The Way of Integrity with Martha Beck

Susie Moore:

Welcome to Let It Be Easy with Susie Moore. Today is a very good day, my friend, because this interview is earth shattering. If you've followed me for any period of time, you know that I love, love, love, love Martha Beck. And when she agreed to come on the podcast, I nearly fainted and I spent so much time pouring into her most recent book The Way of Integrity. And you'll hear me say to Martha that I'm not sure I will ever be the same after reading this book. It's so transformational the way that she makes you connect to your true nature, the practical advice that she offers and the stories that she shares. Wow. If you don't know Martha Beck, she's a bestselling author, life coach, speaker, and she spent years teaching others how to connect to their true nature. She's got several New York Times bestsellers. She's also an Oprah Winfrey magazine columnist.

In fact, Oprah has called her one of the smartest women I know. She's passionate, she's real. I find that there are very few people who are utterly in their integrity only following the path of joy, the path of their own true nature. And Martha is one of those people. And this conversation means so much to me. I think my hope is that it will also mean so much to you and that you'll leave this conversation with who knows what, who knows what transformational tool or skill or takeaway that can utterly change the course of your future, always leading to your own joy. I won't talk anymore, just me. I'm delighted to bring you the one and only Dr. Martha Beck. Martha Beck here you're.

Martha Beck:

Susie Moore you're here too.

Susie Moore:

I cannot thank you enough for being here. I've been looking forward to this conversation. We booked it three months ago. I have devoured your book like, oh my gosh, the most desperately hungry human. First of all, thank you, thank you, thank you so much for being here and for writing this masterpiece. Wow.

Martha Beck:

Thanks for inviting me and reading it.

Susie Moore:

I actually feel, Martha, that I may not be the same again after reading this book in a couple of ways.

Martha Beck:

Really?

Susie Moore:

Yes. When I first heard the statement, integrity is the cure for unhappiness, period. I was like, oh, something felt right and honest just by hearing that. And initially I thought, like you explained in the opening, integrity has a slightly different connotation I think than what you mean in this book. So could you just clarify that for us upfront?

Martha Beck:

Absolutely. Integrity simply means intact. By the way, can you hear this all right?

Susie Moore:

Sure can. You sound great.

Martha Beck:

Okay. All right. A lot of people think that integrity means a Sunday school virtue, like church lady like, well, aren't you the sinner then? No, it's not that. It just means whole. And I like the term structural integrity. So if an airplane is in structural integrity, it means all its parts are working together and the thing can fly. If it falls out of structural integrity and the parts don't work together, it cannot fly or it crashes or bad things happen. We also have different parts of ourselves, and when we integrate them and we're aligned in all our parts, then we are in structural integrity and our lives can fly. And that's all I mean. No moral implications, it's just physics.

Susie Moore:

Yes. And I want to get that out of the way first. Because sometimes there is that like, oh, well you better behave. And that's way of integrity. And people say he's a high integrity guy, meaning he probably does what his wife wants or does what his church wants. And so the way that you define it and explain it is so, in the beginning, of course, first, so helpful. But one thing that I love, a sentence that you write in the book is that you explain the difference between nature versus culture and integrity versus duplicity. And I love how you said living out of integrity is a great recipe if you want to look good, but feel bad. And I was like, I know where I'm doing that.

Martha Beck:

Oh yeah.

Susie Moore:

And I don't want to deal with it.

Martha Beck:

And living in integrity is a way of feeling great, but looking weird. I'm going to warn you right now. Feeling great is so worth it. But we're all born, obviously we're born completely whole. We're not born lying to ourselves. But the moment we start getting socialized to go against our nature and culture just means any pressure from other people. There's little baby born to its true nature, and then by the time this little baby is six months old, it's going, oh, they don't like it when I cry. They like it much better when I smile. So the baby and all of us, even before we can talk, we hit this cultural pressure to abandon ourselves or parts of ourselves and we sell ourselves out hard. And it's not because we're bad that we lose integrity, it's because we're trying so hard to be good for other people.

Susie Moore:

Yes. And you shared too that you were this approval seeking lap dog and it worked for you. You're like, everyone liked me, they're like [inaudible 00:05:39].

Martha Beck:

Talk about looking good and feeling horrible. I had no integrity.

Susie Moore:

I actually feel like from my own conditioning, because when I grew up we lived in domestic violence shelters. There was a lot of chaos, a lot of abuse, addiction. I remember I have to make everyone happy. That's my role. And I've stepped into that quite well, Martha.

Martha Beck:

You're making me happy right now, Susie.

Susie Moore:

I'm genuinely happy. I could sing. I'm so happy right now. But it's interesting. I love, one part of the book that meant so much to me was when you speak about hustle and joy versus hustle. Hustle I think people just think is working hard.

Martha Beck:

Some people do.

Susie Moore:

There is a truth to the hustle of that. But when you share in the book that when you are smiling and you don't want to, that's hustle. When you're playing up to somebody, even though you don't agree with the situation, that's hustle. When you are just acting out of your nature. Could you speak to that momentarily? Because I feel like, well, we have to hustle, don't we? Is that the only way we can survive?

Martha Beck:

Yes, that's what we're told. But I looked up the word hustle, and in dictionaries I found five definitions that I think are hilarious. They described the whole scope of our entire culture in one word. The first definition is to get out there and make things work and find a way to succeed and show up for yourself. Hustle. That's number one. The second one is make something or force something or someone move very quickly in a given direction. All right. Okay. That's what we're trying to do. Another thing is to, it's been a long time since I wrote it, but it is to pretend to be something we're not. I had a heroin addict friend who called it running a hustle. Every time she'd go into a room, she'd figure out who she could please and get money from because she was running a hustle.

So it's to lie and prevaricate in order to influence people to do something. And then the last one was to prostitute ourselves. And that's when it's called hustling when you go out and sell yourself for money sexually. But we all sell out in other ways, even if we're not selling out sexually. And it's all hustling. And that mixture of it's the way to get ahead is the only way to survive. And you have to literally sell yourself into misery and horror. That's what we end up being stuck with in our acculturation.

Susie Moore:

And sometimes I think Martha or I've thought over the years, because I had a tech career for a long time in sales and there were lots of perks to it, but it wasn't my life's work. I thought that there was no choice. I thought I was doing something very virtuous, getting great health insurance, supporting my mom financially, being even the breadwinner in my marriage. I love, love, love, I was like, what? Took a text, sent it to my friends on the page where you describe often the most seemingly virtuous things that we do or the things that give us these halos or these halos that we perceive, are when we're most out of integrity.

Martha Beck:

Because the culture is very specific about how it wants people to work. And so broadly speaking, we have all kinds of cultures, family cultures, religious cultures, ethnic cultures, but pretty much all of us, everybody in the world is being affected by the culture that came out of Western Europe in the 1800s. And we call it modern western culture. Now, that whole thing is based on increasing material wealth. That is the bottom line for this culture. And it's not so much for a lot of other cultures, but we are taught to act like robots because we want to increase the amount of material wealth to the people higher up especially, all the time. So you're sent to school, most schools line kids up, kids of the same size and age, they put them all in same size desks, and they have them all do the same tasks at the same time.

That is not a natural situation. It was designed to make factory workers. And so our jobs, and so, oh, I have such a soapbox about this. And then we're told you're more virtuous if you leave your nature at the door and go act like a robot in school, at work. The fewer you have normal human feelings, and the more you serve the system, which is just about wealth, and by the way is destroying the world, the better you are. It's insane. It's insane. But we all believe it together. So nobody knows it's insane. It's like the emperor with the no clothes. And we truly think we have no choice.

Susie Moore:

And Martha, you are really the ultimate role model for someone who-

Martha Beck:

Oh goodness, we are in trouble.

Susie Moore:

But when you talk about going against, it's almost as if you had this soul contract to come into this earth, born into a Mormon family, with all of the ways that, you say, I've heard you joke that you are doomed to be a cultural outcast because of how life is designed and how you are so true to your nature. Do you still have moments, Martha, where you go, I don't know? Your expression, it's so funny. I love it. The change backs. The change back attacks.

Martha Beck:

Change back attacks.

Susie Moore:

Yes.

Martha Beck:

I'm hesitant to say no because that sounds like I'm putting myself on some pinnacle, but I've really been doing these things called integrity cleanses since I was 29 years old. And that doesn't mean cleansing away integrity. It means cleansing away everything else. And the more you do that, when I first started when I was 29 and I decided not to tell a single lie of any kind for a whole year, and I kept that resolution. I ended up leaving my religion. That meant leaving my family of origin, leaving my home, my profession, academia. I quit my job. By leaving Mormonism I lost not just my family, but every friend I'd made growing up in this Mormon community until I was about 17 and went off to Harvard, which is about as different as you could get.

And it was horrible. And there were a lot of change back attacks to the tune of death threats if I didn't go back to being a good girl, right?

Susie Moore:

Yes.

Martha Beck:

But now at almost 60, I'm like, yeah, I don't know. It doesn't happen anymore. And even does, I'm like, oh, you want me to be different? That's so cute. I just love you. It's not happening.

Susie Moore:

As I read this book and I see you model so much for us, like you being true to yourself, you following the steps that just only resonate with what's inside of you. I wonder, so as a reader, oh, I did the quiz in the beginning. What's your score? So my score was 23. By the skin of my teeth I got in there. I'd like to even share with you the areas that I'm working on your quiz.

Martha Beck:

Oh please.

Susie Moore:

But I imagine reading this book as someone who's done a lot of work on myself over the years, thinking, wow, I wonder if some people, hold this book in their hands, know the wisdom, know it's true at that level that you can't deny and go, it's too scary.

Martha Beck:

It's too much.

Susie Moore:

It's an ocean between me and the person. I would be an artist living in France maybe, but here I am with maybe four kids and I'm stuck. What would you say or what's your message for someone who just thinks it's too terrifying or it's simply impossible?

Martha Beck:

First of all, I have absolute empathy. And you don't have to move one iota out of the path that feels safest to you. Given that if you're moving away from your truth, you will continue to suffer more and more and more until something shifts, because your true self wants to be honest, to live what is within you. So don't do as I did, don't suddenly decide never to tell a lie for a year and do it that way. Make what I call one degree turns. So you figure out what's not right for you. And then you do just a little bit. You take out something that you were going to do that was selling yourself out, and you put in something that really feels good to yourself, like 10 minutes less of talking to a friend that you're a caretaker for, and they aren't really there for you.

10 minutes less of that, 10 minutes more of listening to an audiobook or watching a YouTube video that makes you happy. That's it. That's a one degree turn. And if you were on a plane making a long voyage and you turned one degree north every half hour or so, you wouldn't even notice it, but you'd end up in a completely different place. So that works. One three turns.

Susie Moore:

I love this because it's so accessible. And Martha, I love even the example that you share in the book about the guy who was unhappy and you said, spend 10 minutes less watching a TV show that isn't even satisfying. And I know you like TV. And he spent 10 more minutes with his dog. And then bit by bit, and you share how practice makes permanent. And you also shared in the book, which I learned from you, that we are biologically why to seek enlightenment.

Martha Beck:

Yes. It's [inaudible 00:15:10].

Susie Moore:

Could you speak to That for a moment? Because I've never really considered that.

Martha Beck:

It's not in our culture at all really, but people have been stumbling into it in Western culture for a long time. I talk about Dante or followed him through the whole book, but also people like Walt Whitman talked about this. Shakespeare's last place sound very much like some of the Asian masters who were fully enlightened. Enlightenment simply means that we stop seeing ourselves as separate, doomed little entities, and we get a sense of ourselves as a consciousness that pervades your physical body, but also goes beyond it. And it's not something that you believe as, I'm going to preach it to you until you just learn it. As you move away from falsehood and into what's true for you, you start really looking at things that scare you, even the belief I'm going to die, you start to say, wait, is that absolutely true? Can I absolutely know that that's true?

And as you drill down into your deepest honesty after you've gotten rid of all the surface lies, those things that scare you start to fall apart. And you get a much more East Asian view of what reality is like. It's not a dogma, it's not a man in the sky with a beard. It's the unity of consciousness and the joy of being. Sat Chit Ananda it's called in Sanskrit. And since I was an East Asian studies major in college, I feel like I was set up to recognize that. And now neurologists have found exactly what brain states cause that to happen. And they're very real and very accessible for all of us.

Susie Moore:

And you had this incredible experience, Martha, of enlightenment. Oh my gosh, I read it. Wow. And it's not something that, isn't it interesting, Martha, that the most beautiful things really, words can't contain them. There isn't the language. And I've heard of many other similar experiences. It's like this utter feeling of safety and people are changed. Is it the Satori, the word that is used to explain this?

Martha Beck:

Satori is a Japanese word that means to have a sudden flash of understanding that goes beyond language. I think it's because, I'm writing a book now that's more about that, and I think it's because the left side of the brain is more verbal than the right. And we think verbally, our culture is very verbal. And when that quiets down, the state of enlightenment isn't a state of exciting part of the brain and turning something on, it's about turning something off. So in the Dao De Jing, my favorite Chinese book, it says, in the pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added. In the pursuit of enlightenment, every day something is dropped. So you turn off the part of the brain that is constantly chattering. You turn off the part of the brain that is constantly afraid.

And what happens then is that the complimentary aspects of the brain, which always feels safe and think without words and perceive things holistically, that comes forward. And it's not a hallucination. It's the opposite of a hallucination. You can see, and there's no way to describe it. It's like you forgot you had a hand, and then you look at your hand and go, oh yeah, I have a hand. It's that obvious. But it blows the lid off your fear forever. It's like, oh yeah, this little doomed existence that I thought I had is not it at all. It's really something so much more joyful, so much more beautiful. And as you said, indescribable until one experiences it.

Susie Moore:

And you moved too to a very remote area where you spend so much time meditating, where you called animals. I'm like, this is true. This is Martha bringing heaven to earth somehow, or the separation no longer exists. The way that you live your life now, when you share that joy is always there. Actually this is one area on the checklist where I was like got a little bit of work to do here. The areas for me were, the one that I noticed specifically was, I think these two are similar. These were false for me. There's an undercurrent of contentment that supports me at all times. I feel that way a lot of the time, but in my integrity doing this quiz, honestly, I'm like, I don't know if it's there at all times, but it's there for you, which gives me that.

Martha Beck:

It's not something I have to sustain. It's something I just experience. And so there's no effort to it. And when I drop the effort of thinking or the effort of worrying even, it's like this mattress that just catches me in a state of complete relaxation. It's like, oh, there it is, and I'm just lying on it. I'm resting on it. And you get to it through questioning the things that make you afraid, not going against them, not turning your frown upside down and walking on the sunny side of the street and doing affirmations and all that, that just made me want to kill myself. Nothing made me more suicidal than affirmations about happiness. But when I said, oh, I'm sad, why? Okay, because life is a bitch and then you die. Okay, is that true? It's all about truth.

They say the truth will set you free, and there's no truth that you can learn in a book. It's like looking inside yourself, seeing what doesn't make you happy and saying, is that true? Can I absolutely prove it? Can I absolutely know it? You go at it not like a mystic, but a scientist. Is this absolutely true? And the fact is you can't prove that any of your perceptions are absolutely true. Because you could be dreaming or hallucinating everything. And so when you realize I'm never really sure of anything, in Asia, they call this don't know mind. And you relax into the fact that you can never know. And because that is true, that you can never know, the truth of being rises up to meet you in that truth. And suddenly you feel held.

One neurologist who studied this because he had experienced it, and then he spent his whole life studying, Andrew Newberg, he says it was falling into a sea of infinite doubt, which for some reason was absolutely benevolent and comforting and safe. So the opposite of the western view of I've got it all right.

Susie Moore:

Oh yes.

Martha Beck:

It's like, I don't know. And that's okay. And just when you think you're falling, something comes and catches you, and it's so sweet and so gentle and so benevolent. It's indescribable.

Susie Moore:

I can't wait to read your next book. I'm so happy that that's what you're working on specifically, this area and this expansion. When you think about integrity in, because you work with so many people as a coach, and they come to you and they seek your support, you have this exercise called the walking back of the cat. When it comes to really pinpointing almost like in slow motion, the moment where we just betray ourselves or we go against ourselves. And this book is so full of practical exercises. So like, wow.

Martha Beck:

I'm glad you found them practical.

Susie Moore:

Extremely. Could you walk us through that exercise? So if someone's like, well, I don't know. I'm just doing the right thing by my mother-in-Law, or I'm just doing the right thing by eating this, because you share this egg story. It's not a hugely dramatic story, but it happens often in small ways, these breaches of integrity.

Martha Beck:

I know that eggs don't make me feel good. I'm allergic to them slightly, and they're just not the best. And yet one day I found myself ordering eggs and eating them and knowing that I would feel bad afterwards. And then I thought, okay, the only way I would violate my integrity, when we do things that bring us some physical pleasure in order to cover over some emotional anxiety or discontent, that's what almost all addictions are, is just somebody who's out of integrity innocently trying to feel better about having abandoned their true selves. So what I had, walking back the cat is taken from Spycraft. So when something goes wrong, someone gets killed, an operation gets bungled, whatever, walking back the cat means taking it from the moment things went wrong and then going back five minutes. Was anything wrong then? Was anything wrong then, five minutes further, five minutes further?

Looking for the points at which the operation went haywire. So with my egg example, I was like, okay, I'm in a diner. When I walked in I was feeling tired and hot. Okay. When I was walking down the street, I was feeling tired and hot. I was in my friend's apartment, I was tired and hot, and I'd been borrowing a friend's apartment, and I had just cleaned it up and I thought, oh, I'm really tired and hot, I want to stop and rest and have a cold drink. And I said, no, keep going. We're almost to the end. And in that moment that I did not take care of myself by just taking five minutes and a cool drink of water, I lost my integrity. I wasn't being kind and honorable to myself at that moment, and I became unhappy and I took out that unhappiness on myself by eating eggs.

That's so small. But I've also had clients who were hardcore addicts and they were living on the street as junkies because of similar things of just abandoning their true selves at moments when they could have been kind and caring to themselves.

Susie Moore:

And so it's almost like being a detective in your life, observing those moments, but ideally trying to observe them in action. So when they're happening versus later.

Martha Beck:

What usually happens is you do it in hindsight, and we typically have these patterns of self-sabotage. I used to have a binge-eating disorder many years ago, and so eating is still one of mine. Some people smoke or steal or gamble or whatever it is. Anything that will get the brain to produce enough dopamine to feel good, even though we're out of integrity, that's the whole point. We're trying to get those brain juices to feel good. So what happens is you'll do your negative behavior and then you'll wake up out of the trance the next day or the next week and go, why did I do it again? And you walk back the cat, find the place you left integrity. Then if you can start to do that, you'll notice it sooner and sooner. You'll come out of the addictive trance sooner and sooner.

And I'll never forget how this happened with me with binge eatings. It got to the point where five minutes after a binge, I could look back and walk back the cat and say, that was the moment. And then the day came when I opened the fridge to binge and looked at it and said, I'm not hungry. I'm lonely. And I closed the fridge knowing that food would not help my loneliness and went off to try to figure out why I was lonely and I never binged again. But it was years getting to that point.

Susie Moore:

Wow. It's almost as if in those moments, that's when we're purely conscious, right? There's a real moment of, because it's so easy to keep going, do the familiar, and then when the results just show up and they're so unsatisfying, again, or that sabotage is there again and again. Do you find that in these moments when we are betraying ourselves, is there almost always, so in that experience with cleaning your friend's apartment and not taking a break, it was like the hustle that you kept with in that moment. Because you should just keep going.

Martha Beck:

Hustle, hustle, hustle.

Susie Moore:

I find in my life when I was thinking about it that often when I betray myself, it's because someone else won't be happy. Martha, I know that you shed in the book that so often we're afraid of other people judging our choices. And as a woman without children, who's never wanted children, some people are very, I hear interesting things about that.

Martha Beck:

So judgmental, right?

Susie Moore:

Well, I hear I'll change my mind. I've got time. I'll never know what love is. I won't know what it's like to be a woman.

Martha Beck:

Oh my God. I know.

Susie Moore:

I'm like, I'm pretty sure I know what it means to be a woman.

Martha Beck:

I think you do. Is that true? Is that true? I don't think it's true.

Susie Moore:

But when said it, you use that as an example too. I was like, yes, Martha's speaking about this. You were sharing that it's almost as if people take it as an attack on their way of being.

Martha Beck:

Either you do everything the way we do, or you're a threat to our way of life. So the funny thing, I'm gay and I'm marriage, so I am in a gay marriage. And in America it's considered a threat to straight marriage to have gay marriage. They don't mind divorce, which seems to me to be more of a threat. But gay marriage is definitely going to cause the breakup of so many straight couples. I feel it pulsing out from our house all the time. The marriages around us just falling like firewood. But the reason that people go that direction is maybe the standard definition of marriage isn't working for them very perfectly. Maybe they could stand to look at their relationship, find their own happiness, but the cultural structure of, I said I do, and now we're locked into this. We got a man, a woman, and a picket fence.

Okay, that's holding me together so I don't have to look at the things that are wrong in my own relationship. Now somebody gets married in a completely different way, and that means that the standard structure is not as solid to hold me in place. And because I'm not in my own integrity, which that's how to hold yourself in place, it's just stand in the truth. No, I'm relying on social categories to keep me together. And if there's a 6-year-old somewhere who is born looking like a boy, but thinks he's a girl, she's a girl. That is a threat to my identity. People, oh my God, all the isms, the racism, the sexism, all of that stuff is holding in place people's identity of who they are so they don't have to default to their integrity, which is the only way to actually be happy.

Susie Moore:

Martha, do you feel like life, the pursuit of integrity on our own terms, is this why we're all here? If you think about it, so some people believe you have many lives, and each time we have a soul age, and we had a past life reader, a wonderful past life reader on the show, and he said that often traditional religion is for younger souls.

Martha Beck:

Really interesting.

Susie Moore:

And then he said, at an older soul age, often you lose a lot of judgment, you have a lot of compassion. I just can't help but think, and he explained it in his own way. But if we have these multiple lifetimes, do you think that it's always inching towards integrity?

Martha Beck:

Well, it has to. Everything wants to be itself. Everything wants to return to itself. And it's almost like we would not go to a movie which opens with a happy family, and they're all having dinner and it's a really nice dinner, and then they all play part cheesy for a while, and then they go to bed, and that's the end of the movie. What we want to see is something terrible and conflicted and difficult and full of conflict and strife, and we want to watch someone figure out the puzzle and come free from that. Sometimes we watch tragedies where it's like, oh my gosh, that's what happens if you don't come back into integrity. King Lear is a play like that.

The Tempest is a play about someone in almost the same situation, Prospero who decides to forgive and to embrace the mystical side of his life and to base everything on love. And that's even more satisfying to see a drama where somebody is thrown into pain and suffering and then pulls from that a reintegration of integrity that allows this incredible, compassionate power to flood into the world. And I think it's the joy of that feeling. It feels so good when we stop, but I think that's why we do go into bodies that don't remember that they are deathless, consciousness made of pure joy and love. It's just a game.

Susie Moore:

And you take us through this with the divine comedy. Right through various stages, which I think we can all identify in our lives, especially the dark word of error, which you can set up camping.

Martha Beck:

Forever. Most people do.

Susie Moore:

Martha, I know that it's not our job to ever change others, but sometimes I feel like I could really step in and help you. And this is also a tricky thing.

Martha Beck:

This is why I am a life coach, and it's also why my family is always saying, get your God tentacles off the world. You are not here to fix people. Because it's so tempting to try to put it right, but it's out of integrity. If I ask myself, I need to change that person, is it true? It's never true. It's like when you suffer, I don't, it's not my turn. That's somebody else's game to play. However, the whole you're attacking my way of life thing is actually true, because if I stand in my truth despite what you think, it creates a shockwave. And I loved seeing this during the pandemic when we had the reckoning on race that rose up in the United States to look at the ugliest, some of the most evil things ever done on this very evil doing earth.

And people who'd been suffering ancestrally for hundreds of years, finally standing up and saying, we will not do this your way anymore. And it really got my attention. I'll tell you, I didn't think I was racist, but I really, really started figuring out where my privilege was and where I wasn't seeing other people. And it was a bracing shock to learn that I hadn't been in full integrity because I didn't take the time to learn the truth of other people's lives. So when they stood up, it caused me to change. And some people might actually feel threatened by that, but when I stood up and said, my son with Down syndrome is a wonderful, perfect being, and I will not be ashamed of him, a lot of people were like, what? And then they were like, okay. And they changed without much hassle, because I just wasn't going into the cultural mindset. And it helped them find their way out of it.

Susie Moore:

And you speak a lot in the book too, how often it's just small committed groups of people who drive, and you speak about, I forgot the name of the shape. The shape.

Martha Beck:

The fractal.

Susie Moore:

Yes. Yeah, the fractals. They're just abound in nature. Could you speak to that for a moment? Because when I was reading this, I was like, oh, Martha, this is just really muscle.

Martha Beck:

When you start having mystical experiences and you also were trained in social science, you go looking for the explanation and it's in nature, it's all in nature, it's in physics, and it's in geology. Fractal forms are actually the rule in nature. A fractal form is something, a pattern that repeats itself almost perfectly, but not absolutely at many, many different levels of size. So a tree has a certain shape and size. A branch from that tree will have a similar shape and size, but smaller. A twig from that tree will have a similar size and shape, but smaller. So fractals are shapes that recur over and over and over again at bigger and bigger levels of just plain size. So our nervous systems look a lot like the galaxy clusters that we see around us.

Susie Moore:

It's amazing.

Martha Beck:

And I believe that our behavior does that as well. So your behavior in any, say you're really hustling yourself and you really try to please people. You are going to gather around you people who want to be pleased, and other people who sell out to please them. So there will be a friendship group of people who are similar. And then there'll be a bigger social group, say, you all join a cult because it feels so great to you. And then there are a dozen cults, and the whole area starts to be that way. When you break out of a negative behavior into your integrity, the fractal of your life changes. And as a result, the structures around you sometimes can crack up like mine did when I left Mormonism.

But your integrity will start to fractal out around you, and you will draw in people who are seeking their own integrity and who are stepping into their own truth. And the sweetness of the community you find when you think, I thought I was all out by myself, I lost all my family, all my friends, my marriage, everything. And then it just was a matter of time and constancy before I gathered around me, or a group formed by itself around me of friends and loved ones who are beautifully in their integrity. And it's just, boy, the world becomes a wonderful place when that happens.

Susie Moore:

So this one shift, the one shift, it creates so much. We don't even know where it ends. We don't even know who it impacts, people whose names you won't know. I love how you shared in the book that when you're out of your integrity, one of two things happens, especially if you're playing up to people. Either you meet people or you're around people you don't want to be playing up to, because they're not your people. Or in addition to you are around people who are faking it like you are. And then you're in this group, this fractal of fakery. That's mine.

Martha Beck:

Yes. Oh, that's good.

Susie Moore:

This fractal of fakery, and then it's misery. And then you're like, why am I here? And then you're like, gosh, why am I drinking so much? Or why can't I sleep? Why am I causing problems in my marriage, even though that's a sweet part? I love how you always come back to this analogy of the airplane and you're like, it's not good or bad. It doesn't mean that there is something really here to be morally evaluated. It just is a book.

Martha Beck:

It's just like we're losing lift or the plane won't take off. What is wrong? I've got to go find the part that's wrong. And we can always be led to it very simply by what's distressing us the most. It's this wonderful, that's why you realize people say, if the universe is benevolent, why is there suffering? Because it wants to bring us into benevolence. And the only thing that will reliably get our attention enough to make us actually change is suffering. Something that feels bad and the opportunity to feel better. And that's all suffering is. I don't mean to, there are a lot of people out there right now who are suffering a lot from many situations, and I don't mean to trivialize that or say it's their fault in any measure whatsoever.

But I've seen people from all over the world and all kinds of circumstances find their way out of suffering by finding the truth within themselves. The classic example, if you want one is Nelson Mandela. In a completely discriminatory evil system, he gets locked in prison. He's an angry young activist, but in prison he becomes an absolute paragon of integrity, and he learns Afrikaans, and he becomes compassionate to the guards. I was in college when he was still at Robin Island locked up. And we were all picketing to get him to, we were marching to free Nelson Mandela. Not even a picture of him was allowed out of Robin Island. Nothing was allowed out. And yet the fractal of his integrity shook the world, changed the world. That right there is an example of what we can be if we decide to be true.

Susie Moore:

And you say in the book to pay attention to anything that causes even slight suffering within you. And you even say, are you sitting comfortably? And you ask people that in an audience, yes, yes, I'm comfortable. We're so used to it. We're so used to, that's how life is. And I've even had people say to me, women are just wired for guilt. It's like women are meant to feel guilt. I'm like, I don't feel guilty.

Martha Beck:

Is that true? How does that thought make you feel? It makes me feel like drinking. Maybe not then.

Susie Moore:

This question I have to ask you, is there ever an exception? Because people will tell you, you've got to do the right thing, right? You got to do the right thing. And so for example, that could be travel to Australia for a wedding for a relative, because that's what people do. Or you show up at the baby shower, that's two hours away, because she's a friend for a long time, and this is the most important thing that's happening in her life. Or someone disagrees with you, but they have a very compelling argument and you feel bad for them. And so you'll let it, maybe you just let this one go.

Martha Beck:

I have a friend who calls this integrity lite.

Susie Moore:

Integrity light?

Martha Beck:

Yeah. Like L-I-T-E. Like diet food or whatever. At the end of my first year of not lying at all, when I lost every friend and loved one I ever had, except for my kids, at the end of that year I thought if I were living in Germany during World War II, and I had hidden some Jews in the basement, and the Gestapo came and said, do you have Jews in the basement? I would've said no and felt moral about it. So it's not like there's a rigid set of things that you absolutely have to do. It's much more like the Asian model of flowing with the benevolence of the universe. So your friend is having a shower, and you stop and say, what actually feels most delicious to me? Is the joy on my friend's face when I'm there really what I want? Or is it to spend the weekend resting because I don't feel well?

There is no hard and fast rule about anything. It's always a decision in the moment. I call this your inner compass. It swings toward integrity always, but it doesn't always swing toward the same behaviors. So people say, oh, I was so sure this marriage was right for me, and now it's gone wrong. Well, it was right, and now it's right to end it. The idea that something has to be permanent, unchanging, and always, is a rigid belief set that's based on fear of not knowing, which is, that's the ego. The soul isn't afraid of not knowing. It's like, I'll see when I get there.

Susie Moore:

Right. Right. When you say in the book that spend your time doing what you want, and then you go, well, wouldn't the world fall apart if you don't take out the garbage? Right? Or if you don't agree with you, don't want to ruffle any feathers with your friendship group, or if you wanted to leave your career, even though it feels very secure and the economy's uncertain, and why should you pursue the thing that's meaningful? I'm sure that there's a lot of resistance to that statement, or there has been doing what you want.

Martha Beck:

Well, there wasn't me for many years. My PhD is in sociology, and you learn not to make any generalizations that you can't back up. So when I say that integrity is the cure for psychological suffering, full stop. That's after being basically beaten with shovels every time I made an unsupportable generalization in graduate school. So I really wondered, I really believe this thing about personal integrity, but how would it affect society? Now I've come to believe, because I'm older, I've been watching and I've been observing, and I've realized there actually is a lid for every pot. There is someone for every job that is necessary to survive, or we can figure out a way to make it so that nobody has to do it.

And my favorite example is this man that was on this show called Dirty Jobs here, and his job was to clean out latrines, the porta-potties that go to work sites. And he loved his job. And they showed him, he was putting on his rubber gloves and his mask, his hazmat suit basically. And he says to his friend, all right, let's get in there. We don't know what we're going to find, but we know it isn't going to be pretty. And then he goes for it. I know a woman who's deep, deep love is helping people cleanse their colon. Speaking of potty, one of my own daughters loves spreadsheets, which to me is like-

Susie Moore:

My husband does too.

Martha Beck:

... what? Oh my God. I am terrified of negotiation, but my agent is like, oh, the funds here.

Susie Moore:

Oh, yeah.

Martha Beck:

Really truly there is in us enough variety and enough joy and creativity that when we get together and we start to nurture each other's happiness, we really can do everything with joy and what we want can be aligned with what's necessary to make the world work well. On the other hand, take the society we've created by all of us doing things we hate. How's that working for us? Anxiety, more than half the people that were surveyed at the end of COVID-19 lockdowns suffered from anxiety disorder. We are highly anxious, highly miserable. And again, I repeat, we are ruining the world. It's not working all this self-sacrifice for the cultural ethos, maybe let's try something different because this isn't working.

Susie Moore:

Can I ask you a question that feels trivial, but I'm curious to get your integrity feedback on it while I have the master here on the topic?

Martha Beck:

Sure.

Susie Moore:

I have this slight, it's not serious, but it comes up enough to be slightly annoying where I tell my husband, I want him to spend more time with me. So I don't know if you know or care about the love languages.

Martha Beck:

Oh, yes.

Susie Moore:

Oh yeah. Do you believe in them?

Martha Beck:

Yeah. Yeah.

Susie Moore:

Okay. So mine's quality time for sure, number one. His is gifts, right?

Martha Beck:

Interesting.

Susie Moore:

That's my least one. And I'm pretty sure quality time is his least one. And we already worked together and so forth. But he thinks that we have a lot of time together. So in my integrity, I share exactly what was meaningful to me and what I would like us to do and how it would look. And then I'm like, but am I even being an integrity police force somehow enforcing something that isn't necessarily? Because he will please me because it's, but is he pleasing me and it's not really then in integrity?

Martha Beck:

It brings him joy, it's in integrity. If it doesn't, and if you're trying to control him into giving you what you want, it's not love, it's coercion, right? It's a hostage situation at that point. It's not love.

Susie Moore:

Which I'm happy with.

Martha Beck:

Right. So what I would do, there's a part in the book where I talk about that you try turning around different thoughts that are causing suffering. And one of the thoughts might be he isn't spending enough quality time with me. And one of the turnaround things, this is taken from a spiritual teacher named Byron Katie, a turnaround for he doesn't spend enough time with me, might be, I don't spend enough time with me, quality time. And if he has the thought, she doesn't give me enough gifts. A turnaround might be, I don't give me enough gifts. And a really high integrity conversation would be, look, I know that you need gifts to be happy, but I just can't go there. I on the other hand need more time, and you just can't go there.

So together, let's mutually love one another by seeing how we can get the right number of gifts and the right amount of time in different ways. And I know that I was always lonely until I one day read a book. I opened it to a random page. It was a psychology textbook, and it said, the patient did not realize that her loneliness was not the product of another person's absence. And I was like, wait, what? Loneliness is not the product of being alone? No. Loneliness is the product of abandoning yourself. And I used to be, I needed other people to be around me to feed love in because I wasn't giving it to myself, my true self. I was ignoring that part of myself. There were memories I wasn't letting come up. There were gifts I hadn't given myself in terms of time and leisure and kindness and rest.

And when I started giving myself all those things, if somebody else doesn't want to be around me, it doesn't bother me at all. It's like, oh, yum, more time for me. And then people want to be around you more.

Susie Moore:

Isn't that funny? And so I can't just go kick it back to the love language and go, but it's my love language.

Martha Beck:

You can, but then you have to deal with that in integrity.

Susie Moore:

Exactly. How's it working?

Martha Beck:

It's my love language, so you have to do what I say. Okay. And you have to do what I say too. Mutual hostage. No, it's like if the fractal is spending quality time with Susie, then you set that fractal by spending quality time with Susie. That's how you start the fractal, and then it spreads to others. People, when you love being with yourself, oh my gosh, people love being around you. When you hate yourself and need people to make you feel better, they cannot get away fast enough. My favorite story about this, I just mentioned Byron Katie, and she happens to be a friend of mine, and I truly believe she's fully enlightened.

Susie Moore:

I completely agree. She's been on the podcast. Wow. I find her and you similar, Martha.

Martha Beck:

Oh, wow. That is such a compliment. Well, I was talking to her daughter one day, and she said, she was talking about she didn't know if she was a good enough person, something like this. And her mother said to her, oh, honey, you're my second favorite person in the whole world. And she said, your second favorite, who's your first favorite? And Katie said, oh, that would be me, sweetheart. She loves herself in there, but you cannot be around her without falling in love with her.

Susie Moore:

Martha, why do you think the turnarounds work so well? Because it should feel like it's the opposite. If there's an absence or a suffering, it feels like it's far away. But the way, and you share your own turnarounds here, which wow, your turnaround about leaving Mormonism, about something terrible happening, what you share, everyone must read this. I read it in a weekend. I did nothing else. I abandoned everything. You and I had so much fun in the bath together. We went everywhere together for a week.

Martha Beck:

See, quality time right there, you had it.

Susie Moore:

We had the most quality time of anyone. I would love to ask you this. Why are the turnarounds always just like this aha, that it's almost hilarious when you sometimes-

Martha Beck:

Yes, it is. In Hinduism there's this myth that says that God wanted to hide the heart of man in a place where it would be hard to find because it was a game of hide and seek. And they said, okay, hide it right inside the person who's looking, and that's the last place they're going to look. And when they look and see who's peeking out, it's this shock of that's the truth. And they call it the splendor of recognition. So what I think is that the true self is always in there, and it's a bit of a trickster, and it's trying to tell you the truth, but the rules of the game are you can't just be told the truth or you don't experience that splendor of recognition, which is the joy of the whole beautiful pageant. So what it does is it feeds you the opposite answer.

And I really believe, here is in one sentence, something that really helped me when I figured it out for myself. The opposite of your most painful belief is your next step toward enlightenment always.

Susie Moore:

Opposite of my most painful belief is the next step. Could you give a random example?

Martha Beck:

Okay, so nobody loves me. If that's the most terrifying thing in your heart, and it's always there, and nobody loves me, nobody loves me, nobody loves me, it's the opposite force. It's the dualism of this world trying to get you to seek the opposite. So if you question the thought, nobody loves me, nobody loves me, and you start to say, okay, this person loves me, that person. I can feel the love of my animals. I can feel the love of the trees. And then if you've shaken the belief enough and you try the opposite belief, everybody loves me. To me, honestly, I truly believe that the real self of every single person on this planet loves me just as I love them. We're the same being and it's made of love. How could it not love itself?

Everybody loves me. Whoa. And that if you really get to it, the only way you can crack your ego enough to actually take in the truth is if you suffer a lot when you're in the opposite thought. And then you get so broken down that you can finally let go of it, and the truth comes up as the opposite, and it's stunning. It just shocks you. You mentioned the big turnaround for me. I had written a book about leaving Mormonism that got me in a ton of trouble with Mormons, and I was getting death threats. My children were getting threats. It was a really scary time. I was threatened with bankruptcy, and people killed all the plants in my yard and whatnot. And the book was coming out, and I knew when it hit, I was going to get hurt even worse. So I kept thinking the thought, something terrible is going to happen to me because I wrote that book, something terrible.

And one turnaround is something wonderful is going to happen to me because I wrote that book. That was true, but it wasn't comforting. It wasn't until I tried a strange turnaround that it really shocked me into the truth. And that turnaround was instead of something terrible is going to happen to me because I wrote that book, it became, I'm going to happen to something terrible because I wrote that book. And the book was about chronic sexual abuse in the community and how people's minds were taken from them. That's what I was standing up to talk about, and I was going to happen to something terrible. And at that moment I realized it was fine if they killed me. It was absolutely worth it if they killed me, no problem. I just got a lot of life insurance.

Susie Moore:

But your turnaround was true. You were speaking truths, like truth to power.

Martha Beck:

Maybe. I can never know for sure, but it certainly felt better.

Susie Moore:

And your integrity, because you said if you were given a platform of, every life's a platform, but you were given this opportunity with this audience and people who followed you to do what felt right for you, even though it's terrifying.

Martha Beck:

Terrifying.

Susie Moore:

To your own peril, some would say.

Martha Beck:

Only turn that around. It would be my own peril if I did not do it. If you don't stand up in your integrity, you die inside. It's like a cancer of the soul. So the real self-destruction is not to take the scary step that sets you free.

Susie Moore:

Oh my gosh, Martha, I could just keep you forever. Can we do this again tomorrow? Same time?

Martha Beck:

Every day. No, it's so fun talking to you.

Susie Moore:

I love the work that you have, and you have such a body of work. So this is a candy store. Anyone who's new to Martha Beck, where have you been? Number one. I'm so happy this is your moment of introduction. The Way of Integrity, I really don't think I'll be, I was even at a lunch last week, Martha, and all I spoke about was your book. I'm serious. And my friend, she sent me a picture of her and the audiobook. She's like, hashtag obsessed. It's a confronting, loving force for, it's one of those things that isn't really the language that can contain it. But for me reading this, I think you had to live the life that you've had and had the experiences that you've had, and you are modeling for us. Wow.

What could happen if people allow those one degree turns again and again? We don't have to jump into this ocean of change. These turns, you guide us. Martha, truly thank you. I have one last question. I know you have to run. From the Let It Be Easy podcast, and I think I might know the answer, but who knows? What's one thing that you do every day in your life that allows your life to be easier?

Martha Beck:

Every morning when I wake up, I know that my brain has a built-in negativity bias. So it's looking for what bad might happen today. And so I just steer it away from that, and it's a natural part of the brain. I'm writing about it now. But it lies more on negative than on positive. I hate affirmations, as I said, because I think they feel phony. But I look around and I think, like this morning I woke up and I said, it's cloudy. I love cloudy days. This is wonderful. Oh my God, this is a goose down comforter. I just feel the geese are this warm and comfortable that makes me so happy on behalf of all the geese out there. Just really, really exalt in sensory pleasures, in the pleasure of community and the pleasure of the company of your pets and loved ones. Just focus as much attention on them as you're used to focusing on negative things.

And the thing is, if you do this falsely, it's like I hurt inside, but I'm going to pretend to be happy. It's worse. It's soul murder. Do not do that. If you wake up and you're sad, let yourself rest. Say, oh honey, you're not feeling well. Okay, we're going to be really, really soft on you today. What do you need to take care of yourself? Let's do everything we can. I'm there for you. Anything else is not integrity. You must be loving to the one inside you that's hurt. But after you've been in integrity for a while, there's not a lot of hurting going on, I have to tell you. And then it's just a catalog of amazing treasures every single day. I have to tell you one more story.

Susie Moore:

Please.

Martha Beck:

One of my dear friends is Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote, Eat, Pray, Love. And she told me once about this man who had basically just been so dishonest and evil. She gave him millions of dollars and he robbed her and he was nasty. And he said bad things about her. And she said all this with great humor. And then she said, but then he showed me a place where I could go and pet a live eel. So that was totally worth it. And that's exactly, that is true. And we're both that way. It's like, yes, yes, it was a horrible day. But look, I found a picture of a goat imitating a kangaroo. Holy crap. It's a great time to be alive. This is amazing. Google that. Google that. You will not regret it.

Susie Moore:

It might just make all of our days right now. Goat imitating a kangaroo. Martha Beck. Thank you. What an honor. What a joy. I cannot wait for your next book. Can you share any more about it or way too early?

Martha Beck:

It's way too early.

Susie Moore:

2024?

Susie Moore:

It's called The Art of Calm. 2023, early 2024. It's called The Art of Calm. And it's about how to find the peace at the center of your truth. That is unshakeable.

Susie Moore:

Lucky us. I will look forward to that. And Martha, truly, thank you. It's such a joy to follow you.

Martha Beck:

Thank you, Susie.

Susie Moore:

I consider myself part of your world. One of your close friends. In my mind, that's [inaudible 01:00:56].

Martha Beck:

I consider the same thing. We are part of each other's fractal. And here we are because of Zoom, because of computers. Oh my God, what a time to be alive.

Susie Moore:

Martha, thanks so much. Love and gratitude to you. Thank you so, so, so much.

Martha Beck:

Same to you, Susie.

Susie Moore:

Until next time.

Martha Beck:

All right.

Susie Moore:

Until next time. Bye-bye.

Martha Beck:

Bye-bye.

Susie Moore:

If you like this episode, you'll love my free workshop called Become Your Own Life Coach. Head on over to becomeyourownlifecoach.com now, and I'll teach you how to coach yourself through any of life's problems. I'll see you there.