Rowan Mangan:
Hey, Cahoot. We’ve got an interesting one for you today.

Martha Beck:
Spicy.

Rowan Mangan:
Spicy. So our previous episode, “Why So Anxious?”—this is its follow up, “How Not Anxious?”

Martha Beck:
How not anxious, though?

Rowan Mangan:
Because grammar—

Martha Beck:
How not anxious.

Rowan Mangan:
Grammar is for calmer times.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, grammar—Forget grammar! It’s the tool of the oppressor.

Rowan Mangan:
So today what we’re talking about is how not to be anxious, and why that is linked to creativity and your life’s purpose.

Martha Beck:
And joy and a better society.

Rowan Mangan:
How if we can retrain our brains, we will have a completely different experience of being human in community— and maybe build a beautiful, more just world together. Have a listen.

Martha Beck:
Hi, I’m Martha Beck.

Rowan Mangan:
And I’m Rowan Mangan. And this is another episode of Bewildered. You know us. You remember this. It’s the podcast for people trying to figure it out. Right, Marty Moo?

Martha Beck:
Yes, figure it all out! Let’s just figure it all out. It’s that simple.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. What are you figuring out?

Martha Beck:
Oh lord. Well, I’ve been doing a lot of speaking, a lot of online—

Rowan Mangan:
Just in your room?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Just by myself, alone, to my plants. Now unfortunately, I sometimes go abroad out of my room into rooms and in other places— in entirely different places with other people. And here’s the thing, I talk to them about the way I think. And I use metaphors, usually metaphors involving animals.

Rowan Mangan:
I will say that our Cahoot, our Bewildered Cahoot are familiar with your tendency toward metaphor and, dare I say, also animal metaphors?

Martha Beck:
I don’t see how that would be. But I’ll take your word for it. Now here’s my problem. When I’m actually on a stage or being recorded live by an unsympathetic other, shall we say, I tend to run on caffeine quite a bit. And here, I don’t know exactly how it affects my brain, but I do know that it ups my tendency to use animal metaphors.

Rowan Mangan:
Interesting.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. So I’ve been doing this thing where I’ll be talking along, and I’m using a metaphor and I’m like, “Yeah, we went on a boat in Sarasota and it was like the boat was our, like the boat is your body. And then these dolphins came and they were right by it. And the dolphin is your joy, and the wake of the boat is the mystery around your body. And the dolphin’s blowhole is the suction pump of…” And then this huge thing starts blaring in my mind going, “The caffeine will not hold! The metaphor is crumbling! The caffeine will not hold! The metaphor is crumbling!” And then I just end up going “thm” and then I turn to the audience and say, “What was I talking about?” And clearly it’s dementia. I don’t know if it’s age related, but it’s demented, man. And I gotta figure it out.

Rowan Mangan:
No, I think it’s like you just build these metaphor machines that have so many components and so many cogs, and it’s like you’ve invented some sort of steampunk engine.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
With all the little pipes and the little doodads and—

Martha Beck:
Oh, they’re intricate metaphors.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s just hard to keep track of.

Martha Beck:
Yes. They are.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
So I’m trying to figure out how to rein it in, man, and balance the caffeine and the metaphor thing so that the metaphors either carry or never get started.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s interesting that you bring that up because what I have been trying to figure out of late is to do with our relationship, how it works.

Martha Beck:
We’re going to do this right here, right now, in front of everybody?

Rowan Mangan:
Right here, right now, baby. I mean this is couples therapy, right? That’s what we’re here for, to do.

Martha Beck:
Sure.

Rowan Mangan:
Is this?

Martha Beck:
I don’t know, there’s a dolphin with a blowhole and yeah, I’m not sure.

Rowan Mangan:
Deep.

Martha Beck:
My caffeine is not holding.

Rowan Mangan:
There was a time, not so long ago, we were looking at whales on Instagram. Well, regular listeners will know, I was looking at Instagram and you stuck your little sticky beak in. But it was whales and so I allowed it because I know that this is an important area for you. And you said, and it was really sweet because you were trying to make an effort to come into my world. I was like, “Look at the whales.” And we saw where they were, and we were like, “We could go to there.” Because I think that people were kissing them and stuff. Not in a dodgy way.

Martha Beck:
Not in an abusive way that you kiss a whale. The whale has to consent for you to kiss it.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, well I mean obviously, because they’re wild whales. This is not one of those bad places. And you said to me, “We could go down to see the whales in your van.” And it was a really interesting moment in our relationship because regular listeners will know that I have a little tiny bit of an obsession with #vanlife and the idea of just taking off in a van that’s been super nicely kitted out with a bed and a fridge and a little kitchen, but just a little van. I’m not talking school bus.

Martha Beck:
Oh my god.

Rowan Mangan:
Little van, all these bits. It’s lovely, lovely. #vanlife on Instagram is a very glamorous place to visit.

Martha Beck:
Hashtag I like space. Go on.

Rowan Mangan:
But here you were and you said, “We’ll go down there in your van.” And I said to you, and this was the first time we’d sort of broached this together and I said to you, “Marty, I have to tell you something. I love you so, so much and I love spending my life with you, and you’re not always invited in the van.”

Martha Beck:
Yep.

Rowan Mangan:
And I was quite nervous saying it because I was like, “How’s she going to take this?” And without a second’s hesitation, you responded, “Good. I don’t want to go in your weird little trolley wagon.”

Martha Beck:
Because I’m loving, and I can just absorb any blow that lands.

Rowan Mangan:
But it was like trolley wagon, your weird little trolley wagon.

Martha Beck:
Does this go, you know recently you talked about having some really cool pants that someone called “cute little train conductor pants.”

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
I’m just saying, there’s a trend here.

Rowan Mangan:
Interesting.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Pants, trolley wagons. Cute.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. We could dig into this, or we could move onto the topic of the day.

Martha Beck:
Then we could actually make a podcast.

Rowan Mangan:
We could actually make a podcast. Oh wait, this isn’t the couple’s therapy at all!

Martha Beck:
What?

Rowan Mangan:
It’s our podcast!

Martha Beck:
Then what is the whale doing here? That was our therapist.

Rowan Mangan:
So the whale’s the therapist.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
The krill is the little bits of trauma that the therapist is trying to filter.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. The van is the Freudian method which dies the moment you go near the ocean. The whale has teeth. Okay, go on. Move on.

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

So our last episode, in celebration and acknowledgement of your incredible new book Beyond Anxiety, I believe we entitled the last episode “Why So Anxious?” And I think we had a great conversation about why so anxious. Why so anxious?

Martha Beck:
Why?

Rowan Mangan:
Why, though? Why? You can go back to that episode if you wonder, why so anxious? Probably a lot of people are able to figure that out by themselves. But there’s some good, there’s actually some very interesting brain and sociology stuff in there.

Martha Beck:
Yes. Because we think we know exactly why we’re anxious. But there are layers of being anxious that once you learn them, you can help keep yourself not so anxious.

Rowan Mangan:
Exactly, exactly. So today we’re moving into altogether better, not better, sorry, not better.

Martha Beck:
More enjoyable.

Rowan Mangan:
Subsequent and more fun part of the conversation called “How Not Anxious?”

Martha Beck:
How not anxious?

Rowan Mangan:
How not anxious, though? And I mean that’s what we’re all here to find out, right? Because anxiety is not an enjoyable state.

Martha Beck:
No, it’s difficult. It’s difficult.

Rowan Mangan:
I think its fair to say. So how not anxious, though? And instead of just asking you to answer that big question all at once, I have a couple of let’s just lead us there to how not anxious, though.

Martha Beck:
Okay.

Rowan Mangan:
And the first thing I have a query about, not really, because I understand, I have read the book and I’m your partner.

Martha Beck:
But I love your pretended ignorance.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, it’s the format of the show.

Martha Beck:
There you go. You’re a professional.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m a professional. So this is the full title of your book, and there’s something counterintuitive in here that I want you to explain. The book is called Beyond Anxiety:

Martha Beck:
Colon. Beyond Your Anxious Colon.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, Marty. That’s terrible.

Martha Beck:
My colon can really change a sentence.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, yeah. Okay. Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity (we touched on that a little bit in the last episode), Creativity (we’re moving into that territory), and Finding Your Life’s Purpose. That’s the end of the title. To me, I don’t immediately see the link between anxiety and life’s purpose. They feel like two different things. So could you talk a little to me, to the Cahoot, about what is the connection between getting past anxiety and into your life’s purpose? What the hell do those two things have in common, please, Martha Beck?

Martha Beck:
Okay. So I owe a huge debt to my friend Jill Bolte Taylor, who started talking to me about brain hemispheres during the pandemic. We started having Zoom conversations, and she’s a neuroanatomist who also had a massive left-hemisphere stroke, and she’s lived in the right side of her brain without the left side of her brain. And then she rebuilt the left side. So in the last episode where we talked about anxiety, I was sort of building on her research and a whole bunch of other neurologists’ research that say we are, as a society, stuck in a way of thinking that is confined largely to the left hemisphere. It’s a verbal, time-oriented, linear way of thinking that has helped us dominate the planet and destroy so many things.

Rowan Mangan:
Mm-hm.

Martha Beck:
And it believes that its way of doing business, of doing everything, is the only right way to do anything. There is an entire other hemisphere in the brain, and it operates really differently. And this is how anxiety is related to curiosity, creativity, and finding your life’s purpose. So in the left side of your brain, you get a very ancient organ that sort of sees something unfamiliar, has a burst of fear, then the upper parts of the left hemisphere take the burst of fear, turn it into a story about why you should be afraid and why you have to control everything around you, and then feed back into the primitive part, which gets even more scared, generating even more stories, generating even more fear. And I call this the “anxiety spiral.”

Rowan Mangan:
It’s so interesting, I just had this weird flash, sorry to interrupt you, of the ancient organ that says, “Wooly mammoth—run!” And then that loop starting up in the brain as the brain kind of evolves and became the frontal cortex or whatever and becomes more sophisticated. And it’s like what began as the “Wooly mammoth—run” I don’t even know if they’re dangerous. What was dangerous back then? Bear.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Cave bears were huge and could probably munch you in a bite.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. “Cave bear—run!” the impulse of fear and then the end product of that impulse is like Wall Street and the psychiatrist’s couch.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Right? It’s like one continuous thing.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, we go in, and because of our ability to imagine and by imagining we can create horrors in our minds that are based on dangerous things in the present, but go far beyond the actual present danger in almost every moment of our lives. So the amygdala, the primitive part of the brain, is responding to our thoughts as if they were realities in the environment. The thought “cave bear” can send the amygdala into as big a freak-out as the actual cave bear.

Rowan Mangan:
Hm.

Martha Beck:
So we’re afraid of the things around us, but mainly our thoughts about the things around us are what frightens us. And I’ve been, for years, decades, I’ve been coaching people to identify the thoughts in their heads that were causing suffering and to then question them empirically, get really scientific and figure out if they’re really true. And generally they are not. And when people are relieved of the burden of their storytelling minds, they feel much, much better. The problem is that the storytelling itself and the fear response, they have a locking-in sort of effect that blocks reality and makes the terrors that we project seem more real than whatever, than any danger we’re actually facing. When you’re actually facing, when you’re actually facing danger, you get a burst of true fear, which is like “Cave bear—run!” And you run away and either you don’t succeed and you die, or you do succeed and you get away. But either way, it then stops. The fear stops.

Anxiety goes into these loops in the left hemisphere that never stop and they feel so, so convincing. It’s like, I call it the hall of mirrors in the book. It surrounds us. It’s all we can see. If you are in a place, for example, where you think, “Everybody hates me and everybody’s mad at me,” that’s all you can see. And you live in a bath of stress hormones and a wreckage of relationships, and it just will never stop until you break that anxiety spiral.
How do you break it? You go to the right side of your brain, which has a very, very different, it has a mirroring set of structures that actually have very different functions from the left-hemisphere functions.

So on the right side you get the amygdala, it sees something unfamiliar, it goes “Ahh!” a little burst of excitation and danger, but then it looks at what is present. It turns on the whole perception of the body. So all five senses plus the sense of where your body is in space and the little spidey senses we have that help us pick up on what’s dangerous and pick up on what’s maybe happening. And then if there’s no immediate physical danger, the right side of the brain goes into curiosity. So instead of control and storytelling, it goes into curiosity and discovery.

Rowan Mangan:
Wait, but are you saying this happens automatically?

Martha Beck:
Yes. Yes, this happens. And I think last time we talked about how you can have both reactions at once. If you see an accident, you have a horror/fear impulse, but then you also have a fascination/obsession impulse. So the fear and the curiosity come at the same time because the fear doesn’t want to see what’s happening, but the curiosity is necessary to learn from what happened to someone else.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, gotcha. Yeah. Okay.

Martha Beck:
And so it pulls us toward the things we fear. And we talked about how that’s why there is so darn much murder in our TV shows, our books, podcasts, comic books. Yeah. There’s so much obsession with murder, and it’s because that is frightening and it pulls us into curiosity. So as long as we know we’re safe, I’ve got my little mystery book on my audio books, but I’m in bed and I’m safe and warm and I am going to turn this on and I’m going to listen to a story about someone being horribly murdered and I’m going to be going, “Ooh, give me more of that.” It is curiosity and connections start up when we know we’re physically safe.

Rowan Mangan:
Gotcha. Yeah. Okay, cool.

Martha Beck:
But this is where things get really interesting.

Rowan Mangan:
Go on.

Martha Beck:
When you get curious and you go and find out. It kind of reminds me, one of my favorite stories when I was little was Rikki-Tikki-Tavi by Kipling and Rikki-Tikki-Tavi was a mongoose. Do you know his story?

Rowan Mangan:
I feel like we just not long ago had this conversation on the podcast. I don’t know, I don’t know.

Martha Beck:
I still love Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.

Rowan Mangan:
I still don’t know.

Martha Beck:
Because his life’s motto was, “Run and find out.”

Rowan Mangan:
Brilliant.

Martha Beck:
And so he would run into any situation, no matter how dangerous, because he really wanted to find out. The right side of our brain is like Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. It wants to run and find out. And so I see it when we take or I take Lila for walks in the forest and she’s like, “What is this bug? What is that leaf? What is–” Like obsessively looking for what’s there and how to understand it. And I remember being in that phase as a child, and this is why I’m just going to say this, actually, people are going to hear me saying this exhaustively, in the 1960s, NASA had a study—I may have said this on the podcast already.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, you’ve said it at least twice.

Martha Beck:
They did it. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
But hey, there could be people tuning in for the first time.

Martha Beck:
I’m going to hit it again.

Rowan Mangan:
Just hit it.

Martha Beck:
Basically they were looking for creative genius and they found 2% of adults are creative geniuses and they found out that 98% of four- and five-year-olds are. Somewhere between four years old and adult, almost everyone goes from creative genius to not at all a creative genius. So our whole podcast is about coming to our senses.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s almost like, what happens in between those two states?

Martha Beck:
Coming to our senses versus coming to consensus. The left hemisphere is what allows us to come to consensus. We all imagine the same things. We agree on the same facts, we make the same plans and we coordinate. And that’s great as long as we don’t get stuck in fear and start creating nightmares. Because that’s what we do if we don’t balance the use of our brains because it is the right hemisphere that connects us to the world and creates a sense of meaning. And here’s the golden word: purpose. Because of its desire to run and find out, the right hemisphere of the brain goes and connects things that are, some of which have never been connected before.

Rowan Mangan:
Mm-hm.

Martha Beck:
So every human being who’s exploring a space is or reading a book—this is postmodern literary criticism. Every reader who’s reading that book is reading it through their own subjective lens. And so it’s the author’s book—this is how I feel about my own books—they’re my books when I write them. And then I give, if somebody reads, if you’re out there reading one of my books, that book is yours. You’re taking my words and my thoughts and I do the best I can to sort of project them to you, but you’ll read them through the interpretive lens of your own experience, and therefore the book belongs to you as well. You are always creating. The brain always creates. On the left side, it’s always creating anxiety. And on the right side, it’s always creating connection.

Rowan Mangan:
And can I just say, I just want to draw out this many people are creative geniuses when they’re five. This many people are creative geniuses when they’re adults. And so I think what you’re saying there is that in order to be creative geniuses, we need to be in touch with our right hemispheres. And you said that’s what connects us with the world. And I just want to say, and to put it through the lens of Bewildered, what connects us, the left hemisphere is what connects us with society and consensus and that which also brings fear and conformity and conformity born of fear.

Martha Beck:
And control efforts.

Rowan Mangan:
And that is what is stifling. That’s what happens between being five and being whatever, 40, is that we’ve lost that whole-brain approach to the world that creates genius.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And the left side of the brain is obsessed with controlling physical things and physical survival while the right side is very exploratory and creative. So the arts come from people who drop into their senses and start making connections and then want to express them to other people. We talked about this last time a little bit. Every culture all over the world, no matter how few resources they have creates art, creates music, creates dance. We have these genetic things that all people do, no matter how rough their circumstances. And when we do those things, when we do creative things, we evolve to do creative things. Studies have shown that people like seniors who dance once a week have fewer health problems and less dementia than seniors who play tennis or go golfing or do some other form of activity once a week. People who draw after a traumatic experience have 80% less chance of developing PTSD.
People who write expressively for 15 minutes about a bad thing that happened to them have an increase, they usually have a surge of turmoil over the writing of it, bringing up stuff, but then their wellbeing and their doctor’s visits and everything show that in the weeks and months following that 15-minute session of writing expressively, they’re doing better as beings. Art and creativity in all its forms is our health, is our birthright, is our duty. And our left-hemisphere-dominated society has pushed it to the sides and called it frivolous and stupid and not really serious.

Rowan Mangan:
Hm.

Martha Beck:
And because of that, we have lost touch with the last sort of ultimate gift of the right hemisphere, which is a ticket into the mystery.

Rowan Mangan:
Talk about that.

Martha Beck:
When you begin to create and you begin to connect enough, the parts of the brain that see you as isolated and vulnerable, they can turn off. And when they turn off, brain researchers have found this with people in meditation, meditators who’ve been doing it for years and years. When those parts of the brain turn off the sense of isolation, the need to control, there is a sense, it’s almost like they can cause what happened to Jill Bolte Taylor with her stroke, which, horrible as it was, exploded her consciousness into a sense of being one with the universe and to an intense sense of appreciation and gratitude and absolute lack of fear and anxiety. That is where we find our sense of purpose. That is where we find our joy. That is where our bodies are most healthy. That is what guides societies in directions that nurture and support. That is what makes us, that’s what makes human beings something other than just destructive, mindless robots that are here to trash each other and the world. We need this creative side of us. It is not trivial, it is not ancillary. It is central and it is how to be happy.

Rowan Mangan:
And so purpose and creativity have that intrinsic, two-sides -of-the-same-coin link because we find purpose in creativity.

Martha Beck:
Because purpose always has to do with connection. If I said to anyone that I’m coaching, “Your purpose is to drift in space forever, but don’t worry, we’ll keep you very healthy. You’ll have plenty of oxygen, food, water, you can pee and poop when you need to, you’ll be fine. In fact, we’ll give you a shot that’ll make sure you live forever. Goodbye!” and shot you off into space, you would do anything to kill yourself. Sorry if that’s a trigger for somebody, and it may be because a lot of us feel like we’re drifting in space. I felt that way for decades.

Rowan Mangan:
Right, and this comes back to the whole sense of isolation that is a factor of living too much in the left hemisphere. That control and isolation and the attempt to solve anxiety by control, which inevitably leads to isolation. I want to kind of zoom out a little bit to talk about, I think that there are so many reasons why this moment in time is perhaps more intensely anxiety producing for many of us than any other in our lifetimes, potentially. And so when we’re talking about creativity and purpose and connection, it seems to me that the kind of collective anxiety, no, we experience anxiety individually, and it’s almost like the discipline that we need in understanding what you’re talking about is we need to find the discipline to resist isolation.

Martha Beck:
Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
In our anxiety and instead make that leap via curiosity into creativity and make sure that connection is an essential part of that. Because I don’t think many people have a life’s purpose or a sense of purpose that is purely individual.

Martha Beck:
I don’t think you can. That’s the person floating alone in space. “Go ahead, live your purpose, we’ll give you all the tools.” Well, what point is there in that? You make an excellent point, and I think one of the reasons anxiety is so horrific right now is that our society’s been churning away for a few hundred years saying, “You are alone. The only way to survive is to get enough material wealth to support yourself and those you love, but those you love come second, and you really just need to squat on your pile of gold like a dragon and then you won’t be anxious.” Except I’ve known people, I’ve coached people who’ve been squatting on piles of gold, and they’re horribly anxious because they have no sense of purpose. What I wish I’d written more about in this book is how important it is that the connections in the right side of the brain don’t just lead to art, they lead to community. Art is the building, it’s the glue of communities.
Other things are too. A common endeavor of any kind is glue that holds the community together. But in every culture people gather and they sing and they dance and they joke and they tell stories and they make pictures and they tell legends and they use psychoactive plants wisely to bond the group and elevate the individual. And without community, without connection to other people, there’s no point. This is why Viktor Frankl wrote in Man’s Search for Meaning that in the horrors of the Holocaust in the concentration camps, the people who survived were those whose lives had been committed to a creative work and/or a person they loved. And he survived by talking to his wife who was dead by then. But he conjured her presence so intensely and he talked to her. He knew he had to connect with her in order to survive, and he did. And then he got out and he was able to make other interpersonal connections. The right side of the brain is so brilliant that in almost any circumstance it can find a way to communicate with love, to connect with love to another human.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay, so I want to say that in the same way that the sociology of individualism in our culture can be read as an outgrowth of the anxiety spiral in the left hemisphere of the brain, like a fractal form coming out into the world of that, that what you’re describing in community has a similar outgrowth quality. So one of the things that we are finding with Wilder, with our online community, which is also amazingly starting to pop up in people’s real communities, and people are connecting in real life, which is amazing, but is that the art, the art and the connection are mutually reinforcing and also mutually—it’s like the more art we’re doing together, the more together we are. And the more together we are, the more art we’re making.

Martha Beck:
Exactly.

Rowan Mangan:
And the more art we’re making to get to the final piece of purpose, the more we’re creating something collectively that I think has the potential to take us in a direction, in a new direction that is a really different way of making a society. Where the society that we’ve had has grown out of fear, anxiety, control.

Martha Beck:
Yep. Domination.

Rowan Mangan:
Domination. That this one, that can say curiosity, creativity, connection, and purpose. Connection, connection, connection, cooperation. That what creativity, it may start as beading and zentangle doodles or whatever, but what it is actually inevitably creating over time as we keep churning up that spiral is a really powerful transformation of how we can live with each other among each other in community.

Martha Beck:
And in community with natural ecosystems. Don’t forget that because it includes all of ’em.

Rowan Mangan:
Yes.

Martha Beck:
And here’s the thing, it’s not an either/or.

Rowan Mangan:
Well that’s the whole point, right, of the right hemisphere is include, don’t exclude.

Martha Beck:
Include everything. And the left hemisphere is all about exclusion. Exclude the others. Don’t let them come in here, don’t let anything come near me. Don’t let anything touch my pile of wealth.

Rowan Mangan:
Us and them. Safety and danger. Xenophobia, fear of the other.

Martha Beck:
If y’all want to read an absolutely phenomenal life-changing book, read the Master and His Emissary by Iain McGilchrist. He talks about how left-hemisphere thinking has come to dominate our culture and even change our brains. He says in this book, he’s a philosopher and neuroscientist at Oxford, and he says, we in our culture and the culture, we have disseminated everywhere in the world, we are acting like a person who’s had a right-hemisphere stroke, who has actually lost the right hemisphere completely. And that is not something that’s been repeated throughout history all the time. Every traditional group had a balance. So what he says is the part of the brain that should be the master is the part that knows how to make purpose, how to make meaning, how to make joy, how to make connection, how to feel like our lives are full and rich and worth having. That’s the part that should be in charge. And it sends out the emissary, the left hemisphere of the brain, to do hardcore research on the physical data.

Rowan Mangan:
To take care of the admin and the logistics.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. To do the math.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
You want to get together and cook a beautiful feast together as a village? Okay, you need to coordinate who’s going to bring the vegetables, who’s going to find the whatever, and you need to know approximately what time and you need to know how to make fire and you need to know how to delegate work. And all of those are left-hemisphere functions when they’re balanced with and couched in the creative, compassionate, connected sense that only comes from the right hemisphere. The right hemisphere will never kick out the left, but the left will kick out the right any moment it can.

Rowan Mangan:
Exactly. And so if you were in that process of trying to make this village fete, this community meal, and the left hemisphere was the only one running it, you would end up with, “Actually, I’m going to keep some of this for myself because if I share it with the collective, then I may end up missing out and actually I’m not.” And so then you get back into that hoarding and everything becomes the parts. This is the thing the left hemisphere excludes and isolates. And so unless you can take the half of the brain that integrates and includes, you never get to the transcendence that is more than the sum of its parts, which is everyone bringing together their food and their love and their skills and their strengths and their genius to make something that is transcendent and is more than all those bits put together. And we are in a society right now that is just bits.

Martha Beck:
Just bits. The worst plague in the world, in the history of the world, the one that killed the most people came in the years after Columbus visited the eastern shores of the United States, or what is now the United States, and lost a pig who infected the indigenous population with all kinds of European diseases to which they had no resistance. And I think one out of three people in the world died in that, one out of five, it was a hugely high number, like 95% of the population died. Think about the Black Death in Europe. It took out a third of the population. Unthinkable. This plague took out like 95% of the millions and millions of indigenous Americans that were already living here when Columbus arrived. You want to read a great book about it? Read 1491. Forget who wrote it, but I love that freaking book. Anyway, no, where was I going with that? The metaphor cannot hold. The caffeine is not—

Rowan Mangan:
The pig ran away. The society is just bits.

Martha Beck:
Ah, yes. Okay. So after this horrible plague, you see a really interesting change in the archeological records of the Central and South American civilizations that had graphics, they had mathematical systems, they had very highly evolved art and calligraphy—what do they call like Chinese characters? Anyway, they had systems of writing. Okay?

Rowan Mangan:
That’ll do.

Martha Beck:
That’ll do. So after this plague that hit in the late 15th century—

Rowan Mangan:
Like petroglyphs or something like that?

Martha Beck:
Petroglyphs, yeah. And hieroglyphics. That’s it. Hieroglyphics and petroglyphs. What happened was all the people who knew how to do it died. So what you see is these high, high, high developed artistic and conceptual societies, suddenly there are people carving rocks, but they don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t know how to write, they don’t understand the systems. They’re trying to do it from memory, but they’re not the people who knew. Everybody’s gone.

Rowan Mangan:
So heartbreaking.

Martha Beck:
I know it is. It’s deeply, deeply. Okay. All right, everybody, trigger. Post hoc trigger warning. I didn’t know that was going to bring me down so hard, but here’s the deal. That reminded me of what you said because I have been through the bizarre caricature of being one woman trying to care for three young children while making a feast, Thanksgiving feast, that has certain specific traditional dishes: sweet potatoes, mashed potatoes, corn, green bean casserole, I don’t know, Jell-O salad if you come from Utah. A Turkey that’s stuffed with things and vegetables and it takes forever and you’re trying to take care of the kids, and the drain on resources, you don’t have enough money for all the ingredients. You don’t have enough time. You can’t do it all at once. And the reason is that it’s meant to be made communally. That is what these big feasts were about. Everyone coming together, bringing their harvest, bringing the fruits of their hunting and foraging and all doing it together for fun.

Rowan Mangan:
Can I? I have a metaphor, I think. So the left hemisphere separates things, right? And I’m just listening to you say this and I’m like, oh my God, what that is, what you are describing is the ultimate separation, the ultimate misunderstanding of the thing. Because the point was not supposed to be the meal, the point was supposed to be the communal making of the meal. And what living in a left-hemisphere-dominated society has done is gone: Product, material object, therefore the food. And because we only see parts, we do not see sum and we do not see more than the sum: Woman, kitchen. Man, football game. Sorry, but whatever, you’ll get over it. And isolated women in kitchens completely overwhelmed, which by the way, is a great way to not foment revolution if you’re completely overwhelmed and have kids to take care of.

Martha Beck:
You sound feisty.

Rowan Mangan:
I feel feisty. Feisty here.

Martha Beck:
This makes me feisty.

Rowan Mangan:
But I’m not finished because the food is supposed to bring nutrients to our bodies. And it reminds me, the metaphor is that is about milk and calcium.

Martha Beck:
Oh, a metaphor. Drink some coffee. Let’s go.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Okay, here it comes. Cows traditionally ate grass out of the ground. One of the things that come out of the ground is minerals. Calcium is a mineral. Okay? So cows are grazing and they’re eating grass. And as a result when we milk them, we’re getting calcium that’s come out of the grass. Fast-forward to factory farming, we can’t wait for grass to grow. We can’t give them enough space to have a happy grazing existence.

Martha Beck:
We can’t maximize profits that way.

Rowan Mangan:
Exactly. So we shove them in a thing and we feed them some random feed that’s never come through soil, that has no mineral content. But by then we’ve spent millions of advertising bucks saying, “Give your kids this product. It’s got calcium in it.” Except now that we’re, people have listened and they start feeding their kids milk, the milk’s not coming from there. So do you know what we do? We get a little bottle and we pour calcium into the milk. Isn’t that—we’re adding the calcium to the thing that was supposed to only be good because it inherently contained calcium.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
I am feisty!

Martha Beck:
Yeah, I’m feisty too. And the absurdity of it is something that the absurdist playwrights took on in the early 20th century because it was already starting to happen. And it’s so absurd. I’m going to read a quote from Václav Havel who was the president of the Czechoslovakian Republic when they were coming out of the hardcore communism in something called the Velvet Revolution. He was the first president and he by profession was a poet.

Rowan Mangan:
It should be a prerequisite, don’t you think?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And I just want to offer this because we’re going down a fairly dark road right now, and it’s impossible not to because what our society has created— this anxiety, wealth, control, isolate, attack, dominate society—is very, very dark. But we have in our own heads the capacity to pull ourselves out of that nightmare and inwardly begin to create what I call the “creativity spiral,” which is the opposite, it’s on the opposite side of the brain from the anxiety spiral, and it reaches out to connect us and help us include everything. And when you’re lost in the darkness, it’s the suffering we experience when we have been over-culturalized by this particular culture that makes us want to stop coming to consensus and come to our senses. We can get to hopelessness and then we can push off. Like finding the bottom of the swimming pool. So Václav Havel said, “Isn’t it the moment of most profound doubt that gives birth to new certainties? Perhaps hopelessness is the very soil that nourishes human hope. Perhaps one could never find sense in life without first experiencing its absurdity.” So, finding hope in this culture without first experiencing its absurdity.

Rowan Mangan:
And I love that he talks about the soil and the nourishment from the soil to my point about grass and calcium.

Martha Beck:
Yes. Because it’s a metaphor and it’s also literally true.

Rowan Mangan:
No, it’s literally true. All right, so what I’m feeling in this conversation is actually not darkness at all. I feel a sense of illumination and a sense of understanding what we are dealing with and through this left-hemisphere lens. But also you and I have, I guess probably in the past six months or so, we’ve been doing this podcast for a few years and it was always coming to consensus is the culture, and what we’re trying to do is come to our senses. And I don’t know that we fully understood when we began the podcast, how imperative it is that we come to our senses together in community.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
That we find each other, and that’s how we truly come to our senses. Because one of the big lies of the culture is that we are isolated individuals.

Martha Beck:
Yep. In fact, we started this, it’s so funny because we found community with each other and with Karry-Koo, our beloved Karen, and Adam and the dogs and our little one that came along. But we thought, “This feels kind of isolated. How could we talk to people? What could we make that would make us feel connected?” And what we decided to do was Bewildered. It was the podcast.

And now, then after a while, it’s like all these amazing people are coming. Oh, there’s something called an online community we could make. What if the Cahoot—so Bewildered led to just Wilder. Take off a few letters and you’ve got Wilder and it’s an online community. And that has been our evolution of responsiveness to the continuous outreach of the creative side of our psyches. Constantly trying to create, connect. And what I’ve found is that when I do, because our left hemispheres will keep on cranking and we do have a negativity bias that’s built into the brain, and we do have a tendency to get stuck in anxiety spirals, and the society will reinforce those so that it makes them worse.

So I go into suffering and I feel alone. And when we sit down to do one of these things, or even when I sit down to draw, there’s a part of me going, “Don’t make me create anything. I just want to curl up in a ball and not let anything hurt me. Don’t let anything touch me. It will hurt me.” If I can get past that moment and start to create—and it happens when you and I sit down and we can see each other on the screen and we’re like, “With you, I can do this.” And then in Wilder it’s, “With us, we can do this.” There’s this thing for people, especially people with neurodivergence or autism or whatever called body doubling where I have to do my bank statements or something that’s weird and hard for me, and I don’t need you to do it for me, but I may need you to be in the room.

Rowan Mangan:
I need you to sit next to me while I do something hard.

Martha Beck:
That’s right. Or I need you to be on the phone with me while I open the computer and read the bad news or whatever it is. Or I need you to be there while I apply for this job.

Rowan Mangan:
And sometimes the hard thing that we need help doing is giving ourselves permission to be creative because what the left hemisphere and the culture is going to keep telling us is that that’s frivolous, that that’s a luxury, that you can do that once you’ve done absolutely everything that’s productive and caring and looking—

Martha Beck:
And become fabulously rich.

Rowan Mangan:
Yep. And then maybe you can dabble in a little something. And one of the things that we’ve been talking about ourselves is that we have to stop thinking of art as frivolous, and we have to start thinking of it as essential. So in Wilder, what we do to the body doubling point is once a week for one hour we get together on Zoom, and everyone makes something precious and pointless and pretty, and we chat. And it’s like we’re sitting around.

Martha Beck:
Knitting. Quilting.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. It feels so of the village. And it’s also body doubling ourselves as we do this essential part of coming to our senses together.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And that is not because we need the products that we make while we are sitting together. It is because—please hear me, everybody—this will change your brain. As I began to realize how this worked and pushed myself in the direction of more creativity, more time given to creativity—and by the way, artists working at the top of their game usually only have about four or five hours a week that they really get to do creative work. So if you can just grab an hour here and there, it does make a huge difference.

Rowan Mangan:
Forty hours is an invention. Nothing takes exactly forty hours a week. That’s culture.

Martha Beck:
So if you can put at the center of your life the willingness to create, and you can get someone to body double with you or you can go hang out, your brain will start to change. And it’s very much, I have experienced really good guided plant medicine with a shaman giving me psilocybin and guiding me through stuff. And it’s really good for opening up your brain. And I get the same effect when I draw or paint or write or even listen to music or do a bunch of those things all in the same day. I did a month, an experiment, where I did that as much as I could for a month and it completely changed the way I experienced the world.

Rowan Mangan:
And as we change our brains, we think new thoughts, we create new ideas and we build a different world, but only if we…

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.

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.