August 13, 2025 • 58 mins
What happens when a Harvard scholar, devoted Mormon, and mother of a child with Down syndrome begins to hear psychic messages—and decides to tell the truth no matter the cost?
In this powerful conversation, Martha Beck shares how leaving her religion, embracing polyamory, and facing her deepest fears led her to a life of radical integrity, joy, and healing.
If you’ve ever felt stuck, out of alignment, or afraid to be fully yourself—this episode will change how you see everything.
Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
00:56 Meet Martha Beck
03:02 Growing Up Mormon, Academic Journey, and Her Son’s Diagnosis
10:53 Leaving Mormon Church & Reframing Midlife
14:47 Losing Religion, Finding Soul, and Polyamory
19:20 Returning to True Nature Through Rebellion
21:23 Lessons from Her Son with Down Syndrome
27:10 Psycho-Neuro-Immunology & Integrity
30:58 Shaman Sickness & Becoming a Healer
33:24 A Simple Path to Inner Stillness
40:01 The Radical Power of Not Lying
41:43 How to Listen to Your Body’s Response
52:27 Martha’s Bumper Sticker Wisdom
Learn more about MEA at https://www.meawisdom.com/
#MarthaBeck #ChipConley #TheWayOfIntegrity #MidlifeTransformation #SpiritualAwakening #LeavingMormonism #DownSyndromeParenting #PolyamoryJourney #LifePurpose #InnerHealing #TrustYourself #ModernElder #SelfDiscovery #PsychicExperiences #AnxietyAwareness
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
If you are just getting older, midlife is terrifying.
If you can experience joy, that actually is enough reason to be
alive. And that when we get to our
truth and we embrace it fully, nothing can actually hinder joy.
It is a natural reaction to living in the truth.
(00:21):
From the moment I became pregnant, I began having psychic
experiences and the rest of my life was about coaching and
writing people because I believewe live in a culture that
doesn't adequately explain the full range of our emotional and
spiritual lives, and that hurts people.
Welcome to the Midlife ChrysalisPodcast with Chip Conley, where
(00:44):
we explore how midlife isn't a crisis, but a chrysalis, a time
of profound transformation that can lead to the most meaningful
chapter of your life. Well, today's guest is Martha
Beck, and she is maybe known as the world's leading coach in the
(01:06):
world. And she's written dozens of
books, I think 13 books actually.
And we go through some of the books that she's written today.
She has very, very close with Oprah, very close with Elizabeth
Gilbert. But this this, this podcast is
not just about her relationship with motherhood and Mormonism.
It's and it's not just about meditation and mysticism.
(01:30):
It's also an opportunity for herto be my coach.
And for about 10 or 15 minutes at the end of the session, you
will see Martha coaching me and helping me how learn how to
listen to my body to be integrity with what what my
body's telling me. I'm excited that I am Co leading
a workshop with Martha on our Santa Fe campus of MEA at the
(01:53):
end of September. So I hope you enjoy this
episode. I have to tell you, I had never
read the read the way of integrity.
And I read it this weekend at exactly the right time.
I needed it. I had I had a conversation with
somebody on Friday. It just didn't go well.
And it's something I don't know.It's somebody who represents the
(02:15):
legacy of a well known poet. And so, you know, the the
literary estate in in essence, and it's turned out better now.
But on Friday, I was feeling outof integrity on something.
And I gotta tell you this book, it was like the soul balm I
needed. And so I want us to, I want us
(02:35):
to explore your story, which is one of the most interesting
stories on the planet, being a devout Mormon mom and a
successful hot Harvard scholar, and the path you've taken, which
has been a path of it and a way the way of integrity.
So Are you ready to dive in? It's what I always think about
(02:59):
me, so yeah. Maybe let's start with just your
personal story. So for those who don't know you
well, maybe you can just tell uswho you are, how you grew up,
how you willed yourself on and yeah, and let.
Let's do the full story all the way to.
Yeah, all the way to Karen and and Rowan.
(03:22):
This will take 5 or 7 minutes atleast so, but I think actually I
think starting with that, the full frame and then diving in a
little bit will be helpful. It's so interesting how deep you
want to go. It's like, how far do you want
to dig the layers of people's stories?
Because there's a kind of archaeology of the psyche that
(03:43):
goes way, way down. So I'm going to try to keep it
from going too far, but also tell the parts that I think
might be useful to to somebody going through.
Yeah, difficulty. I always sort of think about
whoever out there needs some help right now.
So yeah, I was born in Utah as the seven of eight children in a
big Mormon family. And in fact, my father was one
(04:07):
of the most revered scholars in Mormonism, and he had defended
the faith against all kinds of, you know, people who were trying
to disprove it essentially. Anyway.
So I grew up that way in this extremely Mormon context, didn't
really know anyone who wasn't Mormon.
(04:27):
And and it's a life world religion.
So it it fills every aspect of your, of your day, every aspect
of your thinking even really is what you're supposed to.
You're supposed to make it the way you think.
So I tried hard. I always wanted to please
people, but I was also in schooland I was trying hard to please
people there. So I did well in school.
(04:47):
And when I was 17, I got accepted to Harvard.
My father, I was, he was a greatintellectual, and so I think he
was very pleased that he had a child who was going off to
Harvard. So I went off to Harvard.
I ended up getting my BA, my MA,and my PhD there.
(05:10):
During that time, I married someone else who'd grown up in
my hometown, so we had a lot in common.
We got married just before I started Graduate School, and
then we had a child when I was ayear in.
And then my second child was conceived shortly thereafter.
And this is where it gets weird.From the moment I became
(05:32):
pregnant, I began having psychicexperiences, things that defied
materialist belief. Now I what I had done is I'd
grown up really, really Mormon that sort of participated fully
in that kind of fundamentalism. At Harvard, starting when I was
quite young, I encountered a different kind of
fundamentalism, which is a strictly materialist worldview
(05:57):
that says, yeah, if we can't measure it physically, it's not
real. And I was sort of relieved to
come out of all that rigidity, the religious rigidity and sort
of relaxing, oh, I can trust my brain.
Then I had my second child and he was prenatally diagnosed late
in the pregnancy, about six months in with Down syndrome.
(06:18):
And so I had to decide whether or not to maintain, to continue
the pregnancy. And I only had a week to do it
while it was still legal. You know, very pro-choice
politically. But I've been having all these
psychic experiences and it made me wonder, OK, maybe a more
mysterious view of the world. Maybe not a religious one, but a
(06:40):
one that encompasses the mystery.
Maybe that's more true than the materialism I've been believing.
And I come to think everything is basically subjective anyway.
We can't know that we're not dreaming anything.
So I thought, OK, I'm going to it's, it sounds very blase.
It wasn't. It was a very hard choice.
I was 25 years old and not not very mature or braced.
(07:04):
But I had this child and switched out of all the
fundamentalisms that I've been taught and began to follow the
best estimate I had for what wastrue and for what brought joy.
Because I'd come to the conclusion when looking at my
son's life that he would never go to Harvard.
(07:25):
And that was fine because there were plenty of people around me
there that were high achievers and not happy.
And I thought, if you can experience joy, that actually is
enough reason to be alive. Emerson said.
Beauty is its own excuse for being, and joy is the felt sense
of beauty. It's its own excuse for being.
(07:47):
And I looked around me and I thought, I don't see a ton of
that here at Harvard. So my whole life became oriented
at finding joy. And in the course of that, I had
to face the memory of having been sexually abused by my
father. And I also had to.
(08:10):
The truth has legs. Yeah.
So I felt like the whole system he was defending was at its
heart harmful to a lot of people, racist, sexist,
misogynistic. And so I wrote about that.
I had become a writer. I wrote a book about my son, and
I started writing self help. I started writing for the Oprah
(08:32):
Magazine and did that every month for 17 years.
When I left Mormonism and wrote about the abuse, it was
considered a real not just someone running off into the
sunset, but someone taking aim at the heart of the religion.
And I knew there would be backlash.
I tripled my life insurance because I knew that some of my
(08:55):
father's acolytes were crazy enough to actually physically
try to kill me. I got plenty of death threats.
They didn't kill me happily. I mean, makes me happy.
But it, it's, it's not very often that you get a chance to
lose your entire culture of origin, to lose every
(09:16):
relationship that that I'd had before I was 17 years old.
So, you know, all my huge extended family, all the friends
I've had in high school, they not only didn't want to hang out
with me anymore, it was kind of forbidden.
And they all believed that I'd considered I had committed the
one sin worse than murder, whichin Mormonism is leaving the
(09:38):
church I had left. So I lived with that and that
made me even more, I will say obsessed with finding what is
true. And I have come to the
conclusion that only the only when we're standing in the truth
can we actually experience joy. And that when we get to our
(10:00):
truth and we embrace it fully, nothing can actually hinder joy.
It is a natural reaction to living in the truth.
And the rest of my life was about coaching and writing
people to try to help them get in touch with it.
Because I believe we live in a culture that doesn't adequately
(10:20):
explain the full range of our emotional and spiritual lives.
And that hurts people. I've devoted my life to trying
to help person by person, book by book, podcast by podcast.
It's it's all about helping people return to a state of joy
that we all know in our cells weare meant to experience, that is
(10:47):
meant to be our fundamental experience and I've been lucky
enough to experience quite a bitof it.
Wow. And there's more to come, but
I'm not going to I'm not diving into that more recent days, but
your life, we call it the the podcast, the midlife chrysalis,
the idea that midlife's not a crisis, but it's a chrysalis.
(11:10):
It's a it's a time when transformation is meant to
happen. And it does feel like, I think
it was you were about 42 when leaving the Saints came out.
This is the the book where you told your truth told told the
truth about your father, told the truth that you were leaving
the church. Which for those who don't know
about 7th Day Adventists and youknow, Mormons or something
(11:34):
honest, no late Church of later states leaving the church is
almost the worst sin. It's worse.
It's worse than killing someone.Yes.
So I mean, I don't know I I would call that a cult, but.
If the shoe fits. You were in early, what we might
call early midlife. How do you perceive midlife?
(11:57):
I mean you you, you have credentials way beyond mine when
it comes to understanding the human mind.
Why have we gotten midlife so wrong as as a culture?
Well, first of all, it's, it's a, an interesting question
because the, the, as I'm sure you know, the human lifespan,
the average human lifespan has, has lengthened so much in the
last 100 years, 150 years. So what used to be midlife 40
(12:22):
was a good solid. Like you were halfway done at
40. Now it you may, you may die at
80. You may live quite a bit longer
than that. You know, both my parents died
at 95. So I'm 62 now.
I'm sort of like, OK, yeah, that's kind of the middle patch.
It's kind of, but I I sort of atat 40, I just decided if you
(12:47):
look at the maiden, the mother and the Crone archetype in, in
Celtic lore, I thought I'm old enough to be a Crone.
I'm just going to designate myself a Crone so I don't have
to shift again and then I can just be middle-aged and happy
about it. But you know, our culture is
obsessed with the fear of death,any creature that has a survival
(13:07):
instinct and yet the and also the abstract capacity to imagine
our own death, even though most of us feel that there will be an
exception made in our case, right?
But we still have to deal with it.
And so people get to midlife andit's like Caterpillar is trying
desperately to crawl backwards out of the chrysalis and go on
(13:29):
growing into bigger caterpillarsforever.
And the fear of death distorts and warps the experience of
aging, which in a lot of cultures is about deepening my.
My undergraduate major was East Asian languages and
civilizations. So I lived in Asia and studied
Asian philosophy a lot, and languages, and the view of aging
(13:54):
is very, very different in thosehistorical Yeah, but not right
now. For example, in Communist China,
it's different. But the ancient Chinese, the
aging was considered a venerableand desirable thing.
And the aged were The Walking encyclopedias, the the sources
of comfort, the connection with the divine.
(14:15):
Because as we get older, we get better at those things.
And I have a friend who says some people just get older, but
some people become elders. If you are just getting older,
midlife is terrifying. If you have in your mind the
archetype of the elder and you Revere that archetype, it's an
(14:36):
honor to get older. It's a joy.
It's 2 steps closer to heaven every year.
You know, it's, it's beautiful. We at the Modern Elder Academy
talk about a modern elder, someone who's as curious as they
are wise. One of the things that you said
you wrote about in your book, The Way of Integrity, is the
(14:59):
idea that you lost your religion, but you found your
soul. And would you mind talking a
little bit more about that? I mean it having had such a
guided path in your life around both your religion but also your
your intellectual pursuits to all of a sudden be in a place
(15:20):
where your not just your religion was gone, but also your
the community that had surrounded you.
Now your husband was your ex-husband.
Now was more is Mormon. Yes.
No, no, no, he was. We both left.
Yeah. And he, he had identified as gay
for some time. And then when we left the
(15:42):
church, I, we sort of unofficially unmarried each
other. I said, well, where does that
leave me? You know, are you going to date
men? He said, well, you do the same
thing. And I said, date men.
And he said, well, not men. And I was like, oh, I can date
women. And it was like, I think I would
actually like that. And very, now I remember you
(16:04):
asked me about this and I didn'tsay, but very soon after that I
was in therapy, thank God. And the therapist who was very
professional all the time, neverever broke the rules.
She one day she said, I'm going to do something really weird.
I've never done this before. It's very unprofessional.
She wrote down a name and a phone number and she said, I
want you to call this friend of mine.
I think you would have a lot to talk about.
(16:26):
So I called the friend, we went out to lunch and and she ended
up we ended up shaking up with each other.
Like after lunch. Significantly after lunch, after
a year of lunches, it finally got to the point where I was, I
was seriously pleased about the idea of dating women.
(16:47):
And so she was my first ever relationship with a woman.
I still live with her and she isstill my partner.
And then about 10 years ago, it was the strangest thing, Chip.
I just felt like someone was missing.
There was someone missing. And Karen and I talked about it.
(17:08):
It was a kind of like we'd been together for quite a years.
It wasn't like, it wasn't like we were looking for kicks.
There was just this odd feeling of someone missing.
And then one day I, I was livingon a ranch and, and an
Australian writer showed up to help someone write a book on a
different part of the ranch. And she and Karen started
(17:30):
hanging out. And one day Karen sat me down
and she said, I'm, I need to tell you something.
I'm having these weird, like extremely loving feelings toward
Rowan. And I don't know what it is.
And I'm, and I'm, I just leaned back and I remember this bolt of
joy. It was like being hit by a train
(17:52):
made of joy, carrying a load of joy with joy driving.
It was so strange. It hit me so hard and I said,
you're in love. This is amazing.
Bring her up to the house. Let's I just was so excited.
I looked everywhere inside myself for jealousy.
It just wasn't there, you know, like after, after all the years
(18:13):
of, of spiritual practice, it just, there was no cultural
model in me that said I should be jealous.
There was just joy that my beloved was in love.
So Rowan came up to the house and we all started talking.
And then we all started talking a lot, like all day every day.
And after a few weeks of that, we were like, this isn't weird,
(18:35):
right? Like we're just friends, right?
This, this, this is so weird. We'd never ever heard the word
polyamory, much less decided we wanted to practice it.
But we all fell in love with each other.
That's just what happened. Three people fell in love with
each other and it seemed weird at first.
Ten years later, it just is. Like, how do people do it with
(18:56):
two? That's like A2 legged stool that
just wouldn't even work. So now there's three of us, Roe
and Karen and I, and we have a four year old because Roe is
just just barely at an age whereshe could still do IVF.
We're super happy and super weird.
We yeah, Roe calls it feeling good by looking weird.
(19:18):
So that's something to do in midlife.
No, this is I mean, if there if there's a great, great message
here is is do not try to predictyour future because coming from
your upbringing, your being in athrouple.
I mean like, come on like this. Oh.
My God. Well, here's the thing, Chip, I
like to say I people ask me for advice and here's here's a
(19:39):
sketch. I went to Harvard to try to be
Mormon. Then I went back to Utah and
turned out to be a lesbian. Then I left Mormonism and
started practicing polygamy. It's all very upside down and
backwards for me. You're a.
Rebel. You're just a rebel, Martha.
We're all rebels. Here's the thing then.
(20:01):
I've coached thousands and thousands of people at this
point. And every single one of us is
torn from the roots of our joy by socializational, sometimes
trauma, but almost always by thecultures that raised us and that
surround us, from the interpersonal cultures of our
families to the national cultures.
(20:23):
And we can see now that the national culture is getting very
strange and difficult. And if we are freed from
culture, then we return to our true nature.
And if getting older is going tobe to feel good to anybody
listening out there, it will feel good if you return to your
(20:43):
true nature. We're.
Going to, I'm going to come to that in a moment.
I want to just talk about Adam for a moment.
You have you have you have now 4kids, you have two daughters and
and then Adam with your husband,your ex-husband and one of the
books that broke you out, as youknow, one of the most well known
(21:03):
writers in the world and ultimately, frankly, maybe the
most famous life coach in the world.
I'm sorry, it's a lot to a lot to a lot to handle.
But you know, if if you do a ChatGPT about you guess what?
That's what it says. I should find that man and pay
him. Oh, he's not a man, he's a
machine. Sorry.
What did you learn? What wisdom did you learn from
(21:24):
your son who has Down syndrome and who is now?
How old is he now? He's 30. 7 Tell more about the
Adams story. So I was almost six months
pregnant with him when I got thediagnosis of Down syndrome, as I
said before, and I mentioned that I'd been having these sort
(21:46):
of paranormal experiences. Actually, I now think they are
fully normal experiences. I would, for example, my then
husband was traveling in Asia and when I was thinking about
him and he was thinking about me, I would see vividly exactly
what was happening around him. Something later, I later found
out was called remote viewing. I don't know at that time if
(22:07):
anyone had even named it, but it's something that has been
studied now. That was the primary one.
But I also had things like precognition.
I just knew things that were going to happen to various
people sometimes in the world, and they kept getting borne out
by actual fact. So it radically, it exploded my
(22:30):
view of what was real. And at the same time, I was, I,
I was fully invested in the culture of Harvard and I was,
you know, finishing my doctorate.
I wanted to be a professor. I was completely bought into
that. And here I have a child who is
never going to succeed in that particular way at all.
So it, the, the psychic part of it, the, the, the mystery part
(22:54):
of it was I could have maybe shaken that off and gone back to
just being like a normal little Harvard PhD candidate.
But then to have a child who would never succeed in that way
gave me a very strong source of motivation to re examine my
values, to re examine what was what a human life is about and
(23:17):
what it's worth. Because I was told by all 5 of
the doctors there at the University Medical clinic that
it was like I had a malignant tumor and I was not allowing
them to take it out. And I thought, OK, so they they
think he's a malignant tumor. What makes people think that?
And I started questioning the set of values that said our
(23:42):
intellect makes us worthwhile. I think therefore I am, yes.
Actually, you know, Descartes said, famously said, I think
therefore I am. But our culture, that's the only
part we quote. But what he really said is all I
know is that I'm not sure of anything.
I doubt, therefore I am thinking, therefore I must
(24:05):
exist. Dubito cogito, ergo sum.
It was not I think, therefore I am.
It was I doubt, therefore I'm thinking, therefore I must
exist. So it was.
Everything in his philosophy wasbased on uncertainty.
And that's also what I found in the Asian religions that and
philosophies that I'd studied asan undergraduate.
(24:26):
There's something called don't know mind.
So an Indian sage I love, Nisargadatta Maharaj, says the
only true statement the mind canmake is I do not know.
It does not know for sure. So once I fully embraced that,
and I embraced a child who wouldalso not know, the whole world
(24:47):
blows open when you decide to accept the fact that you may not
know anything. And so you're open to
experience, you're open to instruction, you're open to
love, you're open to other people, it just leaves you open
and it never closes. And that's a radical ride, but
it's so worth taking. And then he arrived.
(25:07):
You know, the the name of the book is like I think expecting
Adam, Adam arrives in your life.He's been in your life for 37
years, plus the the pregnancy period.
And what have you learned from him?
What, what is what? What wisdom does this child who
might have been aborted by another Harvard PhD candidate?
(25:29):
And by the way, I would totally drive you to that appointment.
I would not judge anyone out there who's had that has
terminated a pregnancy. Never.
What wisdom have you learned from him?
That there is something to be found in stillness and in
silence. Beneath language that is deeply,
(25:50):
deeply wise, that is the source of all our joy, and that is the
only way to navigate this world without being destroyed by it.
Yeah, that there's he. He just operates at a frequency
so deep he doesn't talk much. But, and that's another thing
(26:13):
he's taught me, everything's about energy.
Everything is about the energy created by our nervous systems,
by our hopes, by our dreams, by our laughter.
He's a being of energy. That's the way he communicates.
That's the way he lives. That's the way he connects.
And he, you know, he's done so many paranormal things in his
(26:34):
life. I don't even talk about him.
People wouldn't believe him anyway.
But I've seen him work miracles when he feels like it.
He just doesn't do it very often.
And he's taught me that the world is the mystery and that if
we engage with it from a sense of a field, a field of energy,
encountering another field of energy, then miracles happen
(26:56):
constantly and you get a very different view of what
consciousness itself really is. That it is.
It's actually having experiencesthrough you and through Him.
Only in Him. It's not hidden.
In US it is. At one point in the book, The
way of integrity, you talk aboutyour name is stillness and you
just spoke of stillness with Adam and there's and and
(27:20):
everybody has to read the book. I'm not going to explain what
happened because there there's, you know, coincidence is just,
you know, a little, you know, wink from God.
But I think that one of the things I really took from the
book, the way of Integrity, was this sense that when you're not
integrated, when you're not. Erik Erikson late in life, you
said the the last stage of the eight life stages was integrity
(27:44):
versus despair. To me, integrity is the form of
not. We're not just growing old,
we're growing whole. We're learning to alchemize
curiosity and wisdom. Extrovert, introvert, male,
masculine, feminine, gravitas, depth, levity, laughter,
(28:04):
secular, spiritual talk a littlebit about this idea of psycho
neuro immunology. I think it's is what it is,
which is. That's one of the things I'm
obsessed with, yeah. It's this idea that when you're
not in integrity, you don't havethat wholeness.
Physical symptoms actually show up and your body is keeping
(28:27):
score. So talk about that personally
for you, and then what you've seen over the course of your
your, your life as a coach. Well, one of the the reasons I
became a coach was that I had a lot of I was told that they were
autoimmune, poorly understood, progressive and incurable
illnesses. So by the time I was in my 20s,
(28:51):
yeah, by the time I was in my 20s, I was already experiencing
massive amounts of chronic pain and different sort of failure in
different organs at different time, different muscular,
muscular parts of my muscular system.
I just experienced A tremendous amount of pain and disability.
And that makes you very curious about exactly how your body's
(29:14):
working, especially when you're told it's autoimmune, that my
immune system was attacking itself, which kind of leads to
the conclusion that it, it's designed to fight its own worst
enemy. So I was my own worst enemy.
So I, that was another source of, of inspiration, motivation
for me to look at how I was thinking at the time I started
(29:38):
being diagnosed with these. We didn't really know how
plastic the brain really is, howmalleable it is and how it's
constantly repatterning itself based on what we're thinking
about. We can actually change
physiological structures with our thoughts, not
metaphorically, but measurably in the brain.
I'm not, I know you know, all this stuff, but it blew my
(30:00):
little mind because I rememberedreading in a psychology book
when I was 13 that the brain is fixed after 5.
And I'm like, I just sat there with this book going, I am
screwed. I'm thirteen years old.
My psyche was fixed at 5. I'm a total brain wreck.
This is my life. So in the 90s when they
(30:21):
discovered that the brain was plastic, I got very, very
excited and I spent a lot of time studying.
Yes, psycho neuroimmunology is how the how the thoughts and the
psychological conditions in our minds, what we call our minds,
are affecting our physiological systems.
I also started studying things like the way meditators have
(30:46):
different brains than other people and I started looking at
Mystics in cultures around the world from I'm immemorial
because there is something called a shaman sickness.
Have you heard of a shaman sickness?
Is that when the shaman takes onthe the illness or the sickness
of the person that they're treating or no?
No, no, no. It's, it's actually the
(31:07):
opposite. It's that someone who is meant
to be a healer begins to experience an incurable illness
and it will not respond to any kind of treatment.
And I, I do, I have a friend in South Africa.
I just got back from there and his wife two years ago was
diagnosed with diabetes. And we were very worried about
her. She was, you know, she was
(31:29):
hospitalized. I went back a year.
I go there every year. The next year she was still
sick. This year, I, I was driving
along with my friend and he said, you know, my wife woke up
two months ago and said, I don'thave diabetes.
I have a calling. And so they had taken her to
Western medicine. They had taken her to the local,
you know, the, the native healerthere.
(31:50):
Here's the thing. If you get sick and you can't
get healthy, in virtually every ancient culture around the
world, there is an assumption that you might have a shaman
sickness, which means that you are being guided to learn to be
a healer. And until you decide to be a
healer, you will remain I'll. So my friend told me she went to
(32:12):
the sangoma, which is the the word for shaman in the local
dialect, and she started to train as a sangoma and he said
her health is perfect now it's fine.
When I decided I was going to spend my life trying to help and
guide people, there was no word for it in our language, but I
started to recover. So I have these progressive,
(32:32):
incurable illnesses. They were, you know, surgically
verified. I just have no symptoms.
And I believe it's because I wasmeant to live this kind of life,
the kind of life I'm living now,and to to be able to say it in
public. Yes, I went to Harvard a bunch.
And yes, I completely believe inspiritual realities and yes, I
(32:54):
know that people think I'm an idiot for it.
And I respectfully do not care. As long as I can live in this
way and and devote my life to the the service of of other
beings, I'm perfectly healthy. So yeah, that's one ancient
practice and and wisdom that's come down from all these
(33:16):
different cultures that is now being reflected and measured in
the instruments of Western scientists and they call it
psycho neuroimmunology. Let's explore for another few
minutes the way of integrity. And when someone is out of
integrity, they can feel it and the body sometimes shows it.
For me, I had a NDEI, had a neardeath experience at age 47 and
(33:37):
died 9 * / 90 minutes. Went to the other side and it
wow, it woke me up and I changedmy life rather dramatically
right there in classic midlife. I would I'm curious if you could
just give some instruction. Let's let's like give some
prescriptive tips. Your book is full of amazing
exercises. The way of integrity is and
(33:59):
maybe just give us the short version of how do you help a
person shift out of the culturalnorms that have defined them,
move into this place of not lying to themselves and others,
and then open themselves up to the liberation that comes from
that. Because it's that is a
chrysalis. What you've described is the
(34:22):
ultimate chrysalis that so many people face.
And often they do face it in midlife because as Carl Jung
talked about, you can't live theafternoon of your life based
upon the rules of the morning. But people try to do the rules
of the morning all the time, youknow, with some filler in their
face and, and, you know, hangingout at the gym.
And what's a prescriptive tool for people to know that would be
(34:44):
helpful to actually integrate themselves so they can be feel
more whole? OK, let's let's just get this
out of the way. We can move on to better things.
OK? So the first thing is just to
notice something about yourself.Pascal said that most of our
misery comes from the fact that we cannot sit quietly alone in a
(35:08):
room. So just notice how comfortable
are you sitting quietly alone ina room?
Like if I asked you right now, it would probably be you're very
comfortable sitting alone in A room.
Yeah, I love it actually. I mean, I in fact, I almost,
I've gotten to a place in my life where I'm actually sort of
preferring it. Yeah, I'm with you there.
(35:28):
Before you're NDE, before that experience, how comfortable were
you sitting quietly alone in a room for, say, an hour?
When I was a kid, I was an extreme introvert, so yes.
And then I moved into this era because I was a closeted gay man
who wanted to be an All Americanathlete and student body
president and marry my college girlfriend and.
(35:50):
You're my ex-husband. You're your ex-husband.
I am and so I became Mr. I became a social alchemist and I
was very good and I still am very good as a social alchemist.
So the answer to that would be it was hard for me to be alone
because it took me back to childhood when I was not a very
(36:12):
happy kid. But I preferred my aloneness
than being in a social setting. Yeah.
So what happens to most of us iswe accrue a set of
accommodations to our culture. Let's call it accommodations,
but I could also more brutally call it lies.
We learn to act as if we're fine.
(36:32):
We learn to place our value and things like what we've achieved.
And when we're left alone in a room, what happened to you is
the truth of everything we've lived struggles to come back
into consciousness so that it can help us sort out what we
really want. And some of that is very, very
painful because it's trying to guide us away from things that
(36:53):
are not truly ours, but we've identified with those things.
So like, I've noticed this, I'm moving house right now.
We're moving to a a different place.
And I've noticed that I have some resistance to letting go of
physical objects. And I'm like, Oh my goodness,
I've gotten attached to that. How interesting.
And I have craved sitting alone in a room so that whatever
(37:15):
attachments I have to objects can come up, be examined and
grieved and and allowed to go away.
So that's the first thing. Can you sit quietly alone in a
room? If you can't, it's because there
are things that you believe innocently that are not true for
you at a deeper level. So the second thing is allow
(37:36):
yourself to sit quietly in a room and let yourself feel what
comes up. And this is not easy by the way.
Layer after layer after layer until you find a place inside
you that feels still, if you canfind a place inside you that it
feels completely still. One way I help people sort of
access this is by telling them that of every atom in your body,
(38:02):
99. This is a real statistic I'm
about to give you. 99.9999999999999% of that atom
is empty space. The actual matter is practically
negligible. You are made of space.
(38:23):
So if you imagine nothing can move space, nothing can destroy
it, nothing can harm it, it justis.
If you can shift your attention away from being matter and
instead experience the space inside your body and realize I
am space, switch from matter consciousness to space
(38:45):
consciousness that often will take you into this stillness.
And in the stillness, if you bring in a thought that is true,
like the person I love who died is not really gone, there will
be a sense of this, this settling of the body and the
mind, even if it violates the the edict of your culture.
(39:08):
And if you say something to yourself that is false, like
there's so much I have to achieve before I'll be worthy,
it will feel like hell. It will immediately destroy any
kind of peace that is there inside you, not to hurt you, to
guide you. All suffering is guidance, and
(39:28):
almost all the guidance is guidance about letting go of
things that aren't true. So simple.
But we identify so strongly withour thoughts that letting go of
them feels like death. And we're terrified of death, so
we don't let go. If you can learn to let go of
the thoughts that make you that hurt, you will find yourself in
(39:50):
your integrity. You'll find yourself in peace,
you'll find yourself in the mystery, and you will find
yourself deeply loved by everything that exists.
So it's worth the time. And is what you just described
sort of what you call an integrity cleanse?
No, that's just a, that's just an exercise I just made-up
because you asked for it and integrity cleanses where you say
(40:12):
I am going to refuse to lie for any reason to anybody, but
especially not to myself for a given period of time.
So you've mentioned that lying causes ill health.
They've done experiments that are very, very basic.
They just take two groups of people, all three, there's a
(40:32):
control group and then they say to one group, don't lie so much
and they send them out for threeweeks.
They don't. There's somebody following them.
There's no one policing them. They come back three weeks later
and compared to the group that was just told a story, the
people who have committed not tolying so much have fewer Dr.
visits, fewer colds, better health indicators.
(40:54):
Just saying, OK, I won't lie quite as much for three weeks.
Measurably helps people's physical health.
So when you it depends on how radical you want to get.
I get very radical with my integrity cleanses.
Like I won't even lie with my facial expression, you know,
like, and then you go out and doit for a while and it, it will
(41:17):
woof. It's it's a wild ride and it
will set you free. Well, but won't it piss some
people off along the way? Oh yes, that's why nobody I ever
grew up with will ever speak to me again.
It's not small, but then that's why I recommend to people just
start slow. Start by not lying to yourself.
Start by noticing that you're lying to other people.
When you do, somebody says, oh, I wish you'd come over, and you
(41:38):
say I wish so too. Oh, I'm lying.
I don't want to. Your newest book and the topic
of our workshop September 22nd to 27th is called Beyond
Anxiety, Curiosity, Creativity and Finding Your Life Purpose.
You said something a moment ago around truth and, and lying and,
(42:00):
and about the messages that you know, one of the things you say
in that book is anxiety isn't a problem.
It's a messenger. It's a portal, not a pathology.
So, so in many ways, I, what I hear you saying as sort of a
consistent theme here, as much as you don't want to, sometimes
people don't want to hear what'sgoing on inside of them.
(42:20):
And in the process of not wanting to hear it, they make
themselves sick. Actually, in the case of
anxiety, feeling the anxiety andknowing it's a messenger and
then trying to decode the message and take action
accordingly is that's what leadsto a healthy response to
(42:41):
anxiety. Is that accurate?
Give it, give us a little bit more.
I will give you a little bit more and I, you know, I go into
the brain science of it and everything in the book, but
here's a really, really basic way to go about it.
Think about whatever it is that brings you the most anxiety.
There's there are plenty of reasons.
(43:02):
Do you want to play right now? Because OK, So what right now
brings you the most anxiety? So being at 3 on the Enneagram,
my biggest anxieties tend to revolve around public success
and failure. And so a, an anxiety would be
(43:23):
not being successful with MEA, for example.
And so that would be that would be one that I'll, I'll just,
I'll speak to. So what's the scariest thought
you could think? That it would fail.
And I would, I would be, you know, perceived as this guy who
just, you know, spent a fortune on trying to do something that
(43:44):
didn't work. And people would say, well, he
was a fool. OK, so that's a whole
conglomeration of stories. Let's just start with MEA is
going to fail. All right, So that feels
horrible. It physically feels horrible.
Notice how your body responds. There's always tension, there's
always weakness and then comes mood change and then comes
(44:07):
illness when we believe something that is not true.
The interesting thing is it's not always good news.
I, I had one client who was a Doctor Who was working with a
man who was terminally ill. And his family said he's
terrified of death. Don't tell him he's dying, Tell
him he's getting better. And the man was horrible.
He threw tantrums, he threw objects, He was awful.
(44:29):
And then finally one day the, this client of mine who was a
physician sat down with him and found herself blurting, look,
you only have a week to live. You might, you might want to
live it. And what she said was he took
this huge breath in and said, oh, thank God, because it was
the insanity of knowing this at some level, knowing he needed to
(44:53):
prepare to die and having everybody pretend he wasn't
dying, it was making him insane.So it's not just that it's a
happy thought. But let's switch to the opposite
of your thought. Mea will fail.
Simple enough. Here's what I want people to
remember. The exact opposite of your worst
(45:14):
fear of your worst thought, The exact grammatical opposite of
that is your next step toward enlightenment.
So yours would be pretty simple.MEA will not fail, MEA will
succeed. So sit with that and feel it in
your body and allow yourself to put brackets around the moment
(45:36):
so that you don't have the little doubts and worries.
Just have to stay out for a while and just allow yourself to
fully imagine what how you wouldfeel if you believed that this
will be a very successful venture.
I, the good news is that I have felt that and I know that.
(45:56):
And it's, it's when what triggers this failure worry.
And sometimes it's the looking at the monthly PNL, the
financial statement and saying, OK, we're off budget.
But sometimes it's having two orthree very close people in my
life. Tell me, you know what?
And they're very, I mean, one ofthem is, I won't say because I,
(46:18):
I want to be private. Somebody very close, very, very
close. Say, you know, maybe it's time
to not do this anymore. Say that to yourself.
Maybe it's time to not do this anymore and just be very very
still and attentive to what naturally comes up.
Don't try to change the feeling,just notice it.
So maybe it's not time to do this anymore.
(46:42):
I have stage 3 prostate cancer and when I was going through 19
months of no testosterone hormone depletion therapy, 2
surgeries, and 36 radiation sessions as we were opening our
Santa Fe campus. I do know that when I was
hearing that from him in particular, there was some logic
(47:03):
in it, but I'm now in my, my cancer's in remission and I feel
better and, and I, so I don't believe that this is not what
I'm supposed to do. I I deeply believe this is a
vocation and a calling and and Ion a daily basis have reminders
(47:28):
of that. So what is the physical?
I'm going to come back relentlessly to this.
What do you feel? Not, not the story around it,
not anything but the actual physical sensation that you find
in your body When you say I should stop doing this, It's
time not to do this anymore. When I feel that, I feel I
(47:49):
actually feel some terror. And the terror is, you know, I
think it was Mark Twain who might have said, you know,
there's two most important days in your life.
The day you were born in the dayyou figured out why and that
figured out why. Peace to me this is I'm not
doing this for money. I don't.
I've not paid myself in 7 1/2 years.
(48:11):
I'm not doing this for ego or for attention.
I'm doing it because I love George Bailey, Jimmy Stewart,
and it's a wonderful life. And I love when Clarence the
Angel comes down to the bridge and helps George see what
Bedford Falls would be like if he had never lived.
(48:36):
I love the end of Schindler, Schindler's List, when all of
those descendants walk by the grave of George Schindler.
I think we need to, you know, the technologists in Silicon
Valley need to figure out a technology that allows us as
humans at while we're living to see that effect we've had on
other people. They call it actually in
(48:57):
psychology, they call it the George Bailey effect.
So I know that. But then I think sometimes I'm
like, OK, maybe I'm just delusional.
So do you notice this is fun? Do you notice how I keep saying
I want let me be really clear the the words I'm looking for
and I love these stories. By the way, the words I'm
(49:18):
looking for are things like I feel tension in my shoulders
that that really. And do you notice how when I
said it's time to stop, I shouldn't do this anymore, I saw
a pullback and attention and your face took on this look of
no that told me everything I needed.
(49:38):
Your body doesn't accept that asthe truth.
It's that simple. Then you went into an argument
in your mind with this loved oneand why you keep you keep going
and your larger philosophy and all the things.
I like to boil it down. You know, this is what living
with the sun with Down syndrome,who doesn't speak much and who
(49:59):
doesn't have stories in his head.
This is what it's taught me. If it feels bad, maybe it's not
true and that's the only story you need.
So now let's look at the opposite of it.
It's not time to stop yet. Now say that and your whole
immediately, every micro expression in your face changes
(50:22):
to something relaxed and peaceful.
That's the whole thing. I call it the body compass.
See, now you're going very deeply into your truth and that
brings tears of relief. Tell me where I'm wrong.
Yes it does. That's all.
The body is a holy instrument tome and it will not lie.
(50:46):
And the mind, pardon my French here, but the my mind is a 2 bit
whore. That's not a sex worker.
I mean a 2 bit sex worker. But that's the old fashioned
phrase. And what I mean by that is it
will go after every cultural story it hears and try to spin
(51:07):
ideas and facts to convince other people.
I'm OK, but all I need to know is when you think the thought I
should stop, everything recoils and when you think the thought,
it's not time to stop. You went into this deep
relaxation internally and I can feel it.
(51:30):
I I couldn't feel you. And I mean, I feel literal
physical, like electrical sensations When somebody finds
truth, the the field of their electromagnetic nervous system I
guess reaches me somehow becauseI tangibly physically feel it.
I couldn't feel you when you were in the stories about why
(51:50):
you should stay. But when you said it's not time
and you let yourself go there, boom.
There's an energy that literallyconnects with me through, I
don't know how it does it over Zoom, but it does.
That energy field, I believe is going to take very good care of
your body. It will keep you healthy as long
(52:13):
as you're meant to be healthy. And when it's time for you to
put the body down, it will gracefully lay itself down.
But we had all we needed when you felt that that live on that
path. Thank you.
Thank you. I think I just got a little dose
of what's going to happen at theworkshop.
(52:33):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
I have one last question for you, Marty.
I'm going to call you Marty. So imagine someone younger than
you comes to you and says, you know, I won an auction to have
coffee or tea with you next week.
And I'd love to have you come tothe tea or coffee with a bumper
sticker. Not a physical one, but a sort
(52:53):
of a proverbial one bumper sticker of the wisdom you've
learned in your life. Just a singular 1.
What what would be on that bumper sticker and what's the
origin story if it's not something you've already told
us? I mean, the one that pops to
mind is, is a quote from Gert ofthe German poet who said when
(53:14):
you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
I truly believe that there is a center point in each of us that
is made of space and stillness and silence and yet is intensely
alive. I think it's life itself and if
we trust it, if we trust ourselves because that is who we
(53:35):
truly are, is that part the partthat is pure life, pure love,
pure consciousness. If you trust that and make all
your decisions so that you stay,you feel aligned with that, you
will never make a choice that will be damaging to your life or
(53:55):
to the lives of others. So yeah, when you trust
yourself, you will know how to live.
Especially when you measure yourlife based upon joy.
Oh yeah, Well, that when you trust yourself, you you
experience joy. There's that's how you do it.
I love you. This has been joyful for me as a
guy who started a company calledJoie de Vivre and ran it for 24
(54:15):
years. I I'll finish with a, a quote
from JD Salinger who said happiness is a solid and joy is
a liquid. And so happiness is
circumstantial. Joy really comes from within
you. So I'm overflowing joy right
now. Thank you.
I'm looking forward to seeing you at the end of September, and
(54:36):
I hope that many of you who are listening will join us.
Thank you so much, Chip. It's a real honor to be here.
Well, I I just got a a free doseof Martha.
Martha Beck coaching wasn't thatinteresting.
You know, in listening to Martha's story, which is one of
the most miraculous stories I'veever heard, given just where she
(54:58):
started and where she's come to at age 62, I would say 3 of my
key lessons there are just the value of integrity, the value of
trusting your gut, trusting yourbody, trusting guides beyond
what you expect, the coincidences of life.
Learning how not to lie to yourself is maybe one of the
(55:21):
most important things we need todo.
And maybe one of the challenges of midlife is because for so
many people by midlife, they realize it's what they're doing
no longer works. As I say in the in the episode,
Carl Jung says you can't live the afternoon based upon the
rules of the morning because by the by the afternoon they'll be
(55:44):
a lie. So, you know, how do you live in
integrity? I think that's one lesson #2 is
the key lesson about just both anxiety and what's happening in
your life? Are messages and are you
listening to them or are you distracting yourself?
Often we use alcohol or whateverit is to distract ourselves,
(56:07):
work to not listen to these messages.
But in these messages there's a curiosity bridge language that
she didn't mention today, but ispart of her book Beyond Anxiety.
The idea that curiosity is a pathway to exploring things that
you might not consider and and that curiosity bridge opens up
(56:31):
new options in your life. So I would just say that was a
second lesson. I think 1/3 lesson just really
speaks to this idea that she went through death threats.
She went through a period where she had to basically leave her
family, her blood family, but also her Mormon community.
(56:52):
You could say that in essence, she had to die.
It was the death of the ego, thedark, dark night of the ego that
made it was not so much the darknight of the soul.
And she survived it and she has thrived.
And look at how happy and joyousshe is today in a very unusual
kind of relationship. This is not the way she was
(57:15):
brought up, and yet it's the wayshe wants to live her life.
And so I guess what I would say is for those of you who have the
fear that you're going to live into your integrity of who you
truly are in whatever way that means, it may mean that some
people will no longer want to bein your life.
That may be fine, because there may be a whole new collection of
(57:37):
other people who are magnetized to be with you as a result of
you living authentically. Hope you enjoyed this this
wonderful and deep episode. I'll see you next week.
Thanks for listening to The Midlife Chrysalis.
This show is produced by MidlifeMedia.
If you enjoyed this episode, help us spread the word by
(57:58):
subscribing and leaving a reviewon your favorite platform.
If you are just getting older, midlife is terrifying.
If you can experience joy, that actually is enough reason to be
alive. And that when we get to our
truth and we embrace it fully, nothing can actually hinder joy.
It is a natural reaction to living in the truth.
(00:21):
From the moment I became pregnant, I began having psychic
experiences and the rest of my life was about coaching and
writing people because I believewe live in a culture that
doesn't adequately explain the full range of our emotional and
spiritual lives, and that hurts people.
Welcome to the Midlife ChrysalisPodcast with Chip Conley, where
(00:44):
we explore how midlife isn't a crisis, but a chrysalis, a time
of profound transformation that can lead to the most meaningful
chapter of your life. Well, today's guest is Martha
Beck, and she is maybe known as the world's leading coach in the
(01:06):
world. And she's written dozens of
books, I think 13 books actually.
And we go through some of the books that she's written today.
She has very, very close with Oprah, very close with Elizabeth
Gilbert. But this this, this podcast is
not just about her relationship with motherhood and Mormonism.
It's and it's not just about meditation and mysticism.
(01:30):
It's also an opportunity for herto be my coach.
And for about 10 or 15 minutes at the end of the session, you
will see Martha coaching me and helping me how learn how to
listen to my body to be integrity with what what my
body's telling me. I'm excited that I am Co leading
a workshop with Martha on our Santa Fe campus of MEA at the
(01:53):
end of September. So I hope you enjoy this
episode. I have to tell you, I had never
read the read the way of integrity.
And I read it this weekend at exactly the right time.
I needed it. I had I had a conversation with
somebody on Friday. It just didn't go well.
And it's something I don't know.It's somebody who represents the
(02:15):
legacy of a well known poet. And so, you know, the the
literary estate in in essence, and it's turned out better now.
But on Friday, I was feeling outof integrity on something.
And I gotta tell you this book, it was like the soul balm I
needed. And so I want us to, I want us
(02:35):
to explore your story, which is one of the most interesting
stories on the planet, being a devout Mormon mom and a
successful hot Harvard scholar, and the path you've taken, which
has been a path of it and a way the way of integrity.
So Are you ready to dive in? It's what I always think about
(02:59):
me, so yeah. Maybe let's start with just your
personal story. So for those who don't know you
well, maybe you can just tell uswho you are, how you grew up,
how you willed yourself on and yeah, and let.
Let's do the full story all the way to.
Yeah, all the way to Karen and and Rowan.
(03:22):
This will take 5 or 7 minutes atleast so, but I think actually I
think starting with that, the full frame and then diving in a
little bit will be helpful. It's so interesting how deep you
want to go. It's like, how far do you want
to dig the layers of people's stories?
Because there's a kind of archaeology of the psyche that
(03:43):
goes way, way down. So I'm going to try to keep it
from going too far, but also tell the parts that I think
might be useful to to somebody going through.
Yeah, difficulty. I always sort of think about
whoever out there needs some help right now.
So yeah, I was born in Utah as the seven of eight children in a
big Mormon family. And in fact, my father was one
(04:07):
of the most revered scholars in Mormonism, and he had defended
the faith against all kinds of, you know, people who were trying
to disprove it essentially. Anyway.
So I grew up that way in this extremely Mormon context, didn't
really know anyone who wasn't Mormon.
(04:27):
And and it's a life world religion.
So it it fills every aspect of your, of your day, every aspect
of your thinking even really is what you're supposed to.
You're supposed to make it the way you think.
So I tried hard. I always wanted to please
people, but I was also in schooland I was trying hard to please
people there. So I did well in school.
(04:47):
And when I was 17, I got accepted to Harvard.
My father, I was, he was a greatintellectual, and so I think he
was very pleased that he had a child who was going off to
Harvard. So I went off to Harvard.
I ended up getting my BA, my MA,and my PhD there.
(05:10):
During that time, I married someone else who'd grown up in
my hometown, so we had a lot in common.
We got married just before I started Graduate School, and
then we had a child when I was ayear in.
And then my second child was conceived shortly thereafter.
And this is where it gets weird.From the moment I became
(05:32):
pregnant, I began having psychicexperiences, things that defied
materialist belief. Now I what I had done is I'd
grown up really, really Mormon that sort of participated fully
in that kind of fundamentalism. At Harvard, starting when I was
quite young, I encountered a different kind of
fundamentalism, which is a strictly materialist worldview
(05:57):
that says, yeah, if we can't measure it physically, it's not
real. And I was sort of relieved to
come out of all that rigidity, the religious rigidity and sort
of relaxing, oh, I can trust my brain.
Then I had my second child and he was prenatally diagnosed late
in the pregnancy, about six months in with Down syndrome.
(06:18):
And so I had to decide whether or not to maintain, to continue
the pregnancy. And I only had a week to do it
while it was still legal. You know, very pro-choice
politically. But I've been having all these
psychic experiences and it made me wonder, OK, maybe a more
mysterious view of the world. Maybe not a religious one, but a
(06:40):
one that encompasses the mystery.
Maybe that's more true than the materialism I've been believing.
And I come to think everything is basically subjective anyway.
We can't know that we're not dreaming anything.
So I thought, OK, I'm going to it's, it sounds very blase.
It wasn't. It was a very hard choice.
I was 25 years old and not not very mature or braced.
(07:04):
But I had this child and switched out of all the
fundamentalisms that I've been taught and began to follow the
best estimate I had for what wastrue and for what brought joy.
Because I'd come to the conclusion when looking at my
son's life that he would never go to Harvard.
(07:25):
And that was fine because there were plenty of people around me
there that were high achievers and not happy.
And I thought, if you can experience joy, that actually is
enough reason to be alive. Emerson said.
Beauty is its own excuse for being, and joy is the felt sense
of beauty. It's its own excuse for being.
(07:47):
And I looked around me and I thought, I don't see a ton of
that here at Harvard. So my whole life became oriented
at finding joy. And in the course of that, I had
to face the memory of having been sexually abused by my
father. And I also had to.
(08:10):
The truth has legs. Yeah.
So I felt like the whole system he was defending was at its
heart harmful to a lot of people, racist, sexist,
misogynistic. And so I wrote about that.
I had become a writer. I wrote a book about my son, and
I started writing self help. I started writing for the Oprah
(08:32):
Magazine and did that every month for 17 years.
When I left Mormonism and wrote about the abuse, it was
considered a real not just someone running off into the
sunset, but someone taking aim at the heart of the religion.
And I knew there would be backlash.
I tripled my life insurance because I knew that some of my
(08:55):
father's acolytes were crazy enough to actually physically
try to kill me. I got plenty of death threats.
They didn't kill me happily. I mean, makes me happy.
But it, it's, it's not very often that you get a chance to
lose your entire culture of origin, to lose every
(09:16):
relationship that that I'd had before I was 17 years old.
So, you know, all my huge extended family, all the friends
I've had in high school, they not only didn't want to hang out
with me anymore, it was kind of forbidden.
And they all believed that I'd considered I had committed the
one sin worse than murder, whichin Mormonism is leaving the
(09:38):
church I had left. So I lived with that and that
made me even more, I will say obsessed with finding what is
true. And I have come to the
conclusion that only the only when we're standing in the truth
can we actually experience joy. And that when we get to our
(10:00):
truth and we embrace it fully, nothing can actually hinder joy.
It is a natural reaction to living in the truth.
And the rest of my life was about coaching and writing
people to try to help them get in touch with it.
Because I believe we live in a culture that doesn't adequately
(10:20):
explain the full range of our emotional and spiritual lives.
And that hurts people. I've devoted my life to trying
to help person by person, book by book, podcast by podcast.
It's it's all about helping people return to a state of joy
that we all know in our cells weare meant to experience, that is
(10:47):
meant to be our fundamental experience and I've been lucky
enough to experience quite a bitof it.
Wow. And there's more to come, but
I'm not going to I'm not diving into that more recent days, but
your life, we call it the the podcast, the midlife chrysalis,
the idea that midlife's not a crisis, but it's a chrysalis.
(11:10):
It's a it's a time when transformation is meant to
happen. And it does feel like, I think
it was you were about 42 when leaving the Saints came out.
This is the the book where you told your truth told told the
truth about your father, told the truth that you were leaving
the church. Which for those who don't know
about 7th Day Adventists and youknow, Mormons or something
(11:34):
honest, no late Church of later states leaving the church is
almost the worst sin. It's worse.
It's worse than killing someone.Yes.
So I mean, I don't know I I would call that a cult, but.
If the shoe fits. You were in early, what we might
call early midlife. How do you perceive midlife?
(11:57):
I mean you you, you have credentials way beyond mine when
it comes to understanding the human mind.
Why have we gotten midlife so wrong as as a culture?
Well, first of all, it's, it's a, an interesting question
because the, the, as I'm sure you know, the human lifespan,
the average human lifespan has, has lengthened so much in the
last 100 years, 150 years. So what used to be midlife 40
(12:22):
was a good solid. Like you were halfway done at
40. Now it you may, you may die at
80. You may live quite a bit longer
than that. You know, both my parents died
at 95. So I'm 62 now.
I'm sort of like, OK, yeah, that's kind of the middle patch.
It's kind of, but I I sort of atat 40, I just decided if you
(12:47):
look at the maiden, the mother and the Crone archetype in, in
Celtic lore, I thought I'm old enough to be a Crone.
I'm just going to designate myself a Crone so I don't have
to shift again and then I can just be middle-aged and happy
about it. But you know, our culture is
obsessed with the fear of death,any creature that has a survival
(13:07):
instinct and yet the and also the abstract capacity to imagine
our own death, even though most of us feel that there will be an
exception made in our case, right?
But we still have to deal with it.
And so people get to midlife andit's like Caterpillar is trying
desperately to crawl backwards out of the chrysalis and go on
(13:29):
growing into bigger caterpillarsforever.
And the fear of death distorts and warps the experience of
aging, which in a lot of cultures is about deepening my.
My undergraduate major was East Asian languages and
civilizations. So I lived in Asia and studied
Asian philosophy a lot, and languages, and the view of aging
(13:54):
is very, very different in thosehistorical Yeah, but not right
now. For example, in Communist China,
it's different. But the ancient Chinese, the
aging was considered a venerableand desirable thing.
And the aged were The Walking encyclopedias, the the sources
of comfort, the connection with the divine.
(14:15):
Because as we get older, we get better at those things.
And I have a friend who says some people just get older, but
some people become elders. If you are just getting older,
midlife is terrifying. If you have in your mind the
archetype of the elder and you Revere that archetype, it's an
(14:36):
honor to get older. It's a joy.
It's 2 steps closer to heaven every year.
You know, it's, it's beautiful. We at the Modern Elder Academy
talk about a modern elder, someone who's as curious as they
are wise. One of the things that you said
you wrote about in your book, The Way of Integrity, is the
(14:59):
idea that you lost your religion, but you found your
soul. And would you mind talking a
little bit more about that? I mean it having had such a
guided path in your life around both your religion but also your
your intellectual pursuits to all of a sudden be in a place
(15:20):
where your not just your religion was gone, but also your
the community that had surrounded you.
Now your husband was your ex-husband.
Now was more is Mormon. Yes.
No, no, no, he was. We both left.
Yeah. And he, he had identified as gay
for some time. And then when we left the
(15:42):
church, I, we sort of unofficially unmarried each
other. I said, well, where does that
leave me? You know, are you going to date
men? He said, well, you do the same
thing. And I said, date men.
And he said, well, not men. And I was like, oh, I can date
women. And it was like, I think I would
actually like that. And very, now I remember you
(16:04):
asked me about this and I didn'tsay, but very soon after that I
was in therapy, thank God. And the therapist who was very
professional all the time, neverever broke the rules.
She one day she said, I'm going to do something really weird.
I've never done this before. It's very unprofessional.
She wrote down a name and a phone number and she said, I
want you to call this friend of mine.
I think you would have a lot to talk about.
(16:26):
So I called the friend, we went out to lunch and and she ended
up we ended up shaking up with each other.
Like after lunch. Significantly after lunch, after
a year of lunches, it finally got to the point where I was, I
was seriously pleased about the idea of dating women.
(16:47):
And so she was my first ever relationship with a woman.
I still live with her and she isstill my partner.
And then about 10 years ago, it was the strangest thing, Chip.
I just felt like someone was missing.
There was someone missing. And Karen and I talked about it.
(17:08):
It was a kind of like we'd been together for quite a years.
It wasn't like, it wasn't like we were looking for kicks.
There was just this odd feeling of someone missing.
And then one day I, I was livingon a ranch and, and an
Australian writer showed up to help someone write a book on a
different part of the ranch. And she and Karen started
(17:30):
hanging out. And one day Karen sat me down
and she said, I'm, I need to tell you something.
I'm having these weird, like extremely loving feelings toward
Rowan. And I don't know what it is.
And I'm, and I'm, I just leaned back and I remember this bolt of
joy. It was like being hit by a train
(17:52):
made of joy, carrying a load of joy with joy driving.
It was so strange. It hit me so hard and I said,
you're in love. This is amazing.
Bring her up to the house. Let's I just was so excited.
I looked everywhere inside myself for jealousy.
It just wasn't there, you know, like after, after all the years
(18:13):
of, of spiritual practice, it just, there was no cultural
model in me that said I should be jealous.
There was just joy that my beloved was in love.
So Rowan came up to the house and we all started talking.
And then we all started talking a lot, like all day every day.
And after a few weeks of that, we were like, this isn't weird,
(18:35):
right? Like we're just friends, right?
This, this, this is so weird. We'd never ever heard the word
polyamory, much less decided we wanted to practice it.
But we all fell in love with each other.
That's just what happened. Three people fell in love with
each other and it seemed weird at first.
Ten years later, it just is. Like, how do people do it with
(18:56):
two? That's like A2 legged stool that
just wouldn't even work. So now there's three of us, Roe
and Karen and I, and we have a four year old because Roe is
just just barely at an age whereshe could still do IVF.
We're super happy and super weird.
We yeah, Roe calls it feeling good by looking weird.
(19:18):
So that's something to do in midlife.
No, this is I mean, if there if there's a great, great message
here is is do not try to predictyour future because coming from
your upbringing, your being in athrouple.
I mean like, come on like this. Oh.
My God. Well, here's the thing, Chip, I
like to say I people ask me for advice and here's here's a
(19:39):
sketch. I went to Harvard to try to be
Mormon. Then I went back to Utah and
turned out to be a lesbian. Then I left Mormonism and
started practicing polygamy. It's all very upside down and
backwards for me. You're a.
Rebel. You're just a rebel, Martha.
We're all rebels. Here's the thing then.
(20:01):
I've coached thousands and thousands of people at this
point. And every single one of us is
torn from the roots of our joy by socializational, sometimes
trauma, but almost always by thecultures that raised us and that
surround us, from the interpersonal cultures of our
families to the national cultures.
(20:23):
And we can see now that the national culture is getting very
strange and difficult. And if we are freed from
culture, then we return to our true nature.
And if getting older is going tobe to feel good to anybody
listening out there, it will feel good if you return to your
(20:43):
true nature. We're.
Going to, I'm going to come to that in a moment.
I want to just talk about Adam for a moment.
You have you have you have now 4kids, you have two daughters and
and then Adam with your husband,your ex-husband and one of the
books that broke you out, as youknow, one of the most well known
(21:03):
writers in the world and ultimately, frankly, maybe the
most famous life coach in the world.
I'm sorry, it's a lot to a lot to a lot to handle.
But you know, if if you do a ChatGPT about you guess what?
That's what it says. I should find that man and pay
him. Oh, he's not a man, he's a
machine. Sorry.
What did you learn? What wisdom did you learn from
(21:24):
your son who has Down syndrome and who is now?
How old is he now? He's 30. 7 Tell more about the
Adams story. So I was almost six months
pregnant with him when I got thediagnosis of Down syndrome, as I
said before, and I mentioned that I'd been having these sort
(21:46):
of paranormal experiences. Actually, I now think they are
fully normal experiences. I would, for example, my then
husband was traveling in Asia and when I was thinking about
him and he was thinking about me, I would see vividly exactly
what was happening around him. Something later, I later found
out was called remote viewing. I don't know at that time if
(22:07):
anyone had even named it, but it's something that has been
studied now. That was the primary one.
But I also had things like precognition.
I just knew things that were going to happen to various
people sometimes in the world, and they kept getting borne out
by actual fact. So it radically, it exploded my
(22:30):
view of what was real. And at the same time, I was, I,
I was fully invested in the culture of Harvard and I was,
you know, finishing my doctorate.
I wanted to be a professor. I was completely bought into
that. And here I have a child who is
never going to succeed in that particular way at all.
So it, the, the psychic part of it, the, the, the mystery part
(22:54):
of it was I could have maybe shaken that off and gone back to
just being like a normal little Harvard PhD candidate.
But then to have a child who would never succeed in that way
gave me a very strong source of motivation to re examine my
values, to re examine what was what a human life is about and
(23:17):
what it's worth. Because I was told by all 5 of
the doctors there at the University Medical clinic that
it was like I had a malignant tumor and I was not allowing
them to take it out. And I thought, OK, so they they
think he's a malignant tumor. What makes people think that?
And I started questioning the set of values that said our
(23:42):
intellect makes us worthwhile. I think therefore I am, yes.
Actually, you know, Descartes said, famously said, I think
therefore I am. But our culture, that's the only
part we quote. But what he really said is all I
know is that I'm not sure of anything.
I doubt, therefore I am thinking, therefore I must
(24:05):
exist. Dubito cogito, ergo sum.
It was not I think, therefore I am.
It was I doubt, therefore I'm thinking, therefore I must
exist. So it was.
Everything in his philosophy wasbased on uncertainty.
And that's also what I found in the Asian religions that and
philosophies that I'd studied asan undergraduate.
(24:26):
There's something called don't know mind.
So an Indian sage I love, Nisargadatta Maharaj, says the
only true statement the mind canmake is I do not know.
It does not know for sure. So once I fully embraced that,
and I embraced a child who wouldalso not know, the whole world
(24:47):
blows open when you decide to accept the fact that you may not
know anything. And so you're open to
experience, you're open to instruction, you're open to
love, you're open to other people, it just leaves you open
and it never closes. And that's a radical ride, but
it's so worth taking. And then he arrived.
(25:07):
You know, the the name of the book is like I think expecting
Adam, Adam arrives in your life.He's been in your life for 37
years, plus the the pregnancy period.
And what have you learned from him?
What, what is what? What wisdom does this child who
might have been aborted by another Harvard PhD candidate?
(25:29):
And by the way, I would totally drive you to that appointment.
I would not judge anyone out there who's had that has
terminated a pregnancy. Never.
What wisdom have you learned from him?
That there is something to be found in stillness and in
silence. Beneath language that is deeply,
(25:50):
deeply wise, that is the source of all our joy, and that is the
only way to navigate this world without being destroyed by it.
Yeah, that there's he. He just operates at a frequency
so deep he doesn't talk much. But, and that's another thing
(26:13):
he's taught me, everything's about energy.
Everything is about the energy created by our nervous systems,
by our hopes, by our dreams, by our laughter.
He's a being of energy. That's the way he communicates.
That's the way he lives. That's the way he connects.
And he, you know, he's done so many paranormal things in his
(26:34):
life. I don't even talk about him.
People wouldn't believe him anyway.
But I've seen him work miracles when he feels like it.
He just doesn't do it very often.
And he's taught me that the world is the mystery and that if
we engage with it from a sense of a field, a field of energy,
encountering another field of energy, then miracles happen
(26:56):
constantly and you get a very different view of what
consciousness itself really is. That it is.
It's actually having experiencesthrough you and through Him.
Only in Him. It's not hidden.
In US it is. At one point in the book, The
way of integrity, you talk aboutyour name is stillness and you
just spoke of stillness with Adam and there's and and
(27:20):
everybody has to read the book. I'm not going to explain what
happened because there there's, you know, coincidence is just,
you know, a little, you know, wink from God.
But I think that one of the things I really took from the
book, the way of Integrity, was this sense that when you're not
integrated, when you're not. Erik Erikson late in life, you
said the the last stage of the eight life stages was integrity
(27:44):
versus despair. To me, integrity is the form of
not. We're not just growing old,
we're growing whole. We're learning to alchemize
curiosity and wisdom. Extrovert, introvert, male,
masculine, feminine, gravitas, depth, levity, laughter,
(28:04):
secular, spiritual talk a littlebit about this idea of psycho
neuro immunology. I think it's is what it is,
which is. That's one of the things I'm
obsessed with, yeah. It's this idea that when you're
not in integrity, you don't havethat wholeness.
Physical symptoms actually show up and your body is keeping
(28:27):
score. So talk about that personally
for you, and then what you've seen over the course of your
your, your life as a coach. Well, one of the the reasons I
became a coach was that I had a lot of I was told that they were
autoimmune, poorly understood, progressive and incurable
illnesses. So by the time I was in my 20s,
(28:51):
yeah, by the time I was in my 20s, I was already experiencing
massive amounts of chronic pain and different sort of failure in
different organs at different time, different muscular,
muscular parts of my muscular system.
I just experienced A tremendous amount of pain and disability.
And that makes you very curious about exactly how your body's
(29:14):
working, especially when you're told it's autoimmune, that my
immune system was attacking itself, which kind of leads to
the conclusion that it, it's designed to fight its own worst
enemy. So I was my own worst enemy.
So I, that was another source of, of inspiration, motivation
for me to look at how I was thinking at the time I started
(29:38):
being diagnosed with these. We didn't really know how
plastic the brain really is, howmalleable it is and how it's
constantly repatterning itself based on what we're thinking
about. We can actually change
physiological structures with our thoughts, not
metaphorically, but measurably in the brain.
I'm not, I know you know, all this stuff, but it blew my
(30:00):
little mind because I rememberedreading in a psychology book
when I was 13 that the brain is fixed after 5.
And I'm like, I just sat there with this book going, I am
screwed. I'm thirteen years old.
My psyche was fixed at 5. I'm a total brain wreck.
This is my life. So in the 90s when they
(30:21):
discovered that the brain was plastic, I got very, very
excited and I spent a lot of time studying.
Yes, psycho neuroimmunology is how the how the thoughts and the
psychological conditions in our minds, what we call our minds,
are affecting our physiological systems.
I also started studying things like the way meditators have
(30:46):
different brains than other people and I started looking at
Mystics in cultures around the world from I'm immemorial
because there is something called a shaman sickness.
Have you heard of a shaman sickness?
Is that when the shaman takes onthe the illness or the sickness
of the person that they're treating or no?
No, no, no. It's, it's actually the
(31:07):
opposite. It's that someone who is meant
to be a healer begins to experience an incurable illness
and it will not respond to any kind of treatment.
And I, I do, I have a friend in South Africa.
I just got back from there and his wife two years ago was
diagnosed with diabetes. And we were very worried about
her. She was, you know, she was
(31:29):
hospitalized. I went back a year.
I go there every year. The next year she was still
sick. This year, I, I was driving
along with my friend and he said, you know, my wife woke up
two months ago and said, I don'thave diabetes.
I have a calling. And so they had taken her to
Western medicine. They had taken her to the local,
you know, the, the native healerthere.
(31:50):
Here's the thing. If you get sick and you can't
get healthy, in virtually every ancient culture around the
world, there is an assumption that you might have a shaman
sickness, which means that you are being guided to learn to be
a healer. And until you decide to be a
healer, you will remain I'll. So my friend told me she went to
(32:12):
the sangoma, which is the the word for shaman in the local
dialect, and she started to train as a sangoma and he said
her health is perfect now it's fine.
When I decided I was going to spend my life trying to help and
guide people, there was no word for it in our language, but I
started to recover. So I have these progressive,
(32:32):
incurable illnesses. They were, you know, surgically
verified. I just have no symptoms.
And I believe it's because I wasmeant to live this kind of life,
the kind of life I'm living now,and to to be able to say it in
public. Yes, I went to Harvard a bunch.
And yes, I completely believe inspiritual realities and yes, I
(32:54):
know that people think I'm an idiot for it.
And I respectfully do not care. As long as I can live in this
way and and devote my life to the the service of of other
beings, I'm perfectly healthy. So yeah, that's one ancient
practice and and wisdom that's come down from all these
(33:16):
different cultures that is now being reflected and measured in
the instruments of Western scientists and they call it
psycho neuroimmunology. Let's explore for another few
minutes the way of integrity. And when someone is out of
integrity, they can feel it and the body sometimes shows it.
For me, I had a NDEI, had a neardeath experience at age 47 and
(33:37):
died 9 * / 90 minutes. Went to the other side and it
wow, it woke me up and I changedmy life rather dramatically
right there in classic midlife. I would I'm curious if you could
just give some instruction. Let's let's like give some
prescriptive tips. Your book is full of amazing
exercises. The way of integrity is and
(33:59):
maybe just give us the short version of how do you help a
person shift out of the culturalnorms that have defined them,
move into this place of not lying to themselves and others,
and then open themselves up to the liberation that comes from
that. Because it's that is a
chrysalis. What you've described is the
(34:22):
ultimate chrysalis that so many people face.
And often they do face it in midlife because as Carl Jung
talked about, you can't live theafternoon of your life based
upon the rules of the morning. But people try to do the rules
of the morning all the time, youknow, with some filler in their
face and, and, you know, hangingout at the gym.
And what's a prescriptive tool for people to know that would be
(34:44):
helpful to actually integrate themselves so they can be feel
more whole? OK, let's let's just get this
out of the way. We can move on to better things.
OK? So the first thing is just to
notice something about yourself.Pascal said that most of our
misery comes from the fact that we cannot sit quietly alone in a
(35:08):
room. So just notice how comfortable
are you sitting quietly alone ina room?
Like if I asked you right now, it would probably be you're very
comfortable sitting alone in A room.
Yeah, I love it actually. I mean, I in fact, I almost,
I've gotten to a place in my life where I'm actually sort of
preferring it. Yeah, I'm with you there.
(35:28):
Before you're NDE, before that experience, how comfortable were
you sitting quietly alone in a room for, say, an hour?
When I was a kid, I was an extreme introvert, so yes.
And then I moved into this era because I was a closeted gay man
who wanted to be an All Americanathlete and student body
president and marry my college girlfriend and.
(35:50):
You're my ex-husband. You're your ex-husband.
I am and so I became Mr. I became a social alchemist and I
was very good and I still am very good as a social alchemist.
So the answer to that would be it was hard for me to be alone
because it took me back to childhood when I was not a very
(36:12):
happy kid. But I preferred my aloneness
than being in a social setting. Yeah.
So what happens to most of us iswe accrue a set of
accommodations to our culture. Let's call it accommodations,
but I could also more brutally call it lies.
We learn to act as if we're fine.
(36:32):
We learn to place our value and things like what we've achieved.
And when we're left alone in a room, what happened to you is
the truth of everything we've lived struggles to come back
into consciousness so that it can help us sort out what we
really want. And some of that is very, very
painful because it's trying to guide us away from things that
(36:53):
are not truly ours, but we've identified with those things.
So like, I've noticed this, I'm moving house right now.
We're moving to a a different place.
And I've noticed that I have some resistance to letting go of
physical objects. And I'm like, Oh my goodness,
I've gotten attached to that. How interesting.
And I have craved sitting alone in a room so that whatever
(37:15):
attachments I have to objects can come up, be examined and
grieved and and allowed to go away.
So that's the first thing. Can you sit quietly alone in a
room? If you can't, it's because there
are things that you believe innocently that are not true for
you at a deeper level. So the second thing is allow
(37:36):
yourself to sit quietly in a room and let yourself feel what
comes up. And this is not easy by the way.
Layer after layer after layer until you find a place inside
you that feels still, if you canfind a place inside you that it
feels completely still. One way I help people sort of
access this is by telling them that of every atom in your body,
(38:02):
99. This is a real statistic I'm
about to give you. 99.9999999999999% of that atom
is empty space. The actual matter is practically
negligible. You are made of space.
(38:23):
So if you imagine nothing can move space, nothing can destroy
it, nothing can harm it, it justis.
If you can shift your attention away from being matter and
instead experience the space inside your body and realize I
am space, switch from matter consciousness to space
(38:45):
consciousness that often will take you into this stillness.
And in the stillness, if you bring in a thought that is true,
like the person I love who died is not really gone, there will
be a sense of this, this settling of the body and the
mind, even if it violates the the edict of your culture.
(39:08):
And if you say something to yourself that is false, like
there's so much I have to achieve before I'll be worthy,
it will feel like hell. It will immediately destroy any
kind of peace that is there inside you, not to hurt you, to
guide you. All suffering is guidance, and
(39:28):
almost all the guidance is guidance about letting go of
things that aren't true. So simple.
But we identify so strongly withour thoughts that letting go of
them feels like death. And we're terrified of death, so
we don't let go. If you can learn to let go of
the thoughts that make you that hurt, you will find yourself in
(39:50):
your integrity. You'll find yourself in peace,
you'll find yourself in the mystery, and you will find
yourself deeply loved by everything that exists.
So it's worth the time. And is what you just described
sort of what you call an integrity cleanse?
No, that's just a, that's just an exercise I just made-up
because you asked for it and integrity cleanses where you say
(40:12):
I am going to refuse to lie for any reason to anybody, but
especially not to myself for a given period of time.
So you've mentioned that lying causes ill health.
They've done experiments that are very, very basic.
They just take two groups of people, all three, there's a
(40:32):
control group and then they say to one group, don't lie so much
and they send them out for threeweeks.
They don't. There's somebody following them.
There's no one policing them. They come back three weeks later
and compared to the group that was just told a story, the
people who have committed not tolying so much have fewer Dr.
visits, fewer colds, better health indicators.
(40:54):
Just saying, OK, I won't lie quite as much for three weeks.
Measurably helps people's physical health.
So when you it depends on how radical you want to get.
I get very radical with my integrity cleanses.
Like I won't even lie with my facial expression, you know,
like, and then you go out and doit for a while and it, it will
(41:17):
woof. It's it's a wild ride and it
will set you free. Well, but won't it piss some
people off along the way? Oh yes, that's why nobody I ever
grew up with will ever speak to me again.
It's not small, but then that's why I recommend to people just
start slow. Start by not lying to yourself.
Start by noticing that you're lying to other people.
When you do, somebody says, oh, I wish you'd come over, and you
(41:38):
say I wish so too. Oh, I'm lying.
I don't want to. Your newest book and the topic
of our workshop September 22nd to 27th is called Beyond
Anxiety, Curiosity, Creativity and Finding Your Life Purpose.
You said something a moment ago around truth and, and lying and,
(42:00):
and about the messages that you know, one of the things you say
in that book is anxiety isn't a problem.
It's a messenger. It's a portal, not a pathology.
So, so in many ways, I, what I hear you saying as sort of a
consistent theme here, as much as you don't want to, sometimes
people don't want to hear what'sgoing on inside of them.
(42:20):
And in the process of not wanting to hear it, they make
themselves sick. Actually, in the case of
anxiety, feeling the anxiety andknowing it's a messenger and
then trying to decode the message and take action
accordingly is that's what leadsto a healthy response to
(42:41):
anxiety. Is that accurate?
Give it, give us a little bit more.
I will give you a little bit more and I, you know, I go into
the brain science of it and everything in the book, but
here's a really, really basic way to go about it.
Think about whatever it is that brings you the most anxiety.
There's there are plenty of reasons.
(43:02):
Do you want to play right now? Because OK, So what right now
brings you the most anxiety? So being at 3 on the Enneagram,
my biggest anxieties tend to revolve around public success
and failure. And so a, an anxiety would be
(43:23):
not being successful with MEA, for example.
And so that would be that would be one that I'll, I'll just,
I'll speak to. So what's the scariest thought
you could think? That it would fail.
And I would, I would be, you know, perceived as this guy who
just, you know, spent a fortune on trying to do something that
(43:44):
didn't work. And people would say, well, he
was a fool. OK, so that's a whole
conglomeration of stories. Let's just start with MEA is
going to fail. All right, So that feels
horrible. It physically feels horrible.
Notice how your body responds. There's always tension, there's
always weakness and then comes mood change and then comes
(44:07):
illness when we believe something that is not true.
The interesting thing is it's not always good news.
I, I had one client who was a Doctor Who was working with a
man who was terminally ill. And his family said he's
terrified of death. Don't tell him he's dying, Tell
him he's getting better. And the man was horrible.
He threw tantrums, he threw objects, He was awful.
(44:29):
And then finally one day the, this client of mine who was a
physician sat down with him and found herself blurting, look,
you only have a week to live. You might, you might want to
live it. And what she said was he took
this huge breath in and said, oh, thank God, because it was
the insanity of knowing this at some level, knowing he needed to
(44:53):
prepare to die and having everybody pretend he wasn't
dying, it was making him insane.So it's not just that it's a
happy thought. But let's switch to the opposite
of your thought. Mea will fail.
Simple enough. Here's what I want people to
remember. The exact opposite of your worst
(45:14):
fear of your worst thought, The exact grammatical opposite of
that is your next step toward enlightenment.
So yours would be pretty simple.MEA will not fail, MEA will
succeed. So sit with that and feel it in
your body and allow yourself to put brackets around the moment
(45:36):
so that you don't have the little doubts and worries.
Just have to stay out for a while and just allow yourself to
fully imagine what how you wouldfeel if you believed that this
will be a very successful venture.
I, the good news is that I have felt that and I know that.
(45:56):
And it's, it's when what triggers this failure worry.
And sometimes it's the looking at the monthly PNL, the
financial statement and saying, OK, we're off budget.
But sometimes it's having two orthree very close people in my
life. Tell me, you know what?
And they're very, I mean, one ofthem is, I won't say because I,
(46:18):
I want to be private. Somebody very close, very, very
close. Say, you know, maybe it's time
to not do this anymore. Say that to yourself.
Maybe it's time to not do this anymore and just be very very
still and attentive to what naturally comes up.
Don't try to change the feeling,just notice it.
So maybe it's not time to do this anymore.
(46:42):
I have stage 3 prostate cancer and when I was going through 19
months of no testosterone hormone depletion therapy, 2
surgeries, and 36 radiation sessions as we were opening our
Santa Fe campus. I do know that when I was
hearing that from him in particular, there was some logic
(47:03):
in it, but I'm now in my, my cancer's in remission and I feel
better and, and I, so I don't believe that this is not what
I'm supposed to do. I I deeply believe this is a
vocation and a calling and and Ion a daily basis have reminders
(47:28):
of that. So what is the physical?
I'm going to come back relentlessly to this.
What do you feel? Not, not the story around it,
not anything but the actual physical sensation that you find
in your body When you say I should stop doing this, It's
time not to do this anymore. When I feel that, I feel I
(47:49):
actually feel some terror. And the terror is, you know, I
think it was Mark Twain who might have said, you know,
there's two most important days in your life.
The day you were born in the dayyou figured out why and that
figured out why. Peace to me this is I'm not
doing this for money. I don't.
I've not paid myself in 7 1/2 years.
(48:11):
I'm not doing this for ego or for attention.
I'm doing it because I love George Bailey, Jimmy Stewart,
and it's a wonderful life. And I love when Clarence the
Angel comes down to the bridge and helps George see what
Bedford Falls would be like if he had never lived.
(48:36):
I love the end of Schindler, Schindler's List, when all of
those descendants walk by the grave of George Schindler.
I think we need to, you know, the technologists in Silicon
Valley need to figure out a technology that allows us as
humans at while we're living to see that effect we've had on
other people. They call it actually in
(48:57):
psychology, they call it the George Bailey effect.
So I know that. But then I think sometimes I'm
like, OK, maybe I'm just delusional.
So do you notice this is fun? Do you notice how I keep saying
I want let me be really clear the the words I'm looking for
and I love these stories. By the way, the words I'm
(49:18):
looking for are things like I feel tension in my shoulders
that that really. And do you notice how when I
said it's time to stop, I shouldn't do this anymore, I saw
a pullback and attention and your face took on this look of
no that told me everything I needed.
(49:38):
Your body doesn't accept that asthe truth.
It's that simple. Then you went into an argument
in your mind with this loved oneand why you keep you keep going
and your larger philosophy and all the things.
I like to boil it down. You know, this is what living
with the sun with Down syndrome,who doesn't speak much and who
(49:59):
doesn't have stories in his head.
This is what it's taught me. If it feels bad, maybe it's not
true and that's the only story you need.
So now let's look at the opposite of it.
It's not time to stop yet. Now say that and your whole
immediately, every micro expression in your face changes
(50:22):
to something relaxed and peaceful.
That's the whole thing. I call it the body compass.
See, now you're going very deeply into your truth and that
brings tears of relief. Tell me where I'm wrong.
Yes it does. That's all.
The body is a holy instrument tome and it will not lie.
(50:46):
And the mind, pardon my French here, but the my mind is a 2 bit
whore. That's not a sex worker.
I mean a 2 bit sex worker. But that's the old fashioned
phrase. And what I mean by that is it
will go after every cultural story it hears and try to spin
(51:07):
ideas and facts to convince other people.
I'm OK, but all I need to know is when you think the thought I
should stop, everything recoils and when you think the thought,
it's not time to stop. You went into this deep
relaxation internally and I can feel it.
(51:30):
I I couldn't feel you. And I mean, I feel literal
physical, like electrical sensations When somebody finds
truth, the the field of their electromagnetic nervous system I
guess reaches me somehow becauseI tangibly physically feel it.
I couldn't feel you when you were in the stories about why
(51:50):
you should stay. But when you said it's not time
and you let yourself go there, boom.
There's an energy that literallyconnects with me through, I
don't know how it does it over Zoom, but it does.
That energy field, I believe is going to take very good care of
your body. It will keep you healthy as long
(52:13):
as you're meant to be healthy. And when it's time for you to
put the body down, it will gracefully lay itself down.
But we had all we needed when you felt that that live on that
path. Thank you.
Thank you. I think I just got a little dose
of what's going to happen at theworkshop.
(52:33):
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
I have one last question for you, Marty.
I'm going to call you Marty. So imagine someone younger than
you comes to you and says, you know, I won an auction to have
coffee or tea with you next week.
And I'd love to have you come tothe tea or coffee with a bumper
sticker. Not a physical one, but a sort
(52:53):
of a proverbial one bumper sticker of the wisdom you've
learned in your life. Just a singular 1.
What what would be on that bumper sticker and what's the
origin story if it's not something you've already told
us? I mean, the one that pops to
mind is, is a quote from Gert ofthe German poet who said when
(53:14):
you trust yourself, you will know how to live.
I truly believe that there is a center point in each of us that
is made of space and stillness and silence and yet is intensely
alive. I think it's life itself and if
we trust it, if we trust ourselves because that is who we
(53:35):
truly are, is that part the partthat is pure life, pure love,
pure consciousness. If you trust that and make all
your decisions so that you stay,you feel aligned with that, you
will never make a choice that will be damaging to your life or
(53:55):
to the lives of others. So yeah, when you trust
yourself, you will know how to live.
Especially when you measure yourlife based upon joy.
Oh yeah, Well, that when you trust yourself, you you
experience joy. There's that's how you do it.
I love you. This has been joyful for me as a
guy who started a company calledJoie de Vivre and ran it for 24
(54:15):
years. I I'll finish with a, a quote
from JD Salinger who said happiness is a solid and joy is
a liquid. And so happiness is
circumstantial. Joy really comes from within
you. So I'm overflowing joy right
now. Thank you.
I'm looking forward to seeing you at the end of September, and
(54:36):
I hope that many of you who are listening will join us.
Thank you so much, Chip. It's a real honor to be here.
Well, I I just got a a free doseof Martha.
Martha Beck coaching wasn't thatinteresting.
You know, in listening to Martha's story, which is one of
the most miraculous stories I'veever heard, given just where she
(54:58):
started and where she's come to at age 62, I would say 3 of my
key lessons there are just the value of integrity, the value of
trusting your gut, trusting yourbody, trusting guides beyond
what you expect, the coincidences of life.
Learning how not to lie to yourself is maybe one of the
(55:21):
most important things we need todo.
And maybe one of the challenges of midlife is because for so
many people by midlife, they realize it's what they're doing
no longer works. As I say in the in the episode,
Carl Jung says you can't live the afternoon based upon the
rules of the morning because by the by the afternoon they'll be
(55:44):
a lie. So, you know, how do you live in
integrity? I think that's one lesson #2 is
the key lesson about just both anxiety and what's happening in
your life? Are messages and are you
listening to them or are you distracting yourself?
Often we use alcohol or whateverit is to distract ourselves,
(56:07):
work to not listen to these messages.
But in these messages there's a curiosity bridge language that
she didn't mention today, but ispart of her book Beyond Anxiety.
The idea that curiosity is a pathway to exploring things that
you might not consider and and that curiosity bridge opens up
(56:31):
new options in your life. So I would just say that was a
second lesson. I think 1/3 lesson just really
speaks to this idea that she went through death threats.
She went through a period where she had to basically leave her
family, her blood family, but also her Mormon community.
(56:52):
You could say that in essence, she had to die.
It was the death of the ego, thedark, dark night of the ego that
made it was not so much the darknight of the soul.
And she survived it and she has thrived.
And look at how happy and joyousshe is today in a very unusual
kind of relationship. This is not the way she was
(57:15):
brought up, and yet it's the wayshe wants to live her life.
And so I guess what I would say is for those of you who have the
fear that you're going to live into your integrity of who you
truly are in whatever way that means, it may mean that some
people will no longer want to bein your life.
That may be fine, because there may be a whole new collection of
(57:37):
other people who are magnetized to be with you as a result of
you living authentically. Hope you enjoyed this this
wonderful and deep episode. I'll see you next week.
Thanks for listening to The Midlife Chrysalis.
This show is produced by MidlifeMedia.
If you enjoyed this episode, help us spread the word by
(57:58):
subscribing and leaving a reviewon your favorite platform.
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