But there are a lot of people even in the US who are going through some really hard times. 52% of Americans now struggle to pay their basic monthly bills. When you have more than half the population of a huge country unable to pay monthly bills, and then you have people with billions and billions and hundreds of billions of dollars in the same country, that’s not good folks. That isn’t good in terms of the future of the social integrity of the country, the way it can hold together. And it’s not cool in terms of individual lives. 

And more and more, I’m coaching people who are seeing the famine come to their own fields. I’m grateful that I can still coach them. I mean, people are still willing to pitch in and barter for time coaching or whatever because they’re running out of money. But I just thought it was time for me to sort of take on this issue. It’s something I’ve dodged before. And I will tell you for why: I have never considered myself able to advise people on money matters because I don’t think much about money. I just can’t. I have horrible insomnia unless I take medication and everything. The one place I have ever fallen soundly asleep without meaning to is my accountant’s office. He starts to talk about money and I literally, my head pitches forward, and I wake up in a pile of drool, or he gently moves me over to a couch and he and Karen talk while I sleep.

I can’t focus on money. So I thought it was really weird when I got an award from the Women’s Business Association. I was like, “Seriously?” I have never been able to really get a job. I’ve had a couple of things like when I was in college, but I have tried and tried and tried to join companies, and I never could. And so I would have to make stuff up. So I’ve been making stuff up my entire career, and now I’m getting awards for business? But a person I was talking to who knows me very well and who also is an incredible business person recently told me, “You’ve been writing business books all along.” And I was like, “What? I write woo-woo books. I write books about how to find your destiny within yourself.” And she said, “Yeah. And if you just shift that a little to the language of business, that’s how I’ve been doing my business.” 

And this is a person from a long time business, family, big family company and everything. It really made me think. And I wanted to offer to all of you the only way that I’ve ever been able to make it through the world financially. Because according to my very businessy friend and the folks who gave me that award, it works. And this is how it works. I may have used this metaphor before, but it bears repeating. My wonderful friend Katya used to give me riding lessons when I lived in California. And one of the things, she was this amazing horseback rider and amazing teacher, and she put me on this horse, Buddy, who was so sweet, he would not have heard a fly. And basically he would just stand solidly in one place while I sat up on his back flailing and kicking and trying to get him to go forward.

He was a very sweet horse, gentle. She taught me how to get him to go forward by doing very subtle—she’s very subtle. So you have to be able to feel the horse’s spine and the arrangement of your spine and know that the horse can feel even slight variations in balance for you and that certain things make them sort of want to move forward. And then she taught me how to make the horse want to move backward. And he’d been trained. So he knew those cues and he was wonderful and I sort of learned to do it.

And then she said, “Now I want you to teach him to do something he’s never done before.” And I was like, “Okay.” She said, “I want you to make him step sideways.” This is something that horses now do in dressage in the Olympics. And people think it’s silly horse dancing. Well, it was how horses were trained to go into battle. People wanted to be able to fight with swords and maces and things on horseback. And to get that to happen, the horse had to be part of the operation. And so that jump-sideways thing is when somebody is trying to stab you or your rider.So it’s not quite as silly and pretty as you think. It’s very pretty, but it’s not very silly. 

Anyway, so Buddy, my horse, he was going to have to learn to go sideways, and he’d never been trained. And so Katya said to me, “I want you to give him a signal that he knows is a signal, but he doesn’t know what it means.” And she said, “I want you to flutter one heel against his flank. So flutter your foot and just this tap, tap, tap on his side very lightly.” And so I did that and Buddy was like, what? He got a little bit nervous. You don’t want to get him too nervous. But he was like,what? He’d go forward, he’d go backward. She’d say, “Keep fluttering, keep fluttering.” And then finally, just sort of out of randomness, he took a step to the side and she said, “Stop.” Stillness. Okay, now she’d say, “Flutter again.” 

So I’d start to flutter and he would be like, okay, I got this to stop once. What did I do? And after a few minutes again, he’d step to the side. “Stop.” And she had me do this. And it didn’t actually take very long. It only took about five repetitions before he started to understand: When she flutters her heel against your flank step to that side. And so we had him going both directions sideways within just one session. And it was kind of a miracle to me. 

And I realized then that I believe that I am being guided through this life. And I truly believe we’re being guided. Oh my God, this month in our online community, Wilder, Ro’s and my, the community we run, our topic of the month is how to find luck and catch good luck when it’s there to be caught. And we’ve been telling stories in the community of good luck, things that have happened to people, and it doesn’t happen every day. I mean you remember it, but some of these things, it is so screamingly obvious that there is something, there is some intelligence at work that is making these things happen or helping people get these things to happen. And it’s really, really upped my belief that we are all guided.

But here’s the thing: I believe that the old ways of thinking, the old consciousness, I call it the old ways of doing business, the old ways of doing politics, all of those are flailing. They’re in their last death throes. And it ain’t pretty. But as they dissolve, people have to figure out a new way to do things, not to go forward or back, but to do something sideways that they’ve never done before. 

Now I’ve been doing, this is how I make my living. This is the only way I’ve ever been able to make money. I would feel something like, “Okay, I cannot get a job.” Nothing, nothing that I tried to do that was “normal” ever worked. I would apply for jobs that I was so qualified for, never even got an interview. No one wanted to hire me. So once I left academia, I was just like, “Huh.”So I would sit by myself and I would feel, “Okay, I want to do something with my life. I feel like a yearning toward service in the world. I feel a yearning toward creativity. I feel a yearning toward philosophy and psychology.” 

And then I would feel this annoyance, and it was like something that, oh, it was so anxiety producing. And I’d think, “What am I—I can’t settle.” And then I would have an idea, “Wait, okay, somebody just told me at the dawn of the internet, here, take this website template that’s $150, incorporate your name and offer one thing that you teach as a course online.” And somebody literally sketched this out on a napkin for me. And I was like, “I can do that.”

So I did it, and it took me one night and the next day I put up my little website for $150 that I populated myself, and somebody bought the course and I was in the black. And that was the beginning of this company. People think I have this huge company because I incorporated my name, Martha Beck, Inc. And so people used to call me and go, “Can I speak to your sales manager?” And it’d be like, it would be my home number. I’d be like, “Okay.” They’d be click, “Hi, this is Linda, the sales manager.” “Well, can I talk to your marketing director?” “Sure.” Click. “This is Fred in marketing”—I mean it was me, all right? It was just me.

But I stayed in the black, and I started to realize that there were ways that I could teach people that they wanted to be taught. And now it seems like an edifice. People are like, “Please hire me for your company.” I’m still making it up. I mean it’s still a tiny company, but we’ve had the opportunity to train thousands of Wayfinders. I’m not even going to call ’em coaches. They are people who can find the way through the new territory, through the new way.

Now this whole thing is, I believe that if you’ll detach from the old ways you’re thinking about making a living, and you will sit and find what you long for, find what you love, and start to envision that, and then just say, “Tell me, tell me, tell me,” you will feel something pushing you, pulling you, and it won’t feel positive at first. It will feel uncomfortable. Sometimes it will even feel, there have been times in my life when I think I was made, I was meant to make a certain decision, but I had not thought of this decision. When the discomfort was intense, I would try to do something I thought would work and it would just be like, “No! I’m going to throw up if I have to do it.” Like violent body reactions saying no. And then I would have a different idea if somebody would say something, I’d catch a line in a book somewhere, I’d see something on TV and suddenly it was like, click!

I mean now I know that this is the process of creativity, right? You have a problem that the left hemisphere of your brain can’t solve analytically. It tries, it tries, it tries. You put it in the back of your head, you go for a walk. You allow yourself to be in nature and in peace and connect it to the force. And boom! Suddenly, the right hemisphere will put together things that you know but have never associated that will solve your problem. And it pops them forward in a process called the “Eureka effect.” And you’re like, “Oh my God!” Eureka means “I’ve got it” and you’ve just got it.

So what I wanted you to know is there are so many people who are feeling this pinch so hard, and I worry about you every day of my life. I think about it every day of my life. I yearn to help you every day of my life. I do what I can. So this is what I’m saying: It’s never going to go back to the way it was before. We are all going to learn to dance sideways. We are all going to learn to do things, to do steps and moves and maneuvers that we’ve never done before for a different society. And I firmly believe in my heart a better society, a society where you replace the factory and the overseer and the brutal overuse of people’s labor and the dehumanization of the worker, where you replace that with community and creativity and compassion and mutual sharing. I think this way is emerging. I really believe it is.

We can talk more about it later, but the way to join it is to get by yourself, calm down, feel where there’s an irritation in your life and just say, “Guide me. Guide me. I’m available, I’m open.” And just keep knowing what you yearn for. Dig deeper and deeper into what you long for. Your work in life is where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. That is the only thing I’ve ever done for a living: Something made me deeply joyful, and people were hungry for it. Not everybody, just a few people. And that’s all it takes. 

I don’t think this is going to solve all the problems of our economy, but when I know that over half of you over there, out there on the other side of this camera probably can’t make your bills, I have to do what I call “jumping the tracks.” I’ve talked about this before, where I just pull my consciousness out of the way things have been, and I plug it into the way things have been underneath—underneath the system that has oppressed and crushed so many and exalted and enriched a few. Underneath that system is a natural order that’s been holding it. And as it breaks that container will continue to hold it. And those of us who love that container, because it’s what we’ve always been, I believe we’re going to relax into different, better ways of making a living.

But we’re in this horrible moment of precipice right now where everything looks like it’s being run by the old system. It is, but it’s so broken it can’t even support people anymore. No longer can one guy with a decent income and a high school education support a family of four, which that was true for 10 minutes in the fifties and sixties. Now it’s not. So what I wanted to say today is let’s dance sideways. Let’s bring out all our creative ideas. Let’s meet and talk and laugh about things that we could do to enrich each other’s experience and see if we can draw out on a napkin a thing that says, “Oh, I have deep gladness here. Here’s the world’s deep hunger. I’ve never thought of doing this. Oh my God, I don’t see any reason why that wouldn’t work.”

Again, I got an award for business after living like this my entire life, and I’ve coached so many people who tell me it works for them too. So that’s what I have to offer today, and I hope I have more to offer later, but this is us getting together to say there is a rider involved and there’s an intelligence that loves us, and it wants us to learn something new. And the time has finally come, the time has finally come when the horrible job can be a thing in the past. And the community creativity that is our communal nature for like a hundred thousand years of evolution finds a way to express itself in the modern world, in our current world. So let’s get ready for it. Let’s dance sideways. And I always think, “But that sounds so, that doesn’t sound hardcore enough to make money.” That’s the Old System talking. This can make money. I can tell you that. It can. You just have to dare to do it. And you just have to feel for the tap on your side.

So someone says: “How can we be more open to the signs we might get that we are guided? Sometimes I don’t know if things are a real sign or I’m making it into a sign.”

Yeah, here’s the thing. If you make something really easy like, “I saw a tree that turned yellow in the fall, that’s a sign.” Not really. It’s just a tree that turns yellow in the fall. Somebody asked me about coincidences lately, like aren’t coincidences everywhere? Why should we be looking for that? What we’re looking for is not a coincidence, which is just two things randomly happening at the same time, but something that is not coincidence: two things happening at the same time that are causally related.

And for that you need to have a somewhat higher standard. You need to say, “What I take as a sign has to be unusual.” And also when I see a sign, there will be a sort of, it’s almost like the veil of the universe has been pulled back, and I’m watching something function in front of me, like somebody uses exactly the phrase that I was thinking of. Or, three people in a row tell me about the same individual I’ve never heard of, and the next day I meet that person. I mean really, really statistically significantly not, probably not random.

So set your standards high and say, “Guide me and don’t be subtle.” I have a friend who used to say that at the end of every prayer: “Don’t be subtle.” Because if you ask for things that aren’t subtle, you’ll get them. The intention and the request serve. It can be filled. I think if you don’t request and you don’t pay attention, you don’t get signs that are as dramatic. So if it just feels like, “Meh, I saw a tree,” that’s not a sign. Go for the gusto. Go for something that is like, “Wow, that’s unusual.”

Oh my gosh. We had this thing, the three of us, me and Ro and Karen, the throuple, we had this thing with “Let’s manifest money” the other day, and we each named some money—I’ve told you to do this before—that we felt could easily come from no cause of ours, just money that comes from nowhere. And we all wrote them, and Karen wrote down $2,000, and she said, “But I’m retired, I’m not even working anymore. That won’t happen to me.” And then she went and got the mail. And the next day we were talking about our little money manifestation exercise, and she said, “Oh, I should show you something.” And she went and got a $2,000 check that had come in the mail for her as a repayment for a loan she’d made that she didn’t expect would ever be repaid. And this happened five minutes after we made the deal! And she was like, “Yeah, I didn’t think much of it.” And we were like, “Wait a second! You need to stop and salute.” You need to say, okay, the rider just rewarded you. You manifested it, you said you wanted it, it came. You’ve got to pay attention to that.

So don’t pay undue attention to the stuff that’s just obviously could be random, but when something happens that is that perfect, do stop and say, “This could be random, but it sure doesn’t feel like it.” And if those things keep stacking on top of each other, which is how it always happens for me, then it gets more and more statistically improbable that that is not caused by some sort of connection.

All right, I love that question. Another one: “Does jumping the tracks impact intergenerational patterns?”

Yes, absolutely. Because when you jump the tracks and you’re seeing more clearly, anybody in your ancestry who was under illusion of some kind, they could have been trained to be pessimistic or they could have undergone trauma that left them reeling and half-awake or whatever. And then you jump the tracks and go into a place of “I am being guided. I feel it. I know it. I trust it and my life feels so much less scary to me now.” If you do that, it is like going back to your ancestors and saying, “It’s okay, I fixed it. You don’t have to bear the guilt for this anymore. And I figured out the reality that was the reality you weren’t able to see that was causing delusion.” And I actually believe that you can retroactively heal family lines that way, retroactively heal your own self the way we do in trauma recovery, but also even go to people who aren’t alive anymore, people you have never met, because you become the solution to the problem they couldn’t solve even with their best efforts. And then the generational patterns going forward are very different because you’ve changed it.

All right, someone else says: “Besides being in nature asking for guidance, how can we enhance that guidance? I want now to delve towards sociology or health topics into teaching.”

Okay, so you lean into what fascinates you. You go down internet rabbit holes of what interests you. You want to, I am not sure what you mean about delving towards sociology or health topics, but if that’s what you want to examine, to look for guidance, you can say, “I want information about this certain topic. I want it to come from a sociological direction. I want to know more about…I want to be guided into ways to take care of my health.” So you can make it a specific topic and you don’t have to go into nature. Just be still. Just go into yourself. You’ve always got it written in you. It’s written in your desires, it’s written in your yearning, the longing in your heart for something maybe kind of vague. And you have to sort of figure out what that longing is. 

Ro and I were talking about how we want to sort of create a container where people can sort of cocoon to awaken because I think the time has come. And it wasn’t quite right, it wasn’t quite right, it wasn’t quite right. And then somebody said to us, “Well, here’s a kind of ordinary angle you could take on it. You could combine it with pragmatic stuff.” And suddenly it was just like boom! The horse had stepped sideways, there was full release, everybody felt a burst of energy, we all started laughing out of joy. That’s the feeling that you want. And you don’t have to be in nature to experience it. You can do it with a group of people even as long as you’re all going inward and feeling what wants to happen and then testing it in the outer world.

Okay, someone else says: “Looking for guidance with processing anger and frustration, how to remain calm and kind when constantly dealing with the rise of anger?”

So anger is because there’s a perceived injustice, because something you need is not available to you or something you cannot tolerate is present. And anger is teaching you what that thing is, what the thing is you can’t live with or the thing you can’t live without. And if you can see it as the psyche’s intention of pushing you toward an awakening to what’s making you angry, it is an awakening of justice. So you’ll think that this isn’t right, something’s not right, something’s not right. Instead of saying, “I should be fine, I should be zen, I should be patient. I should be kind,” sit down and say, “What is my anger teaching me? Where is justice? What do I absolutely need to have that is not being afforded to me? Or what is absolutely intolerable that is present?” 

And you sit down and you really parse it out and get really clear. And then you can go about taking action, whether that is building something, making something, engaging in civil disobedience, breaking away from a friendship or a family relationship. Whatever it is that’s causing the anger, you get a clear step toward justice and that’s when you take the action. And you’ll know it because anger itself is the flutter against your flank, and when you figure out, that would be the step that restores justice, peace, peace, peace, peace.

Question: “How do you know what’s the next right move?”

This is pretty much the same thing. You feel around, you feel what you want to have happen, you think through the particulars of it, and you wait for the feeling of, “Ah! Okay, okay.” There’s like everything sort of perks up. You get a little more energy coming into you. You may smile spontaneously, you may even pump your fist. You may say, “That’s what I’m going to do.” And if the fluttering continues, if nothing’s working and you can’t figure it out—this is how I learned to make money. I could not get a job. And so I sat in my room and went, “Okay, I have chronic illnesses. I can’t sit, stand, or use my hands. I have three little kids, I don’t have childcare. I have a PhD in sociology. What the hell good is that going to do me?” 

And it just came out that people wanted me to help them understand how to get through the world. And that’s all I wanted to do was tell people how to get through the world. And so they started paying for me. I didn’t even ask people for money. They asked if they could pay me. That was how it happened. They asked me if they could pay me and I was like, “Oh, I don’t think I’m worth that.” But I was, I’ll tell you frankly, I really was. And you are really worth something. You are really worth people paying you for something. I promise you, you are. And it’s a thing you’ll love to do as well. And that’s how you’ll know what’s the next right move.

[Another question:] Did I paint the painting behind me? 

Yes, I did. I painted it as the cover of a novel I wrote when no one wanted me to write a novel, but that felt good. And I’ve never done a sales campaign on that book. And it’s called Diana Herself. If you want to trek over to online bookstores and buy it, and there it sits. And I didn’t actually know what constituted a good, a successful book. There’s this weird thing in publishing where no one will tell you what books actually earn. It’s so weird. 

But because of my wonderful agent, I started learning the business after 30 years, and I found out that book did very well and I got a gold medal for the cover design and stuff. But I just wanted to do stuff. I was sitting in my house going, “I want to make a book. I want to write a book about a woman and a pig, and I paint a picture, put it on the front.” And I got awards for it, for the book and the cover. Yeah, but it’s all this same thing. I can’t do normal society. But this works because it’s nature. It’s nature, it’s God.

Okay, three more questions. [First:] “How do you get over decision paralysis from fear of narrowing options?”

You just let it flutter and flutter and frighten you until you finally go, “All right, if I step out of fear, peace.” So if you are revving it up, stop revving it up. Feel for the flutter of indecision. That means keep thinking and feel for the stillness. We didn’t do our Stillness, Silence and Space meditation. I’m going to do it at the end. Those of you who need to go can jump off.

[Question:] “What is your definition of healing?”

My definition of healing is the discovery of acceptance for what is present now because that heals now. And things that I’ve had like injuries that have healed, guess what? My body’s still aging, it’s still going to break down. But when I was lying on my bed for eight weeks after a foot surgery, I could be present now and I was healed in that moment for that moment. Now my foot is fine in this moment for this moment. If it breaks down again, I’ll have to find a way to be fine in that moment, for that moment. And I will stay healed in that way. Thanks for that question.

Couple more. [Question:] “When we have many creative interests, AI is on the rise, and solid jobs require expensive training, how do we dial into our intuition to find another way?”

That’s what this whole thing has been about. Learn what it feels to have the guidance as a flutter. We look for guidance as, “Here it is, honey, you can take, we will give you things.” No, it is bothering you, bothering you, bothering you, bothering you. “Oh, I took a step toward what I wanted in a certain way, and all the bothering stopped. I feel really quiet.” And then you’ll get to the point where you can practically hear angelic beings cheering for you when you get that.

And the last question: “After getting a sign, what should be the next move?”

Stop and celebrate that sign! Another thing you have to do to train a horse, or a person, is that when they do it right, when they learn a new thing, you stop and celebrate. You take all the pressure off. You curl up on the couch with your sweetie and a bowl of popcorn and a crappy movie, or binge something wonderful on TV, and you say, “We thought of something today,” or “I figured something out today,” or “I listened for guidance today,” and that’s enough to celebrate. You stop and you stroke your horse’s neck and you tell that horse what an excellent horse he is and what a great team you are. 

And when you do this, I swear to God, you have guides who are going to be celebrating with you, who are going to be cuddled right up with you there on the couch, coming closer and closer to the point where you’ll be able to feel them almost pushing you in gentle directions. And you realize there’s always been a rider and the rider knows where to go. And you’ll always be gently and lovingly taught if you just learn to listen to the flutter and listen to the peace.

So now I’m going to spend a minute in our Silence, Stillness, and Space meditation because that is where I go when I have had a bit of guidance and I want to celebrate. So let’s end with that. So breathe in, let it all go. Shake out any tension and trigger your brain. Trigger an open focus move in your brain with the odd question: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes?

Don’t answer it. The question is, can you imagine? And just let it float there. Can I imagine the distance between the top of my head and the bottom of my chin? Can I imagine the space between the base of my spine and my sacrum and the top of my spine where it goes into my skull and I imagine the space inside the matter of my body because I am made mostly of space. Space that is continuous with every other thing in the universe. Can I imagine the space inside my body?

Can I imagine the silence under all the sounds I’m hearing right now? Can I imagine the stillness that holds everything I do and every action I take, the stillness that holds me when I’m asleep, the stillness that holds me when I’m running and hurried the stillness that holds me right now? Can I imagine that space and stillness and silence are awake and loving and containing my life, guiding me gently, gently toward the next step and celebrating with me in wild, wild, loving celebration when I learn to step sideways?

Thank you all for being here. Thanks if you stayed late, and thanks for your questions, always. I love you and I hope you have a wonderful week being guided. See you next time.