Rowan Mangan:
Hey, Marty.

Martha Beck:
Hey, Roey.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, we’ve got a fun episode of Bewildered coming up for the Cahoot today. So today we’re talking about surrendering to life versus trying to direct your life. Or, isn’t it more our true nature if we were to let the cosmic flow guide us through our lives?

Martha Beck:
Sure. If you believe that, it’s a nice concept, but how do you operationalize it? What are the directions for that? How do you do that?

Rowan Mangan:
This is what we discussed today and what you’ll find out in today’s episode of Bewildered.

Martha Beck:
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:
Just trying to figure it out. Yeah. What are you trying to figure out, my darlin’?

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, well, I feel like I always just go, “Oh my God, where do I start?” But where do I start? I am always trying to figure you out because you are fascinating. You’re like a most—like me taken to my logical extreme. And so I was thinking about—

Martha Beck:
I’ve never been accused of being logical.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, yeah, to the extreme, let’s just say that. Yeah. We went to the bank, did we not?

Martha Beck:
Oh, we did recently. I remember.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. Recently you and I went to the bank to open a new bank account that we had to do. I do recall. I mean, for the listeners, we were there for over, it was nearly two hours. It was a hundred-plus minutes. Why? Why did it take that long? I don’t know. We’d sent documents ahead of time, but that’s not the point of this story.

The point of this story is it’s so boring in the bank. Okay, so boring. But there are those modes that you can, well, I can access a mode where even though I feel like I’m going to keel over from the boredom, I can go into a mode that at least on the surface is like, “Oh, you do offer that? Oh yeah. Oh no, no, I don’t need to read it.”

And so that’s me sitting there, and we’re, I don’t know, we’re like 25 minutes in. We’re sitting in the bank, we’ve parked the car, we’ve walked into the bank, we’ve sat down in the bank, and we’ve been there for 20 minutes. And at that point, our little friend who was helping us at the bank decided to get to the point, and she was like, “Okay, so let’s open this account.”

And we were like, “Thank you. That would be great. That’s literally the only reason we’re here.” And so she says, “And do you already bank with us?” Frankly, something she should already have known before we walked in the door. You would think. You would think, but anyway, whatever. She’s doing her job. I’m doing my job.

Marty, what job you are doing I do not know because at the moment where she said, “Do you already bank with us?” you did something that was quite hard for me to understand the motivation for. Right? So as she waited for us to answer the question, “Do you already bank with us?” you started looking around you as though there was a bee in the room, frantically kind of turning your head up, down looking behind you.

And I was like, what is she doing? And then you know that thing where you don’t say the quiet bit out loud. So then Marty says to the woman who’s helping us at the bank, she says, “Sorry, I’m trying to see what bank we’re in. I’m trying to figure out what bank we’re in.”

And I just thought—

Martha Beck:
I didn’t know!

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, but how could you? It’s just amazing. It’s amazing. It’s just you.

Martha Beck:
I just followed you like a duckling. That’s what I do.

Rowan Mangan:
You’re so cute. And the woman, because bankers are different species from us. I mean, we love them, the ones that can get to the point, we love them, adore them, but she could not fathom it. I mean, I’ll admit, I can’t fathom that you said it out loud. I wasn’t remotely surprised that you didn’t know what bank we were in. She was just, honestly, her eyes did that Jim Carrey thing— came out of her head, and I spent the rest of the nearly two hours in the bank trying to come back from it.

Oh, but there was another funny thing I need to do a callback to the “grack your ankles” story that some listeners will remember from a podcast some time ago where Marty told a story about trying to “grack” her ankles many years ago. Just listen to the back catalog. I can’t give you any clues that’ll spoil it.

So at one point she’s trying, this banker is trying to get us to sign something with a stylus. I said, okay, this is where I’m bad. I’m like, “I literally can’t do that with my finger if I try to do that. It’s just finger painting and that’s what it looks like.” And so she’s like, “Let’s see if we can get someone with a stylus in the office.” And so they then proceed to spend 15 minutes trying to find us a stylus with which to sign our names for our account, which have to be recognizable, right? Okay. I can’t just go…

All right. Comes back with a stylus. It’s a dodgy stylus. And while I’m not going to tell you the name of the bank we were in, which was very clearly displayed everywhere, as well as in our calendars that this is the appointment you’re going to today. The bank, you would think, a bank of its, I don’t know, prestige—

Martha Beck:
Stature.

Rowan Mangan:
Stature. Thank you. Might have been on top of this, but anyway, there we are. The stylus was crap. It didn’t work. And at one point Marty was trying to sign, and the woman who was helping us from the bank began to say, “You need to tap it, tap, tap.” She was so frustrated, which is ironic given that we’d been in there for so long.

She was so frustrated that Marty wasn’t doing it right. She started prompting her: “Tap, tap it, tap, tap, tap.” And when she started going, “Tap tap,” Marty got stressed out. And so she started just going with the stylus: tap, tap, tap, tap.

Martha Beck:
What was I supposed to do? I still don’t know. Was it that EFT thing where you tap your body to calm down?

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, that’s what we should have been using.

Martha Beck:
I should have tapped her.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my gosh. But just that moment, that moment where you said, “I’m just trying to figure out what bank we’re in right now,” will go down in my heart as one of the all-time great Marty Beck out in the world moments. And I really wanted our listeners to hear it because it’s like, you know what? Yes, she’s a genius, I know. And also that. Right? That’s all I’ll say: Also that.

Martha Beck:
And after the critical moment had passed, I started seeing logos everywhere, business cards, a little bunting sign. The woman had it stapled across her forehead, and I was just like, “Where are we? I don’t know if I ever bank here.” Yeah. I turn into Scooby-Doo in banks: “I don’t know.”
Once, I swear to God, I fell peacefully asleep on the banker’s desk. I just put my head forward, just to rest it for a minute, and I woke up about an hour later. Karen was still working with the banker. See, when, this is how I react to banking and anything related to it. But they love it when Karen walks in.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, is this what you’re trying to figure out?

Martha Beck:
One of the things, like how does she do it? How does she do it? She manages to follow the thing about how many points and whether or not there’s a feed.

Rowan Mangan:
First time listeners, welcome to the Cahoot, which is what we call you, our people, because we’re in cahoots. So Karen is our beloved, and that’s all I’ll say. She’s my beloved, she’s Marty’s beloved, and thank God for her, or we would both be quite literally wandering in the woods.

Martha Beck:
Yes. And Karen is just able—you go into that mode, and I’m amazed. Karen goes into that mode so deeply that half the people we’ve ever banked with have literally come to our house for dinner. I’m like, “No, Karen, shut it down. It’s bad enough to be here with them. Don’t bring them home.” But she’ll be like, “And he ate at this restaurant right across from us that one week.” I just don’t care. Make them go away. It’s like some kind of a horror film with zombies.

Rowan Mangan:
Karen.

Martha Beck:
People with logistical competence are the zombies of my world. But what I was really thinking about, you want to know what I was really thinking about?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
I was thinking about how sometimes at the bank they would say to me things that would confuse Jane Austen.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh yeah.

Martha Beck:
Yes. And this is what I was thinking about because I’ve been rereading Jane Austen.

Rowan Mangan:
This is what you were thinking about while we were in there?

Martha Beck:
Yes. Because I’ve been rereading Pride and Prejudice sprinkled with Spanish words to try to learn Spanish. It’s a thing, they have it online. Try it. It’s great. It’s weird to have Jane Austen suddenly say, “Hombre!” But it’s fun. It’s so fun. It’s like Jane is gaining a whole new dimension.
But I like to think about as I walk about the world, how Jane Austen is this incredible exquisite observation of manners and people who are a little put off and people who don’t do everything right. And how she always is so gracious and always the smartest person in the room. And I just want to bring her out from the past and say, “Come with me,” and have her come to the bank. And she would do everything right.

And then they would say to her, “Here, sign this document. You can do it with your finger or a mouse.” And she would be like, “What?” I imagine. And I love the thought of Jane Austen looking for a mouse with which to sign a document.

Rowan Mangan:
You know what? You are so freaking cute because A, that is funny, and B, that’s a joke from 1993 as well: “It’s a mouse. I mean it’s a mouse, but it’s not a real mouse, you know what I mean?” I think that’s a Jerry Seinfeld bit.

Martha Beck:
Yes. But this is 30 years later and I’m talking about Jane Austin in Spanish having to sign a bank notice. This is not something they talked about in 1993. It is fresh and new as a newborn babe, Ro, a newborn babe. “You can sign it with your finger or a mouse, Jane.”

Rowan Mangan:
I wonder what it would feel like to be told to sign something with a mouse and not have any context for it.

Martha Beck:
There were a lot of mice around. I mean, we used to live way out in the country. There are mice everywhere. She was acquainted with mice.

Rowan Mangan:
If you signed it with the tail, you can sort of see how that, you know what I mean? There’s like a bit of a fountain pen dimension.

Martha Beck:
I was thinking more of holding it by its little midsection, maybe just behind the head. So its little feet are all splayed out and then you thump it on an ink pad and just press it. Press it onto the paper. Not in a mean way.

Rowan Mangan:
That’s cruel. Thump it in a nice way?

Martha Beck:
Well just tap, tap, tap, like I was supposed to do with the stylus. I still dunno what the F she wanted me to tap. My intelligence? Sorry, that’s been gone for years.

Rowan Mangan:
Your awareness of where you were?

Martha Beck:
I wanted so much to just lean across her desk and just tap her right in the center of her forehead: tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. And just say it at the same time. “Tap, tap, tap, tap.” What would she have done if Jane Austen were with us? What would she have thought? She wouldn’t have known what bank we were in. They didn’t even have America. Oh yes, they did. Sorry, sorry. Anyway. Oh my God. I’d rather sign it with a rat.

Rowan Mangan:
I’m trying to think because her books are like comedies of manners, I guess you would say?

Martha Beck:
I think. Comedies of manners.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah. How would you—as Jane Austen or as Emma from Jane Austen or Elizabeth Bennett or something like that, someone who’s good at stuff like that, like people and situations, which is basically all of Jane Austen’s books are about people and situations and actually much of literature, now that I think about it. But anyway, I digress.

Martha Beck:
The Old Man and the Sea: person, situation, same as Jane Austen.

Rowan Mangan:
There’s so many regrets right now. But if Jane Austen had been sitting there as we ticked around past the 90-minute mark to set up one simple bank account—I mean, listener, it was not a complex task.

Martha Beck:
No.

Rowan Mangan:
We’d heard a lot about her son.

Martha Beck:
A lot.

Rowan Mangan:
And his attempts to make apps and he had some limited success. Anyway, you don’t, I don’t need to hear.

Martha Beck:
And all the places he went.

Rowan Mangan:
But what would Jane Austen have done as a pro in manners after 90 minutes? Would, because she’s witty, right? How would she have gotten out of that? Because I couldn’t think of anything to do. I was held in a spell.

Martha Beck:
I think she would’ve gotten to her feet with those big skirts they had and just gently swept past the woman to the window and looked out and said, “We should walk if it’s fine.” And then tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap on the woman’s head until it drove her slightly crazy and then we would leave.

Rowan Mangan:
I think you are right, but I think she would’ve said, “We could walk if it’s buen tiempo.”

Martha Beck:
Ooh, “Excuse me, Mr. Darcy. I believe it’s become muy caliente. Mr. Darcy, tu es muy caliente!”

Rowan Mangan:
He wasn’t, though. That’s why I’ll never understand that book.

Martha Beck:
I know.

Rowan Mangan:
Anyway, we really digress.

Martha Beck:
This is what we get accused of. Enough. Enough college talk about literature and banks, things that I prefer never to think about again.

Rowan Mangan:
And attractive men, which we try never to think about at all.

Martha Beck:
I forgot there was even such a thing.

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

Martha Beck:
Yes, please.

Rowan Mangan:
So today, regular listeners will be excited to know that we are doing a BeWild Files episode of Bewildered. And the BeWild Files is when we hear from you, our beloveds, our peeps, our Cahoot, and you tell us what you’re trying to figure out. And then we try to figure out what you’re trying to figure out. And then we try to all figure it out together. And we don’t really get anywhere, but we all enjoy the ride.

Martha Beck:
Exactly. I think that’s beautiful. And I think that if I ever meet all of them in person, we should have a call like, “Cahoooooot!” like that.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay, let’s workshop that offline.

Martha Beck:
All right, here we go.

Rowan Mangan:
So anyway, today we’re hearing from Mandy who has a question about surrender versus flow. Let’s hear from our good friend Mandy.

Mandy V.:
Hello, Marty and Ro, this is Mandy V. and I need your help. So I feel a lot of pressure to manifest some big dream in the world and go against this cultural current, honestly, that feels quite contrived and sort of cultural in itself. So I recently read a book called The Surrender Experiment by Michael Singer, which is a memoir about how he turned his life over to the universe and how this current took him to extraordinary places that he could not have fathomed on his own. And I sort of feel like this is a much better path for me. Can you speak to the distinction between drifting in a cultural current versus surrendering to some kind of cosmic guidance? Thank you so much for your help.

Rowan Mangan:
Obsessed with this question. Absolutely obsessed with it. So brilliant. Good question. So smart. So, okay, so can you speak, yes at length, to the distinction between drifting in a cultural current versus surrendering to some kind of cosmic guidance? So here’s what I think Mandy’s getting at. Marty and I would, had to sort of wrap our arms and legs around this one for a while. So I think that Mandy’s saying, stating what you want your life to look like, especially if it’s a big, fancy, shiny life, and then trying to manifest that or make it real in a direct way is living in response to and therefore kind of within the culture. And so she’s asking us, is it more countercultural or true nature to do Michael Singer and surrender your will and be a leaf in the stream as you actually said in one of your books, and see what the universe just wants from you in this lifetime?

Martha Beck:
This is really the core question we’re always looking at on the podcast. What is the difference between the behaviors we adopt because of cultural pressure and the behaviors that truly represent our deepest selves? And she’s put this interesting spin on it by saying the Michael Singer idea of saying yes to everything to the universe. Is that a good alternative? And it’s a wonderful practice to adopt. I just had one thing to say before we go on with this and that’s that for while, I tried this for a while, and it was before I knew the difference between what the feeling of pressure of the culture is and what cosmic guidance is.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh, interesting. Okay.

Martha Beck:
I mean, you didn’t grow up around people who were saying to you, “I know what cosmic guidance is and I have it all the time and I know what you should do.” But I grew up, yeah, I grew up in a very religious community where everybody, especially the male, people identified male, had personal revelations and were, talked about it all the time. So I sort of pushed away from all that. And then I went off to college, graduate school, had my—

Rowan Mangan:
Sorry, wait. You went to college? You didn’t mention where you went to college.

Martha Beck:
{cough} Harvard. Yeah, nowhere.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay. Okay. I’m just going to randomly have a sip of my water.

Martha Beck:
Near Boston. Yeah. Okay. So when Adam was born, I had all these metaphysical experiences and I was like, “Oh my goodness, there’s something to this cosmic force. Maybe it isn’t blind chance. Maybe there is a divine something.” So I thought, “Well, I want to say yes to that. I’m going to say yes to that.” And I was so physically and emotionally beat up that I went back to Utah where I’d grown up for two reasons: I wanted to finish my PhD dissertation in a place where it was easier to raise kids than in Cambridge and—Massachusetts, that is—and I also knew that the people around me in Utah would not question my decision to keep the baby.

Rowan Mangan:
Just for context, Adam has Down syndrome.

Martha Beck:
And he was diagnosed prenatally and very late in the pregnancy.

Rowan Mangan:
And she kept him, and a lot of Harvard people thought that was a bad idea, a very bad decision because they really valued being super smart. That’s my CliffsNotes version of Marty’s life story.

Martha Beck:
Thank you. Now you don’t have to read anything I’ve ever written. Anyway, I thought, well, I had felt these experiences of a force that was incredibly loving, incredibly home, incredibly peaceful, everything they talk about. So I was like, “Okay, well I want to follow that.” And I went back to Utah, and I became a complete doormat. I would do anything everyone, anyone said. I didn’t just follow the rules of Mormonism. I would research other religions and follow their rules as well.

Rowan Mangan:
Wait, wait, wait, wait. So when you say rule, do you mean that you were, if anyone said anything to you, you took that as being, for the sake of what Mandy’s saying, you took everything anyone said you should do as cosmic guidance? Is that what you mean?

Martha Beck:
Yeah, yeah. I was just going to say yes to the universe, right? I’m just going to say yes to everything.

Rowan Mangan:
But is Mrs. Mills at the hardware store, is she—why is she necessarily the voice of the universe? Sorry, I’m sorry to cross-examine you.

Martha Beck:
That’s a really good question. And I think when you first start looking for a source of guidance outside of culture, it is a really good—is the woman at the hardware store the voice of the divine intelligence of nature, or is she not? Is she just talking? And I couldn’t differentiate. I didn’t know. So somebody would say something to me at the hardware store, and I would literally go do it. I said yes to everything.

Rowan Mangan:
So you started using a stud finder on the regular before you—

Martha Beck:
Oh, I did. I did indeed. But that was the lesbianism raising, trying to come up out of the morass of rule following. Yeah. I mean, and maybe because I was so dissociated from myself that I didn’t know I was gay. I was so dissociated, I didn’t know what felt like truth. It was very, I didn’t have much foundation in solid integrity. Knowing what had happened to me in my life and what it felt like and what had made me feel more healthy and what had made me feel less healthy. I didn’t have that foundation. I had just tried to please everyone all the time. That’s how I got to Harvard. Drink.

Rowan Mangan:
And that felt like cosmic guidance to you?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. I mean you say the woman at the hardware store, but literally, I went to the hardware store once and somebody there made a reference to this Mormon authority who’d written stuff and said, “You should read this book he wrote and do whatever’s in it.” And so I went and got the book, and I read it and I tried to do everything in it because of a guy at the hardware store. I’m not even kidding.

Rowan Mangan:
And because to you that was the mouthpiece of God or the cosmos.

Martha Beck:
Everything was. Yeah. I was like, “God is everywhere.” I became a pantheist: God is everywhere in everything. So I’m just going to say yes. Then I ran into some problems. For example, if you’re a young working mother or a working mother of any age—

Rowan Mangan:
Thank you.

Martha Beck:
You are going to encounter, you are going to encounter, get this, conflicting demands. You will try to say yes to things that are mutually incompatible.

Rowan Mangan:
Let’s just say working parent, let’s not be too general.

Martha Beck:
Working parent, right.

Rowan Mangan:
I mean, let’s be more general.

Martha Beck:
Also, also, also, the moment there’s a person in the room who says yes to everything, it is like chumming the water for sharks. People begin to swim up to you who have a vested interest in getting you to do what they want.

Rowan Mangan:
So it can be. It can be. It was in your experience.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, if you do, if you’re as unbalanced and ungrounded as I was. I was literally just trying to do anything anyone said. And so some people just thought I was weird, but other people thought I was useful.

Rowan Mangan:
They also went wrong.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. And basically I overworked, I over-cared, I over-everything-ed until I literally almost died.

Rowan Mangan:
So I think what you, in that situation were doing, and you tell me where I’m wrong, is you decided that saying yes to everything, which isn’t necessarily exactly what Mandy’s talking about, but in your experience, that’s how it manifested. So it’s like here is the rule: I say yes to everything. And so I think that’s part of, as we unpick Mandy’s question, is part of it is that if there’s only one thing to do in every situation, e.g. in your case, say yes to the hardware store chick and—sorry, I shouldn’t say chick. So yeah. So that’s the thing is that to me, the thing is if you know what you’re going to do before you know what the situation is that’s going to call for it, to me, that starts sounding like culture.

Martha Beck:
That’s really interesting. And the other thing, you’re pinging this for me because this is definitely a shortfall that I have in my own experience. What you’re pinging for me is that I was doing things that were not concerned with anything in the moment. I was going and reading books about what I should do for the rest of my life. You know what I mean? Yeah. It wasn’t about what to do right now. And I really think, I mean this is for later on in the podcast, but you don’t get rules for the rest of your life from cosmic guidance. You get the next step maybe. But culture just can’t help. You know, the left side of the brain seizes on “There is one right way,” and then it makes these cultural layers.

If you set out to do this experiment, you are in an onion layer of cultures that just goes from small to large and back again. So you’ve got the culture of success, the American dream, get the big house, get the big car, get—that’s a cultural pressure. And then if you say, “No, I don’t like that. I’m going to be more spiritual,” well now you might find yourself in the culture of spiritually oriented Americans who have their own kind of language and their own kind of culture.

Again, you find that you’re under cultural pressure to look a certain way, talk a certain way, fit with a certain group. So then within that, you might say, “Okay, I’m not going to follow that. I’m going to specifically just be with people who’ve surrendered and who always say yes to the universe.” And then you may find yourself in a tiny little subculture around that. Cultures form around almost anything. And whenever you feel pressure, it may be coming from a culture that has formed that you didn’t even know existed.

Rowan Mangan:
Right. And yeah, I think that’s true, but—you might find yourself surrounded by a little culture. You don’t have to have other people around you doing the same thing to be in a culture, right? Because culture is an impulse or a set of behaviors that are about—what do we say on this, what is it we say on this podcast? Coming to consensus.

Martha Beck:
Coming to consensus.

Rowan Mangan:
Rather than coming to your senses. So as soon as you’re leaving your senses and saying, “I’ll always do this,” so I think a big red flag for me—and Mandy, remember, we’re just talking about this through our lens, it’s not, this is like, for God’s sake, don’t treat this as the thing that’s always universally true. For God’s sake, please. Now we’re doing it. So for me personally, what I would say is a red flag that you’re in culture and not in your own true nature is when you say, “Okay, I’ve found the thing now. I’ve found it.” It’s called whatever. I’m not even going to say things because it’ll start to sound bad, but I’ve signed up for it. I never have to think about it ever again. I know from now on that whatever situation I find myself in, I’m going to do this.

Martha Beck:
Mm-hm.

Rowan Mangan:
Because it says right here in this book or whatever. And I wasn’t meaning Michael Singer, I was actually meaning the Bible as the example.

Martha Beck:
As an example. Nobody’s going to object to that, Roey. Yeah. It’s such a well-meaning thing to do, and it’s a labor-saving device: “Oh my goodness. I never have to decide again. I have the rule book to lean on.” For some reason, I’m zipping into the play or the short story, is it a novel, The Crucible? Where all the—

Rowan Mangan:
It’s a novel.

Martha Beck:
Okay so all the people in early America are running around hunting witches based on the rules of the book, and what rules people are keeping or not keeping starts to get more and more granular and more and more judgmental, more and more self-righteous and ultimately more and more violent. So it’s weird, this very well-meaning thing, if you succumb to the layers of culture, can turn really ugly. But we see it as, we do it because we’re so well-meaning. We do it as the ultimate social grace: “I’m going to give up, not my will, but thine be done.” That self-abnegation virtue. That’s how it’s seen—guess where?—in our culture.

Rowan Mangan:
And that can look really beautiful. That can look like, “Let me be a pencil in the hand of God” or whatever. That can look lovely. And it’s like anything is, it’s like sure, but don’t say always and don’t say every single time under any circumstances. Don’t say that.

Martha Beck:
And also it can look really beautiful if it’s real, and once you get in touch with yourself as I ultimately did, it can look really beautiful if it’s real and look really strange when it’s not.

Rowan Mangan:
Interesting.

Martha Beck:
I really think that the two young people who live in our house, Adam and Lila, both of them not yet really subjected to culture. I think they can tell the difference instantaneously between someone who’s saying yes to their own cosmic guidance and yes to a culture. One is fresh and life-giving and the other one is stagnating and suffocating.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay, so how do we then come to our senses about this, Martha?

Martha Beck:
Well, I think we should figure that out right after this.
Martha Beck:
So Roey, we’ve talked about coming to consensus. Now, how do we come to our senses when we’re looking to do the surrender to the yes thing?

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, surrender to the cosmic flow of it all versus trying to direct our own lives. Really genuinely one of my favorite questions we’ve ever had. So I have a metaphor for you. Regular listeners will be absolutely mindblown that there’s a metaphor in this podcast, but everyone could change. So here’s my metaphor for total flow, total yes to the universe, no matter what. And versus being super cultural about “I need $6 million and a Ferrari.” So this is my metaphor. So the first one is—it’s about rivers, because rivers are my favorite thing in the world. So the first one, “Go with the flow no matter what.” My metaphor is, you’re getting in a barrel. The barrel is being closed, I’m hazy on how that used to happen when people went over Niagara in a barrel?

Martha Beck:
They had friends.

Rowan Mangan:
They had friends—

Martha Beck:
Questionable friends.

Rowan Mangan:
Who nailed them in?

Martha Beck:
Yes, they did. Yeah, that happened. Yeah.

Rowan Mangan:
So that happens. But don’t let that sway you in any way about the neutrality of my metaphor. So you get in a barrel and you are rolled onto the Niagara River, and it’s total surrender: Where the current of the river takes you, there you go. If there is a waterfall there, you go over, over you go. And some people survived that. So neutral metaphor.

Martha Beck:
Like three survived it.

Rowan Mangan:
So this is my variation on that in terms of surrender because I do think surrender is really beautiful as a general, sometimes way of doing life. So say instead of getting nailed into a barrel, we get in our kayak with our paddle and we go for a kayak along a river. And there’s a current, the river, it’s a strong current. We live near the Delaware River and it’s got a strong current. And so yeah, you’re definitely flowing. But the difference is that you are making slight course corrections as you go according to what it feels like in each moment.

Martha Beck:
In each moment.

Rowan Mangan:
Right, yeah. So you don’t know upstream three miles what you’re going to want to do when you get to this— oh no, I’m going to run out of river words—an eddy? It’s an eddy.

Martha Beck:
Flux.

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t know. There’s a rock, there’s a goddamn rock in the water or a duck or something. Okay? You didn’t know about that before. And so you make an adjustment, but you’re still going with the flow. You’re just— it’s a directed flow. So that is my metaphor. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen and others.

Martha Beck:
Thank you very much. Thank you. I was about to nail you into a barrel, but I guess I’ve decided not to. As you were talking, I was thinking about how this has felt to me. First of all, the way I got out of the doormat situation was I decided to tell nothing but the truth for a year. I’ve talked about that endlessly other places. I did not lie for a single year. At the end of that year, I had no relationships and I had my integrity back. And from there, it’s been easy to feel what’s the flow of the universe and what is being nailed into a barrel and shoved over it by people calling themselves your friends. Nobody’s ever done that to me. It’s a metaphor. It’s a metaphor. The thing I’m thinking as you’re talking, those of you who have not heard other versions, other episodes of the podcast and have just heard Karen mentioned, our beloved, our beloved, we live in a deeply satisfying domestic arrangement or “Boston marriage” as it was called back in the old days, three women raising a baby in the woods and doing it together. So it’s an unorthodox situation. It’s quite counter-cultural.

Rowan Mangan:
Looks weird. Feels great.

Martha Beck:
Yeah, looks weird. Feels great. I was paddling along in my kayak and I looked pretty normal. I was living in the woods in California, and that was a little abnormal, but in a kind of fun way. And people were all around and we would do a lot of spiritual talk. And I meditated, so I fit into the culture of the spirituality.

Rowan Mangan:
You fit into California.
Martha Beck:
Yeah, of New Age California spirituality. And then you came to visit and getting to know you and what happened with the three of us was almost for me, like Niagara Falls. It was, I could hear a roaring downstream, and I was terrified because I was once again going to go off culture, and everybody was going to think how weird I was. And I couldn’t lie because that was my whole thing. If I start lying, especially to myself, I lose the ability to differentiate what feels like freedom to me, which I think is truth and peaceful and what is anxious and crunches me up and makes me want to keep secrets, which never works for me.

So I knew I was going to have to do this openly, and I knew it would be super weird. And I’m here to tell you people, the Delaware River, somebody was telling me yesterday, I was talking to a friend and she said there’s such a lot of energy in some situations that it’s like somebody who says, “I’m not going to let this happen” standing on the beach and a tsunami is coming and they’re standing there going, “No! I refuse it! I will not!” And it just takes you, right? And in a way, that’s kind of the payoff, I think, of learning to follow those subtle signals because once you’re queued in at every single moment, sometimes it’s really gentle and slow, but when it takes you, you know it’s taking you. And it’s like, “Oh, there is something. There is something. There’s a current, there is the way, there is the force, and it’s moving me.”

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
You have to pay such close attention.

Rowan Mangan:
So falling in love with me was the equivalent of getting nailed into a box and going over the world’s most famous enormous waterfall.

Martha Beck:
Yes. But you and Karen were also in the barrel, see? So we got smashed together.

Rowan Mangan:
So it was also claustrophobic?

Martha Beck:
No, it was very intimate. It was very tender.

Rowan Mangan:
I don’t know.

Martha Beck:
And we got the shit kicked out of us.

Rowan Mangan:
Well, we did get the shit kicked out of us. That is true. And it continues to be true from the culture from time to time a little bit. But we’re better at dealing with it now. Now it’s just like we got our paddle, we’re in our kayak. I feel like I haven’t authorized the way that you’ve taken my metaphor and used it about us falling in love. And I think you should have asked permission for my metaphor. It’s trademarked.

Martha Beck:
I’m so sorry.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah.

Martha Beck:
You were just talking about it, and I could hear the roaring downstream and I thought, “Oh, I remember this. Now I hear it again.” Because I’ll say something also about you, about how finding my integrity and then finding you, what fits so well is you will not let me leave my integrity. You feel the difference between people just bullshitting and people actually doing something that feels real more acutely than anyone else I’ve ever met, I think. And you will not let me get on any kind of a false course.

Rowan Mangan:
Every now and again, we secretly agree not to go to a social engagement, but otherwise, yeah, thank you. Thank you for that.

Martha Beck:
Also, I just made it sound like Ro is the cult leader that I’ve been looking for all my life, and that she has all the rules and I don’t have to make a decision anymore. But you never get to clock off. Never.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, so, and I mean that’s— wow, long way round. Whenever we think, “Oh, I found it. This is the way, this is how I get to do it. I am now on a…” Oh, get this Marty, now what I’m on instead of a kayak or a barrel is now I’m on one of those inner tubes that go down the river.

Martha Beck:
Oh they’re fabulous!

Rowan Mangan:
And you’re just kicking back and you know that the current’s got you, but nothing bad’s going to happen because it’s run by a tourism company and they’ve got good liability insurance and stuff, so you are just chilling. And that’s what we think happens when we find an answer that applies to every situation. But we don’t get to clock off that way. We don’t get to check out mentally and spiritually from the moment that we’re in. We always need to be in our lives making our own adjustments to the course that we’re on based on how we feel, not based on any book or any person at the hardware store or anyone speaking any sort of truth to us.

Martha Beck:
And whenever I get confused, it feels awful, and I have to go off by myself. That’s the first step. And I breathe and sometimes I go, “Well, I was being pressured into that thing I didn’t like,” and I’m tempted to blame culture, blame the other people around me who in one view pressured me into doing it. But when I’m always open to the cosmic guidance, one thing it always tells me is, “You made a choice, dear.”

Rowan Mangan:
Say more about that. I don’t really understand.

Martha Beck:
Well, when I feel like I have kind of gotten confused and I don’t know what my guidance is, or I do something that feels wrong to me. Like somebody asks me, “I want you to do this, this and this for me,” and it feels icky.

Rowan Mangan:
But you say yes because you surrender.

Martha Beck:
I say yes because it’s a friend or they have a deep need or whatever it is. And then more often than not, a person who encroaches on your boundaries that way will encroach even further. And so I get into these struggles where I’m trying to say yes to everything, but somebody’s asking me things that I want to say no to.

Rowan Mangan:
Or that you should say no to.

Martha Beck:
Or that I should have said no to. And then I get, we were talking today about how the resentment is such a signal that you’ve already caved in to someone’s social request that you shouldn’t be doing. And what I was saying is that when I get in touch with one of those things and I feel angry at someone for pressuring me, my cosmic guidance always reminds me that it was my choice. I’m not saying that everybody gets to do things by choice, that is coming from a privileged place. There are a lot of conditions that really can force people to do a lot of things. But when I say yes when I meant no, in my life so far, it’s always been a choice. A choice that probably maybe saved a friendship or got out of an embarrassing situation, but a choice nevertheless. And when I followed the cosmic guidance, the water can get a little bumpy when somebody’s pressuring you to say yes and the answer is really no. And you still have to follow it if you want to feel centered, if you want to go toward the ultimate expression of your true nature.

Rowan Mangan:
Yeah, yeah, sometimes. Yeah. And crucially, unfortunately, for our little meat selves here, our little human egoic, our little bound body selves, we are not ever going to find the one answer to every situation that is. I mean, look, there is an infinite number of monkeys on an infinite number of typewriters somewhere that could chart a life where just saying yes to every possible foreseeable situation for one person could work. But I just think that’s, that what instead, what it is for most of us is, okay, I made that call like Marty said, I made that decision. I said yes to something that should have been, that my integrity said should have been a no. Hm. Cooler, cooler. So I’d get my little paddle, very mixed metaphor, and I paddle back closer to the center of the river, which in this metaphor is my integrity and my alignment with who I am. And I will end up in the weeds if I keep going further off track. And that’s not flow either.

Martha Beck:
This is actually, the Buddha used almost the same metaphor, only he was talking about a road.

Rowan Mangan:
People often compare me to the Buddha. That happens a lot.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. It’s because you sit so still, my love.

Rowan Mangan:
Oh my God, I’m sorry. I never sit still. I’m always wriggling. Sorry.

Martha Beck:
That’s good for you. No, but he said some students came to him and they were like, “You told person X to go be more wild and free and crazy, to go have fun. And so we all went to have fun. And then you told person Y to be more serious. And then we all got serious, but you’re hypocritical. This is hypocrisy.” And he said, “No. If he’s going off into the weeds in one direction, I’ll bring him into the center, the middle way. If he’s going off in the other direction, I’ll correct him into the center, the middle way.” The middle way is where it’s the calmest, clearest, freest place. And I think that’s a big difference between Asian and Western mindsets. That we really do, in the West we have a historical mindset of “Anguish and deprivation for me will lead to good things for you. It is a virtue.” Where the whole Asian thing, or even the hedonists were like this, though nobody says they were. They’re just like, “If you’re doing what’s right, it feels pretty good, and things are pretty problem free.” And so if you’re having—correct course, correct course, one way or another.

Rowan Mangan:
But crucially, if it feels good. Right? If it’s feeling good. So it’s like, okay, nature is always as we like to bang on about, nature is always how it feels and never how it looks. And so to Mandy’s point about feeling pressure to do something big and manifest like a big destiny, I think if that, if you’re feeling a pressure, if that were in your nature, it would feel exciting. It would feel like a towards, it would feel enticing.

Martha Beck:
Yeah. Pressure is always a sign you’re responding to an external directive. And there’s a little handful of things that really pull you forward as cosmic guidance that I think you should say yes to. And they are joy, fascination, fun, and yearning. Not wanting, but yearning, which comes from a deeper place.

Rowan Mangan:
And no matter what, you should always, always absolutely say yes to those things with no exceptions. I’m just making fun of you now.

Martha Beck:
Now we’re doing it. Now we’re doing it. We can’t help ourselves. Do what we say, Mandy—now we’re culture.

Rowan Mangan:
Nature is always changing, never staying still. Nature is always adaptive to the context. It’s an ever-universal in all contexts, in all situations. So with, Marty, you teach your Wayfinder Coach Training, and the idea of being a Wayfinder is that you get life skills, right? You get life skills and they apply in the same way no matter what the terrain is. So you don’t need to memorize the terrain or understand the terrain where you’re going. You need to know how to navigate, and that’s Wayfinding. And then once you’ve got that locked in, any terrain is sort of possible and manageable because the skills remain the same. Fair?

Martha Beck:
Yeah. You can be in any bank and if you look around hard enough, you’ll figure out which bank it is. And then when they ask you to sign with a mouse, you can grab that little rodent and just calmly stamp him in the ink.

Rowan Mangan:
It is so funny that we’re here being the ones to talk and give advice, isn’t it?

Martha Beck:
It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? It’s the Cahoot! We’re just here for the Cahoot to remind you that always tap, tap, tap, and always feel for the sense of joy, fun, fascination, or yearning. And always feel free to surrender to yes or no.

Rowan Mangan:
One of my favorite poorly translated signs from, I think, Chinese, and this applies so beautifully here, is I’m going to post it on our Bewildered podcast Instagram. It’s a sign and it says what it says in Chinese, and then in English, it’s translated as, “Beware of safety.” And that’s what I think we have to be aware of because the illusion of safety is almost always culture.

Martha Beck:
Wow. Well, on that note, my love, let’s go do what cosmic flow asks us to do. I feel like I have a barrel that I want you to nail me into, so I think we should go get that job done.

Rowan Mangan:
Let’s do it. And in the meantime, let’s all…

Martha Beck and Rowan Mangan:
Stay wild!

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

Rowan Mangan:
We hope you’re enjoying Bewildered. If you’re in the USA and want to be notified when a new episode comes out, text the word WILD to 570-873-0144. We’re also on Instagram. Our handle is @bewilderedpodcast. You can follow us to get updates, hear funny snippets and outtakes, and chat with other fans of the show. 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.