The Path Back to True Self with Martha Beck

hey everybody what's up it's chase welcome to another episode of the chase jarvis live show here on creative live you know the show this is where i sit down with amazing humans and i do everything i can to unpack their brain with the goal of helping you live your dreams and career in hobby and in life my guest today is the one and only martha beck now if you're not familiar with martha's work you're in for a treat in this episode and if you are then this is going to be like we're going to pull back the layers of the onion and get to her latest philosophy uh and the title of her new book the way of integrity and if you don't know what integrity means it's not about being good in the classic definition in the martha beck world integrity means feeling whole so if you have ever felt less than whole felt like a part of you was doing something for someone else where you weren't being true to yourself where the prescribed path whether that's from your your parents your career counselors your peer group if that ever felt out of whack if it was dissonance in what the world was saying and what you were feeling in your heart and your soul this episode is for you now uh for those of you that don't know i want to give you a little bit of background martha beck is a best-selling author life coach and speaker oprah called her one of the smartest women she knows she's written a number of best-selling books i have uh referred to her work often in my personal journey and i know that you're gonna get a ton of value so i'm gonna get out of the way be ready for a ride we're talking this woman goes to harvard i'm i'm i'm i'll let her tell it because her words are better than mine but what a journey she has been on and this conversation is going to be a treat i promise so i'll make out of the way and leave with martha [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] back martha thank you so much for being on the show i want to welcome you thanks a lot oh my gosh chase it's such an honor to be here i i was uh i confessed to the listeners and watchers out there uh that right before we started recording i was sharing with you that your books and teachings have been a fixture in my household for i mean i don't know i don't know if i can say decades but certainly a long time and so it's a treat to have you on the show i think i was sharing a uh finding your way uh book that i've got of yours with you know dog-eared uh pages and this has been lugged around europe uh was in my my bag going back and forth between seattle and san francisco for a couple of years um thank you so much because i listen to your podcast and i look at your photos and everything and i think i wrote that book about him but i had no idea you'd read it well i'm i know one of the things that i'm excited to have you on the show for today among many others is your new book which comes out uh i think we're gonna try and drop it the same week and our posse of listeners are very good at helping authors move units and so that's a a part of what we want to cover today in the new book is the way of integrity finding the path to your true self uh but i want to start at the start i want to go way back because your spiritual journey as i understand it has been it's it's a long arc and and uh this work you know a lot of people are not a lot of people are called to it and yet you seem to be so such a natural in this space and i'm wondering how you got here what what were some of the early um indications that this was a path that was meant for you well i was born into a very fundamentalized religious scene so i was born to um a very mormon family in the mormonist town in the mormonist state in the union i'll let you guess what that is um and and race you know before social media before i mean there wasn't we didn't even have a tv so i was just told all these odd religious things you know every righteous man gets his own planet i was like i don't know okay i'm five what do i know but it all sounded really odd and and but it was so persistent that it gave me this kind of obsessive hunger to know what was true and what wasn't and it sort of faded as i sort of i got to be a an adolescent and i started pursuing high achievement in secular culture and then i went off to college and got really really out of that became a very materialist sort of atheist actually kind of agnostic i didn't know what i believed except i wanted everyone to like me that's good this is better to look good than to feel good and then i think the breaking point was when i was halfway through my third harvard degree and um i had a daughter i'd gotten married had a daughter and then i had a second pregnancy and it was very strange like from the beginning of the pregnancy i started having sort of paranormal experiences being able to see what was happening in distant places and it was very weird and then about six months into the pregnancy i was the baby was diagnosed with down syndrome and so i was facing this question of do i want to terminate the the pregnancy and i only have two weeks to decide um and i'm very pro-choice politically but my everything in my body everything in my heart everything in my intuition was saying no there's something something's been happening throughout this whole experience and it hasn't been fun all kinds of things went wrong and this is devastating and people are telling you if you don't terminate the pregnancy if you keep this baby you'll be throwing away your life and i looked around at the life that i had and i'd been at harvard since i was 17. i looked around at all the people and who were doing so well and i thought they don't seem very happy and then um i started to ask the question can someone with down syndrome be happy and the answer was yes unequivocally so i started to think what is the nature of the life i want to bring into the world give it's not that i don't want to have a baby what kind of baby is acceptable and i realized that if it's just intellect and achievement that's a very cold hard world and it was not making me happy and so i sort of i did i threw my life away turned out that life sucked and i went into a kind of exploration where i wouldn't believe anything i was willing to go anywhere leprechauns bring them on i don't care i'll keep like instead of not believing anything until it's proven true i decided i can't really prove anything true so i'm going to accept and open myself to anything until i'm pretty darn sure it's not true and that just threw the whole world wide open to me it's been a strange story ever since well this openness and that's i mean part of what originally attracted me to your work is this sort of these this allowance for things that we don't understand and i think you talk about it in terms of magic for example and and that conceptually and and just being open and willing to um go against convention and again from the the not saying i can know you personally but knowing you through your work this um there's there is an undercurrent of what culture says and what is and what is true for us and there's a dissonance between those two things and i think you have captured that in your work and you've with that that awareness with a capital a but there's also an awareness for the people who watch and listen to the show that there's a a gap between where they are and where they want to be they've been told by their you know their career counselors their spouses their parents their grandparents and and what's hard for this is hard around this is these are people that care very deeply about you that you're doing it the wrong way that you can't you can't be or become the thing you want to be in the world because of all of these reasons yeah and that you have done such a masterful job of finding resonance where there is dissonance culturally yeah what what is at the root of your wisdom here how how have you been able to reconcile this in a world that is struggling to reconcile it i think i just have a very low tolerance for suffering like i really believe that we're all born with an intuitive inherent nature that wants certain things i mean your life is such an example what little i know of you you were headed for med school right like yes all of the things that were approved by everyone improved things and then according to the story i read your grandfather left you a bunch of photography equipment yes and then i mean what was sorry to turn the tables but what did that feel like for you well it felt like um the curiosity the it felt like a hall pass i feel like a permission slip to actually veer or step off the cultural norm but just long enough to get a whiff of something that was different than what was prescribed and it was that whiff the scent it's sort of like when something's cooking in the kitchen and you want to learn more and there's there is a harmony in what i would say my heart head heart connection right of when i started sort of pulling on this thread or walking toward the kitchen or the way i talked about it in my book is is stepping onto the path is things began to feel effortless and i know from your book this is what it feels like to be in integrity but yeah i mean but you you're so you turn the the tables on me which is fair but like you have been on a journey did you know this when you started when you left that path from harvard when you decided to have the child or was and did you magically arrive or was this a series of of peeling back layers of an onion well when i look back it was it was happening from the beginning i talk in this book about the difference between nature and culture so you put the two on the ends of a of a spectrum and we're all born true to our nature every animal is and we are the only animal so far as i know that can go that can work against its own nature to the point where we will walk into canons we will live lives of private hell just to please other people and that's culture culture meaning every every terence mckenna says whenever you have two people in a room culture is the third guest at the table it's the pressure to conform and there's social primates and and primates with very high ability to imagine things we've taken leaving our nature behind to a point that no other animal has ever taken so far as we know maybe there was a dinosaur back there but they're done but um what happens when we pull away from our nature is that our the i divide the meaning making systems of the psyche of the self into four and this goes along with many uh wisdom traditions around the world by the way um spirit heart mind body and we usually especially in our culture we're very enslaved to mind in asia there's a saying that the mind is a wonderful servant but a terrible master and we have put in mind at the very center of our entire cultural paradigm and to follow what we mentally believe to be approved of we will abandon our heart our body and our soul in fact completely deny the existence of a soul and ignore the body as sir ken robinson said we see the body as a mechanism to take our heads to meetings and it's just we can be so torn to ribbons so when i look back i'm i think by the time i was five i remember thinking i'm here to participate in a change in the way human beings think and it wasn't something that anyone told me i remember i was sitting in my bedroom and i just thought oh yeah that i better get to work and and it was just sort of there in the background this assumption and then um when i started to leave my nature further and further behind to try to climb higher and higher in the social pyramid and in my pyramid it was intellectualism and academia i got more and more unhappy and when i was 18 i started developing mysterious autoimmune illnesses that nearly killed me i was in chronic pain for 12 years had my kids in the middle of that had this second child who was cognitively disabled so now i've got a sick body a different child um and a life that's still desperately trying to achieve the cultural norm and i just finally the suffering got so intense that i said i can't i can't do this i'm going to let go of all the cultural rules and i'm going to see what happens when i land somewhere else which to me sounds a little bit like what you did there's kind of a breaking point where you go all right i'm just not going to hang on and i when i let go i just fell i didn't expect to land anywhere but as you said when we do that there is something and i i don't i don't believe in magic i believe in science but i believe there's a whole lot science doesn't know yeah and when you let go of your cultural paradigms and you fall into your true nature miraculous things start to happen and that from my early 20s on was like that was something i was obsessed with yeah i i probably should have said magical rather than magic you know this oh it's all the same and but that's this this this miracles when you start to look for them rather than expect them to you know to the point you made earlier um expect that they don't exist and rely on the world to prove it to you if what if you what if you flipped your script on that yeah i remember i think it was in you know your the true north around or north star around um this idea that the first thing the first phase is meltdown yeah and there and and i'm wondering if that i'm guessing that takes many forms um but right now there's someone who's listening someone who's watching someone who's on a run somewhere or sitting on a park bench and they are feeling exactly what you're describing they are feeling this this dissonance between who they are and what culture thinks they are there's there's this a break in the integrity between who they represent themselves publicly and what they feel privately let's just i would ask for you to speak to that person right now and what's if you could just be with them for a moment what would you tell them the first thing i'd do is sit down with them and i'd say there is no such thing as time relax there is no hurry there is no hurry if we're rushing we're just rushing to the grave so here we are let's not think forward from right now but instead let's look at the full span of what you're experiencing in this moment what is your body feeling i always start with the body because that's what is most disowned by the culture and yet it's always talking to us when i give speeches out of covid time i'll sometimes stop in the middle of a speech and say is everyone comfortable and they're like yeah i'll be like really seriously are you comfortable i'll be like yes and then i'll say if you were at home alone right now how many of you would be in the position that you're in at this moment and no one raises a hand and i say why not and it takes them like five minutes to realize they're not comfortable so and the discomfort is not the problem the problem is that they have so tuned out their own biology that they can run it through a cultural filter that says i have to be sitting upright in a straight back chair so given that this is tolerable and they think they're comfortable so the first thing i'd say to the person on the bench is relax and feel the discomfort wherever it is in the body and as you tune into that then you'll start to feel emotion now most of us at this point run blizz pascal says the the reason for all our misery is that we are unable to sit quietly alone in a room because when you sit quietly alone in a room and your mind starts to relax and the body comes online and then the emotions come online you may learn that your life is not what it's meant to be you may realize very starkly at that moment oh my god i'm in the wrong relationship or the wrong job or um i really am going to die someday that kind of thing and that moment is what i call a catalytic event following that as you said there's a there's a cycle of four stages that people go through and i like to compare it to what a caterpillar does so the caterpillar they get to a state called full fed where they're as big as they're ever going to get and then i always like to think about what are they thinking the day they decide to metamorphose like they're just like i've been eating my whole life but now i'm going to make a small sleeping bag out of my saliva and go in there forever like what are they thinking so they go in there we don't know what they're thinking but people think they just go in there and like grow legs and wings they don't they dissolve into a liquid so the first stage of a real change in anyone's life and like covid did this for all of us it pushed us all it was a catalytic event that hit every human on earth and what happens then is not that you get yourself together and start flying you fall apart completely and our culture says that's a bad thing and i would say to the person on the bench lean into it it's okay you're not happy enough to want to be this way forever and if you can let go and let yourself be nothing for a while it will trigger the mechanisms that are meant to give you wings and you don't even have to do it just relax into this and let nature do its work and you will come out of this a completely different being and it's going to be wonderful you you made a leap that i that my follow-up question was aren't we in this time right now where you see so much um racial injustice economic strife political uh problems and i i don't think i'm alone in saying if you look around if this is not sort of a re-shuffling or liquefying to use the caterpillar uh um example the next phase is also around dreaming right it's about what is it that you want to be or become so keep talking to the person who's stopped and is listening right now so once you've really fallen apart and in asia they call this ego death the monk goes into the cave and lets his mind go away and becomes they say you're the face you had before your mother and father were born you become complete nothingness and then in the case of a caterpillar this triggers the activation of uh imago cells and these cells have the instructions to take the liquid that is in the cocoon and reassemble it into a butterfly and in our own personal lives the way we experience that is that we're just sort of plastered by the way the way you fall apart is the grieving process it's not fun but the only way out is through and you go through this cycle of resistance denial bargaining grief anger acceptance and once that's complete one day you wake up and you think i have a new idea and i don't know you've you've recreated yourself so many times like this podcast is not what i would the med school thing to the photography thing that's like odd then there's okay now he's a world famous photographer he's going to start a podcast like talk about reinvention where did those everyone feels those flickers of the new life coming in the same way but most people are trained not to pay attention what does it feel like to you like when the flicker of the new thing comes what does it feel like i want to answer this very truthfully let me think for a second what does it actually feel like it feels at first like um a little light in the darkness and then it feels scary and then it feels um intellectual for a second the scary part is the mind takes over and tells me all the reasons that it's hard and difficult and when people before me haven't done it and then it i go back to the muscle that i feel like i was lucky enough to develop which is a muscle around trusting my ability to land on my feet to figure it out to not know all of the steps but just know the first two and two take those that is so cool i've never heard it referred to as a muscle i immediately identify with what you're saying and just in in regards to the latest book i wrote what you're talking about is your integrity which doesn't mean like sunday school stuff it means to be one thing whole and that's why airplanes can fly because they're in structural integrity it's not because they're good and we should pat them on the head it's just integrity is what works and what you're feeling there that muscle we've been trained away from it and for the reason being that if we start to trust that muscle in us that says i know what i am becoming and i will become not just one butterfly but different iterations of myself and i will go against my culture my family culture my friendship culture my work culture whatever it is my national or ethnic culture and um i can do this that is the most dangerous thing you can say to any social system and i believe that's for example that's why you got the black lives matter thing rising up during covet because everyone had to sit quietly alone in a room for a while and the truth started to rise and there was a certain group of people that said we have been oppressed for centuries and it's it is no longer acceptable that's got to go and there's no precedent for justice being established in that area but there is that feeling you know dr king's dream where did that come from that dream it had to come from something internal and possibly numinous or like otherworldly it had to come from truth with a capital t and so you're landing in that personally huge groups of us are finding that muscle collectively and it is faith exactly as you said it is faith and trust in that that allows us to leave cultural forms that aren't working not for us not for anyone and go into something beautiful but in this scheming and dreaming stage stage it all happens inside so both the first stage i call it square one the square of death and rebirth and then the second which is the square of scheming and dreaming they happen inside your own head heart soul and then after you've thought for a while you can take it out on the road so tell me more about your process like you have a brilliant idea and then you didn't just get catapulted to world fame and success how did you get through square three which is the square of where you actually get go from the ideal world to the real world well first of all this is so fun to be in conversation with you about this because i've read your work and watched you dissect so many other people not to be on the receiving end of this dissection when we're talking about your book about integrity um uh let's see i find that that dreaming and scheming phase is a there's a truth like a a beacon of truth that if i have pretended that it's something besides that beacon of truth i've struggled to go into the real world but when i have when i have trusted that beacon of truth and it's something that i love that i feel passionate about i feel connected to i feel like i feel like bubbles up inside me yeah that makes the work i can't say effortless because i put a ton of effort into it sure but it feels like i'm doing the right thing which again i know from this is integrity this is the oneness i think that you're talking about and that action starts to feel like it's in sync with who i am rather than um the times where i have you know had performative roles in my life or you know done things against my will or you know pretending that i wanted to go to medical school when it was just something that was socially acceptable so is that is what is what i'm describing there do you feel like that's a an analog for integrity for for oneness is that why it's easy it's not even an analog it is the thing itself you're talking about living in integrity and when i love that you used language that was both emotional and physical you talked about bubbling you talked about passion bubbling is a physical thing when you observe and so many of your pictures have bubbles and passion is something you feel in the heart then you said some more things that made me think that's really he's going on soul he's imagining what's never been and then you bring your intellect to it all four of those systems are aligned and you're so into the the wholeness of yourself that you are then able to be your nature despite your culture which not only improves your life but improves the culture itself like this whole book now is based around dante's divine comedy because that's an obvious self-help thing um but it is i mean i know no it's a but it's this is your brilliance martha this is like layering those two things together is just that's to me pure genius but sorry keep going you know i'm like 18 i'm like help me learn to be happy i'm reading anything i can the divine comedy it never occurred to me to read it academically i read it as self-help and it worked so why not um but he went through an experience like that where he fell apart and he struggled and he came back and and he writes about it metaphorically in the divine comedy and as he comes into complete integrity with himself it's exactly what you described there's a period of intense effort but driven he says if i didn't i had so much passion i had so much desire to go up toward paradise that i i developed i grew wings and he's not sure how it happens but somehow he gets to be this other this other being who's dropped all of his cultural associations and at that point he starts drifting upward into paradise and all kinds of magical things start happening i thought that was just metaphorical let me tell you something it actually happens and and chase your life is kind of it's one of those wonderful things i can point to and say look it works look at him he's doing it well this i want to paint a picture that's real like there were that to say it works it didn't feel like it was working at all kinds of different stages along the way and and i say that to make to to sort of help people feel included in this process that this is that it sometimes it feels difficult it feels hard and yeah but when i refer to it as a muscle because once you've gone through that once or twice you start to recognize this as a pattern and when you realize it's a pattern you can look back at and connect some of the dots and saying great how did it play out when i doubled down on the thing that i truly felt was in my heart oh it worked and how did it feel when you you you sort of leaned back or shied away from the thing oh it was total disaster and these are this is true with relationships this is true career path this was true for me in in friendships physical health yeah finance everything yeah well i want to talk about integrity because right now there are people who like there's an in the book you talk about an unlearning and yeah i feel like that was the hardest and to be fair i am white i am male i am born in america i have basically every privilege i mean i was lower middle class but i've basically ticked all of the privilege boxes and unlearning lessons from culture was what i would say was the hardest thing for me to do so you know not what if you were not in all you if you didn't win the um the privileged lottery like i did how much harder would it be to unlearn these things and just just put this unlearning in context yeah it's harder and it's easier when you're um less privileged so what happens and i just want to go back to dante for a minute what we have to do is he finds himself completely adrift in a place he doesn't recognize where he's very terrified and things are not good and then he has to go through hell literally hell the inferno and then he gets to climb up and have all those fabulous experiences in paradise and every time we want to break with an aspect of our culture and become a new aspect of ourselves it's that same feeling i'm lost this isn't working oh boy here we go through hell but i remember going through it before and then you have to climb this mountain called purgatory which is literally cleansing away anything that's not integrity then you'll be fine now you are so unusual because you were born into what i call the man cage um and it's i use that because max weber the first great sociologist in the 19th century talked about how people who were in this privileged material wealth driven culture were simply going to be pushed further and further toward being machines that make money until their souls were dead and he called it the iron cage of rationalism and when i look at what's going on in our national culture our global culture people who are born relatively privileged are really inside that cage there's no reason to leave it the whole cage it works for you or it looks like it works for you because it gives you power wealth and status which are the things we think will make us happy and this is something dante talks about too how we can try and try and it won't make us happy now if you're female if you're a person of color if you're trans or whatever the system is going to make you suffer more sooner and what that means is that you start questioning sooner and you start rattling the bars of the cage and saying i want out sooner and you start realizing this is not fair this is not right i'm you know i will give my life to say something better has to happen and so it's easier in some ways to become independent of the machine if you're less privileged if you're more privileged the very trappings of privilege walk around you like an iron cage and the men that i've coached so many of them days have just sat when i used to see people one by one they'd just sit there and try not to cry for a whole hour because they didn't see a way out they didn't understand why they weren't happy they saw no way out and their lives looked perfect and that in some ways is the worst trap you can land in you do such a good job of using your own life and you know talking about your personal quest for integrity as the mechanism for illustrating what the process is that we're talking about we're talking about a process right that's it whether it's the dante's journey or the hero's journey or like we're talking about a process right and i'm wondering if you you've helped unpack me i'm wondering you can you know use some examples from your own life of going through this you did a little bit earlier with um you know the recogni reconciliation of the recognition of your time at harvard and deciding to have a child and but if you you know maybe back out a little bit expand our app talk us through some of the how this has worked for you maybe some examples of how it worked and maybe some where it didn't because it sounds like i want to just make sure that people in the world know that all this stuff isn't isn't just like a little script that you can just read and follow so share a couple examples from your own life again with the goal of helping as many people relate as possible i kind of believe in destiny i don't think we're born with an absolute destiny but i do believe in general life mission and i seem to have been born with a dis a destiny of being culturally unacceptable so i grew up a very intellectual girl in mormonism went to harvard had a baby with an intellectual disability then i was so traumatized by the fact that everyone thought i'd made the wrong decision that i moved back to my hometown of provo utah the most mormon place on earth because i knew they'd they wouldn't question my decision with the the pregnancy and i tried to fit in with the locals there and i tried to be good to the people that i'd known in childhood only to discover that i really truly did not believe in mormonism well this meant that um i was now the most i was in mormon culture leaving the religion is the single worst sin you can commit it's worse than murder and not only that but as i was struggling with that i started having flashbacks um really violent intrusive flashbacks of being sexually abused as a child by my father who was a big cheese in the church and i realized as a sociologist that that the abuse of girls and women is is pretty rampant among people who are in these old mormon families that had polygamous backgrounds and everything that it just is an odd psychological legacy so um then i left i left my when i was 29 i decided i was not going to tell a single lie for an entire year i took this as a new year's resolution because i couldn't figure out how to get my feet on the ground with all these different cultural pressures and i just i knew i needed something solid to stand on so i decided not to tell a single lie the whole year i was 29 i kept that resolution and during that year i lost um my family of origin well first my religion then my family of origin all my friends that i'd had before the age of 17 or 18. my industry my job my career as it was going at the time my marriage my home my basically everything and began to feel truly whole for the first time in my life like it had to just shred and then i was like okay i get it um when i feel bound to culture and it's not working i will throw myself into the fire i will i will trust this process absolutely oh yeah and then i realized i was gay so here's what i like to say i went to harvard to have a baby with a cognitive disability then i went to utah to become a lesbian and people ask me for advice they pay me for it it's just weird but that's i think that's fascinating because that is the that if that is what finding like peace if you have to do that like then and when we know the other stuff deep deep deep down the other stuff is does not work it doesn't it doesn't surprise me for a second that we turn to you to help us i just say burn every bridge but love which is the same as truth just burn everything that isn't really you and your life will be incredible but you will potentially lose everything you presently value it i like to say it'll give you everything you wanted it will give you everything that will make you happy everything that will make you wealthy everything that will bring you love everything that will make your ideal world and it will cost you absolutely everything else those are the stakes in your book there are some questions that we can ask ourselves and i'm wondering if you can share some of those questions because that person who's listening right now they are hooked they stopped whatever they were doing now they're sitting on the couch maybe uh you know staring at the at the wall or they're still on that bench or they're walking a little slower because we've struck a chord and now let's let's help them connect with this integrity what are some questions that they can ask themselves in this moment that we've got their attention it's so so simple and i'd really like you to use a little um of a therapeutic school car called internal family systems where you divide yourself into parts so wherever you are take the part of you that's like listening to this podcast and everything then take out any part of you that feels um something moving inside you when you hear this something it may be an ache it may be a joy it may be a sting it's but it's a sensation and take that part of yourself and move it like to a different chair in the room or another seat on the bus or whatever and then look at this part of yourself look at it from the perspective of a self that is outside of time and outside of suffering it's just pure awareness and compassion and ask this self of yours the suffering self what are you feeling what hurts doesn't hurt what do you know that you're afraid to know what do you what are you afraid other people will know about you if you were to follow your heart's desires what are you afraid would happen and as you start i don't even know if these are the questions you're talking about yeah no no yeah am i feeling what i really feel um you know am i letting myself know that oh yeah true ultimately yeah i i really believe that a life of integrity and it sounds so selfish to us in this culture is know what you really know feel what you really feel do what you really want and say what you really mean and people say well if i did that i'd just rob banks all day i'm like ah not if you stopped not if you really knew what you're feeling and what you're um knowing at a deep deep level i've worked with i test these things on like convicted murderers and you know psychopaths and they all have the same thing if they really ask what's going on inside they end up in a place that at least the people i've talked to where they there's the desire to do harm is much less than the desire to realize one's own truth which is always benevolent always you mentioned working with uh socio and psychopaths and at the other end of the spectrum i don't know if this is the right spectrum to draw but you've coached so many of the world's top performers and you you were a regular in oprah's sphere and i'm wondering at our base level are are the problems the same they just manifest differently and what have you learned from a life you know that spans work with such a diverse population yeah it's interesting it's like the more you gain the the credentials and the awards and the approbation of society the the harder and faster your life is moving forward so it's like um somebody who's sitting on a bench now who just graduated from college and doesn't know what to really do it might be sort of tooling along going 40 miles an hour on a road somewhere with his life where you having done everything you've done are now riding driving an 18-wheeler at 80 miles an hour down a freeway like your life has a lot of power to it what that means is that if you go astray if you leave your integrity it won't just be like oh i crossed the media and i'm going to pull back on the road it will be like you'll take out a building so no matter how much we gain in terms of um success in the culture all we get is more intense versions of the same stressors that bothered us when we were powerless right it just it goes with us unless we choose to walk away from cultural pressures into our integrity other than that you just get harder and faster punishment when you go wrong harder and faster punishment hey that's the title of my next book bestseller in the making uh i want to go back to the root this concept of integrity and what are some simple things that one knows or one can know when it's working because is it is it mine is it body is it you start with the body but i wanted we never really got to complete that thought what does it feel like because again that same person and i've been this person this is i'm i'm saying that person a little bit to relieve the burden of owning this myself but the person who's on the park bench who stopped their run to listen to this conversation um we we talked about the feelings that it feels when you're in integrity but what are some of the other signs and signals oh the interesting thing i i talk in the book about a friend i had who was a hardcore junkie on the streets of new york for 20 years then got clean and sober for 20 years and then and died shortly after i met her actually a couple years and um what she would always say is she said i've run a thousand hustles in my life and i realize pretty much everyone is always running a hustle i did it for heroin other people are doing it for praise or for money or for love and she said they're all all the hustles are the same they're all flimsy because they don't have truth in them once you start telling the absolute truth about your life you come into harmony with reality and so you don't have to build your life anymore you are resting it on a solid foundation and she used to say at the end of the day only the truth has legs nothing else is left standing and after she died i got a tattoo on my right ankle that says only the truth has legs and no matter what you're trying it will start to create suffering and unease you'll get uneasy and then you'll get disturbed and then you'll get distressed and then you might have a crisis because part of you that is born to find integrity will never stop saying come this way come over here come over here and the further you get away from it the more you suffer so once you start to get into a harmony of what you what you feel in your body what you feel in your mind what you feel in your soul and what you know sorry i said feel in your mind so body heart soul mind once those all come together the internal experience is of a puzzle piece clicking into place like perfectly like oh emotionally it feels like peace and it's so interesting i've it doesn't matter who you talk to murderer beggar billionaire the one thing that i've found that makes everyone feel that most strongly is the statement i am meant to live in peace when people say that everything goes click and that's like the lesson and once you're in peace well two things happen i talk about this uh integrity as a path to what asians would call enlightenment i was a chinese major as an undergraduate spent some time in asia and they talk about this awakening process now western scientists have looked at asian meditators and found that this enlightenment is a real measurable thing and they say it's not only measurable in the brain but we are biologically predisposed to seek it and what it does is it turns off our sense of being separate from the world so our sense of self disappears into being everything and the other thing it turns off is our our sense of control so if you ask people what they want to lose least they would say my sense of self and my sense of control but when those two things go quiet and you surrender to peace you go into a state of bliss in which things happen to you with improbable levels of joy and success and that's what i mean by the magic and again i'm so glad to be talking to someone who's done it because i can just point to you and say haha it really happens you have uh i've got it my wife and i have a dear friend who has completed your coaching um and wayfinders and i'm wondering if you can talk about some of the the approach not just the teachings but the approach to teachings because i think it it provides an it might be a lenser which we get some really interesting content context so just you know there's a post that i was drawn to on your instagram which is wayfinders have many labels medicine people shamans mystics healers but today most wayfinders live among people who have no name for them so paint a picture for us of wayfinders that live among us but have no name yeah um as a sociologist i went looking as part of some of my research forever ago i went looking at all the pre-modern tribes and specifically what formed culture originally and culture always forms around someone who has a kind of it was called charisma and that was not used in english until anthropologists and sociologists started using it to define people who have this connection to something inner and other that we've been talking about this whole time and in every group around the world there are these people and they have a cluster of characteristics typically they are um they're all kinds of things that we separate so artists that would be you're on for that um psychologists mystics animal behaviorists botanists medicine you know healers psychologists they have this cluster of characteristics and in every group there will be elders who have this and who will be called whatever the that particular people calls them there's no one word i chose wayfinders because it was a very unusual english word that sort of sort of put them in in a pile but in prehistory every group of people had about 50 to 135 people in it that meant that they always had some medicine people growing up they also had some elders and they had some babies so there was a fairly high recurrence of this cluster of characteristics in every known culture and i thought they've got to still be happening and i started looking for them and it was related to that feeling i had when i was a young child that there's something we've got to fix about the way people perceive the universe and the way they function in the world the way we think there has to be a shift in consciousness if we're going to keep living in harmony with the earth and each other and so i i ended up writing this book and i called it the way finders and my premise is that you're born that way to quote lady gaga um i went to i lived on the shore of california for a while and i looked at uh history to see what the original people there did you know to pass the time for six thousand years before the europeans got there and it said they lived by storytelling by picture making by weaving fishing hunting gardening and i thought they lived for 6 000 years doing things that we do on vacation you know we go to spas to do that stuff but that's what we're naturally meant to do and some of us are natural medicine people but it doesn't mean doctors although a lot of doctors do fit this it just means you're a wayfinder and so i kind of look for those people and there's a sense of recognition that goes with it and they're always doing something really interesting and nothing like anyone else and you seem to have been able to grab that with both hands early in your life and i just hope that people out there listening are thinking huh that sounds really cool and one more thing you talked a bit about unlearning before in the doubting my favorite book of chinese wisdom it says in the pursuit of knowledge every day something is added in the pursuit of the way or of enlightenment every day something is dropped less and less you have to force things until you arrive at non-doing when nothing is done nothing remains undone that's the wisdom of china coming through its wayfinders and all the wayfinders say the same thing in different languages you let go of culture you let go of what you're so attached to and what lives through that fire is pure magic i love that you you continue to bring the eastern and then my wife as a meditation mindfulness teacher is trained under rom das and that's one of the reasons your books have been such a fixture in our in our home um this this is such a foreign context for a westerner like the idea of like you know trusting uh trusting the universe that everything is great if you just like there's no we're in a constant tug of war maybe this is a better one and you know it sounds like what you're advocating is dropping the rope and that to me there's that same person if you go back to the 22 year old me right terrified to drop the rope i believed that my ability to pull hard on that rope was what had provided you know the the things that were [Music] special to me and you know achievement and the things that that you know you're articulating very clearly that this is not where the goods are at but it violates such a deep deep deep and i'm maybe creating a false distinction between east and west but just help help me reconcile this or help someone right now right like wait a minute i've i'm i got here because i pulled so hard on this rope and yeah and you're telling me to set the rope down and there's no more tug of war that just reconcile that for us as long as it's pulling you into joy into peace i've got no argument with you whatsoever it's interesting right at the beginning of the divine comedy dante's lost in these woods and he sees a mountain that's bathed in sunlight it's really beautiful and people are climbing it and he thinks that's the way out of my confusion and he starts climbing and he's so tired but he fights his way forward and then he starts running into wolves and bears and leopards and things and nothing works he's feeling miserable he's climbing as hard as he can but things keep coming at him and they're always metaphor for emotion states in in the divine comedy itself so if you're climbing and pulling on that rope and you're feeling joy and lightness and beauty then keep keep it up great but if you're suffering and the higher you get on that mountain the more you suffer and the harder you pull the more you suffer i've worked with people who are at the very top of the pyramid socially i mean like really close to the very top and like one person perfect life famous wealthy gorgeous everything was taking 200 oxycontin a day because the pain was so intense like that's how bad it is so dante goes all right well that's not it and then he goes back down into the forest and ends up going finding the gate of hell and it says abandon all hope ye who enter here which doesn't sound all that fun but what it means is the caterpillar never makes it out alive if you go the way of transformation it's all going to burn but you'll not only survive it you'll come out of it with magic you'll come out of it with brilliant new colors and wings and things you can do that the caterpillar never even imagined possible so if you're not enjoying the pull towards success try letting it go see what happens i want to talk to you forever i want to just handcuff you to the microphone there i'm in i'm let's see i want to try we got a couple planes in the air here and i want to land them and we i want to go back to the the title of the book again the way of integrity because even you know the subtitle is finding the path to your true self and i think there are a lot of people listening right now they're like okay i'm in but the the question i have is the way of integrity even the word the way it's prescriptive right because it's like this is the and and i want i'm challenging you i want you to to to throw rocks at my my question here or you know explain i love it and i and my my belief is that that the way is sort of in air quotes but talk to me about why you titled the book the way of integrity versus something else um i'll be full disclosure i just wanted to call it integrity because integrity doesn't mean honesty it means being one thing whole and undivided i also wanted to call it undivided but they didn't like that either so we compromised on the way of integrity a lot of people think it is a prescription a way is a prescription for doing things and here it is and it's right and you have to do it to be happy that's not how i mean this um way and i say in the book it can mean either a path like this is the way or it can mean a method a recipe here's the recipe for happiness it also you know that i mentioned the dao da jing dao is chinese for way and so i that's my favorite book in the world and i am obsessed with it so it chimed that for me too if you think this is prescriptive you'll find that's not what i'm talking about it by way i mean a path that is meant for your feet only it's not anyone else's trip to wholeness because no one else is you and there's a method so if you're stuck it will tell you the next step to move forward or the next thing to do to make what you want of your life and so it's the opposite of actually the danger is always that you're going to come across as a pulpit pounder saying i know the way but the content is that you abandon all other ways and you find the way that is only yours and then you're undivided and good lord you're gonna do things no one's ever seen before i have to say thank you so much for being a guest on our show time just absolutely blew by i i wanted to be cognizant of i know you're in the process of launching your book i want to say again congratulations i cannot recommend the book enough just to give it a little plug here so you don't have to the way of integrity finding the path to your true self it's out now we're dropping this podcast the week that it drops and um are there some other coordinates out in the world you know besides the book again which is a must read if this is resonated at all of course what people are going to do is they're going to grab the book and then they're going to realize that they've got they want to pull on all of the threads that you have put in give us some other give us some other threads to pull on where else besides you know getting the book how can people participate in your work what would you recommend well yeah my whole my my obsession is to create that shift in consciousness that takes us from suffering into joy and i think potentially could help us build a better world so everything i've done is basically about that if i do like if my marketing team has me do an ad the ad has to try to move consciousness forward a little because i'm obsessed with it so i'm not saying i'm a master of any kind i'm a humble student but my website and everything connected to that it'll list my the influences that have changed me the most which are so many i can't even list them here um and i hope it will bounce you off into places like this podcast where you can see that the way finders are everywhere and that even though no two of us are going to the same place we're all following the same process and yeah whatever just google it [Laughter] to just find your own path i don't care what you do with mine but uh well you know it's not a mistake that oprah called you one of the smartest women she's ever met and i i've been so inspired by your work uh it's touched so many in my life and i wanted to say personally thank you and congratulations on the book uh and our community here are uh supporters and advocates and uh we'll do everything we can to get the word out so thanks so much for being on the show really great thank you for your life your work um your ideas i just i'm a huge fan it's been an absolute delight to talk to you all right now signing off everybody you've got work to do if you're anything like me uh i want to completely uh devour everything that we've just spent the last hour talking about until next time i bid you [Music] you

Channel: Chase Jarvis

Views: 11,836

Rating: 4.9119806 out of 5

Keywords: chase jarvis, chasejarvis, creativity, business, entrepreneur, artist, creative, freelance, photography, career, advice, martha beck, integrity, true self, martha beck life coach, dealing with fear, dealing with stress, society pressure, inner journey, self-improvement, self-development, personal growth, intuition, inspirational talk, motivational talk, identity

Id: UFZnBOalzEc

Length: 59min 45sec (3585 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 14 2021