No, I have anxiety sometimes, but now I have to say I do know how to turn it off, and it works. And it’s always nice when you’ve written a book and you’re using the method in the book and it works. Very comforting.

The thing about writing a book in this day and age, it used to be I’d write one, you write for a year, then they publish it for a year. It takes a year to get all the publishing pieces in place. And then you have a launch and you tell people, “I have written a book and this is about thus and such.” This was all set up before the internet. Now I write a book for a year and I’m like, “Guess what? I’m writing a book, you guys.” Only, it was three years ago I started the research. And I started telling everybody on The Gathering Room about my research, and then I sold the proposal and then I wrote the book so it went deeper. And I told you, as I went, all about what I was writing, and then I recorded a bunch of podcasts with a bunch of lovely people. So it’s like the publicity part that usually came after the book came out has been going on for years. And like, you guys already know as much as I do about this book.

But—but I thought, “What can I tell them today that I haven’t told them already?” And I had some ideas because along with the other people who run my Wilder community online with me, we have been designing a deep dive into the subject matter of this book, which is called Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose. I think I have a copy of it somewhere. I’m always forgetting little things like that. 

And those of you who are in the Wayfinder Life Coach Training, this gets folded into your curriculum as well. So you’ll hear it too. But I thought as we’re doing the deep dive, the thing about living with this through the whole research process, writing process, testing things on readers and on clients process, and then the interview process, you actually do get much deeper perspective on what you’ve written than you might if you just were sitting at home waiting for it to come out and hoping it sold well, which is the way it used to go.

There it is. They did a spectacular job on the cover, it really—the book’s all about spirals in the brain and ways of being creative, and they did an exquisite job of capturing that on the cover. And everybody on the publishing team has been amazing. It’s been lovely.

But what I wanted to do right now is tell you about some of the deeper things because of the deep dive as we’re designing the deep dive. Oh, and if you’re in the Wilder Community, it’s free. It is scot free. And yes, it’ll go on for a whole year. We’re going to be really, really investigating all the stuff that I put in this book.

So it’s in three parts, the book. They’re called The Creature, The Creative, and The Creation. And what I discovered about living beyond anxiety is that first you have to acknowledge that the nervous, anxious, scared parts of you are, they’re like little tiny animals that are very, very alarmed and that you cannot use any fancy model of analysis or even medication to just sort of bash that little creature into a state of calm. You can’t force anyone into a state of calm.

So another way of looking at the creature/creative/creation trio is to think of the first one as calming the creature. And there are ways to calm a creature that we all know instinctively. If you found a little starving kitten on your doorstep, you would not look at it and think this cat needs to be analyzed and drugged so it won’t be nervous anymore. You would give it kindness, you would give it gentleness. You would approach it very softly. You would put all of your emphasis on gentleness and creating a space to heal. That’s the first thing you have to do to get beyond anxiety.

Now, as I’ve talked about this and practiced it—because I’ve really needed to, what with the anxiety of a book launch—I’ve realized that setting up to be kind to yourself, so any time I feel the slightest bit of anxiety, instead of trying to outrun it or try to push it down or try to analyze it and fix it, what I do is I go immediately to kindness. And you find that if you bring kindness to yourself every single time you feel even the slightest bit anxious, kindness starts to permeate you. And it starts to, and you’re only kind to yourself at first. You don’t need to worry about anybody else. And the kindness starts to fill you. And it ends up just feeling like you’re saturated with this beautiful sensation. It’s not sentimental, it’s not maudlin, it’s not making you a victim. It is just kindness.

And it reminds me of a time when I was very, very sad for several years and I memorized the poem Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye. And the end part of it I will quote to you because it’s one of the favorite things I keep in my mind. But I have to say as I’ve used kindness to respond to anxiety, I’ve come to understand this poem at a very felt level. I was thinking about it before, now I feel it. She wrote, “Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it until your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore. Only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say it is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.”

And I have to tell you that because I have such an anxious personality, I have had to trigger kindness over and over since I decided that this was the first step beyond anxiety. And it’s like, oh, it’s always with me like a shadow or a friend. It’s something, it’s like being able to feel a warm hug whenever you decide to feel it and you create that within yourself. My friend Jill Bolte Taylor talks about the part of the brain that creates that environment for the other parts and holds it with kindness. So that’s the first thing is this oceanic quality of kindness that begins to open up.

Now the second thing, after you’ve calmed your creature, that’s not the end of it. Because if you just go to calm and go to calm and go to calm, you’re going to get spun out into anxiety again because there are all these pressures on your brain, from your social environment. We tend to be anxious. We have a negativity bias, as I keep saying. But if you start using the parts of the brain that are creative, you actually sort of rob energy from the parts of the brain that are anxious and you start a different pattern in the brain. So when you are presented with a problem, there are two ways you can go with it. You can panic and try to solve the problem because you really, really have to. Or you can be curious, calm, confident, and creative and say, “What am I going to make? What am I going to create to change this?” And immediately you get calmer, and you will find that being in a panic is not a creative state and therefore can’t solve your problems, especially problems you’ve never encountered before. For that, you’ve got to have creativity.

So when you start using creativity, so I get kind to myself and then I’m like, “Hmm, what shall I do to deal with this problem?” And what happens is that everything becomes material for creativity. There’s something called functional fixedness where you see an object, you’re taught an object, and you’re taught how it is to be used. So for example, I have a pair of glasses, I need a pair of glasses to read up close. And that is what they’re for. They are for glasses. Do you know how many things I can use glasses for? One of the things I use them for most often is to stir coffee is the one thing I have. Now that may disgust you. You may be saying, “Never use the temple of your glasses to stir your coffee, that is vile!” Well, that’s your cultural perspective on it. I happen not to agree.

And now the objects in the world and the situations in the world that I see are not functionally fixed as much as they used to be. There are all kinds of solutions to everything, and they just pop up. Because the more you practice solving problems creatively—which I did just to get out of my anxiety—the more you start not just solving problems, but making stuff that’s actually really fun and cool in your life. So you become a creative, but you don’t need to worry about being judged for not being able to draw or dance or whatever it is. It’s about making anything that creatively solves a problem. So suddenly, you’re living in an ocean of kindness, and all around you are the solutions to all your problems and they’re just popping at you in a way they never have before because you’ve changed your brain into a creative state.

And then the final thing I call The Creation. And that happens when you become so loose and creative in your way of engaging the world that you realize you really don’t know much about the nature of eternity or about what consciousness is or what we actually are or what we’re meant to be doing here. You come into a profoundly open mind, and that is when the creation itself starts to pick you up and tumble you like a mother dog playing with a puppy.

Have you ever seen a golden retriever mother playing with her pups? They’re the most playful dogs. And they’ll just roll and they have such soft mouths. They gently hold each other with their mouths or trim each other’s fur, and they roll around and they bounce and they’re having this beautiful time in very intense activity that is all a celebration of love and consciousness in material form. And as you get away from fear and into the creative part of your own brain, it delivers you into this world where, as Mary Oliver said, “Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination.” And that’s what happens, everything begins to come to you.

So I was just in Wilder, my community, we just had a shindig. We have shindigs at the new moon. It’s a little after the new moon, but we had a shindig and I was telling the group in there about how your imagination starts to put things together, but then you start to see synchronicities. So the other day, our little 4-year-old Lila was having a meltdown, not a real meltdown, just she was getting fussy. And I said, “I’m going to distract her with a cool story.” Is it okay to tell this? Just leave out the bit?

Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Okay. So I told her—I was just consulting with the Gracious Badger, Rowan Mangan. So we were at the beach when we were doing IVF and trying to conceive Lila. And obviously we know it worked, but when you don’t know if it’ll work, it’s really rough going. And we were talking about it and then we were looking out to sea from the beach, and suddenly out there a cloud formed and a water spout came down and it’s like a little tornado at sea and it picks up water and it creates this big maelstrom coming down from the sky, coming up from the ocean. And we looked at it and thought, “Maybe that’s our baby. Maybe that’s our baby out there expressing herself or himself or their self in a way that is more master of the universe.” It was just a thing that we talk about. It’s not like we believed it, but we filmed the water spout.

And the other day I told Lila about it and we said, “We talked about maybe that was you.” And then I was like, “I shouldn’t have said that to a 4-year-old. I don’t want to make her think things that aren’t really true.” And then I went to physical therapy and they usually have a table with magazines on it at my physical therapy. And I sat down to get ready and all the magazines were gone. And the only thing on the table was a book by a person named Robert Beck. And on the cover it said “It’s Personal” and it was an oil painting of a water spout. I’ve never seen a painting of a water spout, but it looked exactly like the one we saw at the beach. 

All right, this is just what I mean about how you get tumbled up in creation and you start to see things that just, maybe they’re the product of selective attention, who cares? They’re amazingly fun and affirming and joyful and they do start to add up. I mean, that was just one synchronicity. But I’ve had events lately where there were like 12 coming at me all at the same time, way beyond statistical probability.

So the Deep Dive Beyond Anxiety is worth going to, and it’s deeper than you can go in this book that I just wrote. But I do hope that you use the book because the way to get into it is just to read it and then do the stuff and then keep doing it. And it really, really, really drills you down into things that are so fabulous and fantastic about human life in these bodies. And I hope you experience all of them because they are fantastic. Oh, I just got a text. 

In the Deep Dive, by the way, there will be videos from me every month about each chapter because there are 12 chapters. We’re going to do it for a whole year. We’re going to do a monthly live Q&A. We’re going to have group discussions with this incredible group of people, and there are a whole bunch of other bonus resources and activities that I’ll tell you about if you go there.

All right, good. I did that. I said the things, and now I am taking the questions. Anyone? Oh, I don’t see any. Ah, there’s nothing here. Can I see it on your phone? Sure. I don’t have any questions. They’re not here. Hang on, hang on. Don’t be anxious. Roey, the Gracious Badger’s here. It’s not working. Let me, show it to me on your computer, then.

Rowan Mangan:
All the technologies are breaking down, the robots are taking over.

Martha Beck:
Here we go. All right. Okay. PC Longston says, “What are ways of making things that aren’t art, music, or dancing? Is cooking one? Other examples?”

Oh yes. Cooking is definitely another one. Conversation is another one. Creating a group connection, like going to lunch with friends or creating—one of the most creative things in my life is a five-person email, or sorry, text thread where these are the funniest people I know, and only the very best things go on that thread. And that is one of the, and we bring in memes that we love and we share ’em with each other, but they have to be good. And that is an incredibly creative act. Any time you, for example, rearrange your furniture or try to deal with your hair or make a birdhouse or put out birdseed and take pictures of the birds, I mean, it’s just everything human beings do is creative. We are the most creative species in the history of the world, so far as I know. We have found dinosaur bones, but we have not found little dinosaur houses that they made for themselves. We have not. So I think we’re the most creative, and everything you make is creativity. 

So if you’re anxious, one of the things that I would do—first, kindness—remember this is one of the things people think that, “Oh, if I’m anxious, I need to do something creative.” Yes. And before you do something creative, you have to do something kind. Because as long as the kindness is missing, your brain is going to stay locked in this little spiral of anxiety which shuts down your creativity. So you go to calm, you go deep into kindness, you get really, really like this wonderful, warm, mushy feeling of kindness. And then you say, “What could I make that would be fun?” Like, choosing what to watch for TV tonight, that’s still a creative choice. And you’re participating. If you watch a fantastic show on TV or online, you are participating in creativity. If you know any postmodernist criticism, the movie or the TV show you’re watching belongs to you as an artist when you are taking it in as an audience member. So there’s a massive array of things that are creative. Please don’t think I mean you have to do something fancy, although if you like to dance or write or draw, you’re going to love it.

All right, I’m bringing another computer in. Brandy says, “Where will you be hosting the monthly chat about your book?” That’s in Wilder, the community. Right, Ro?

Rowan Mangan:
Wildercommunity.com.

Martha Beck:
Wildercommunity.com, all one word, wildercommunity.com. And it’s certainly not the only thing we do there. We have a great time in there. So I hope you come and check it out and see what you think.

OutKat says, “What do you recommend for people who have trouble tapping into creative artistic pursuits?”

I’m so glad you asked. There’s two things. First thing is you definitely need to be kinder to yourself. And I know you may think you’re being as kind as you should be to yourself, I don’t believe that. Because anyone who’s in a state of complete—the state of being accepted is automatically creative. I keep shouting to y’all about the study that was commissioned by NASA to find creative geniuses, and they found that 2% of adults were creative geniuses. But when they finally decided to give it to children, four- and five-year-olds, they found that 98% of them were creative geniuses. Somewhere between four and five years old and adulthood, society kills our genius and it does it by making us anxious. So if you’re having trouble tapping into creative pursuits, be kind, be kind, and then be kinder. Then when you’re really feeling kind, just ask yourself, “What do I like to make?” What feels even—the subtitle of the book is Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose. The first step away from the anxious state after you’ve gotten kind and calm is curiosity. “What makes me curious?” Go on some kind of social media platform and get an algorithm going that shows you things you love to look at. The things on my—I’m on Threads, for example, and I have science, I follow sciency things, I have animal things, I have birds that dance, very big topic for me. All the things that I plug into that create my algorithm, help me enjoy the world more. And that is a creative act. Participating in receiving art of any kind in any genre is a creative act. Going for a ride in the car and really looking at the clouds is a creative act. Just ask yourself, when you’re in a state of deep self-acceptance, “What do I like? What am I curious about? What would I like to know?” And then maybe “What would I like to make?” 

So be gentle, gentle, gentle. This is the hardest thing is to remind people you don’t jump into the part that’s about “getting something done right.” You start with the way you would treat a starving kitten that was all cold and wet, and you have to get that kitten calm, fluffy, and dry before it’s going to start playing. It’s just the way it is.

Oh, and the other thing, the thing is, you may be very physically tired. You will not feel creative if you’re physically tired. One of the things about our culture, which is—get ready for a nice word—anxiogenic. It makes anxiety. It is an anxiety factory. And I mean that on many levels. One of the things it does is it wears us out. It burns us out. And if you’re burned out, it is not kind to say, “I must be creative.” You will be anxious because the body that is exhausted and being pushed to keep going is afraid. It’s afraid it’s going to be worked to death because that’s the way things are going.

So one of the things I say in the book is come to a full emergency rest. And I had to do this when my first three kids were really little and I was working and my then-husband was gone all the time, and it was hard to work rest into the day, but I just lay down the second I could and tried to soak in all the rest that was possible. And if you have the opportunity to call in sick for a couple of days, lie flat and allow the well to fill. You cannot just force your brain to produce more hormones that will get you galvanized when you’re in a state of exhaustion. The body doesn’t work that way. We almost all need more rest.

Okay, ShineOnAndrea says, “How might medication get in the way of this process?”

Hmm. It could—one thing I’ve heard a lot is that tired people who get brain fog and confusion will be put on something to pep them up, and that can bring them to a state where they’re pushing themselves beyond their limits. And then later they tell me, “That was what really burned me out.” I am not saying no to drugs. Don’t say no to drugs. I think there are wonderful medications. Medication, if I hadn’t had medication for fibromyalgia, I’d be dead. I really, really want you to be careful and gentle with yourself about this. But if you have an instinct that a drug they’re having you take is not good for you, trust yourself. Be kind to yourself. Tell your doctor, “I need to change this,” or get another doctor. Do not take a medication that you know in your gut, in your body, is doing something harmful to you. Don’t do it. Be creative. Get away. See, that’s a creative act. “How am I going to get a different doctor to help me with this?”

Rowan Mangan:
Never go off your meds without talking to your doctor first.

Martha Beck:
And never—Roey has just reminded me—never go off meds without talking to your doctor first. That can be pretty scary. So, kindness, kindness, kindness, gentleness, and then creativity in that case, as in any other case with any other problem.

So Jacqueline says, “Can this be applied to a PTSD response? The one that says the world is not a safe place. Sometimes the anxiety I have isn’t a problem, I just suddenly don’t feel safe, usually grit and bear it.”

So glad you asked about this. A whole chapter in my book is about the different parts of you that may have been traumatized and how that is a physiological response. So you can’t relax yourself out of a response to trauma. The way the brain does this is if something bad happens to you, say you’re in a car accident, and right before that, you saw someone holding a red balloon, the body-mind at a very primitive level will associate red balloons with the car accident. And you may not even know it’s happening, but every time you see a red balloon, you freak out. Noticing how this happens and then being gentle with the animal that has created this construct—because it’s not verbal—you can’t analyze it away, you can’t preach it away, you can’t say, “Red balloons have nothing to do with traffic accidents.” 

You have to, well, I don’t really have time to describe how to deal with it, but it’s in the book, where you have to gradually desensitize the animal of you, the creature, and that can be done. Trust me, I have done a caboodle of it, so I know it works. But gentle, gentle, gentle.

Okay. Teddy says, “The big fear is always that attempting to live life creatively and all that will result in being broke. How do you lean in against that fear?”

Oh, there’s a whole thing in the book about this, and it’s about what I’ve observed in 30 years of coaching and living this way, that when you calm yourself, become your real, vibrant, alive, joyful self and start making the things that are joyful to you, that’s the place where Frederick Buechner says “your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” And at that point, people, an economic ecosystem will start to form spontaneously around you. Ecosystems aren’t set up by someone who has like, “Here is energy, we’ll put this in.” But what I’ve noticed is that when we have yearning or desire and energy and then calm, we start to create ecosystems that take care of us economically. And we’re going through a period of massive economic disruption in our culture. It’s going to be really wild for a while. So I think this is the best way to go forward. And I’ve told this to a million clients and a lot of them have taken the advice and I’ve seen it work over and over and over. Hear me now, understand me later. Thank you for that question. That’s great.

And finally, Dr. Donna: “Do you find that once kindness and creativity have calmed anxiety that sadness emerges? I find myself free of anxiety and instead very sad.”

Yeah, that means that there’s an underlying grief that needs to be addressed. And you know what? You use the same thing with that. You hold it with kindness and you go through a stage of anger, which is really important, as well as sadness, over things that have transpired in your own life. And I don’t know what those would be, but the thing is, you don’t have to be afraid of the process of grieving that is there to set you free and make you stronger. We heal stronger in the broken places, and we resist healing when we’re afraid to go into the grieving process. So congratulations for getting to the grieving process. That’s really, really hard and really, really productive. And it happens to all of us in a zillion ways. We have to know sorrow as the deepest thing inside before we know kindness as the deepest thing inside too.

So I hope you come deep dive with me some more. But it’s fun to sort of summarize this as Ro and I have been getting it together and preparing to, well, it’s already launched, isn’t it? And yes, the book is here. Actually, I’ve got to tell you, I’m so excited making the next book, I kind of wish that I could just do that.

Rowan Mangan:
Now, listen—

Martha Beck:
Uh-oh, Ro’s mad at me now.

Rowan Mangan:
Okay. This is a wonderful book. Don’t listen to its author. Listen to me. This is an incredible, life-changing book. She’s thinking about the next book. We’ll be grateful for that in a couple of years. Right now, go get this and then we can all be on the far side of anxiety by the time the next book comes. But go get this. It’s out January 7th. Join our Deep Dive in wildercommunity.com. We can’t wait to see you there, and let’s all give Marty a big clappy clap for her hard work hanging on.

Martha Beck:
Have a wonderful week. I’ll see you again on the Gathering Room!