Hi, I am 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:
And it seems to get more and more complicated the more we figure!

Rowan Mangan:
The deeper we figure, the less it outs.

Martha Beck:
That’s really incomprehensible, sweetheart.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s a poem I just wrote.

Martha Beck:
Based on something a toddler once said.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Just in the car, a 4-year-old, see if this is creepy enough, going, “The more die, the more be born.”

Rowan Mangan:
Then you say, “What are you saying? Why did you say that?” And she goes, “You never know.” I mean the kid was creepy, legitimately.

Martha Beck:
It was odd. So we can’t figure her out. But what are you trying to figure out lately, Roey?

Rowan Mangan:
Real estate, baby. Real estate.

Martha Beck:
Oh, yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
We are, for our sins, embarking on another real estate adventure. And the other day, that included showing our home to some strangers. And I think it’s fair to say, Marty, that we’re the epitome of the like, we don’t want you to see how we live kind of archetype.

Martha Beck:
Pretty much.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Pretty much.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So we don’t like showing our house.

Martha Beck:
Now let me clarify, we’re not like hoarders. It’s just a very weird house because we had a baby during—I mean the house is great, but we are weird inside it. Super weird. Why do we have all these bedrooms and stuff?

Rowan Mangan:
No, no. I think we don’t want people to know how we live.

Martha Beck:
Okay.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m prepared to own that. It’s not that weird. No one wants people to know how they live, but especially us. And so here’s the thing. I, like any good weirdo, took myself to Google to “tips for showing your house so that people will want to buy that house and you can move to another part of the country for no real reason.” And the internet, dare I say, knows me. And so in addition to the baking cookies advice, I always thought it was baking bread in Australia, but I guess Americans are very committed to the cookie.

Martha Beck:
Yes, Toll House cookies. It’s an absolute must for selling a house.

Rowan Mangan:
All right. So it also gave me some very fruity woo-woo stuff that I needed to do. So fast-forward to the morning before these strangers are coming. We’re about—we want to get out of our house because you know.

Martha Beck:
Never be home.

Rowan Mangan:
The realtor’s like, “You can stay.” And we’re like, “No. We would literally rather have our skin peeled off with a vegetable peeler than be here while someone looks in our closet, please.”

Martha Beck:
A hundred percent. I would be hiding under sacks of cement in the garage.

Rowan Mangan:
So we were rushing to get out, and Marty’s strategy was she’s going to buy plastic bins.

Martha Beck:
Yes!

Rowan Mangan:
She’s gonna put the mess in the plastic bins and hide the plastic bins containing the mess in the attic. Am I right?

Martha Beck:
It’s not so much a mess, it’s just stuff. It’s not that messy. It’s just stuff.

Rowan Mangan:
What’s the difference between stuff and mess?

Martha Beck:
I don’t know. I grew up in a hoarding house and I’m sensitive about it. I have a little trauma here.

Rowan Mangan:
I know you do.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I don’t want them to think that I’m like sitting on a sea of grotesque food rotting or something.

Rowan Mangan:
So it’s just like the more you protest, the more they do think that.

Martha Beck:
God, you’re right.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Yeah. This went from a lighthearted, funny story to we’re delving deep into the recesses of your psyche.

Martha Beck:
I’m so sorry. It’s just going to go that way, isn’t it? It’s very traumatic. Okay, just move along with the—

Rowan Mangan:
Okay, so when it became truly hilarious to me is, and I’m laughing at myself here, you are diligently—

Martha Beck:
Sure you are.

Rowan Mangan:
Diligently feeling plastic bins with the stuff and—

Martha Beck:
Clean stuff.

Rowan Mangan:
I have hidden all my stuff behind an armchair and in drawers, obvious places. I wasn’t organized enough to go to the attic, but I just was struck by our different ways. Because you were quite stressed out. In the bins. Up the stairs. Down the stairs. And so I am walking around following the instructions given to me by the internet and clapping in corners. So you’ve got to clap in corners, you see, if you want to sell a house.

Martha Beck:
Wait, why would you clap in the corners?

Rowan Mangan:
Well, listen, I’ve only just found out that this is essential. And I mean, I dread to think how easy my life could have been in the past if I’d known.

Martha Beck:
I saw you saging, you drifted past me in a thin haze of smoke as I actually put things away so it looked like nobody lived here at all.

Rowan Mangan:
Is it like a—what do you call it when you go into the little booth? A confession. Is it a confession when you sage your own house before someone comes in? Because I just thought, “They want to imagine themselves. So I’ll just clear our energy so that they can feel their energy there.” But it’s also if they could smell the sage and they know what it is to sage a space, they would think, “Who lives here that they think they need to sage?” You know what I mean?

Martha Beck:
But here’s the thing, the smell of sage is just the smell of smoke. So they wander around the house thinking, “It’s on fire. I just can’t see where.”

Rowan Mangan:
Actually, the smell of sage is just the smell of weed.

Martha Beck:
That’s true. “So these people are completely baked. That’s why they’re putting cookies in the oven and also why the house is on fire and someone has been applauding to all the room corners.”

Rowan Mangan:
It’s so funny. So you have to clap in the corner because you have to clear out stagnant energy. See, I never knew, Marty. I never knew. I should have been clapping in corners for years.

Martha Beck:
God, there’s so, so much stagnant energy in our corners.

Rowan Mangan:
I know. So I walked around the house, and I was really unclear because the internet hadn’t specified how many times you must clap? How do you judge how stagnant the energy is? And we’ve got a lot of weird angles in our house because there’s the A-frame bit. And it’s like, how do I clap at it? How do I ensure that— And I was just laughing at myself walking around. Sage, clapping. Clap, clap. “Congratulations. You can have our house.” Anyway, they hated the house. So good old life.

Martha Beck:
Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Don’t clap in corners.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, a house of demented people obviously high on weed and bingeing on cookies applauding to themselves in every corner of your house, and you can feel that energy. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
There’s another thing I forgot to mention, which is we did make cookies.

Martha Beck:
Yes we did.

Rowan Mangan:
And we took them out of the oven and I was so ashamed of the cookies. We’d planned to leave them out as a bribe, but I was so ashamed of them because they were like, what’s this—they were like, I can’t think of a verb of what they were doing, like languishing over each other.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, that’s a pretty good word for it. They were cookies but languished.

Rowan Mangan:
They were draped over each other.

Martha Beck:
They were.

Rowan Mangan:
And it just looked like a pile of cookie dough.

Martha Beck:
It was lovely and it was perfect. And they were crunchy on the sides and soft in the middle. And it’s your fault that we stuffed them in a drawer right before we left the house.

Rowan Mangan:
Lucky I clapped at the corners. That’s all I can say.

Martha Beck:
That’s true.

Rowan Mangan:
All right. What are you trying to figure out?

Martha Beck:
Well, I’m trying to figure out, as usual, my horrific social anxiety because bad things happen to me when I’m standing in line. And the reason is because I get so bored standing in line that I play games on my phone. Right? Play a little game on your phone. It gets the thing. But I refuse to pay for the game, so it goes to ads.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh God, I know this about you.

Martha Beck:
So I turn off the music and sound effects on the game, but then the ads come on and they’re out loud. And so I’m standing in line and suddenly what everyone around hears me, hears from me is the sound of whatever ad it is. And lately it’s like self physical care products, although some are also for dog care. So I’ll be standing there, and they don’t know my voice, they haven’t heard what I sound like. So I’m just standing there and suddenly they think, everybody in the area thinks that I say something like, “Free calming duck.” These are all real things that happened.

Rowan Mangan:
Say again?

Martha Beck:
“Free calming duck.” You buy this duck, it’s supposed to calm your dog down. It’s a fake duck and it calms your dog.

Rowan Mangan:
And it’s free?

Martha Beck:
Apparently so. I don’t know because I always immediately, you know, hit the mute button panicking because everybody around me thinks that it sounds like an imperative, like, “Free the calming duck.” Right?

Rowan Mangan:
Like Marty, that’s a defensible political position.

Martha Beck:
Well, and then they think if somebody sees me twice, they’re going to really think I’m demanding because another one that shouted to all the people was, “Stop dusting.” And everybody looks around at me like, “Woah. Says who?” And then there are the truly bizarre ones. I love this one. When I was at the post office: “My gums have never felt calmer.”

Rowan Mangan:
You’re kidding me.

Martha Beck:
No, it came out. That is what the ad said. “My gums have never felt calmer.” You’re supposed to buy this thing and bite down on it and it calms your gums.

Rowan Mangan:
My gums aren’t stressed out.

Martha Beck:
Mine, it turns out, are very stressed, now that I know there’s a difference.

Rowan Mangan:
Right.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. But I think my all-time favorite was this makeup ad, and it starts out with a woman saying in sort of shocked delight, “Where did my pores go?” So everyone out in the world thinks that I’m standing there just pondering aloud, “Where did my pores go?” Which is not a sane thing to say. And then if you say—

Rowan Mangan:
Not in any context. Not in an ad either.

Martha Beck:
No. Where did my pores go? Once my older children had a kind of contest to figure out what is the most disgusting orifice for your brains to ooze out of?

Rowan Mangan:
Uh-huh? And was the consensus?

Martha Beck:
They settled on pores.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh yeah.

Martha Beck:
Pores have a certain special place in my memory.

Rowan Mangan:
Are pores, strictly, an orifice?

Martha Beck:
I wouldn’t have called it that, but I think technically you could say your pores are orifice-like. Oh, that is disgusting.

Rowan Mangan:
Because if you accept that your pores are an orifice, then you could in theory at the post office have said, “Where did my orifice go?”

Martha Beck:
The tiny orifices.

Rowan Mangan:
Actually, you have that fear that would make pores scary to you, wouldn’t you? Because you’ve got that fear of holes in a wall or something.

Martha Beck:
Fear of a whole bunch of little holes all together. Ew.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, AKA pores. And you know what’s interesting is if that was in my accent, if an Australian had been hired to do that ad, you can’t tell the difference between “Where did my pores go?” and “Where did my paws go?” And you could have little paws, but then they disappeared in the night and the dog woke up and went, “Where did my paws go? I’ve just got stumps.”

Martha Beck:
Well, it circles back because that’s when they need the calming duck.

Rowan Mangan:
Right.

Martha Beck:
There you go. If you buy all these products, it’s the perfect circle of life.

Rowan Mangan:
I think the duck would calm my gums too, so there might be a middleman that we can cut out.

Martha Beck:
That’s right. A free gum-commenting— Sorry. Gum-calming duck. Don’t try to say that in public. Now I’m going to blurt it out while I’m standing in line somewhere just because of the fear that I’m going to blurt it.

Rowan Mangan:
You’ll save, you’ll save it. It’s fine. Don’t worry.

Martha Beck:
Can we move on to today’s topic?

Rowan Mangan:
I wish we would.
Hi there, I’m Ro, and I’ll be your podcaster for today. Do you know how to tip your podcaster? It’s actually pretty easy. You can rate our pod with lots of stars, all your stars. You can review it with your best superlatives. You can even subscribe or follow Bewildered, so you’ll never miss an episode. Then of course, if you’re ready to go all in, our paid online community is called Wilder: A Sanctuary for the Bewildered. And I can honestly say it’s one of the few true sanctuaries online. You can go to wildercommunity.com to check it out. Rate, review, subscribe, join, and you all have a great day now.

Martha Beck:
I really like today’s topic. It sounded at first like, “Oh, that’s a nice topic.” But as we talked about it, I was like, “No, this is really key. I need to get this. But for real.” The topic is:

Rowan Mangan:
Okay. So as you know on Bewildered, we like to talk about the culture and why it is evil. It’s not evil, but we’re creating an effect here.

Martha Beck:
We don’t need to make the defense, though, of how we’re defining culture.

Rowan Mangan:
No, no. Look it up.

Martha Beck:
All right, look it up.

Rowan Mangan:
Refer to our back catalog. Okay. And here’s what we want to talk about. Kindness. Look it up. It’s a thing. The culture will often frame up kindness as naive or foolish or passive. And the thing about that is there’s a reason they do it. And by “they” I mean “we”, I mean “it”—this unseen force that holds us together. And this is the thing, if we stay nice and we subscribe to this cultural idea of kindness, then we stay obedient. So we are going to get ultra revolutionary around kindness today.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. It turns out too—

Rowan Mangan:
I’m here for it.

Martha Beck:
It’s really an incredibly seditious force because if you think about it, the culture has to move you off your true nature to get you to conform with everything else. And so it is fundamentally cruel. It’s designed to be competitive, it’s designed to extract things from you that don’t feel good in the extraction. So it of course says, “Don’t even think about kindness. Kindness is weakness. Strength is the absence of kindness and the presence of cruelty.”

Rowan Mangan:
Right. And so the subversive thing is that when you come at these forces with kindness, it actually disrupts all the systems that are based on division and cruelty. It’s like a rebellion against the culture’s scarcity mentality and rampant individualism and self and all of that stuff, and ego.

Martha Beck:
It’s so interesting because the kindness that has to be repressed most viciously is kindness to ourselves. Because if you’re kind to another person, they can escape bits of the culture. But if you’re kind to yourself, you can escape bits of the culture. And that’s when it starts to rattle the whole machine. But, so we’re told, “Stop being selfish. Kindness is selfishness.”

Rowan Mangan:
Kindness to self is being selfish.

Martha Beck:
Yes, they’ll tell you that self-kindness is selfishness, but actually the reverse is true, that always capitulating to the culture, always fawning on people is in fact a sort of transactional behavior that is not kind to self and not kind to other. And if you can instead take on a position of observing what part of you needs to be treated with kindness and then doing whatever simple words and actions that self needs to be nourished, you are disrupting culture at its absolute base, which is the genesis of your thoughts and actions.

Rowan Mangan:
To be clear, when you’re talking about self-kindness or kindness in general, you’re not talking about that sort of people-pleasing.

Martha Beck:
Yes, you’re right.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s not self-sacrifice or anything like that. We’re actually digging into a kind of new narrative or a new definition of kindness that sort of runs counter to what the culture would have us believe about it, right?

Martha Beck:
The groveling, the fawning, the culture will tell you all those are selfless. Even though the truth is that when our minds are dressed up in the culture, we do it for selfish reasons. We grovel and fawn for selfish reasons, and we’re always out to get something because we aren’t nourished at our source. So we’re trying to get something from outside ourselves. And it’s always, it’s that extractive individualism: “I’m going to consume you by making you be nice to me by groveling and fawning.” And you get this dance of sycophancy that is not actual kindness.

Rowan Mangan:
Hm.

Martha Beck:
But it’s approved by the culture. Yes.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So we’re kind of reframing kindness or just kind of defining kindness as something that is intrinsically powerful, one of the most powerful forces that we can tap into and use for good. Especially, I want to say, living in a time when the culture often feels especially drenched in narratives of cruelty and extractiveness, right?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And so people are rightly anxious and nervous lately. And because I’ve written a book on that, I have been talking about how to get out of anxiety, and one thing I keep coming up against is if I said to somebody, “Be calm,” there’s no way to do that to yourself. It’s like saying, “Fall in love with this person.”

Rowan Mangan:
It’s like asking your gums to be calm.

Martha Beck:
Yes, it is. If you try to calm your gums, it’s like, “How? I need this product,” whatever it was. But if I said to you, “We’re in a stress-filled situation, there are some people here that are frightened or worried, be kind.” Even if you were afraid, even if you were disturbed, and you couldn’t be calm, you could be kind. And if you hold that kindness, which is the ultimate sedition in any sort of conformist culture, you become a force for the revolution, the kind of revolution we want.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So my hero, feminist, amazing Black feminist, Audre Lorde said, “I’ve come to believe that caring for myself is not self-indulgent. Caring for myself is an act of survival.” And I feel like what she’s getting at and what we’re getting at is that kindness can actually cut through these patterns, these adversarial patterns that culture gets into, and it can build bridges and it can actually disarm cruelty. And I was thinking about that classic iconic photograph from a Vietnam War protest where there’s a line of, I don’t know, National Guard or something standing against the protesters, and they’re placing flowers, like stems of flowers, into the barrels of the rifles along the line. And I feel like that’s the image of what we’re getting at is, and putting a flower stem into a gun barrel is exactly the kind of thing that the culture will have you believe is naive, childish, simplistic. But you know what? That is the game, that exact reaction that we will have in our heads to the image of putting a flower in a gun—

Martha Beck:
Stupid, frail, idiotic, get your own gun and shoot back.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. And that’s how they keep us small and powerless. But yeah. So self-kindness, you were saying, Marty.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, I mean kindness to others is a really lovely thing. And I’ve been going around saying, yes, I could tell you to be calm and you couldn’t, but if I said be kind to these other people, you could. But what I’ve realized is that I actually can’t be genuinely kind at a sustained level for a long time to other people unless I’m kind to myself first. And maybe people are used to that. Maybe I am starting to think that I have a particular impediment in this area because I find it really difficult to be kind to myself.

Rowan Mangan:
You do, yeah.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. So I’m always trying to be kind to other people first. And as many dissatisfied customers will tell you— no, they’re not customers. And a lot of people have told me the times I think I’m being kind to them, but I’m not being kind to myself, it doesn’t come across as kindness. It doesn’t have the right effect. It has to start inside. It has to come from the core of your being. So to be kind to the part of you that is at the core is to fundamentally shift away from culture, but to start feeding your own kindness from an infinite well. Whereas if you’re just kind to other people, you’re drawing from an empty well.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. And I love the fact that this kind of programming is so deep in us that we almost have to take these steps or workarounds or hacks to trick our internalized cultural messages. So you have to say to yourself, be kind to someone else as the stepping stone to being kind to the self. Right? It’s like tricking the code so that you bypass the part of our brains that are like, “Oh, are you kind to yourself? Oh, isn’t that nice.”

Martha Beck:
“Oh, is it self care? Bubble bath?”

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, bubble bath.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. It’s really interesting that, so they’ll say, the culture says, “Be kind to others at the expense of yourself.” But if you look at even the Bible, Jesus supposedly said, “Love others as you love yourself.” And “as” means—

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, good point.

Martha Beck:
“In the same way.” It means causally, like I’m taking an umbrella as it is raining. So love others because you love yourself. There’s no other way to do it. And yet we’ve reversed that, and we’ve created this image of the Messiah martyr who is suffering and in anguish as the ultimate kindness gift to the world. And it’s bizarre and doesn’t work.

Rowan Mangan:
It is. And it’s worth, because this is some deep programming, I feel like it’s worth digging into how that happens in the culture and what is that cultural narrative around kindness? Because kindness is encouraged by the culture, but it has to look in a certain way. And so I feel like the culture treats kindness as either a moral obligation, like, “Be nice!” Or transactionally, like what you were just saying of I’ll be nice to you so that I can get something myself later.

Martha Beck:
Can I just say something to all the folks who think, “If I’m super nice to a celebrity, they have to give me something in return.” I don’t consider myself a celebrity, but I’m celebrity-adjacent enough that I’ve felt that energy coming at me for decades. And when you use apparent kindness as a way to manipulate other people into doing nice things for you, they can tell. Sorry. But it’s very different from getting real kindness.

Rowan Mangan:
No, it’s funny how deeply transactional kindness can be detected and that we still just go along with it because I think there is such a strong, “This is acceptable” message that goes out. So there’s that kind of moral obligation or transactional feeling, I think, sometimes there’s kindness is a performance.

Martha Beck:
Oh, definitely.

Rowan Mangan:
That sort of virtue-signaling stuff that happens on social media or anywhere, posturing, performing kindness, which feels exactly as gross as—

Martha Beck:
Could I just say my algorithm goes heavily towards animals being rescued from danger, and there are tons of videos of people who claim to have found a puppy in the snow and they raised it, only it’s kind of a different color in the second, like the animal changes as they save it. So they’re actually doing this performance of saving an animal. And you can see they’re using different film, different animals.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s editing. It’s editing.

Martha Beck:
It’s all editing.

Rowan Mangan:
Very true. Very true. So that’s as entertainment, I guess.

Martha Beck:
I guess.

Rowan Mangan:
And then another way that kindness is presented in the culture or expressed in the culture is manipulation, emotional manipulation with love bombing, if you know that term. Any kind of coercive.

Martha Beck:
Say more about love-bombing.

Rowan Mangan:
So love bombing is this term that I guess comes from sort of popular psychology. And I think it’s a strategy that is used, I guess you would say by, I don’t know, there’s probably like the DSM 5 would say these are the types of personality disorders or whatever that would use it. But it’s basically when you just heap love on someone relentlessly, and it’s a strategic move to gain something from them.

Martha Beck:
Have you ever had someone do that to you?

Rowan Mangan:
Yes.

Martha Beck:
I have too. And it’s so frightening.

Rowan Mangan:
It’s funny how icky so much of this stuff is. And then at the same time we’re acknowledging that it’s so familiar and so common.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And I know I’ve said this a million times on the podcast, but it’s this Buddhist concept of the “near enemy.” So even when we sat down to do a podcast on kindness, I immediately had little yellow flags waving that said, “People are going to think you mean debasing yourself towards someone else.” You know, doing things, exhausting yourself for other people. All that fawning, all that false, what appears to be kindness. And because that word has been so colonized by the culture, right? So it stands for something that is cooperation with the culture where you throw yourself down at the bottom of the pyramid and let people take advantage of you and call it kindness. But that’s not kindness.

Rowan Mangan:
And I really feel like part of what’s going on here with the culture is, I mean, we anthropomorphize the culture as though it’s like a giant puppeteer evil Wizard of Oz kind of thing. But there’s this facade of fake kindness that gets trotted out. But real kindness, the sort of an expression or a sensation of true kindness, which we’ll dig into more soon, is the culture will take that and weaponize that instinct that is actually fairly pure.

Martha Beck:
Extremely pure, yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
So I mean, women will automatically be feeling all this martyr energy in how we’re defining the put yourself down. But it’s a really strong, it’s a way that marginalized people of all stripes are kept in their place. They’re being, like kindness is being demanded in a way that is like, “You will not take up space. You will be nice. You’ll sit down, you’ll make sure you maintain the status quo of what we’re doing.” And oh my gosh, I saw this thing on the internet that was talking about from a gender studies perspective, it was about how thinness comes in and out of vogue. And someone was recalling a gender studies professor saying things like, “Yeah, well you can’t fight if you’re underfed.”

Martha Beck:
Ah, interesting.

Rowan Mangan:
And who benefits from you taking up less space?

Martha Beck:
Ahh.

Rowan Mangan:
So these cultural ideals are part of the way that the status quo and the power structures that we have that are based in cruelty, that they’re sustained. And so it’s like co-opted in a really creepy way.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, yikes.

Rowan Mangan:
But you were talking about fawning before, Marty, and I’m curious about what is that? What’s fawning and what’s its function and what happens there?

Martha Beck:
When you’re frightened, you have a fight/flight response. We all know that. And what I have also come to know and maybe said before is that there are a few other F-words that get turned on when you become worried, anxious, fearful, and it’s fight, flight, yes. But it’s also freeze, faint, and then fawn, where fawning is a behavior that social predators in particular use to keep other members of their own group from attacking them. It’s like lone predators don’t need it, and animals that aren’t predatory don’t need it. But if you got a predatory animal that’s living in groups, you actually have to defend yourself against the predation of your own species. And the way that shows up in dogs and foxes, and us, is this sort of groveling. And as I said, I put my head literally down. And there are cultures where you literally have to put your head down lower.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh yeah. In Thailand you had to do that. And it’s really hard when you’re a fairly tall person in a nation of fairly short people because I was always like, I’m going to blame my bad posture actually on that year in Thailand.

Martha Beck:
There you go. It is really interesting how I remember doing a study on a workplace in Asia where the height of people’s desks was actually established. They would put ’em on daises above the floor to build them up if they were in a literal higher position. And it’s universal, I think it’s biological. But I think most of us, and maybe y’all listening out there can remember a time when you were acting the way the culture wants you to, you were calling it kindness, but it was actually fawning. And I have a life’s history of this. Oh my God. So I often say, and it’s true, I will go to my grave fighting for the good of humanity, but I do not like people.

Rowan Mangan:
Uh-huh.

They scare me, and I want to run away from them. And what always happens is I’ll have to do something with people and I hate the approach. And then I go and do it and I come back and I’m like, “They were really nice. I really liked them.” So you said to me the other day, y”You know what? It’s not that you’re afraid of people because you don’t like them. You’re afraid of them because you like everyone, and then you don’t know how to deal with that.” But then someone else who was there who knows me well, said, “No, I think you actually are afraid of people because you have such an overwhelming hair-trigger fawning response that you actually have no idea whether you like people or not. You’re completely off your own base. You don’t even know what you think. You’re just a fawner at that point.” So you’ve lost yourself, your integrity altogether.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And given it up and called it kindness and that—you can’t be calm from there. There’s nothing there. There’s no there there. You’re pretending. So if people think you’re being kind, but you’re really pretending, that’s not nice. That’s not kind. If I pretend to be in love with you because I’m afraid of you, and then I want to run away from you, that’s not genuine kindness. I’ve actually done that with people.

Rowan Mangan:
With me?

Martha Beck:
No.

Rowan Mangan:
Because you’re not doing a very good job of getting away.

Martha Beck:
No. When I was 15, and a 30-year-old man wanted me to be his bride, and I was like, “Ah, you’re the best person in the world.” And then I ran as fast as I could. Yeah. I don’t want to go into the gory details. He’s dead now, so that’s okay. But I used to walk around, I heard the song, “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and I would walk around singing it, only I would sing the lyrics, “Someone to walk over me.”

Rowan Mangan:
Like by accident?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I’d just be hung on, “Someone to walk over me.” Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
Aw. Remember that thing when we used to sing that song? How does it go? The sweet dream?

Martha Beck:
Oh, dream a little dream of me?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
When we’re at a seminar, we’re in a hotel with a hundred fans. “Sweet dreams till someone finds you.”

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Instead of sunlight. Until someone finds you.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. It’s so sweet.

Rowan Mangan:
We hide. We love hiding, though, actually, we kind have this delight in hiding.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. There is an enormous delight in hiding when you live as a fawning sycophant.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
Oh gosh, this is so confessional. I think you’re right. This is like the confessional booth. How would I know? I’ve never been in a confessional booth. A girl can dream, Ro.

Rowan Mangan:
I’ll take you to a confessional booth sometime. If you’re good.

Martha Beck:
Oh, nice.

Rowan Mangan:
If you’re good, if you’re kind. Be kind. Oh my God, we’re programming our daughter with this stuff right now.

Martha Beck:
Oh we are. So what does real kindness look like? Now I’m getting into my confusion because I really am deeply confused in this issue. But I think you are less confused.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, I don’t know. I have a kind of radical vibe about kindness, but I’m not very good at defending it in language. But I do know. So I will always try and turn, I dunno, take a kind of political angle to things. Even with this topic, I’m like, “Rawr! We’re going to revolutionize kindness.” But when I have encountered real kindness, it has cut right through every one of those mental systems that ultimately are just as cultural as any of the other shit that we’re lambasting here. I think I’ve talked before on here about when I was in Cape Town in South Africa and I got mugged and I got all my money taken away from me. It was quite an upsetting experience. And the time, the six hours at the police station was quite upsetting as well. And that happened sort of early afternoon or then I guess late morning, early afternoon went to the police station, rah rah. And then the long and short of it was that I needed some money to be wired to me or I wasn’t going to be able to do anything. And I went to a place where they accepted wire transfers. It was like a tourism shopfront kind of.

Martha Beck:
You’re so resourceful. I just would’ve lain down and cried. Forever.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, I went to this place and it was about 4:45, and I’m guessing it was probably a Friday too. It was like that was the thing. And I went in there and I was like, “I need to get in touch with Australia. I need you to call Australia and ask for a little cash.” And this woman, who later told me she lived on the outskirts of Capetown, so she had a huge commute ahead of her. She was in this customer service role that I can guarantee you did not pay well. And she looked at the time and she looked at what was involved in Western Union or whatever it was going to be, and she reached under the desk and she picked up her wallet and she opened it up and she handed me, I don’t know how many rand, but enough to get me through.

Martha Beck:
Wow.

Rowan Mangan:
And it cut through every, you can have all these mental constructs about privilege and race and rah rah. And it was just like there was nothing. None of that meant anything. It was just like that, “You’re hungry. I have food. You need money, I have money.” You just need it. Everything else is incidental.

Martha Beck:
Oh, it reminds me of the quote from Shakespeare. I think it’s Twelfth Night where one of the characters said, “So shines a good deed in a naughty world,” and it’s about a candle being lit in the darkness that they can move toward just the tiniest light and it will cut through all that darkness. And it sort of paves a way forward. And just the energy of that anecdote is so different from what we’ve been talking about as the cultural training we get in being nice. It’s so powerful. And always you told me that story and I was like, oh, she’s such a kind woman. I don’t know if I would’ve done that.

Rowan Mangan:
No, you would’ve.

Martha Beck:
Maybe. But I’ve come to believe that that impulse on her part, because I have felt it, I would probably do it, but only to the extent that I have learned to turn kindness toward myself. That’s what I’ve learned doing my little book tour and everything is that to go from a state of anxious deprivation where I’m terrified and fawning and scraping into a genuine kindness, into an abundance of goodness coming from within me that wants to spill into the world, that only can happen if I turn my kindness toward myself. And I do it in the simplest ways. It’s so simple. Every morning now since I’ve been on this book tour, I wake up and I say to myself, “May you be well, may you be happy, may you be free from suffering, may you be protected.” And the kindness in the words starts to draw on this well inside me that I didn’t know was there really. And I’ve been around a while and it’s pulling something up for me that is intensely beautiful. And I had no idea I didn’t know about it before.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, I mean you use the example of a well, and it’s almost like there’s this potential for us to access an eternal wellspring of kindness, but we do have to learn to subvert all our ideas. All of those sort of Judeo-Christian, probably, ideas about kindness equaling self-sacrifice and learning to be able to be kind, which is easier than being—like it’s an easier, it’s an easier “fake it till you make it.”

Martha Beck:
That’s what it is. It’s the way you can fake it till you make it.

Rowan Mangan:
So this is the beginning of how we come to our senses. But Marty, how do we come to our senses?

Martha Beck:
Well, let’s talk about it right after this.

Rowan Mangan:
So we’re talking come to your senses when it comes to kindness. And I feel like what we’ve kind of been talking about is the way that true kindness, starting with kindness towards ourselves is actually a deeply subversive force in our culture and that it has the power to disrupt systems of cruelty and division, and it’s a rebellion against the scarcity, everyone-in-it-for-himself kind of mentality that is pedaled so widely, never more than now in this culture.

Martha Beck:
So if you want to be a rebel against the culture of domination and extraction and overwhelming force, be a rebel first by being kind to yourself. That is such an act of rebellion. And I used to meditate every morning, and I could call this meditation still, but I’ve just been actively practicing self-kindness. And I did dig my way toward this well of just sweetness that came bubbling up from nowhere. It didn’t feel like it was—actually, it did feel like it was me, but an aspect of myself I’d never found before. And the more I am deliberately kind to myself, and it’s always tiny, it’s always like, “Would you like a drink of water? Would you like a fuzzy blanket?” Really small things. “Would you like to go outside?”

Rowan Mangan:
“You need to pee. Why don’t you just go pee?”

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I remember when I was doing my dissertation and I was interviewing women about their role conflict, and this one woman told me, “I just was aware of this growing pain all day. And then I realized I’d been helping other people all day at my job at work, and I had not peed.”

Rowan Mangan:
Do you remember we had a conversation once in Wilder, which is our online community for Bewildered, and I don’t remember what our explicit context for this conversation was supposed to be, but for a whole Arty Friday Hang where we were all chatting with each other on Zoom, this whole thing just came running through it, which was “We don’t even let ourselves pee.” I mean, that’s the level at which we have absorbed the self-denial narrative or virtue-signaling or something. No one knows if you need to pee and you’re not, and yet somehow that’s virtuous?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And people say it with pride. I’ve heard people say it with pride. And I don’t think, I mean, it’s something to be proud of in terms of yes, you do have the ability to really hold yourself apart from goodness out of the best of motivations, but it’s not kind to the world if it’s not kind to ourselves. And the other thing is that kindness is a clear establishment of personal boundaries because it’s not about pleasing other people. It’s about living in your own truth. So if I don’t pee because I don’t want to disturb you, that is not the truth.

Rowan Mangan:
Or if I won’t pee because I can get another hour’s work done and it’s fine, I’m fine, it’s no trouble.

Martha Beck:
But no animal would listen to that. When they need to go, they will go and they will come put a paw on you, especially if they don’t have a calming duck.

Rowan Mangan:
“Where did my paws go?”

Martha Beck:
“Where did my paws go?” And they will openly own what they need and they will do their best to get along with everybody, but they don’t totally deny their own feelings, especially not, I mean, we do it emotionally. It’s one thing not to pee for a while, but it’s another thing never to offer yourself the kindness of just saying inside yourself, “You did your very best and I’m proud of you.” Stuff like that. “Yes, you made a mistake. Everyone makes mistakes. Of course you feel sad, but it’s okay. I’m right here with you.” This is the kind of thing I’ve been asking people to say when I do podcasts, and they start to weep just because I ask them to say, to tell yourself you’re doing your best and it’ll be okay. And I’ve come to realize that kindness is the alignment with truth, the truth from within us and then the truth around us. And we actually only have access to our truth if we are being kind. The moment you step out of kindness, you step out of alignment with what you really are, which is inherently kind, I believe. So it’s like, in the book I wrote about integrity, I talk about how structural integrity, everything being aligned in a jumbo jet, if all the machine parts are aligned with each other, it can fly. But if it gets really misaligned, if something gets really misaligned, you’re in danger. And I have spent years being subtly and blatantly cruel to myself and thinking, “This is fine. It’ll keep the plane flying.” No! No, it endangers the flight. And I know that because when I increased kindness to myself, everything started working more smoothly, and I was happier.

Rowan Mangan:
So this is interesting because when I was saying I have vibes about kindness and what it really is, but I’m not that clear on how to verbalize it. It’s really cool listening to what you’re saying because I feel like maybe tapping into kindness, the idea of being able to tap into it like it’s oil or something, or water is a better analogy. And that it’s this huge powerful force that is accessible to us and that flies in the face of the divisions in culture. I feel like maybe kindness is just another word for whatever, the universe, like “it.”

Martha Beck:
Yeah, “it.”

Rowan Mangan:
Whatever the substance of spirituality is, whatever you feel when you meditate or pray or whatever, is that just that is us getting into a level of truth that is the same thing? And so therefore, if you saying to yourself, “Don’t worry, you tried your hardest and you did really well, and I’m really proud of you,” and that feels better in the way that truth makes your body feel better, then what a beautiful full-circle moment where truth and kindness and grace are all the same thing.

Martha Beck:
They’re aligned.

Rowan Mangan:
And revolution.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, and when we were talking about it, and you said, I said, “So what happens when you’re kind to yourself?” And you said, this was just a little while ago, I remember it so clearly. You said, “Oh, so when I align myself with the kindness that I believe is in the world, I do this and this.” And I was like, “Wait, what? Go back.” Because you talked about aligning yourself with a kindness that you felt was in the world. And I always thought kindness is when you dig down, take a deep breath, push your needs aside, and pull up kind actions and are polite to everybody no matter how bad you feel. And the idea when you said that, I had this, I love the image of kindness as a frequency that is already reverberating through the cosmos,

Rowan Mangan:
Right. It’s like dial in. That’s why I was saying tapping into it, there’s all these different, it’s just like it is a frequency that you can access. You just have to tune the radio right and then for yourself, for everyone else, it’s all there in abundance.

Martha Beck:
And you don’t do it because you want to be liked, or you want to be approved of, or you want to get money or whatever. You do it because it’s the truth. And the truth makes us strong in ourselves. And that and only that, I believe, this alignment with the goodness that is intended for you from all the universe, when you align with that by being kind, just by saying a simple kind thing to yourself, you open the doorway for the feeling you’ve been looking for all your life, this feeling of being securely loved, of being embraced, of being held. I mean this for me, this simple practice of self-kindness is so much more than I thought it would be. It’s not just how to stop being anxious. It is access to the bedrock truth of reality as I experience it right now.

Rowan Mangan:
And another word for that is home. Right?

Martha Beck:
You’re so right. That’s where we live.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. So when our truth is more important than how much we’re liked, that’s the kindness that’s accessible to us, and that’s how we learn to…

Martha and Rowan:
Stay wild!

Rowan Mangan:
We hope you’re enjoying Bewildered. If you’re in the USA and want to be notified when a new episode comes out, text the word WILD to 570-873-0144. We’re also on Instagram. Our handle is @bewilderedpodcast. You can follow us to get updates, hear funny snippets and outtakes, and chat with other fans of the show. Bewildered is produced by Scott Forster with support from the brilliant team at MBI. And remember, if you’re having fun, please rate and review and stay wild.

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.