Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan, and this is another episode of BEWILDERED, the podcast for people trying to figure it out. How you doing, Marty?

Martha Beck:
I’m doing pretty well. It’s been a while since we sat down to do this, and it’s really fun to be here again, I have to say.

Rowan Mangan:
But they don’t know that. Our listeners don’t know that, because of the magic of something, of regular releases. We’re supposed to maintain.

Martha Beck:
We deposit them in a special eggery.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
They’re like eggeries. We put a little egg podcast.

Rowan Mangan:
And you all have the illusion that we do things regularly. But in fact, we don’t, as we very often end up saying on this [inaudible 00:01:13] podcast.

Martha Beck:
That’s true, we say it like every time, and then, we say, “Oh, but they don’t know, because of the magic of whatever,” but we’re wrong.

Rowan Mangan:
We’re wrong.

Martha Beck:
And they’re right. Anyway, what are you trying to figure out?

Rowan Mangan:
Well, Marty, as so often, what I’m trying to figure out today is, what the hell is wrong with me?

Martha Beck:
Oh, this should be quick.

Rowan Mangan:
Right? Case in point, don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this on the show before, but we have a young daughter.

Martha Beck:
I don’t think you’ve ever said that. No. Nor have I. We never, ever, ever talk about it.

Rowan Mangan:
We don’t really notice her very much.

Martha Beck:
No, she’s very inconspicuous.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
We give her a little priority.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, she just sort of sits in the corner quietly, almost at the time. Anyway, so one of her hobbies at the moment is that she likes to play hide and seek, and I find that bedtime runs a lot more smoothly if we do a little hide and seek first. Little, I scratch her back, she scratches mine.

Martha Beck:
I didn’t know that was part of hide and seek, but now, I want to play it again.

Rowan Mangan:
You don’t want to play it the way she plays it, Marty, because it’s terrifying.

Martha Beck:
What?

Rowan Mangan:
Well, and this is to the, what the hell is wrong with me? It shouldn’t be terrifying to play hide and seek with your toddler, but here we go. So first of all, playing hide and seek with Lila involves her taking you to the place that she wants you to hide. In this instance, her toddler bed, which is like a crib with the sides taken off, for those of you who don’t know such things. All right, I climb into the toddler bed. And then, she says, “Okay, now I’m going to go and count.” She walks out of the room, and here’s what she does though. She starts counting. She’s great at counting.

Martha Beck:
A bit random.

Rowan Mangan:
“One, seven.” But then, for some reason, and this is where it starts getting ehh. As she gets closer to 10, she starts to whisper the numbers. And I personally find it very disturbing. I can’t exactly explain it, but when you go “1, 2, 3, 4,” that’s one thing. But then, when it’s like “8,9,” so then, she comes in, “Ready or not, here I come.”

Martha Beck:
Well, now you’re scaring me.

Rowan Mangan:
By the way, “Ready or not, here I come” is a scary threat.

Martha Beck:
It’s a terrible thing to say to a person. What if your doctor said that to you? Instead of knocking on the door, they just stood outside and went, “Ready or not, here I come.”

Rowan Mangan:
Marty, I feel like it would be wrong if we didn’t take a break at this point to let you tell a doctor joke that you recently read in a David Sedaris book.

Martha Beck:
Okay.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Oh, absolutely.

Martha Beck:
This is a family show.

Rowan Mangan:
No, it’s not. It’s an adult only show.

Martha Beck:
So this is a joke from David Sedaris, this book, A Carnival of Snackery, and to give it full attribution, he heard it from Phyllis Diller, and now you’re hearing it from me. Here’s the joke. A man goes to the doctor. The doctor says to the patient, “You’re going to need to stop masturbating.” And the man says, “Why?” And the doctor says, “So I can examine you.” End of joke. It did make me laugh and laugh, I have to say. One of my favorite jokes.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s a wonderful joke. How did I get to that from hide and seek with our toddler?

Martha Beck:
I said, if the doctor stopped outside the examination room and said, “Ready or not, here I come.

Rowan Mangan:
“Here I come, Clarice.”

Martha Beck:
That would be really genuinely terrifying. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a Clarice situation. It’s not good. So go on. What does our daughter do?

Rowan Mangan:
So she understands that the first part of how to play hide and seek when you know full well where the person’s hiding is that you walk into the room and you talk loudly about where they aren’t. And so, she’s like, “I wonder where my mommy is, Clarice.” And she just thinks of really lame places right here in the middle of the room. No. Anyway, there’s just a point where she does that for a while, and I’m under the covers, right? I’m hiding under the covers in this tiny, tiny bed, all scrunched up awkwardly. But then, as the game builds, I think I go into a kind of prey-predator kind of dynamic.

Martha Beck:
All right.

Rowan Mangan:
And I feel like my hands are starting to get clammy. The kid knows where I am. She’s told me to be there.

Martha Beck:
Well, that’s why it’s so frightening.

Rowan Mangan:
And then, there’s this point where she just goes silent. And Marty, it’s so scary. My heart’s beating, and I’m under there. And I’m trying to listen to see if I can hear her footsteps and if they’re approaching. And just in my head, the words are ringing, “Ready or not, here I come.”

Martha Beck:
We may need to consider getting some nanny help, not for you.

Rowan Mangan:
I need someone to just sit by me and rub my forehead.

Martha Beck:
Wouldn’t that be great? Is it Amy Schumer that says, “If you want to have fun in New York, just hire a babysitter for yourself. They let you play with their cell phones, and they charge very little money.” Anyway.

Rowan Mangan:
So yeah, there is a moment where you do start to hear the toddler breath in your ear, and it is absolutely terrifying. And that’s all I have to say about that, because I’m a really well-adjusted and good parent, and I am fine.

Martha Beck:
You know she’s going to prey upon you. Because you are in a prey relationship with her, she is going to go predator. By the time she’s a teenager, you are not going to believe the things she does, when you’re ready or not. This is what I think. I think you have to stop being afraid. But right now, how’s that helping? You look disturbed.

Rowan Mangan:
I know. I feel like you just looked into my eyes and said, “Ready or not, here I come.”

Martha Beck:
Yeah, you can’t help but play with it. If you’re going to be that, yeah, if your threshold of fear is that low, things are going to want to play on it, I’m just saying.

Rowan Mangan:
All right, well, I will continue to work on it. What are you trying to figure out?

Martha Beck:
Well, I’m trying to figure out how to live without caffeine, which is a horrible, horrible thing.

Rowan Mangan:
There’s no solution to that.

Martha Beck:
My doctor quite literally said, “You should not have caffeine.”

Rowan Mangan:
“Stop masturbating.”

Martha Beck:
And I was going to say “Why?” And she would say, “So I can examine you,” but you jumped the gun.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m sorry.

Martha Beck:
That’s all right.

Rowan Mangan:
I didn’t think you had known to go there before I went.

Martha Beck:
I was going to go there, and you were like “Ready or not, here I come. I’m going to give you the joke you’re about to give.” Anyway, so it’s bad enough to have to live without caffeine. It’s horrible. We get up in the morning. We are not morning people. Karen, our beloved Karycoo is a morning person, thank God. Because Karycoo has done all the morning things in our lives for a long time now. And so many people are morning people, and they really, really need to stop. Anyway, all babies are morning people. So we have relied heavily on coffee, and we have coffee down to a science. We’ve got really good coffee, right? And now, I can’t have caffeine. So I get up in the morning, and I was like, “I can’t have caffeine. Doctor said I can’t have caffeine, so I can’t have my coffee.”

And Karen said, “It’s fine. I’ll get you a cup of tea. If you drink two of them, it’s as strong as coffee.” And I said, “Yeah, because of the caffeine, which I’m not allowed to have.” She’s like, “All right, well, Coca-Cola has some caffeine in it. I could get you that.” And I was like, “Again, Karen, the issue is not how is the caffeine delivered. The issue is I can’t have caffeine in any form.” But it drives her… She’s so sweet. She wants me to have whatever I want, and I want caffeine. So she keeps trying to deliver caffeine to me in disguise.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, she’s trying to trick you into doing exactly what your doctor said not to do.

Martha Beck:
Exactly. The sad thing and the painful thing for everyone in the family, I think, is the look of stricken disappointment on her little face every time she tells me another thing that’s full of caffeine that I could now eat, because it’s not the other things. And I have to say to her, “No, it’s the caffeine itself.” But she did recently show us a picture of a southern flannel moth caterpillar, that would probably make me wake up out of sheer terror.

Rowan Mangan:
So that’s something she’s got going for her.

Martha Beck:
I have to say this, I should have saved it for another podcast, but I’m brimming with the knowledge.

Rowan Mangan:
I knew this was going to happen.

Martha Beck:
The southern flannel moth caterpillar also called the tree asp, asp as in the kind of snake that killed Cleopatra, because it is one of the most venomous creatures in North America. And it looks like a blonde Elvis. It’s got this big pompadour of fur, and it just wiggles around and then, it turns into a moth that looks like a bunny rabbit. Violently poisonous. Never touch a caterpillar, especially if it’s furry. That’s what I have to say about that.

Rowan Mangan:
We had a caterpillar, a really big caterpillar, that tried to break into our house in Africa, in South Africa.

Martha Beck:
I heard it going, “Ready or not, here I come.” Yeah. And then, it tried to come in. It was huge.

Rowan Mangan:
It successfully came in through a closed door. We don’t know how.

Martha Beck:
And then, Ro did try to sloop it out with a stick.

Rowan Mangan:
I was being butch that day.

Martha Beck:
And it freaked out.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God.

Martha Beck:
This six inch long caterpillar, and a meaty, it was a meaty caterpillar. And it had this weird little conniption fit, like a seizure. And I don’t think I’ll ever sleep again.

Rowan Mangan:
No. It brought me to my knees.

Martha Beck:
And then, there was a spider the size of my hand. And then, later in the same place on the same curtain, a huge scorpion.

Rowan Mangan:
We were like channeling some big powerful animal medicine energy that day.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. We wanted big animals. We did not get the elephants. We got the damn caterpillar, but they were terrifying. We got terrifying huge tiny animals.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, we got huge versions of tiny animals. That’s so interesting.

Martha Beck:
That would be a good title for a book, Huge Versions of Tiny Animals. If only we’d had tiny versions of huge animals, we would’ve had an elephant in a teacup, instead of the spider.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, I want a giraffe in a teacup.

Martha Beck:
Oh, that would be so cute. But it would kind of obviate the whole purpose of a giraffe, which is to be tall.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, and the whole point of cup of tea is to not have a giraffe in it.

Martha Beck:
Seriously, I promise to get off this topic, but when our friend, Boyd, came to get the spider for us, because we had to call someone to come get the spider, he brought a teacup. And even his sister, who grew up in South Africa on the reserve with him, even she looked at him and said, “Boydy, you’re going to need a bigger cup.” It was bigger than a teacup.

Rowan Mangan:
Marty.

Martha Beck:
What?

Rowan Mangan:
I just love that you are so hypocritical that you can tell that story without even mentioning that, maybe three, four years earlier, in the same room…

Martha Beck:
Oh God, this. I had repressed this, and now, here “Ready or not.”

Rowan Mangan:
Well, guess what? Some of us can’t repress it, because we’re not…

Martha Beck:
Better tell the people.

Rowan Mangan:
She gave me spider coffee.

Martha Beck:
Oh, I did.

Rowan Mangan:
It was, and this is not a small spider. Okay. So yes, my beloved made me a cup of coffee first thing in the morning.

Martha Beck:
First thing in the morning.

Rowan Mangan:
Very, very sweet of her.

Martha Beck:
Not a morning person.

Rowan Mangan:
Not a morning person. Doesn’t necessarily check the bottom of the cup.

Martha Beck:
Who does?

Rowan Mangan:
It’s white on the inside. That spider was brown, dude. And it was huge. It was the same kind of spider that, later, you made a big fuss about being on the curtains. That was in my goddamn coffee, Marty.

Martha Beck:
I know. And the worst thing is, okay, the worst thing is it wasn’t at the top. It was at the bottom, and you drank the coffee.

Rowan Mangan:
And then, a big leg kind of floated out of the gloom of the coffee.

Martha Beck:
Oh, it was disgusting.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh God, you are so lucky you repressed that.

Martha Beck:
No, no, and no, I don’t want to hurt our spider fans, but God, that was disgusting.

Rowan Mangan:
That was awful.

Martha Beck:
Oh my. Let’s do a podcast. Let’s stop reminiscing about things that make us want to hurt ourselves. And let’s just make a podcast. What do you say?

Rowan Mangan:
Let’s do it. All right. Pretty crazy, but it just might work.

Martha Beck:
Just might work.

Rowan Mangan:
We’ll be right back with more BEWILDERED. I have a favor to ask. You might not know this, but ratings and reviews are like gold in the podcasting universe. They get podcasts in front of more faces, more eyes, more ears, all the bits that you could have a podcast in front of, that’s what they do. So it would help us enormously if you would consider going over to your favorite podcasting app, especially if it’s Apple, and giving us a few stars, maybe even five, maybe even six. If you can find a way to hack the system, I wouldn’t complain. And a review would be also be wonderful. We read them all and love them. So thank you very much in advance. Let’s just go out there and bewilder the world. So we are actually doing a BeWild Files episode today.

Martha Beck:
Woop woop.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. And that’s nice, which means that we get to hear from y’all, our beloveds, out in the listening world of listeners. And today, that person is Celestine, that we’re going to hear from.

Celestine:
Hi, Ro and Marty. My name is Celestine. What I’m trying to figure out is when to stop trying to figure it out. I have spent the last 12 months in bug soup, dissolving all the different areas of my life, and I’m starting to see the path of the future. But the control freak in me wants to show up and plan it out, break it down, make an action plan. And there’s another part of me that now understands that it’s just my job to show up and watch it unfold. So where do you find the balance?

Rowan Mangan:
Celestine talks about bug soup. One of my favorite expressions in the English language and essential term, I think it would be fair to say, in Martha’s work.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
So in Wayfinder Life Coach Training, which she developed once upon a time.

Martha Beck:
I keep developing it.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. It’s a development.

Martha Beck:
I just keep developing it.

Rowan Mangan:
And it is sort of loosely based around this brilliant concept of the Change Cycle, that she made up in her own little head.

Martha Beck:
It was data grounded.

Rowan Mangan:
“It’s data grounded. I went to Harvard.”

Martha Beck:
I didn’t say it. They don’t get to drink. I didn’t say it. You said it. Say it again. No, don’t say it. Tell them about this loose metaphor. Or do you want me to do it?

Rowan Mangan:
When you said, “Say it again,” it made me think that the listeners are probably going to think that that’s what you want to hear in bed.

Martha Beck:
All right.

Rowan Mangan:
Just “Say Ivy League.”

Martha Beck:
“Say Ivy League.” It just occurred to me that what I gave you in Africa, what I made for you is what you just said is one of your favorite things. And that was literally spider soup.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my god.

Martha Beck:
Spider coffee, bug soup. What really is the difference?

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, wow.

Martha Beck:
See, you manifested it. Stop thinking these thoughts. They manifest.

Rowan Mangan:
Wow. They manifest four years ago.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, they did.

Rowan Mangan:
Time is an illusion. All right. So the Change Cycle by Martha Beck. It is a four stage description of how we all go through change. Is that fair?

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
For me to say that?

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
So once upon a time, we did a episode of this podcast called A Space for Dreaming. And in that episode, we talked about the second part of that.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Which, so Marty calls it square one, square two, square three, and get this, square four. So the Space for Dreaming was about square two. We’re going to go backwards today and talk about what Celestine is referring to when she says bug soup.

Martha Beck:
All right. So a change occurs when something hits your life that does not allow you to remain the same. So it could be a shock, like a loss, or it could be an opportunity, like a job interview or whatever. Or it could be just growth, that you just outgrow your life. Anyway, for a caterpillar, like the one that assaulted us that day, the thing that triggers it to go into its little change, big change, big metamorphosis, is that it gets full fed. And that means that it has the same bulk as the eventual butterfly or moth. But it has to grow until it’s big enough to make a whole butterfly. And then, something inside it gets triggered.

Rowan Mangan:
This is literally true what she’s saying right now.

Martha Beck:
This is literally true. And that full fed caterpillar will make a cocoon, and he’ll just lie inside there. And I used to think they just lay in there growing long legs and wings, but they don’t. They disintegrate, at least many species disintegrate inside the cocoon, until there are no two molecules that are hanging together anymore. And then, that condition triggers something called the imago cells. And the same cells are now reorganized and regrouped into a butterfly. It’s like you took a person made of LEGOs, and then, you took apart every other LEGO from every other LEGO. And then, you made a totally different shape out of exactly the same number of LEGOs. So this meltdown process is what happens to us when we hit a place in our life where we can’t go on being what we’ve been before. And we don’t like it much.

And we don’t accept it. We resist it, and our culture doesn’t even have language for it. So when it happens to you, when your life is hit… Like classic thing that affected us all, the pandemic. COVID-19 spreads across the world. Everything shuts down. Nobody could be what they were before that. And so, there was a huge period of not knowing what to be. And it’s this ego dissolution, this feeling of everything falling apart, that is a signal that we’ve gone into a new metamorphosis. And for us, it could happen, for a caterpillar, it happens once, for us, it could happen dozens, hundreds of times, I suppose. But that dissolving part has to happen, and people resist that like crazy.

Rowan Mangan:
So the dissolving, you said ego dissolution, but where we feel it is in our sense of identity?

Martha Beck:
Right, right.

Rowan Mangan:
So that sense of who I was, I can no longer be. And then, what Celestine’s talking about is that period of time where the new thing hasn’t come yet. And we are bug soup. We are spider coffee.

Martha Beck:
Even worse than the spider coffee. At least the spider still looked like a spider, though it was dead. But really, if you just kept cooking it until it all came apart.

Rowan Mangan:
No, no, no.

Martha Beck:
Okay. This is bad. Well, this is the thing. It’s not fun to dissolve something, to let something fall apart. It is death-like. It is the death of what we were, and our culture’s very frightened of death. We should talk about what the culture says about all this anyway.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. We’ve discussed before that the culture does not really like change, doesn’t really acknowledge it, doesn’t really accept it.

Martha Beck:
Except change for the better. There are certain things. Every day and every way, I’m getting better and better. That’s the one thing we’re allowed to do.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s true. That’s true. No, and there’s absolutely no room for this process, this natural process, that does happen many times. Like you say, there’s no language for it. No, there’s no space made for it. So I think the first thing, if we’re talking about this square one, this death and rebirth process that we’ll all go through in our lives, it feels really important to me that our first priority is to make that space, because it’s kind of big. And when it happens, you kind of got to let it happen.

Martha Beck:
You put it once, you said you have to insist on your right to melt down. Because the world around you, at least in our culture, is not going to be supportive of it. And so, you run a very high risk of having internalized beliefs that say, “This is not okay.” So if the reality is that everything’s melting down, things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and all that, if you quote Yates, then you’re going to be really, really stressed as you fall apart, thinking, “I must not fall apart.” And everyone around you going, “You must not fall apart.” But the reality is you are melting, and it just happens.

Rowan Mangan:
So the melting can happen in a lot of different ways. And even just in certain parts of our lives, you could be sort of more or less have your shit together with your family and at home and your relationships and stuff. But you might be in a square one with work, where you’re just like, “No, this isn’t serving me anymore. I need something new. But I don’t know what it is yet.” So I thought I’d talk a little bit about a really massive square one that I had recently.

Martha Beck:
Okay. Were you full fed?

Rowan Mangan:
That’s funny, because I had a baby. And just before that baby came out, I do not think I’ve ever felt more full fed.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
I was full. I was full of baby.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, you were full of baby.

Rowan Mangan:
So there’s this lovely term that people are starting to use, which is matrescence, and it’s the process of becoming a mother, from not being a mother to being a mother. And what’s lovely about it is like adolescence or senescence, you mentioned, it’s a period of time. It’s not a toggle switch from not to that.

Martha Beck:
It’s not “Yesterday, I was a caterpillar, and today, I am a butterfly.”

Rowan Mangan:
No, exactly. And what was interesting to me about this square one for me is that I had my daughter late, by most biological standards. I was 40. I’d just turned 40 when she was born. So I’d had a lot of life before becoming a mother. I was very conscious that I wanted to do it. I prepared for it. I could not have been told more explicitly or more times that this thing I was doing would change my life wholly and utterly. So the bit I wasn’t prepared for though was the bit where it changed my life wholly and utterly and irrevocably and freaking every second of my life is different now. And because I’m different and a whole new self was given birth to. And so, she’s coming up to three, and I still feel like I am right in the middle of that particular bug soup experience. And I don’t know when I take form again after this, in the part of my life where parenting, motherhood lives. I know I won’t be the same as before. I won’t be what I am right now, which is an absolute freaking mess.

Martha Beck:
I will be. I always am.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, I’ll still be me.

Martha Beck:
Right.

Rowan Mangan:
But yeah, I definitely will have new pieces to integrate into myself, which are being born and being melted every day, every week, as we go forward.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, they change so fast when they’re little babies that, just as you get used to one stage, they’re another stage.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
And it’s interesting how hard we try to hang on to the previous stages.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s so true.

Martha Beck:
I call it grabbing backwards. And grabbing backwards is something that I can feel myself doing very often, and I’ve been actually doing it a lot. We went off to, I was working on my chapter book and my picture book. I was working on creating the illustrations for a children’s book. Plus I’m working on a nonfiction book that I’m actually under contract to create. And I was on fire with my research and the momentum of writing, and I was drawing all these pictures. And I was getting up at four and doing things, and I just had to put it all on pause, go to Africa for a month. And I resisted that too. Because it was like, “No, I don’t want to. My life is so great right now.” Then we get to Africa and of course, to South Africa, we’re seeing our friends. We’re out in the bush, and it was wonderful.

And I completely let go. And just like every single time, every trip is always going to be new. So it was this completely brand new experience, and I thought, “Oh, good that I put my life on pause.” We’ve been back for weeks and weeks, and I, just today, realized I cannot be the person I was before I left. I have to approach the book. I read what I’d written before I left, and I went, “Oh yeah, this is bad.” Started the book over, after writing the first 100 pages, had to start a whole new… I looked at my art supplies and thought, “I actually don’t know how to use those. I have no idea what to do with them.” So I’ve been grabbing backwards for weeks now, and it doesn’t work. I forgot to just let myself melt, but even something small like that. I grabbed backwards for my identity.

Rowan Mangan:
So your writing career is in bug soup at the moment or maybe is just starting to give you some hints?

Martha Beck:
Yeah, the book became bug soup. Even though it’s on the same topic, it had to be completely different.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, that’s cool. Yeah. I love this idea of grabbing backwards, because we don’t think we’re grabbing backwards. We think we’re sustaining forwards, but there isn’t that. Because there is only the present. And so, that’s a cool way of conceptualizing it, I think.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
All right, so how do we figure this out, this bug soup square one mess?

Martha Beck:
Yes. It’s a mess. It’s a spider in a cup of coffee. And I will tell you how to fix it. Or we will tell you how to fix it. Or we won’t, but we will do it all in a minute.

Rowan Mangan:
So why is it then, do you think, that we need to continuously die and be reborn in this way through our lives? Why does this happen?

Martha Beck:
You mentioned the whole square one thing, and I always say that’s the place of death and rebirth. And you can’t stop either one. Everything’s always dying and something new is always being born, because nature, we compare culture and nature, and the culture says, “Get to a state of perfection and then, hold that and die looking good with a lot of toys.” But nature never, ever stops changing. Your fingernails are longer than they were when you started listening to this podcast. You’re a little bit closer to your own death, I’m sorry. That’s a good podcast. “Ready or not.” But seriously, everything’s always in flow. And we get attached to a state of being, and we say that is reality. And then, when it continues to change, it’s like, “What? What? No, don’t let it change. We need to hold this state of being.” And it’s almost like our whole culture is about trying to hang on to what cannot ever stop leaving and arriving. Our reputations, our legacies, our lives, they’re all just dust in the wind. Right?

Rowan Mangan:
Right. So because there’s only the present and the present is only ever change, like the reality of change, it’s like we get stuck in a state of grabbing backwards, because that’s what we are doing when we think we’re staying the same. Is that right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And I think there’s two ways, it’s either regret or anxiety. The regret is, “Oh, I looked so much better a year ago. I’ve got to get back to that.” And the anxiety is, “Shoot, I look like this now. What am I going to look like in another year?” The continuous change thing is not so much fun when you’re out of your, you’ll see this, when out of your forties, it becomes a real debacle. It’s like…

Rowan Mangan:
Well, I personally won’t be leaving my forties.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, you’ll look exactly the same. Yeah. It’s like this Pema Chodron, the Buddhist nun, says, we somehow really believe that our skin, our hair, our teeth will never change, not like an older person. And then, we get old, and it’s a complete surprise. It’s just like having a baby. You know it’s coming, and it’s a total shock. So actually, I saw this thing on senescence, speaking of essences, and they said the single most common reaction to being old, when they talk to people who are over a hundred, is that they are shocked that they aged. And I think they have a reason for that, but I’m going to say it in a minute. But anyway, we watched a show the other day with Shirley MacLaine in it, and she was playing this role.

And she’s 89 years old when she recorded the show. And I remembered seeing her get an Academy Award in her fifties and talk about how hard it was for her to age. And the whole room kind of went quiet, like she was speaking the unspeakable in this room full of Hollywood perfect stars. And then, I saw her at 89, and I was like, “You’re magnificent.” But who is she? Is the teenage person that started acting? Is she a baby? Is she the glamorous 30 year old? Is she the 50 year old saying it’s hard to age? Is she the 89 year old? Yes, she’s all of them.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Is there something about how we perceive, when we are very young, that someone’s age is somehow feels intrinsic to their identity? I remember saying to my father at, I was quite young, and I said something about how old people dress. I had this idea that, once you reached a certain age, you had to put on old people clothes. And I was like…

Martha Beck:
Is that not true? Wait, what?

Rowan Mangan:
Well, and I said to him, “Why would you never see an old person in jeans?” And he’s like, “Well, I’m going to get old, and I’m going to wear jeans.” And now he is and he does. So the prophecy was…

Martha Beck:
It was fulfilled.

Rowan Mangan:
It was fulfilled. That is the word. I was like, “What is a prophecy?” And so, yeah, I feel like I have this habit of thinking about identity and age and probably lots of other things as well as being linked. And then, you see a gap like that. And it’s confusing to something about our minds.

Martha Beck:
We see states, statuses, like that is who that person is, and it goes all the way through. And then, wait 10 years, they’re completely different. And you’re like, “Whoa, I wonder why they let that happen. I certainly won’t let it happen to me, but I guess they’re like that now.”

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, that’s it. It’s such a funny thing, that seems to be a tendency of how we think. This isn’t even in a nature culture kind of basket situation. There’s just this tendency to… I think it’s like… All right, weird sort of metaphor incoming. Because we’re trapped in bodies, we experience what’s a flow of change as like one of those flip books, where it becomes a little guy walking along. You know what I’m talking about? You flip through the little book, and the cartoon seems to move. Because it’s just incremental progressions. And there’s something sort of staccatoey about it. And so, for us, because we’re stuck in the matter of our bodies, we are experiencing it as death, rebirth, death, rebirth, death, rebirth. Like, “Oh, I’m falling apart. Oh, I’m bug soup. Oh, I’m coming back together. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.”

Martha Beck:
Right, right.

Rowan Mangan:
But actually, that’s the illusion. And what it actually is is just movement and flow and this sweet, beautiful, constant flow. It’s just this strange aperture that we look at it by, because haven’t got a great perspective on what’s happening.

Martha Beck:
Why does the aperture feel like calming? “This will sustain.” And when you say it’s a sweet, beautiful flow, it sounds so nice, but if you say, “Yeah, you’re older than you were five minutes ago, and you’re just going to keep getting older forever, then you’ll die and decay and be gone,” you can say that sweet and beautiful, but at least in our culture, again, I have other cultural references, but the idea of the stasis is comforting, even though it’s absolutely observably not real, where the idea of continuous change is like “Ahh,” even though it is the only thing that is for sure.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s strange. Maybe it’s to do with that left hemisphere stuff that you’ve told me about, where the left hemisphere, which is the side of the brain that our culture favors, its tendency is to slice things into smaller and smaller pieces, because that’s the…

Martha Beck:
Analysis means to cut things up.

Rowan Mangan:
And so, I wonder if we just want a slice, we just want one 2-D image. We don’t want something that can dance. We want something that we can frame and hang on the wall.

Martha Beck:
It is fascinating, because according to Iain McGilchrist, my favorite neurologist in the world, the left side of the brain is also responsible for the actual hand movement of reaching out and grabbing. It wants to grab. And so, we talked about grabbing backwards. So it has this slices of time, and it wants to grab a slice and hold it. And it also has this feeling of itself being the only right thing, whereas the right hemisphere is what’s responsible for just observing, with awe, the continuous fluid movement of everything.

Rowan Mangan:
So maybe what it is is that it’s just like what we are is like waves, but the way we experience ourselves is as particles, if that makes sense. So what feels like death, rebirth, death, rebirth, or meltdown or new identity or change or “Ahh, it’s all [inaudible 00:39:54]. It’s different.” It’s actually just a single wave coming into shore or…

Martha Beck:
You are blowing my mind right now, because this, saying that we feel like a particle, even though we’re a wave, it really puts it into an interesting space for me, because of the whole Heisenberg uncertainty principle thing. You know that?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Sort of.

Martha Beck:
I will talk a little… I’m sure I’ve talked about this before. It’s been called the most elegant experiment.

Rowan Mangan:
You’re going to double slit right now.

Martha Beck:
Oh my God, that sounds filthy. You’re going to have to stop doing that, so that we can make a podcast.

Rowan Mangan:
Stop double slitting.

Martha Beck:
Okay. There was an experiment that had nothing to do with sex. It had to do with light particles, with photons. They created a barrier with two slits cut in it, and they shot these photons at the barrier, boom, boom, boom. And the photons would land on a photographic plate behind the two slits. I won’t go into massive detail. Look it up if you’re not familiar with it. It’s amazing. Bottom line, if they weren’t looking to see which slit the particle went through, if they just went away and ran the machine without looking, the way that the light particles hit the photographic sheet was dispersed the way waves are in water. It was clearly showing that the light was like a wave going through a sieve, and it was separating out into the pattern, that is characteristic of a fluid.

But if they watched, then the photons would just go through one slit or the other and just make two bars on the photographic plate. And this was discovered in like 1913. It’s been known for a long time. But what they realized is that, when it is being observed, the light particle and potentially all particles act like chunks of matter, like pinpoints of stuff. But if consciousness is not observing them, they array like a wave. In other words, when you look away… Imagine this, this is not part of the experiment, but I often imagine this, that every time you look away, whatever’s behind you just disintegrates into energy. But the moment you look back, it hardens again into matter.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God.

Martha Beck:
It’s not actually that far away from the implications of the double slit experiment. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t know if this is a bad idea to ask you this, but how do you take in the implications of this idea that the observation of consciousness fundamentally changes the nature of the universe?

Martha Beck:
Well, I remember reading this in a physics book a long time ago, and it explained the experiment. And then, it explained the implications. And then, it said, “If after reading this, you do not feel as if the earth has disappeared from beneath your feet, go read it again.”

Rowan Mangan:
Oh.

Martha Beck:
And I get it. And here’s the thing. You have to accept that we are fundamentally paradoxical. So trying to accept ourselves as waves doesn’t really work, because we experience ourselves as matter. But experiencing ourselves as matter doesn’t work, because we’re constantly fluidly changing like a wave, because we are both. And that means we are either or we are both at once and we are neither one, all at the same time. And so, it suspends your brain in a state that I think is what people are after in Asia when they talk about don’t know mind or the perfectly clear mind of consciousness. It is completely still itself, but it is also the source of all movement. It contains all matter, but it has no matter at all.

Rowan Mangan:
If it weren’t for the still point, there would be no dance. But there is only the dance.

Martha Beck:
Yes, we are still and still moving. The dance and the stillness are the same thing. Consciousness, maybe consciousness is the still thing, and within it, everything is always changing. And maybe that’s why we’re so confused about the fact that we’re constantly changing, because the part of us that is thinking about it is actually consciousness, which maybe does not change, but is eternal, that is existing outside of the flow of time. And so, the flow of time doesn’t make sense to consciousness, because it gets diluted into thinking it’s matter.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
I don’t know. I start to feel like a talking golden retriever.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. You start to look a bit like one too.

Martha Beck:
Thank you.

Rowan Mangan:
Because my consciousness is observing you and you’re turning into a golden retriever, as all things do.

Martha Beck:
Theoretically, something could just turn into a golden retriever and then, back again. And that would just be a matter of statistically improbable things happening. Very improbable. But it could happen.

Rowan Mangan:
Like a whale in midair or a bowl of petunias. So let me ask you this then.

Martha Beck:
Okay, I’m listening.

Rowan Mangan:
Do you think, I’m just going to put aside the whole mind-boggling crap you just laid on us, do you think that we experience death, rebirth, death, rebirth, metaphorically, through our lives in the form of unwelcome change, because our job here is to practice or to learn how to let go?

Martha Beck:
Huh. Because that would be the opposite of grabbing, isn’t it? Just open those hands and let go, let go, let go, let go all the time.

Rowan Mangan:
And if it’s like, Ram Dass says, we’re all just walking each other home, if it’s like maybe we’re learning how to…

Martha Beck:
How to let go. Huh? It’s an interesting idea, because then, after you’re dead, then would you still have to know how? Or is it all a rehearsal for death? Actually, this brings to mind a story that I want to tell our listeners. And it was an interesting thing. You were there. We were on a plane. I believe we were coming back from Europe, South Africa? I don’t remember where we were, but we were coming home.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay, yes.

Martha Beck:
I think we were on the plane from London to Philadelphia or something. Anyway, I bought in the airport this book called In Love with the World by a Tibetan monk named Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. And I’m reading the book, and it’s all about how he grew up. And his father was a great teacher, and he would say things, when he was two or three, like “I want a tricycle.” And his father would say, “Well, you know that just rusts and degrades. Everything dies. Everything’s impermanent. Just get that through your little three-year-old head.”

And it was spoken of in a loving way. But I thought, “Dude, that is harsh. You’re telling this to a toddler.” We go get Lila and just say, “Want to see something dead? That’s going to happen to you.” That is not how our culture does it. So I was quite put off by it, frankly, even though he is a beautiful writer, and he would talk about this how, in a lot of Tibetan households, everybody drinks a cup of tea at night and then, turns the cup upside down and puts it by the bed to say, “This day has gone, it’s dead. This day is dead.”

And in the morning, if you wake up, if, you say, “Oh, another day,” and you turn the cup upright to receive what’s coming now. But it’s a totally different life. I thought, “Well, that’s really interesting.” And I stopped reading, and we were playing with this little girl, this beautiful British family, parents with two kids, a little maybe four year old and a baby. And they were so adorable. Remember those kids? And you were thinking about having a baby? And we were like, “Oh my God, that’s so adorable.” And I started to talk to the mother, and I said, “What are you doing in Philadelphia?” And she said, “We’re going to a special hospital, because my oldest here has a terminal illness that nobody understands. Only 40 people in the world have it. And they want to study her brain as it decays, until she’s dead.”

And it was so surreal. But the other thing that was going on is that I had noticed, from the moment I got on the plane, that the crew was bizarrely nice. A lot of crews are very polite, but these people were over the top. Remember? They like, “Can I bring you some tea? Can I bring you some coffee?” And I was like, “I can’t have caffeine. Why are you hurting me?” No, I could. But they were like, “Really? Can I bring you anything?” It felt weirdly sincere. And so, I kept talking to this little girl’s mother. What do you say? I was just like, “Ah.” And then, she said, “The crew knows, and they’re doing everything they can to make this… This is her big airplane trip of her life.”

Rowan Mangan:
I think the airline had sponsored the family for the flight.

Martha Beck:
Oh, that’s right. So they were getting help. He was like a salesman or something. They didn’t have much money, but there was so much love coming from the crew, coming from these parents, who had accepted their fate. And the love for that child, they weren’t holding it back one iota. They were there, totally present. And then, as this sort of spread through the plane, the whole plane full of people started to get loving. Like, “Oh, this is all she gets. Oh my God. We’re going to love this. We are going to love this.” And I got home that night. I drank some herb tea. I turned my cup upside down, and I let it die, let the day die. Let’s see what’s born tomorrow.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Because really, with the story of the little girl, you can feel how futile the urge to grab backwards is and yet, how human it is, to be there in the presence of this beautiful child and be so obsessed with what you know is going to happen to her, even though it’s completely abstract in the present moment. It’s just exactly what she looks like, a happy little girl. It’s like we want to grab backwards, even from a perfection.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Yeah. We want it to stay. But that is the opposite of joy. What I think we were seeing there, and what Mingyur Rinpoche was trying to say is, when you let it flow, when you are continuously letting go, that’s when the beauty can reach you. That’s when you’re in reality. And reality is kind.

Rowan Mangan:
And so, I guess, to Celeste’s question.

Martha Beck:
Oh, Celestine, right. Hi, Celestine.

Rowan Mangan:
So you just keep letting go, just let go, let go, let go, let go, let go. And the river is going to take you where it’s going to take you.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And if you try to stop it, if you grab backwards, it actually slows the process down and makes it hard. But you can park yourself, I think, in consciousness and watch it unfold the way you would watch a caterpillar on YouTube going through metamorphosis. Just be fascinated. Don’t try to control it. You can’t. It’s nature.

Rowan Mangan:
And that’s why we continuously say stay wild.

Martha Beck:
Stay wild.

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

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