Martha Beck:

Oh my God, how many times have I said I would end up loving to do: “Tomorrow Me loves working out on the exercise bike. Tomorrow Me loves studying Spanish for three hours. Tomorrow Me is going to get into that.” I’m always putting things on Tomorrow Me’s schedule. 

And most recently, I had a speaking junket where I gave one speech out west and then I had another speech out west. So I stayed out west for the eight days in between. Eight days when I’d just barely rejoined my family after another long trip. And I was like, “Ugh, I see the logic in staying, and it’s such a bummer that I’ll just be there for those eight days with not a lot to do. But book proposal, emails, texts, calendaring things, I mean I will catch up on my life. I will write something brilliant as my book proposal. Tomorrow Me loves that stuff.”

So I gave my first speech and went to the second city, and I was in this little tiny hotel room. There really was almost not room for the bed and also the bed was really, really soft and squishy, which I find, for some reason, excruciatingly painful. Go figure. Fibromyalgia, whatever. Anyway, there was one place I could lie down happily, and that was the luggage rack. It was sort of a bench. So I took the blankets and I went over to this little luggage rack, which was shorter than me and about as wide as my body, but if I bent my legs I would fit there nicely. So I bundled up, I slept there the first night and then the next day I was going to get up and start my hard day’s work, writing and answering emails and doing all the things.

And I basically clung to my luggage rack all day without even moving. I didn’t get up and go for a walk. I didn’t see the sites. I didn’t go have food. I just lay there on my luggage rack, dreading the hard day’s work I had scheduled. Now I know, because we do this in the Wilder community, we do this thing where we just show up and work, like 40 people or however many are there at a time. We’re all on Zoom—oh, we call it body doubling. And it’s also our co-work session. And I know that when I go into those things, when there are other people around me, for some reason, it is much easier to work.

Maybe it’s because there’s a scientist named Rupert Sheldrake whose work I love. He’s really into some woo-woo things, but he’s also brilliant. So he talks about, there’s research showing that if you give a rat a really difficult maze to run—or a mouse, I believe it was mice—and you teach this mouse to, you run a lot of mice through this maze, and it’s very hard for them to figure out, ta long time. But then you select one mouse and you get this mouse through the maze going through the maze so many times that he learns how the maze works and now he never does anything wrong. He zips through the maze. Then you put the other mice in. They have not even had an opportunity to talk to the first mouse. No communication—although they do sing when they’re in love, that’s a whole other Gathering Room, I believe—all the other mice get put in the maze and they can all do it faster.

Furthermore, if people in Japan or New Zealand, somewhere far away from an American research facility where this research is being conducted, if people way across the oceans have the same maze and they put a bunch of mice in the day after one mouse in the US—I think it was the UK, actually—has solved the maze, suddenly all the mice in the world can solve this maze more easily because one of them did it.

So when I’m with—this is what I was so stupid because I have done this so many times. I’ve been on the road, have a long boring gap in the middle where there’s not much to do, and I tell myself, “I will work, I will work and work and work.” Or everyone goes away and leaves me by myself. “I will work!” I don’t work. No, I work when there are other people near me. For some reason, the energy of other people working, just like the mice, makes me able to get through the maze in my mind that keeps me from working. So I clung to that luggage rack for eight straight days just watching baking show reruns. 

And every day I did try to work. I would get up and try and try and try and all the work, I had nothing in my brain for writing. I was supposed to make videos. I tried for hours, it all came out in garbage. Tomorrow Me did not like the work thing where I was by myself in a strange place, and all I had to do was hard labor.

And I thought about how we abuse Tomorrow Self. When I got back, I had an email inviting me to such an exciting, amazing opportunity and event, and I was on the fence about going because it would be another long trip away from my family. But it was such a—like if I gave you this opportunity, you would jump at it. So I was going back and forth and Ro was helping me, my beloved Gracious Badger of a partner. And she said something that really, really hit home. She said, “If you were packing right now to go there, if you were there today, would you want to do this?” 

And it involved a lot of social dinners and parties and everything and I’d be like interacting with people. She said, “If you wouldn’t want to do something today, don’t condemn Tomorrow You to that thing.” I really don’t, I would not enjoy that experience. I can tell you. Because I’ve done it a thousand times. “Oh Tomorrow Me is going to love that party.” No. Today Me doesn’t like parties and Tomorrow Me doesn’t like parties. Today Me doesn’t like working all by myself and Tomorrow Me doesn’t like working all by herself.

So here’s the thing: I believe that we all have some fairly puritanical stuff in our heads from the sort of universal work culture that has spread throughout the world. And it really wants us to be puritanical. It wants us to condemn Tomorrow Self to do things that Today Self doesn’t enjoy. You’re supposed to be more righteous in the future. But I also believe that whatever Divine force there is in the universe—consciousness, call it whatever you want—I believe that it wants us happy. And I have made a whole career—a whole career, everybody—by saying, “And you can do this, go hang out a shingle, say you’re a life coach, do this.”

What I tell people is if something feels good and you love it and you want to do it, do more of that. And if something feels awful and you hate it and it feels like you’re grinding yourself to death on a cheese grater, maybe don’t do that. Back off it a little. And people are like, “Well if I did that, my whole life would fall apart.” 

And I think, “Well, if your entire life is based on doing things that make you miserable, yeah, it will fall apart if you start doing things for the joy of it.” But I’ve got to take it on as a challenge for me to come into resonance with what I believe the consciousness of the universe wants for us, which is to live in joy.

When we do our seminars in Africa, we take people tracking because tracking is a metaphor for how to live your life. And the track we’re looking for, as Boyd Varty always says, is the track of joy in the body. So if you are doing something and you feel joy in the body, plan to do more of it. If something comes up and you think, “Well I don’t want to do it, but Tomorrow Me will want to do it,” don’t do it. Because, as Ro was telling me, Tomorrow Me never gets here. Tomorrow Me is always tomorrow, and she don’t want to do it.

So I was thinking, okay, two things. Something you’re contemplating doing that you have a choice to either do it or not do it. You could cancel it. Like you’re planning to cook dinner, but you could also buy a frozen lasagna and cook it, whatever. So you’re planning to cook dinner, do you want to do it? If you love cooking, you’ll say yes. I would always say no, I don’t really care about cooking.

So never condemn yourself to doing tomorrow a thing you wouldn’t want to do today. Go through the things on your list that you think Tomorrow Me will want, but Today Me doesn’t want it—because Today Me is the manifestation of universal consciousness in your form, in your physical form. It’s calibrated to know where to go in life by the feeling of joy in the body or the feeling of pushback or tension or general mood deflation in the present.

So notice what you’re being guided to do, and it will always be that what you really love is what you should keep doing in the future. And what you really don’t love is not what you should keep doing in the future. I believe that God loves Today You, your preferences, your joy. So don’t over-promise things that you want Tomorrow You to do, and do start planning wonderful things that Today You would like to do but maybe you don’t have the time or the resources right now.

So I was thinking what would Today Me really love to do? I have this plan to build a little grotto in the woods near my house where I would go to meditate. That’s the plan. So that’s something I would really love to do, but I would never take time to do it, ordinarily. I’d let my schedule fill up. So I’m actually going to put in my calendar going forward, “Time to work on my grotto,” which I know I love. I gather stones and I’m making a circle and a place to feed the birds and everything. I’m going to put that in my schedule where it will absolutely remain unless an absolute emergency comes up. That is time I will spend doing something tomorrow that I would love to do today.

And I’m going to really consider the invitations I get, the plans I make to be a working engine. I’m going to consider those and think, “Would Today Self love that?” And if not, Tomorrow Self’s not going to love it either. And I believe the whole arc of your life will change if you start moving toward what brings you joy and away from anything that doesn’t bring you joy. And this is the first day that I’ve actually thought of going through the calendar and winnowing out the things that Today Self doesn’t love that I’m assuming Tomorrow Self will love. Tomorrow Self never gets here.

So love yourself now. Accept yourself now. And as you make the plans to not do things Today Self doesn’t love and to definitely put in, save time and money towards something that Today Self would love to do, as you begin doing that, your whole life does turn in the direction of a sort of deep spiritual happiness. This sounds very sort of nuts-and-bolts, and it is, but that’s one of the most important ways you can reorient toward the part of you—call it your higher self—that is longing for you to be free, joyfully free of all the burdens you carry and joyfully participating in any delight that is available to you. But we have to make plans to do that, y’all.

So that’s what I have to say about Today Self and Tomorrow Self and how it relates to our souls. If you do that, if you just plan things your Today Self would love and just don’t plan things your Today Self wouldn’t love, you will actually step into the full realization of yourself as a being. Sounds so simple and it is, but it’s huge too.

All right, we have questions. I’m going to move them to the center of my computer screen. So question: “I think thinking about Tomorrow Me is so, so smart, but how do you intertwine this with a woman’s menstrual cycles where every day is so different in terms of social desire and capacity?”

Basically, I would—a lot of people try to get, they set goals to do things that would be the maximum they could do on their best day. What I have learned, especially having the many years of chronic pain that I did, is only plan and only promise—if you have any way to work with it—only promise something you could do on your worst day and something you could tolerate on your worst day or something you could actively do on your worst day.

And always put that in because there’s always the opportunity to add things like work and socializing, whatever it is. But once you’ve only promised to do what you could do on your worst day, if the time comes up and it’s your worst day, it’s still okay. I’ve been working like this for all my life. I call them “minimum days.” Those are my plans, minimal. So yes, I totally get that about the hormones. But yeah, you just plan for what you could do on your worst day.

Next question: “Is this why I end up dreading things I’ve planned that anyone else would never pass up? Little epiphany, I think.”

I could have written that text, actually. I always end up dreading things that I’ve planned that anyone else would love. I mean I told a friend what I’d been invited to do and I could see her just recoiling with horror that I had turned down the offer. But every time I checked, the track of joy through my body was like, “I would not do that today. I would not do it today.” And that was so clarifying. So, “Would you do it today?” became my big catchphrase and I’ve been using it every time I get invited to anything ever since Ro said it. And then I don’t dread what’s coming.

Question: “Are the mice communicating through telepathic communication through the quantum field? I feel like my mental health impacts my teen son’s mental health even when we’re not together.”

Well, Rupert Sheldrake believes in something he calls “morphic fields.” So a field is an emanation of energy that affects different people in different areas and sometimes without any obvious physical means of communication. And he really looked at it in animals quite a bit. But there’s also evidence that we humans are connected through fields. So I’m not going to say, “Ah, no. How could your mental health impact your teen?” My first impulse is to comfort you and say, “Ah, it doesn’t affect your son at all,” but actually it does. So there are two things you can do about that: You can either really, really focus on making yourself happy. And there’s one study I’m remembering that showed that children of troubled parents, like people with depression and high anxiety, if the parent went to get therapy, the child’s mental health improved, even if the parents were in their eighties and the child was in their sixties.

So anytime you’re, in your lifespan, that you make things better for yourself, healthier for yourself, everyone who loves you and maybe other people who don’t even know you are positively impacted. The other thing I would tell you is negativity is not nearly as powerful as positivity. When we actually send out a signal of positive energy, it has a lot more impact. When we reward animals for doing a task instead of punishing them for not doing it, they learn much, much, much faster from reward and positive reinforcement than from punishment and negative reinforcement.

So you’re not destroying your son’s life, but if you have any opportunity to make yourself happy, do it for your child. And even clinging to a luggage rack and watching baking shows, it made me happier than anything else I could think of. I got up every single day I was there, I went, “What do I want to do? I want to get some oatmeal and watch a baking show!” And then I’d go to my luggage rack. It was ridiculous. But I truly think that if I had done something harder, it would’ve communicated not only through our words and phone calls and everything but through the field that connects me with my loved ones. They would have been less positively impacted that day if I hadn’t done what brought me a tiny bit of joy. In my defense, I was also getting really sick and I didn’t know it yet, and I got through the whole thing because I clung to my luggage rack and watched my baking shows.

All right, question: “Is it natural for the things that bring us joy to inevitably disappoint us at times? How do I navigate this, especially in terms of creative activities?”

Yes. Byron Katie says, “All pleasure is pain.” And I remember hearing that and thinking, “No, it isn’t.” Then I read a book that Nisargadatta Maharaj—I was going to say he wrote it, but actually somebody wrote down what he said—and he said, “What you call pleasure is just the interim between two pains.” And I was like, “Oh, I get it. Anything we attach to because it’s pleasurable goes away because of constant change and impermanence.” So if we’re clinging to something, if we’re attached to it, it’s going to change, it’s going to move. Or even if it doesn’t, we will. We’ll age, the situation will change.

I wouldn’t call that joy, though. I would call it enjoyment. I would call it pleasure. It’s pleasurable. But I wouldn’t call it joy because joy for me is something deeper, but that’s just semantic. Anyway. If you can find a place where you have equanimity and peace within yourself and then release your attachment to things that cause you pleasure and things that cause you pain, like don’t be negatively attached to pain by worrying constantly that you’ll be sick or something. And don’t be positively attached to pain by thinking, “Oh, I love the way I look, but I’m going to get old.” 

Shinzen Young, another zen monk I love, he’s a mathematician, and he says, “Attachment times pain creates massive suffering, and detachment times joy brings massive amounts of joy.” If we’re detached from something, if it’s pleasurable, we feel it far more. And if it’s painful, we feel it far less. It’s really odd and it’s all about letting go of attachment. And when you’re not attached to either pleasure or pain, a constant stream of joy starts to rise from somewhere in your center, and it’s very deep, it’s very peaceful. It’s not always what we would celebrate in our culture, but joy in the body is something we absolutely need to track. And it’s actually—that lasts, where pleasure and what we call happiness sometimes will inevitably end, but joy doesn’t have to.

All right, question: “Hi Martha. I’m a therapist and my next client is a 16-year-old and she is mean. How can I find my compassion for her?”

I suggest that you don’t try to access compassion for her because that is a lie to your body. If your body doesn’t like being around this client, you’ve got to acknowledge it, especially if she’s 16 because they know the minute we leave our integrity. Oh my gosh, she’ll feel it and she’ll play you. So I suggest you sit back with your notebook and write things. I saw a cartoon once where there was a psychoanalyst and the patient was lying down and the therapist was writing notes and he was writing, “Completely effing nuts.” I’m not saying you should tell that to the client, but I am saying that you should be honest about what you feel and then watch yourself feel it.

So there’s a compassionate self inside you that is watching you. In fact, you really can’t understand anyone else outside yourself, but that compassionate witness you have inside you can watch your different parts. And you can sit there and go, “Huh, there’s a part of me that wants to heal everyone and she’s included. And there’s a part of me that can’t stand this kid.” And just, “Oh, that’s really interesting. So I’m going to try to keep going in my mission to heal people while not trying to like this person.” And in the end, that will be easier and more relaxed and more joyful for you. And I think it gives you a better shot at actually making progress with a client. But maybe she’s a sociopath. That happened to me with a client once, and I just didn’t like her, and I tried to force myself to like her so hard. I’d think, “Tomorrow Me, yes, let’s do more free sessions because Tomorrow Me will like you.” Tomorrow Me never did. But you can use that as an opportunity to watch yourself so that you don’t take on things like that in the future.

More and more questions. Okay: “How do I balance a creative career for money and my own enjoyment? Tips?” I removed—you said, “It’s like walking a tightrope with the left and right brain.”

Yeah, creativity that you do for the joy of it, experimentally, they have found that when you’re doing a creative task and someone offers to pay you for it, you actually immediately get worse at it because creativity and money, they don’t really ride the same circuits in the brain. I think the best thing to do is always, always drop into joy first. Do things that you don’t enjoy only when you literally have to do them. I’m going to say this, something I say all the time: If you don’t have to do it, and you don’t want to do it, don’t do it. Never do it. So once you’re doing something for the joy of it, don’t let yourself think, “And this will bring money.” I know it’s hard not to, but while you’re in the creative process, abandon yourself to it. Get so into creating that you forget about the money. And that process is where we get the famous phrase, “Do what you love and the money will follow.” It’s not: Do what you love for money, and then you’ll get money that way. It’s: Do what you love—period—and money will follow.

That’s been my experience of life, and I can never quite explain it in a materialist perspective, but that’s how it works. Do it, do it all for the joy and let the money come as it will. And it may come the way you expect, and it may come in a totally different way, but I truly believe the universe wants us to be doing things for the joy of it. And we get rewarded not because we’ve been good little boys and girls, but because the universe is saying yes, yes, come over here. It’s a positive reinforcement to help us understand that we need to do those things that make us happy.

Too many questions to answer here. “What if the mind is conditioned to start and end the day with, ‘You haven’t done enough’? It’s a mean internal voice that makes it difficult to actually prioritize things Today Me would love to do.”

I believe you and most of us have that critical voice, and I suggest that we rebel. I suggest that we just become traitors to misery and saying, “You think I haven’t done enough? Well, F you. Today Me was happy.” It’s really amazing for me to live with my son who has Down syndrome and never questions whether he is done enough or not. He’s almost always content, and he knows exactly what he is going to do in the day, and that’s enough. So if he empties the dishwasher and has a workout with his trainer, and I say to him, “Do you want to help me wrap presents for somebody’s birthday?” He’s like, “No, I did two things today. I don’t do three.” He just won’t. He will not. And it’s working very well for him, and it’s a good example for all of us.

Okay, question: “What if it’s things you know are good for you and you’re just scared in the moment? That’s when I normally say I’ll do it tomorrow. How do I just do it today? Thank you.”

Great question. Try doing it today, the way I tried to work in that hotel room. If it just isn’t happening, make other plans because ultimately, your essential self will jeopardize and sabotage the things you are doing to Tomorrow You that are making you miserable. So yeah, try it today. If you can do it today, do it. If you can’t do it today and you hate doing it today and you don’t have to do it ever, never do it, ever. Tomorrow Us is off the hook. Future You is off the hook. If we follow this philosophy. Good luck.

Question: “I feel myself becoming a bit of a hermit, especially during the fall and winter. It’s not depression, just more a need for solitude. How do you balance being of service and remaining in integrity?”

I love this question because yesterday I got up and I said to my family, “I have decided what I am meant to be for the rest of my life. No, for the next little patch.” And they said, “What?” And I said, “I am a recluse. I am reclusive.” It gave me such joy when I realized I want to be reclusive, and I’m going to cancel everything that Tomorrow Me doesn’t want to do. And almost instantly, within five minutes of my rejoicing that I am now going to just be reclusive and not do anything, we had a really good idea for doing what I think will be an incredible event for people online. Yeah, I’m not going to give you too many details, but a very, very creative—a burst of creativity that was purely service-focused just came out at the moment after I decided, “I don’t want to see anybody. I don’t want to do anything. I really don’t care. I’m a recluse.” And then the service happens through you, and it feels like joy.

All right, one more question. Sorry, my voice still is not well yet. “I surrendered a year ago. I rest and do not force. I am at peace, but I also do not feel joy or excitement. Am I missing something?”

Huh. Yeah. If you feel you are missing something, believe yourself. Always believe yourself. Like anything I could say would have far less authority in your life than what you know right now. So sometimes when you’re tired, you just subside and that surrender you made may be what you needed to recover. But when we start to get rested, there’s a part of us that wants to go do something. So I may have told you the story about how when I was diagnosed with interstitial cystitis, yay, it’s a very painful disease. And the doctor gave me a hotline to call and I went home and they said, “You need rest.” So I rested forever, three days or something. And then I called the hotline and I said, “It’s not getting any better. I’m lying down. I’m not doing anything.” 

And God bless the nurse running that hotline. She said, “Well what would you do if you could do anything? If there was no pain?” I’d say, “I’d love to get up and exercise.” And she said, “When we want to get up and dance, lying in bed is harder. It is more stressful.” 

So I would ask you, when you get to the point where you’re thinking, “I’m kind of bored, I don’t feel a ton of joy,” maybe the energy’s come back and it’s time for you to look at lists of things that you did joyfully in the past and build on them for the future. I have loved the two long walks I took in Europe. I’m going to make more long walks in the future and take my family. That would be even better. So the fact that you’re missing joy or excitement is wonderful news. It means it’s time for you to have adventures again.

But always remember, folks, rest until you feel like playing and then play until you feel like resting. And don’t ever make Today Self do anything different and don’t make Tomorrow Self do anything different, and we will all become the people we are meant to be and have the experience our spirits came here to have. Thanks so much for being with me. See you again soon. Bye.