to me right now that that’s bullshit, you are trying harder, you are burning more calories denying it than it would take to accept it. Do you know what I’m saying? That’s bullshit.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And the way I think of that.

Rowan Mangan:
But I just, no, no, sorry, I need to, I can’t let this go any further without saying, neither of us said the word “bourgeois” as, no, that didn’t happen.

Martha Beck:
I thought it.

Rowan Mangan:
You thought it was bourgeois to talk about intuition?

Martha Beck:
No, I didn’t. I just made that up.

Rowan Mangan:
You are a funny, funny woman, Martha Beck. You are like an orca with a salmon on its head.

Martha Beck:
Thank you, that’s in style.

Rowan Mangan:
Does this make me look bourgeois?

Martha Beck:
You’re making me cough and my eyeballs will pop.

Rowan Mangan:
So what’s interesting about this is that the culture will say to you, “If you can’t see it, if you can’t measure it,” Bewildered listeners know this, “then it does not exist.” Right? That’s what the culture tells us. So they’re like, yeah, burn that energy, saying that when you have had a very strong feeling not to do something and listen to it and then later found out, well thank God, or whatever it is, that’s clearly the culture. But I want you to tell a story about a telescope.

Martha Beck:
Oh yeah, that’s a good thing. So there came a time in my life when I was having so many experiences that were not, they didn’t conform with the idea that reality is strictly material. They were little psychic flashes and sometimes pretty damn big psychic flashes. Flashes, I have to say. So I had a decision to make. I either had to cut out a large and very startling part of my experience and stick with the culture I’d been educated in, or I had to free my mind from the culture I’d been educated in and allow that these non-material, spooky-wooky things were actually real and deserved my attention. I had to pick up that call.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, and it’s a particularly hard thing to do because the culture has built into it that sort of sneering, condescending attitude towards it. So it does actually take courage to make that movement, right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I was talking to someone the other day who I had gone to a convention of some kind and just felt something very negative about someone else at the convention and just wanted to steer around them and then met someone else who said, “There’s something really strange about that dude. I just want to steer around him.” And the person I was talking to said, “Isn’t that just absolutely wild?” Neither one of us had talked to him, and we just both had this feeling that is just incredible. And I was thinking, man, we are like, I think all animals are aware of energy. All babies are aware that we transmit and receive energies. And here’s this brilliant dude, famous and well known and everything, and he’s absolutely blown away at the ABC level of “I’m picking up an intuitive hit.” We dumb ourselves down in this one area to the point where cats must just look at us and think, “What morons.”

Rowan Mangan:
Oh Marty, I don’t think that’s fair. I think we dumb ourselves down in all kinds of areas.

Martha Beck:
Also, to be fair, cats think that about us in every area.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, that’s quite right. So what about the telescope then?

Martha Beck:
The telescope, okay, so I’m having these experiences and I’m like, how do you what? So then I thought, well, religions and traditional societies have things they say about this. They train people.

Rowan Mangan:
They call them very bourgeois.

Martha Beck:
They’re bourgeois in some cultures. No, they’re considered real and in some way manipulable, that you can make yourself more accessible to them, that you can connect to them, that you can disconnect into energies very much like we use our cell phones. And in order to do this with energetic phenomena, they have practices. And I’ve looked at practices from all over the world because I was fascinated. I mean this stuff was happening to me. I wanted to explain it. I believe in science, but I don’t think our brand of science in our culture has gone—I don’t think it knows most of the reality we experience every day.

Rowan Mangan:
So bourgeois.

Martha Beck:
Yes, so I looked at all these rituals and everything and usually the primary practice is learning to still the mind. And there are different ways of doing that. But if you can still your mind, your verbal logical mind, and I think this has everything to do with sort of bringing the whole brain online, the right part of the brain being the part that picks up the signals, I think, the right hemisphere. I just completely lost my train of thought. Oh yes. So I tried these things. I mean, my eyeballs popped.

Rowan Mangan:
Telescope.

Martha Beck:
Telescope. I did these practices. I would do these things to still my mind, and it would in fact allow me—I had more psychic things happen and I had more energetic accuracy and I was able to test it and it worked. And then I would say to someone, “I think maybe those things could exist and are real.” And they’d be like, “How bourgeois of you.” And I would say, “Well, have you ever tried stilling your mind?” They’d be like, “Why would I still my mind? My mind is the best thing I’ve got going and I would never still it. And I’d say, well if you would—

Rowan Mangan:
It’s got a salmon on it! Have you seen it? It’s very bourgeois.

Martha Beck:
Magnificent salmon. So “No, I’m not going to do those practices. They’re ridiculous. We know those things don’t exist.” And I thought that is like saying we know that there are no rings around Saturn because we can see Saturn and there are no rings. And if you do, and the telescope in this analogy is like a metaphysical practice that allows you to focus in. So you say to someone, “Well come look through the telescope and you’ll see that Saturn in fact has these magnificent rings.” And they would say, “Why would I look through a telescope? I’m looking with my eyes, I see reality. Your telescope is bourgeois, is bullshit, actually, bourgeois bullshit. And no, I’m not going to look through it.” And they would continue to believe in the reality that they were seeing without the instruments that could make their perceptions more acute. And I think that’s what we do in our culture.

Rowan Mangan:
We refuse to look through the telescope.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And tiny little flickers of intuition come in. And maybe we allow them in at a time of great grief when we’ve lost something or someone or when we’re in intense physical pain of some kind. Then it’s like, “I think I felt a flicker of something.” Dude, if you use the practices that have been discovered and employed by normal people all over the world throughout history, you can pick up a lot of stuff.

Rowan Mangan:
But even without it, I mean I think a lot of practices or whatever, a lot of it is just ceasing the resistance a bit. It’s like what I was saying before about it takes more effort to disbelieve sometimes than to just go with it.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
What about you with the walking stick thing?

Martha Beck:
Yes. That was really interesting. We were talking about had we ever had experiences specifically of intuition coming in and not in a way that is like, “You will marry this person and move to France” or whatever. It’s something.

Rowan Mangan:
Then become the bourgeoisie!

Martha Beck:
Yes. You will enter the bourgeoisie. Just something that represents the usual sort of sound of intuition. Because here’s the thing, when our culture does believe in intuition, it tends to equate it with anxiety.

Rowan Mangan:
Say more about that.

Martha Beck:
So usually people think of intuition as warning them against something dangerous.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh like your example about the person at the convention that everyone was avoiding.

Martha Beck:
Right. Exactly. But that is not the way I experience intuition. We’ll talk more about this in a minute, but the way I experience it, it is like this. I was getting ready one autumn to go on a long walk in England with a bunch of new friends. And we walked, we did these walks where you go from village to village every day, you walk all day for a week. And it was like 85 miles in total. I did 75 because I had to do a day off. Someone I loved was sick. But the point is I walked 75 miles in six days and as I was getting ready to go— why are you smiling like that?

Rowan Mangan:
Because I have a new drinking game. That—

Martha Beck:
My 75 miles in six days?

Rowan Mangan:
Specifically, I’ve even said this to our beloved Kit, that 75 miles is one of my new drink terms, along with Harvard, Down syndrome, near-death experience. 75 miles.

Martha Beck:
I walked 75 miles to Harvard with my child with Down syndrome. There. Just drink until you’re just lying face down somewhere with a salmon on your head.

Rowan Mangan:
Again?

Martha Beck:
But for me, I—

Rowan Mangan:
It’s very impressive, my darling. I can’t believe it. It’s astonishing. I’m so proud of you.

Martha Beck:
Well, after you do it, you can be snide. No, it really wasn’t nearly as big a deal as I thought it was. But you, my very beloved Roey, are very into the “equipaje,” the equipment. Actually that means luggage. The equipment that goes along with any activity.

Rowan Mangan:
I love me some equipment.

Martha Beck:
You love props.

Rowan Mangan:
I do.

Martha Beck:
So you got me a very, very fine and fancy set of walking sticks.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah!

Martha Beck:
The thing about them is they make it harder to walk.

Rowan Mangan:
That sounds like me.

Martha Beck:
Little bit.

Rowan Mangan:
But boy, they’re cute.

Martha Beck:
And you were like, “Are you going walking with your sticks now? Is it easier?” And I was like, “Well, I’m burning twice as many calories, and my shoulders ache all the time.” It’s really quite something to walk that far with the sticks going.

Rowan Mangan:
How far specifically?

Martha Beck:
About a hundred thousand miles, give or take. I round up, what can I say? So I use them a couple of times walking around Pennsylvania where we live, and they were a lot of extra effort. So I wasn’t going to take them because you also want to cut weight when you’re doing a long walk. You’re carrying everything in a day pack on your back and so you need light things. And I didn’t want to put the sticks in my backpack. And I was packing and putting things in, taking things out. Really, it was a weird packing situation. I don’t usually do that. So I was editing like crazy, and you were helping me because you’ve done long walks and you’d come in and pick up a tube of—

Rowan Mangan:
Lotion et cetera.

Martha Beck:
Lotion, et cetera, and say, “This is heavy.” And I’d be like, “It’s a hundred milliliters,” and you’d go, “That’s going to be too much.” So I wasn’t going to take the sticks. And I got finished packing and something said really, really calmly but very strongly: “Take those sticks.” And I was like, no, wrong. They don’t help, blah blah, blah. “Take those sticks.” Very calm, very strong. And it would not stop. So I put ’em in my backpack. The voice stopped. It wasn’t a real voice, it was just sort of an idea that formed in my mind. And then two days into our walk, which turned out to be much hillier than I had expected, I found out that walking sticks are amazingly helpful when you’re not on a paved surface and you’re going up and down hills. It really, really, really helped. And that’s the only reason that I walked 87.3 miles in two and a half days. Without that—

Rowan Mangan:
Let’s just get this straight. We don’t need to obsess over how far you walked. We know it’s very impressive.

Martha Beck:
Yes, we do.

Rowan Mangan:
I just want to go back for a moment to the bit where your intuition said to you, “Martha, your wife is always right about everything. Do as she has suggested in this and all things. I love you. The force is strong in you.”

Martha Beck:
That ‘s the voice that often comes to me when I use the tiny earbuds you gave me as a gift.

Rowan Mangan:
Pre-programmed.

Martha Beck:
Wireless. So that was my point was that when you get a bolt of intuition, it’s like that. It’s very calm, very pragmatic usually. And it doesn’t feel metaphysical even though it is. And we both had it at the same time one time, remember?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I love that it doesn’t feel metaphysical because it’s the cultural lens that says it should be like Gandalf branching his staff and lightning coming out of it or something. It’s just part of our bodies. It’s just part of our makeup that we can sense this stuff if we aren’t busy talking to culture or listening to the elevator hold music that culture’s doing at all times. Sorry. Metaphor torture. We moved across the country some seven, six years ago?

Martha Beck:
Maybe you should make them drink every time we tell them that too.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, hey.

Martha Beck:
We do talk about it a lot just kind of because the last thing we actually did.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. We moved across the country and then we sat in a chair for seven years.

Martha Beck:
Basically did, yeah. We were cruising around.

Rowan Mangan:
We were looking at houses in New Jersey. I don’t know why that sounds so funny to my ear, but it does sound really funny to my ear. Our friend Liz said, “There’s this cool part of the country, it’s really nice, you’ll love it. Come and live here.” And we went, “All right!” because that’s how we do.

Martha Beck:
But also, it must be said, something told us, “Move. Go to a different place.”

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. That something was Karen.

Martha Beck:
That’s true too.

Rowan Mangan:
Sometimes intuition speaks in the most unlikely voice. No, it was a very clear message that we all received. And so we were looking at these houses and then there was something, you know how it comes up, and there was something just over the river because this part of New Jersey is near the Delaware, so it was over in Pennsylvania. And we just both had this strange but yet unremarkable experience of driving across on the bridge across the Delaware River from New Jersey to Pennsylvania. And both of us had this “Ahh” sort of thing. It was just like this relaxation or this sense of, “Oh, that’s it!” is probably the best way to put it. Just like, oh that, yeah. Okay, now the flavor of this soup is right.

Martha Beck:
It felt clear and obvious and open and just better.

Rowan Mangan:
It just was better.

Martha Beck:
Nothing against Pennsyl—or New Jersey.

Rowan Mangan:
Nothing against New Jersey.

Martha Beck:
Nothing against New Jersey. No one’s ever said anything against New Jersey.

Rowan Mangan:
Home of the finest turnpike this nation has ever seen, and that’s just for starters.

Martha Beck:
Beautiful turnpike. But our intuition, our collective intuition signaled to us by—it was almost like this huge clean breath that we both inhaled. It just felt like, “Oh, this is better.” We literally are a stone’s throw away from a place that felt distinctly worse for no reason. There was no geological or—

Rowan Mangan:
Geological. It was just static. We work with someone who talks about the feeling of static a lot. It was just, it was a bit more staticky. And this is in the context of it’s your destiny talking to you through your intuition because everyone’s is unique and the whole thing was just, we were just being steered where we were supposed to go. And it’s not where other people were supposed to go.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Everybody else is supposed to go away from where we are.

Rowan Mangan:
I feel like there’s three reasons that we miss that call when it comes. Like that we have a tendency in our culture to kind of ignore it, let it go to voicemail. Sorry.

Martha Beck:
Now, see—

Rowan Mangan:
I get waylaid in the beauty of the metaphor.

Martha Beck:
Let me give the metaphor a little, how do we give it anesthesia so we can just keep doing this?

Rowan Mangan:
Just give it a little tickle.

Martha Beck:
Give it a little tickle and some laughing gas. Okay. Tell us these three reasons we miss the call of intuition.

Rowan Mangan:
So I was trying to figure this out and I was like, let’s mix the metaphor and imagine. All right, so let’s imagine that you’re walking through the woods and your best life or your ideal circumstances are trying to steer you on a path through the woods. And I was like, what’s three things that would stop us listening to that, following those imperatives to turn left here, turn right here, whatever, walking through the woods. And the first one I thought of in terms of the culture, this is what the cultural stories we’re listening to, the first one is quote unquote “reason.” Like, “Well, you wouldn’t want to go down there because clearly I once read in my Boy Scout manual that blah, blah, blah, blah.” You know that sort of thing that overrides empiricism and all of that which will find a way to belittle what you’re feeling and override it, right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Trying to go with what is called “logic and evidence” by the culture, but is in fact very tightly selected. So it’s called evidence. Our scientific culture talks about certain things being solid evidence and certain things being solidly reasoned, but actually cuts out a lot of what we all experience empirically ourselves in our own lives. The goal of science is supposedly to be parsimonious, to take all the evidence and give the explanation that comes up most easily. And what you were saying before is people will talk themselves blue in the face to explain around an intuitive event without acknowledging it—when maybe it’s just that we can pick stuff up sometimes!

Rowan Mangan:
So what you’re saying, this is blowing my mind. So what you’re saying is the culture of science has actually kind of, is consistently interfering with the spirit of science. Like what the actual science is supposed to do because you’re absolutely right, it is empirical, these nudges that we get.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Everything we experience is through our own lens of subjectivity. So when we get a very strong signal to do something that doesn’t come through what our culture considers empirical means, we need to just, it violates our true nature to ignore that or to say it doesn’t exist, but we have to do it if we’re going to fit in with culture.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. Talk about—sorry, I don’t mean to just remote control you, but I do do this sometimes. Lisa Miller talking about her research and the way that the academic kind of—

Martha Beck:
Lisa Miller is a brilliant, she’s a brilliant psychologist. She’s Ivy League all the way, was at Stanford for a while, I believe, I think she’s now at Columbia. And just absolutely impeccable research. Brilliant, brilliant mind. And she and her assistants went through this huge data set on all these different variables about people’s happiness and health, and it’s just kind of a big general national survey, I think, in the US, huge number. And they combed through this long questionnaire and they found exactly one question that could have some connection to the spiritual perspective of life that has been considered real by most cultures throughout history. And it was something about religious participation. So Lisa Miller and her assistants ran all these statistics on this one variable. And what they found out is that it had a massive positive effect on health, on happiness, on relationships, on job satisfaction. Pretty much any variable you looked at other than that was positively affected by this one question, if people said, “Yeah, I do. I have a spiritual community” or something.

Rowan Mangan:
Some sort of sense of spiritual life.

Martha Beck:
Some sort of religious life is what it was.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, was it religious? Okay.

Martha Beck:
Yeah because that’s what they asked about on the survey. You don’t want to ask about spiritual phenomena, you just say, “Do you go to church?” Because that’s something you can measure. And the numbers were absolutely stunning. The effect of this one variable was unreal. So she has done a lot of subsequent research where she’s shown definitively, time after time, that people who allow for a spiritual dimension in their own experience are just much, much, much healthier and happier mentally and physically than most other people. So she presented this work at an Ivy League seminar expecting a standing ovation because the statistics were so dramatic.

Rowan Mangan:
You don’t know that she was expecting a standing ovation?

Martha Beck:
Oh, I don’t know, but she describes it in her book of just being so excited. And I think her book’s called The Awakened Brain, I should check on that because it’s a terrific book. But she talks about being so excited to present these findings and putting them up there and just like the silence was deafening. And afterward people came up to her and said, “Yeah, you’re really going to have to work to find the hidden variable in the data that will account for your findings.” Because—

Rowan Mangan:
Wasn’t it—I remembered this as that they would say, “Well of course you haven’t considered that.” And she would say, “No, we controlled for that. This is how.” “No, you haven’t considered that because it could have been this.” And then she would say, “No, we did control for that. We have actually done the study.”

Martha Beck:
Yeah, I think people did poke at her that way. That’s one of the ways people get challenged when they have sort of unusual findings. So there was a lot of that. But then there was also just a general consensus that, well, she had pretty well controlled for all the variables they could think of. So there was a hidden one that was going to explain how some kind of spiritual life made it seem that people were happier, but actually it was being filtered through something empirical and physical. So the logic got really ornate trying to work around people’s experience into the precise box our culture wants to believe in.

Rowan Mangan:
And so that’s anti, what do you call it, Occam’s Razor?

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Like, just believe it. It’s like my favorite thing in, I dunno if I’ve talked about this on the podcast before, but my favorite moment in the C.S. Lewis books is when in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, when the older brother goes to the old man that they’re staying with, it’s the blitz, and so they’ve been sent out to this country house and says, “My little sister says that she’s going into a wardrobe and going to another land.” And the professor’s like, “Yeah, all right, so why don’t they teach logic to these people? Okay, so there are three options. She’s lying. Do you know her to be lying? Do you know her to be a liar?” No, she’s absolutely not a liar. “Well then, she’s mad, she’s delusional. Do you have any evidence that she’s delusional?” No. “Okay, so what’s the third thing? She’s telling the truth.”

Martha Beck:
Duh!

Rowan Mangan:
It’s like that. So I mean all of that to say, so that’s one reason that we miss the call from destiny.

Martha Beck:
One other, I have to slide in another.

Rowan Mangan:
Slide it in.

Martha Beck:
This really drives me crazy because I had this white-light experience that people similar to what people experience during near-death experiences, and they will all say, and I will repeat, that it’s more real than the realest thing you’ve ever experienced. But the way scientists explain this is that they say because this phenomenon occurs everywhere on earth and people who’ve gone through the same set of circumstances describe it exactly the same way, that means we know for sure it’s a product of the brain. And I’m like—

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God.

Martha Beck:
Okay. People all over the world also report seeing a moon that waxes and wanes up in the sky. People all over the world claim to see it and see it getting bigger and smaller and blah, blah, blah, blah, which proves that the moon is a product of the brain. No. Maybe it’s just there.

Rowan Mangan:
Marty, what are we defending? This idea that it would be less work to just say this is real. So what is it that we are defending when I say “we” as the culture, as the scientific voice of reason, what’s being defended there? Because it’s clearly a defensive posture.

Martha Beck:
Well, if you read a whole bunch about the brain, what you will find is that the left hemisphere tends to be in control of what we call logic and reason and most of language and counting and the passage of time and all of that. And that it also tends to tell fear-based stories and try to control everything around it. So the same part of the brain that measures things and wants them to be very physical is the same part of the brain that wants to control everything and that is afraid of everything. So I think what we’ve got is a fear-based culture that is hanging out mainly in left-hemisphere-dominated functions, and in that part of the brain, it’s like a part of us that is terrified of losing control. If you said to someone in a science class at, I don’t know, an Ivy League university like Harvard, if you said, “Okay, I completely believe in physics as we know it, and I also, when I close my eyes at night, I can see what’s happening to my relatives far away and it’s verifiable and I’ve tested it 25,000 times,” the whole control mechanism, the whole structure would have to break open if that were possible. And I think it partly was a pushback against religion when it first arose.

Rowan Mangan:
How ironic that it’s so religious now.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, exactly. It became dogmatic, but people were tired of being burned alive for knowing that the earth goes around the sun and not vice versa. So they said, “Ugh! None of your religious nonsense. We’re just going to look at what we can measure.” And then they became their own dogmatism. And now we’ve got dogmatism that says, “There is spirituality, but we get to control it,” the authorities of the church, whatever the church is. And then we’ve got, “There’s science, there is no spirituality, and we get to control everything.” Fear and control. Fear and control. Fear and control.

Rowan Mangan:
Silly.

Martha Beck:
Boring.

Rowan Mangan:
Boring.

Martha Beck:
So boring.

Rowan Mangan:
So we’re walking through the woods. The first noise that’s going on that stops us hearing the call of our intuition in which way we should be walking, that’s reason, that really dominant voice of culture. I would like to posit that the second reason we don’t pick up that call, I like to call it in my many years of research into this, I have decided to call it “the Blair Witch phenomenon.”

Martha Beck:
Oh! Do tell.

Rowan Mangan:
So you’re walking through the woods. Yeah? And then you just suddenly think, “Oh shit, what if I saw one of those creepy stick things hanging from the tree there like in The Blair Witch Project?” Now I’m anxious, now I’m thinking about The Blair Witch Project. Now I’m thinking about creepy things in the woods that might grab me with a jump scare. And then you can build stories that will basically lead us on a path to paranoia, which will cut—anxiety and paranoia will cut that connective tissue between what we know to do and what we’re doing with our brain.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. So this is what I was saying a little while ago about insofar as our culture does allow that we have some kind of intuition, it very often confuses it with anxiety and even to the point of paranoia. So people don’t think of intuition as a friendly, practical voice that tells you things that sound fun. But in my experience, it is. What people think—and we were reading something online about how to be okay in the apocalypse or something, and it said, “At times when there’s a lot of social disruption, your intuition will grow sharper, and you must trust it.” And I thought, most people I know think that that means having to stay anxious about whatever’s going on in the world because anxiety itself is the source of solid information about what to do next. I used to think that way, and I only recently stopped thinking that way because I realized that nothing, actually, nothing intuitively accurate comes out of anxiety. When I’ve had intuition about danger, it’s been super calm. Have you ever had intuition about something, avoiding danger, and it didn’t scare you? It’s not like the stick figure in the woods. It’s just like, “Hey, let’s do that.”

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And it seems connected to that thing like when you have a car accident or whatever, and everything slows down. It’s like it’s a faculty that we have that it’s almost like that’s actually reason. It’s what the cultural voice that says this is, is the actual physical version of that which is just like, “Okay, now you’re going to lift this arm and you’re going to turn this and instead of braking, you’re going to accelerate through the—”

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And it’s so interesting how you start moving your body to describe it because I do believe it comes through the whole brain, not just the left hemisphere and not just logic and reason. And it’s almost the wisdom of the body, like when I grabbed those stick.s

Rowan Mangan:
But why is the body separate from any other kind of wisdom? That’s a cultural distinction to begin with.

Martha Beck:
Right. When I had the thing with “Take those sticks,” I really think it was my body sending that message. I didn’t know how helpful those sticks were going to be in my head. I had read about it, I theoretically said, it’s easier on your knees or whatever, but my body had been out with the sticks a little bit and it knew something that my brain, my verbal brain was not allowing, and it knew it very calmly. And I’ve also had things about the future, things I should do in the future. And they’re calm, they’re never panicky. And so by tuning in to anxiety, thinking that it’s intuition, we totally miss all the calls from our destiny.

Rowan Mangan:
And the thing that those two types of storytelling have in common—the supposedly rational one and the fear, the anxiety-based one—is that they’re both very sure that they’re the right answer. They’re both very beguiling and very convincing…They diminish any other alternative.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And they kick a kind of fight-or-flight response. They’re a little bit combative, a little bit definitive, or they scare you and make you want to run. So, I get didactic immediately. If I feel anything that is fight or flight in a message, I don’t think it’s real intuition. I think it’s just something I’ve learned to be afraid of.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s so interesting. Yeah, I think that’s a pretty good rule of thumb. So then, I think, this is my third type of story that goes on in our brains that stops us picking up the call. And you described it so well when we were chatting about this. It’s the phenomenon where people will say something and then they’ll say, “Well maybe this is just me.” And so I’m kind of thinking about it in terms of consent, the forcing of consensus that comes in culture. We talk about on Bewildered, we like to talk about culture is coming to consensus while nature is coming to our senses. And so this sense of if “it’s just me”—that that in itself disqualifies it from being the right information. And that’s absurd because it is just you. It should be just you. You’re the one receiving the message for you.

Martha Beck:
Mm-hm.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s not the message for the other person.

Martha Beck:
And that’s so interesting because it requires a kind of courage and not the courage of being afraid and moving forward anyway. But the courage of saying, “There is no force outside me, there is no group of people outside me that can give me the instructions to find my destiny. I have to trust what I feel and hear as the call in my own being. And I have to trust that, despite all the pressures telling me not to.” That’s a pretty brave position. But it also, I think, feels very, it feels like when you say that, I feel like there’s something settling. Like the right puzzle pieces clicking together and it’s like, “Oh shit, nothing’s going to do this for me, but wow, I have the capacity to do this myself.”

Rowan Mangan:
So I want to talk a little bit more about how we go about doing that in just a minute.
Okay. Marty, real talk. How can we hang up on culture once and for all so that we can finally be ready to listen to the intuitive hits that are coming through all the time?

Martha Beck:
Well, I love the way this metaphor frames it up because people do really think just moseying along, taking group calls from culture all the time, that somehow their intuition is going to break through all the conversations they’re already having in their heads with culture.

Rowan Mangan:
Right.

Martha Beck:
So it’s like we’re on a Zoom call with 50 people and no one’s on mute. We’re trying to listen to every single person that socializes us and—

Rowan Mangan:
And someone else’s dog is barking over here and someone’s kid is screaming for something.

Martha Beck:
And we’re thinking, “I wish I could just figure out what to do and trust myself and find my path forward.” You actually have to hang up occasionally. Hang up on culture.

Rowan Mangan:
So is it fair to say then that a good clue that what you’re hearing is not intuition is if there is that kind of feeling of clamor?

Martha Beck:
Yes. Yes. That if you can hear many voices, it’s quite probable that none of them are your true nature. If it feels like—and so people who are dithering or trying to process logically can hear all these different arguments. When there are multiple arguments, that’s not your destiny calling.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s right. And that’s interesting that trying to come to consensus, like what you’re then going through is a process where you’re trying to make all the voices agree, rather than sinking into your body and coming to your senses where there is, at least at the beginning, there is some sort of silence.

Martha Beck:
So we’re back to Pascal’s statement that all our suffering comes from the fact that we are unable to sit quietly alone in a room because that is the best way to get intuitive hits is to take time every day. When I was packing to go on that trip and the sticks thing happened, it was so difficult for me to think logistically through this thing that I’d never done before, that I had to make everybody leave and I had to pack by myself. You advised me many times, but then I had to get by myself and it was in the moment when I was by myself and I had sort of finished and I was just looking at it and I stopped worrying and then: “Take those sticks.” And it was not like, I’m not going to change my life and go live in a bunker in Colorado based on these things. It was a very, very pragmatic thing, but it came from silence.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s interesting that sitting alone in a room, we don’t talk specifically about solitude that much on Bewildered, and yet it is the only context or the only circumstance in which legitimately we could say there’s no culture. Although there’s always a little bit in there, if you know what I mean, but, and so as a very practical kind of way to hang up on culture and start learning to use our intuition, solitude and silence is a great start. Right?

Martha Beck:
And then listen, but don’t listen for something that is frightening: “Oh, go and do this.” Don’t listen for something that sounds arduous or dark. I really believe the real voice of intuition is always, it always has a kind of touch of joy to it, and it always feels like you’re being lifted. It’s a pleasant feeling and we think things have to be huge or magical or whatever. And in fact, they’re usually just fun.

Rowan Mangan:
I want to suggest something. I agree with the fun and the pleasure aspect, but I think that “listen” is maybe not quite the right verb because I think if we’re listening, we’re in a, there’s some sort of vigilance there that, because I think what actually have to do when this knowing actually manages to penetrate is we need to hear. So instead of being in this readiness that it’s like you don’t know when it’s going to happen. So instead of waiting for it to happen, when you do hear it, hear it. Let it land, let it actually—acknowledge it.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, and I do think that it reminds me of a quote from the book, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates by Tom Robbins. There’s a parrot in that book and the only thing it ever says is, “People of the world, relax.” And I— instead of “listen”—I really think the key is to relax. It’s that simple.

Rowan Mangan:
And then trust yourself. Trust yourself. And I think over time as you develop evidence that it’s real through your own experience, which is actually the scientific method.

Martha Beck:
There you go.

Rowan Mangan:
I’ve got to say, you’re building the metaphorical muscle to be more and more in touch with that faculty, which isn’t actually woo-woo in particular. It’s just a faculty that the church of our current culture doesn’t allow.

Martha Beck:
Says it’s wicked.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s wicked.

Martha Beck:
And nonsensical.

Rowan Mangan:
I want to burn it on a stake.

Martha Beck:
And then put it on my head and swim about.

Rowan Mangan:
What a weird episode.

Martha Beck:
It’s a very weird episode.

Rowan Mangan:
If anyone’s still listening, thanks for bearing with us.

Martha Beck:
Oh my God. All right. No, so there it is. Your destiny is always calling, and literally unplugging and relaxing and then trusting what comes is all you have to do. And I think we should cut the previous hour of this podcast and just say that.

Rowan Mangan:
All right. But first, let’s not forget to say…

Martha Beck and Rowan Mangan:
…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.

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.

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.


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