Access Your Best Self With Mind-Body Practices, Belief Testing & Imagination | Dr. Martha Beck

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine my guest today is Dr Martha Beck Dr Martha Beck did her undergraduate Master's and PhD training at Harvard University she is also considered one of the foremost experts in the personal development field having authored many best-selling books including her upcoming book beyond anxiety curiosity creativity and finding your life's purpose I must say that today's discussion is a truly special one I've long benefited from Martha's teachings and I assure you that during today's episode you will benefit from Martha's teachings she describes and we explore practices in real time that will allow you to truly understand what is most important to you and what you ought to spend your time pursuing you will hear a rich discussion about how to frame the thoughts And the emotions around any topic including pain points in life as well as your goals and the things that you are in pursuit of you will also learn how to figure out exactly what is most essential to you and indeed how to explore what Dr Marthur calls your essential self those deepr rooted desires that are unique to you and your history and what will make your life most fulfilling by the end of today's episode You Will Be armed with new intellectual and practical knowledge and you will be able to adopt the best possible stance for you as you navigate forward in your life before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is better help better help offers Professional Therapy with a licensed therapist 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the optimal functioning of all the cells in your body and that's especially true for the neurons the nerve cells in fact we know that even a slight degree of dehydration can diminish both cognitive and physical performance so to make sure that I'm getting proper hydration and electrolytes I personally dissolve one packet of element in about 16 to 32 ounces of water when I first wake up in the morning and I drink that or sip that across the first half hour of the day or so and then I also make it a point to drink another packet of element dissolved in an equal amount of water so 16 to 32 ounces at some other point during the day and maybe even a third if I'm exercising and or sweating a lot I should mention the element tastes absolutely delicious my favorite flavor is watermelon although I also confess I like the raspberry flavor the Citrus flavor basically I like all the flavors if you'd like to try element you can go to drink element.com huberman to claim a free element sample pack with the purchase of any element drink mix again that's drink element.com huberman to claim a free sample pack and now for my discussion with Dr Martha Beck Dr Martha Beck welcome oh it's so good to be here Andrew thank you I'm so excited I mean I don't know how to convey to the people listening and watching just how excited I am I have very few heroes in life but you are one of them I don't it's true that does not compute it's true I I won't name all of them but you know you the great Oliver Sachs are among the people that have really influenced me so much in terms of the things I do the ways I try and think the ways I try to not think oh yeah at times and your life story is an amazing one so we have a lot to cover today so I'm not going to spend any more time talking about why I feel that way because it's going to just become apparent in our discussion but I do want to say that you have really been ahead of your time uh I mean you're triple degreed from Harvard you have these academic credentials and yet you were one of the first people to be public facing about the mindbody connection in a way that is operationalized what we sometimes call in and around this podcast protocols yeah and you've offered some practices that have absolutely transformed my life and other people's lives and I gain them through reading your books and that's not a standard book advertisement but all of your books have been transformative for me one of the exercises that has had a profound effect on my life is the perfect day exercise oh yeah you know and when I first read about it I I thought you know what could this possibly be you know and and as I recall it um involved taking a little bit of time maybe 10 minutes maybe 30 minutes and just sitting or lying down closing one's ey eyes and just imagining with no limitations yeah one's perfect day yeah and what's so wild about this exercise is that several not all but several of the things that I imagined in that exercise yeah have amazingly come to be reality it works I don't know how or why it works but it I've I used to have people send me a postcard this is how long I've been doing this stuff now it's emails and texts that I say okay we just did your ideal day you've got it all written down now send me a notification when that day happens and I get a lot of notifications okay well I'm giving you a notification right now because at the end of that exercise and I ended up doing it several times uhuh I do I do it all the time okay that's that's good to know I want to know about the the frequency there um was you know I'd love to sit down and talk to Martha Beck what I wouldn't do so I'm in a pinch me moment right right now this is so great it's wild it's a like reality weaving back on itself and I've listened to your podcast and I thought that guy is really cool and here I am thank you I'm um I'm moved by by that so let's just talk about this exercise for a second cool um clearly uh we could come up with scientific explanations for why it would work you know the the brain is a predictive machine you know once it understands that something might be possible maybe it looks for avenues for that unconsciously we could come come up with a whole narrative around that but just for sake of those listening what is this exercise how how would you suggest somebody try it so the first thing is that you don't make up something I used to people would always tell me they'd make up a day where they woke up in a white room with white sheets and windows with white curtains and then they would put on white clothes and drift around and I realized finally that these people were just tired and they were they they they could not project anything but a sort of blankness that I finally realized meant that they just pushed themselves too hard so I stopped doing this with people until they were well rested then you don't make it up you see it happen that's the key thing you allow it into your mind not as though you're reaching with your imagination just as though it emerges so I talk people through it um you first thing is you wake up in the morning you're perfectly crashed by a beautiful sleep in your imagination don't open your eyes but listen what do you hear so you don't make it up you listen for it what what do you hear for me the first thing I hear is like just feeling how comfortable my body is on the bed you know something that I don't do enough right what about the sound of someone or someone breathing mhm yeah someone next to me breathing and they're still asleep ah lovely you have is there a dog breathing on the foot of the bed well if it was like my Bulldog Costello that's snoring I'm G to get another dog soon so I would like a dog that breathes with less snoring than Costello although I I must say I I miss his uh bulld dogs is like incredibly deep snores the early versions of this podcast the early episodes we kept him in the room snoring and um and by the way the the watering up in my eyes these are truly tears of joy um and I said in uh at the beginning of the uh podcast I said listen I have a bulldog he's getting toward the end of his life so we're going to keep him in the room and so when you hear that breathing in the background that snoring let's call it what it what it is um he's he's in here like so sorry not sorry so anyway so yeah so there's some um bulldog breathing you can have as many dogs in the room as you want just listen and maybe you hear birds outside maybe you hear the ocean maybe you hear wind maybe you hear people talking or the noise of traffic just just listen for a minute until you're pretty sure you've heard everything there is to hear yeah I like the sound of kids playing ah sweet okay so smell the air what's it like how humid is it what's the temperature you know I'm California it hard I like um I like it in the 70s and ' 80s perfect not too humid and um I don't it's weird that it don't jumps in but there's something about the the sound of airplanes flying over interesting it always depresses me it must be some par Association sometime like I don't like that okay no planes so birds bird chirping who doesn't like birds chirping um and by the way for for our listeners this is not one magical day that you'll never live again this is a typical day but your life is now perfect so it's an ordinary day but in your perfect life so put it out three years five years whatever makes it possible for you to allow that your ideal life could form in that time you'll find as you do it many times the time necessary for it to happen becomes much shorter anyway so you get up look look around you sit up in the bed look around who's next to you what does the dog look like what does the room look like yeah it's my partner next to me my dog is you know I told myself I wasn't going to get another Bulldog but I think I'm get you are they're the best they're like the the essence of efficiency of metabolism meaning they do as little as possible and they experience as much joy as possible they're he us when you need a wise hedonist in your life right and and they are capable of protecting if they need to but I honestly don't care about that you know all that all that stuff like all that like my Bulldog I don't care about any of that something tells me you could protect yourself pretty well I'm I'm good I'm good there um so I look around the room what color are the walls what pictures are are hanging there if any yeah I'm a wyth fan Andrew WTH fan which one Andre or NC well the Recently I saw a caption I don't know if this is true because it was an Instagram post that um the woman in the field oh image Christina's World that um yeah yeah um I didn't know that the name of it thank you that that this was a neighbor of theirs that had a degenerative um neural condition yeah and rather than use a wheelchair of sorts she insisted on crawling everywhere um and so that image is actually of her crawling out into the field happily to enjoy the field because my impression of the of the painting before was that somehow because she's seated up there it looks like in my mind I projected onto it that there's some like desperation there or something to get back to the house but that's not it at all turns out this is a woman who preferred to move with her own agency even if it meant crawling to enjoy nature and it's a magnificent painting it's a magnificent painting so it's on the wall there yes maybe not the original although that would be awesome why not it's your perfect then I'm waking up in in uh in in the met and also just notice that you're creating a theme which is the the theme is I will go out as myself and and I will reach and strive for things and I I I'm not here to be helped I'm here to do hard things and to do them for the joy of it so that's what that painting is strong symbol of Who You Are so get out of the bed and your partner's still sleeping the dog's still sleeping go look out the window where are you and you can be anywhere I'm a mountains guy as much as I love California you know I've I've realized that I just went out to Boulder Colorado for the first time for a week just by myself and I fell in love with it yeah um so I'm in the mountains Colorado feels right to me um and there's water uhhuh like a river they a river they've got Great Rivers there yeah they do um or or the little streams I like the little streams that they have there um because the rivers are so loud the rivers are really loud when they get going um yeah and yeah so are you looking at a a small town a city or just do you just live out in the mountains by yourself definitely small town I I can't be too isolated if I'm going to be in a city I'm going to be in Manhattan it's like it's all or none so if I'm going to be in nature I I want to be in nature um It's a Small Town beautiful so just look around smell the pine and Aspen air and then you go into your perfect bathroom and it's all it's beautiful you could go through a lot of description if you wanted to but I'm G to rush through that to get to the interesting parts so you take a look at yourself in the mirror your body is absolutely perfect of course in your case that's not an aspirational thing you're already there but make it even better yeah that for me that that means being cleare eyed you know I'm people who listen to this podcast know that you know I came up through Neuroscience studying a number of things but the visual system and you know these two little bits in the front of our skull are pieces of our brain yeah the only pieces of our brain outside of our skull and and they yes they may be the windows to the soul if people want to refer to them that way but to me like just feeling like my eyes are clear yeah you know and and um there's a certain um tone or something that I'm like okay like there is a reality I I I've seen it I don't know if you've worked with people who are dying or who are really ill sometimes you'll see a shift in their the transparency of their eyes there there actually seems to be a Radiance coming from the eyes or gathered around the eyes that's what I'm sort of thinking as you talk yeah and the I think it's the Buddhist that talked about you know it's someone who's at the level of their their eyes are at the level of their skin so like right there as opposed to Sunken back into their eyes yes you know um and then of course some people are like really forwarding but this and I also happen to work on the intersection between the visual system and the autonomic system you know so you know stress or calm and I think what that's referring to and I'm speculating here is where we are alert but calm yes so we're present alert but calm and of course that controls pupil size and all this stuff I I do believe has been understood in other traditions and ancient Traditions through a kind of unconscious genius where they're recognizing all the symbols integrated of you know Clarity of the eyes and um level of the skin and you know and of course we can measure the stuff in the lab but that's just isolating variables so for me it's yeah looking in the mirror and like okay my eyes are clear this is so interesting because my friend Liz Gilbert of Eat Pray Love Fame that she wrote something before she was famous where she dressed as a man for a week and and walked around and she's tall and Broad shouldered and has you know great chin so she could get she could look male and she got herself all dressed up male and they faked a beard and everything and then she had her friends come and a male friend said to her no Liz pull your eye pull yourself back six inches away from your own eyes and she did it and he said now you're looking like a man interesting and she walked around that way and she said it was the lonliest saddest week she's ever experienced like yeah people gave her more respect in certain ways but she said when they told me to back away from my own eyes it was like my soul went dim wow and that's really really interesting that you would say that exact distance even that's like a retraction of our humanness that's fascinating I mean I don't ever recall as a kid you know my dad or or my mom or anyone telling me like where to place my my vision and I'm probably guilty of being um more expressive uh emotional um effusive than um than certainly the uh traditional male stereotype right like if I love something people are going to hear about it and um and I'm not shy about the fact that thinking about Costello or my graduate advice or people I love like I'll I'll well up and I I'm I'm okay with that yeah but I think well to to flip that one around do you think that that's a real thing that um I have no idea conditioning that that um men and women tend to kind of be either more I don't know there's no language for this I have an N of two you and Liz Gilbert okay all right um but I think it's very interesting that you said that that you're forward and your eyes and the the idea that the eyes are the parts of our brains that are showing it's fascinating that she had that experience too so I would love to I I'll be asking people from now on if you're design male identified male do you feel you have to pull your sort of Vitality back from the world and I I suspect it's true I suspect it's true just from interacting with people um and ask women if they I think it's more vulnerable to be right on the surface of your life and the surface of your eyes but it's also much more um there's a sensuousness to the world when you're fully present that I know I had to shut down like when I was in the ivy league it was I had to pull myself back and syn down and that's a typically male environment I think it's about materialism and conquest and oppositional thinking as much as very tactical yes like taking what's out there and holding it in I actually can do it I know how to do this you just did it yeah I know how to do this it's like visible yeah and I I probably just learned how to do it right um cuz I'm comfortable in a lot of different environments there are certainly environments I don't want to find myself in again or in the future for the first time but um yeah I'm very very um aware what that that the distinct change in internal state that a companies that that's so that was so interesting that you just did that wow okay back this the problem I'm having now is that I have and I quote an interest-based attention system I love that ADHD which means I pay attention to things that interest me which means that I literally follow squirrels away from business meetings but I have I have paper and Pen here and it's okay because the because the art of podcasting in my opinion is that we can spin a couple different plates and return to them because it's like conversation otherwise we might as well be on a highly produced uh traditional media show and that's not what this is sure I say so so we're back so I look in the mirror and I see I'm like you are C like I'm clear and present okay and of course for those listening you should all be doing this exercise for you right yes okay um okay and now you go to your closet and you're going to get dressed open your closet which is the closet of clothing you have in your ideal life and just look at the different outfits you have the different like how many kinds of shoes are there this is pretty funny because I definitely have my ideal wardrobe which is very sparse I've always owned 20 or so of these button- down black shirts like uh for work purposes I like t-shirts that are super soft mhm and because I have a short torso and long arms like they have to like fit right and so I find the ones that fit right it's a nightmare trying to get them but once I get them I I adore them because um I always own two belts or so MH one watch black jeans the shorts I like I get teased for wearing mailman shorts but they're actually the Costco purchased male or like Kmart purchased like male person shorts they fit best um for me and um and I've always worn Adidas so yeah I'm happy oh yeah I own a pair of proper leather shoes I have a suit I actually own a tuxedo oh my um I own those things and um I like the I like my closet I've always liked it it feels very safe in there uhhuh I like I like it and then um I've always kept a couple photographs of people that I love in my closet oh sweet so whose photographs are there do you see any photographs you don't recog at this moment it's my sister mhm it's my grandfather and then I think that's it yeah don't apolog apologies to my parents apologies to my parents apologies to my parents and anyone else forgive me okay yeah okay so then you go through the whole day and I I can spend at least an hour going through this with someone you and the important thing is that you do something I call the three ends you notice what comes into the field of your imagination but you don't try too hard to see it specifically and then as you go through you sort of narrow down what it might be and if the name of that thing comes up you can then name it but for example in one of my ideal days I was writing short pieces of writing then I was interacting with people very regularly about it and I I I couldn't even IM imagine what what kind of job that was and then um and an editor in Manhattan knocked over a manuscript I'd written and she got she was the editor of a women's magazine and she called me and asked me to be a columnist I was like I always a magazine columnist for like 20 years and it was exactly what was in the ideal day but I had not named it I didn't know that you could live in Phoenix and be a columnist for New York magazines so notice what you're doing you put on your very comfy t-shirt very cool black jeans you're one watch your belt your Adidas and you go do something really fun with people you really love in a place you really enjoy well the the work part of my life quote unquote work is like reading and teaching and talking about stuff on the internet which is podcasting um but what I got a flash of is I I'd want to work on my fish tanks with my kids oh yeah I see now I skipped a thing you're supposed to go down to breakfast and see if you've got a family I do I I um yeah I've always wanted kids um been trying to time that correctly and with the right person um so yeah I I like tending to my fish tanks I have kept fish tanks since I was a kid I haven't had one for a few years now but um I like I'm always setting them up for other people it's kind of interesting I always go in real life I go place I see people I'm like I'm gonna put a fish tank there I don't know my interest based detention system just went oh really you do it for other people oh yeah I'll show up and I'll be like I got will you let me and then I'll set it up and I I love setting up fish tanks it's like the who knows so your kids are helping you how many kids are there realistically no in your imagination you're going have 20 if you want two two I I for some reason I got obsessed with numbers for a while but I was thinking like five or something no two you never know it could happen the important thing about this exercise is you don't get logical about it you don't think what's manageable and what's probable and you just see who's there yeah two feels good all right fair enough two feels good and um yeah there's so much life in a fish tank there's the plants there's the food there's who how the fish are interacting with one another who's chasing who who's nibbling who's hiding who's dominant who's like being kind of unruly and like you know um I mean I must have seen the Finding Nemo movie especially the second one like like 12 times fabulous like 12 times it's crazy as an adult it's not crazy this is wonderful so good like I just loved the personalities I mean any any movie where Willam defo the voice of a fish you're like okay like uh so um all right so we we tend to the fish tanks which is great which is great pleasure and then for me it's we come here and sit sit down with you and hang out with these guys and uh my team and um and share what I like know to be really cool useful like truly useful yeah practices fabulous so you're very very close to your ideal day right now but and as you said I don't know the mechanisms that get put in play um certainly directed attention you're now like a guided missile that knows where its Target is or at least what the target looks like and we we all make countless decisions every day and you can think of it as a lot of little wi's branching out and if you've got this in your mind really clearly you're going to take the option that leads to it that's what I tell people it's logical directed attention except that in many cases I have to say a miracle occurs you know my favorite cartoon is this physics equation with these two physicists and they're all these symbols on both sides of the board in the middle in Brackets it says a miracle occurs I love it my dad's a theoretical physicist so he will but he will Delight in that as many of you know I've been taking ag1 for more than 10 years now so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring this podcast to be clear I don't take ag1 because they're a sponsor rather they are a sponsor because I take ag1 in fact I take ag1 once and often twice every single day and I've done that since starting way back in 2012 there is so much conflicting information out there nowadays about what proper nutrition is but here's what there seems to be a general consensus on whether you're an omnivore a carnivore a vegetarian or a vegan I think it's generally agreed that you should get most of your food from unprocessed or minimally processed sources which allows you to eat enough but not overeat get plenty of vitamins and minerals probiotics and micronutrients that we all need for physical and mental health now I personally am an omnivore and I strive to get most of my food from unprocessed or minimally processed sources but the reason I still take ag1 once and often twice every day is that it ensures I get all of those vitamins minerals probiotics Etc but it also has adaptogens to help me cope with stress it's basically a nutritional insurance policy meant to augment not replace quality food so by drinking a serving of ag1 in the morning and again in the afternoon or evening I cover all of my foundational nutritional needs and I like so many other people that take ag1 report feeling much better in a number of important ways such as energy levels digestion sleep and more so while many supplements out there are really directed towards obtaining one specific outcome ag1 is foundational nutrition designed to support all aspects of well-being related to mental health and physical health if you'd like to try ag1 you can go to drink a1.com huberman to claim a special offer they'll give you five free travel packs with your order plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 again that's drink a1.com huberman there was something that popped to mind I mean there all these little things um that also go into my perfect day that we don't have to go into every detail about like working out and the whole thing but I just want to maybe um mention a point of contrast that served as one of the reasons why I did this practice in the first place was that in real life I was waking up and sometimes still do wake up with this like underlying like tension like something's not right yeah I don't feel good I wasn't anxious I wasn't like but like something's not right and I went through years of kind of like gnawing and scratching at different things that you know I quickly discovered you know like going out for a couple drinks with people made me feel worse I don't judge people who drink whatsoever I'm like I don't like this like it doesn't like I was just but this un unease um this it's like a restlessness um that lived inside of me for so long and still can Surface as a signal that like this is not the right life and at that point at a laboratory Wow Grants we're publishing papers like all these things that I loved doing and that I loved the trajectory that I took to arrive there and the people that were in my life but like I just knew I could just say like something's not right and I felt terribly guilty the reason I'm telling this is I felt terribly guilty like I owned a home right I was in my mid-30s and it wasn't an expensive home certainly not by today's standards but I was able to buy a home on my own I was um my dog I had you know people in my life but it was like this it was almost like a gear that was grinding and that was the um stimulus for exploring this perfect day my life looks completely different now and it's far from qu perfect um meaning there's still work to do in a lot of domains a lot but um but I feel like the trajectory is right yeah and I really believe the the source of all my work you know I was at um was getting my doctorate at Harvard I'd gotten my bachelor's there I'd been there since I was 17 and halfway through my doctorate I during that time I'd gotten married had a child my second child was prenatally diagnosed with Down syndrome and that I was six months into the pregnancy almost and I had like two weeks to make a decision and I'm politically very pro-choice um and I would again never judge anyone who made the other decision but I couldn't do it I was already sort of bonded to him and I kept asking the question of myself what makes a human life worth living because the doctors at the Harvard Medical Clinic and all my advisers told me you have got to at the very reled institutionalized this child the second he's born institutionalized oh yeah for sure they said you're throwing your career away the head of the obstetrics um committee there were five Obstetricians and um the chief dude came in and there I was sitting on a bed in my little Hospital napkin and he said um this is like a cancerous tumor you've got to let us take it out it will ruin your life and I just looked at him and I had the weirdest experience and I looked at this very intimidating guy and I'm there sort of young and naked and pregnant and um suddenly it was like I could see two faces on him and one was this very Stern knowledgeable doctor and the other one was a terrified child terrified and it was so striking that I like started looking at him strangely I'm sure he thought I was completely nuts but um I looked at him and I thought you're afraid you're afraid of this baby and I realized that's when I realized that a lot of people don't go to Harvard because they know they're smart they go there because they're afraid they're stupid and he probably true for a lot of higher education institutions yeah and I thought he's afraid of the in quote stupid little boy inside me because he's afraid of the stupid little boy inside him he's terrified of being the person he's worked so hard not to be he's afraid of being like my son and he thinks that should be thrown away and that was the point which I said I will not make my decisions based on social pressure I have to do something from a very very deep place within and so I kept that I mean he's home right now you know we're having a great time Adam right Adam my son Adam I only know his name through your books of course but I feel like I know him a little bit cuz I love the story about him peeing on the doctor yes the very first thing I ever did in this life was he the doctor pulled him out of my body and I saw this Arc of urine go straight into the doctor's face and I was like so proud of my child at that moment I thought if only I'd thought to do that I want to just um for lack of a better way to put it double click on two things first of all well I I wonder if we're going to speculate no need to but if the perfect day exercise is really about accessing the subconscious that's what I that's why I told that long story that that when I had to make that decision it was the first time I had dropped everything conscious and logical from my mind and come from a place that was I believe it's part of our neurological apparatus but the cognitive structures are so you know cognitive function is just a tiny fraction of what our whole nervous systems are able to detect and tell us and for the first time I was making a decision from every cell in my body instead of just my you know neocortex and I realized my life is not meant to go like his life and the person in the next bed their life isn't meant to be like mine but we all have this programmed into US somehow and when we start to leave it in my last book I called it um leaving our integrity because to be an Integrity just means to be one thing it doesn't have any moral implications in the original like Latin it just means integer one thing so if we we're born knowing who we are but some point at some point usually not long after birth we get socialized away from what from expressing exactly what our own truth is telling us we we get socialized to behav behen ways that please other people very simple and as you're describing it I had a great life I had a lab I had a dog I had a house those are all socially recognized items that say your life was working but they have nothing to do with your personal Destiny right and in my case again I loved and I still love doing science I mean I um my lab is certainly shrunk I everyone I got it made sure people got placed in jobs and faculty positions Etc um still involved in some clinical trials but you know one thing that pained me about the work I'll just come clean about this this makes my throat uh lock up a bit is uh I've been an animal lover since I was a kid I do eat meat I eat it from sustainable sources but you know not all but a lot of the work that I did in my laboratory was on animals and at some point it was approximately halfway through um my first position I realized I was like I I I I don't like this yeah and we could talk all day about animal research nonanimal research I decided to work on humans instead um because they they can consent um and they house themselves um but you know there so there were some pain points but I think my unconscious was pulling at me yeah um like this isn't good this isn't good and um for me yeah um and and I do think that the conscious mind and The Logical mind as you're referring to it is it's very tactical and it part of the problem is it works so well Works in quotes to move us forward on metrics related to that exactly but I mean there are very few people that I know who are truly aligned with their I guess what you've called essential self um one who um I'm fortunate to be good friends with he just so happens to be famous for lack of a better word um who resonates with a lot of what we're discussing is the great Rick Rubin the music producer who produced all these different types of yeah music and one thing that's really interesting about Rick uh spent a lot of time with Rick um and we communicate all the time and one thing that is very interesting about him is he's he has incredible powers of observation he can really feel the energy yeah of a musical artist or and he's produced other things too he does great documentary he's got his own great podcast but he doesn't get absorbed by it and I wanted to talk to you about this because I you know I think for people that are very feeling very sentient um or really in touch with that the ability to like feel music to feel other people's emotions to really um that's a beautiful life to taste food but there's a threshold Beyond which we kind of lose ourselves in the experience of others and what's going Rick can go right up to that line wow and really see it and enjoy it but it doesn't absorb him in a way that he he has a place that he returns to that's in him and the reason I discovered this is I I said wait you don't drink alcohol he said no I said no drugs he said no doesn't judge it but he doesn't do it I said did you ever he said no and I said who comes up through music yeah and never takes a sip of alcohol goes to college and never took a sip of alcohol tried any drug and again you know I don't judge I've talked about psychedelics on this podcast I've talked about my own relationship to those what I think are very interesting clinical trials and things of that sort I think there's tremendous potential there I agree but what is it to be able to like experience life in the richest way but make sure that we don't get lost in feeling or in thought it's like this ability to move back and forth seems to be the most um the best definition of like a great life yeah in my opinion to because we need to do things each day I would say you don't even have to go back and forth you can do it all at once you can feel you can think and you can stay in the driver's seat and not be overwhelmed either intellectually or emotionally but I think it has a lot to do with you were talking about Asian Eastern like meditation practices um there's a little exercise I like to do with people where if they're struggling with a bad habit I say imagine the part of you that is always doing the bad thing like smoking 20 packs a day or whatever um imagine them as a wild thing in your left hand and then imagine the part of you that hates him and says stop smoking in your right hand and look at them and begin to see that they're both well-meaning they're both exhausted and you can wish them both well so one the Wild Child part is not thinking it's just feeling the controlling part is not feeling it's just thinking and if if I can get people and I have them put their hands out because I know it's going to activate both sides of their brains and then I have them wish these people well may you be well may you be happy when they can feel compassion for both sides of themselves then I ask them so who are you and who they've become is a compassionate witness which is not thinking and it's not feeling in the way we it's not emotional ovar the the word emotion means movement disturbance this part of the of one's being is not ever Disturbed or moved it's totally still and totally peaceful and completely compassionate it's like the ultimate parent yes it is and um dick Schwarz who who came up with the model of internal family systems theory I don't know if you've had him on the show have not but I I'm learning more more about internal family systems models I learned about this first in the context of uh visiting a trauma Healing Center that's great and then people are now applying this to addiction as well yeah um I'll get his name from you later Richard Schwarz anyway he I was talking to him and he said there is this part we all have different parts there's a part of you that feels like a little kid and wants to curl up in bed there's a part of you that wants to go rule the world whatever your parts are so he talks to people about these different parts and then sometimes they say oh there I've just come up against there's someone here who's very still who's very huge who's very kind and he he calls it self with a capital S and he says after thousands of patients they'll say he'll say what part of you is that and they say oh this isn't a part like the others this is who I am this is who I am and he believes it's just one unified self and for me if I don't find and lock into that self I am immediately Swept Away by my emotions and my brain just like in a gale force winds so I have to be very not grounded but centered and identified with this self before I can even leave the house how do you go about doing that and one of the reasons I'm asking this is because I think everyone including myself would do well to be able to access this compassionate witness self but also because so many people are on social media nowadays where you can almost feel yourself getting pulled down these um on these trajectories like the gravitational pull of a battle or or a video or or even something that's delightful but then you find like two hours went by and you were you overc consumed and and underc created in some sense junk food it tastes delicious but then you feel like it goes nowhere yeah you know this sort of goes nowhere um so do you have a practice that you to make sure that you're in that place I do and it's called suffering um it's very reli that made me laugh my best friend suffering I have a deeply LoveHate relationship with suffering if I'm for example um I can barely look at Instagram because I will watch a monkey nursing a kitten and then I will be down that rabbit hole so far you and me both eight hours later I'm but I will start to suffer I will start to physically feel cramped my eyes will start to hurt and water and I will start to feel what you were saying the grinding of a the gear that is wrong the machine isn't it's not in structural Integrity it's like when your car starts making a funny sound and you're like I should not ignore that and it always feels like discomfort tension anxiety um anger any of those things and then the practice of my life is to notice those Sensations at a finer and more granular level so that the moment I'm off true I can stop and say okay wo out of Integrity okay now I'm into anxiety because a divided person is always anxious so to get away from that from anxiety and back to true I use the body sit back straighten my spine take a deep breath do all the things that I'm sure you do when you meditate and then I sink into that part of myself that I was just trying to pull up for people with with the two hands exercise and I believe you could probably tell me the truth of this I believe that I've wired a pretty strong Super Highway in my brain that goes oops suffering find self with a capital S and I've done it so many thousands of times that I think I have like a highly melinated circuit that just goes there and then no matter what's happening I can usually just find it feel it and it it's an Exquisite sensation it's like coming home completely over and over again it's and now when I do an ideal day everything else is incidental the key is I'm in that self so the state is what's key yes and that it is so it has so much fun in this world and so you can walk around in that state oh yeah um you can so to be um sure I understand so say I wake up in the morning and I'm just like not feeling right or something triggers me or um I don't know just like I'm off center right um you take that sensation of of suffering yeah and you don't fear it you don't amplify it you just kind of pay attention to it you pay attention to it and here is the here is the key thing this is in my new book I kept this a secret because it sounded so silly and I thought this would never go in the ivy league but there something I call kissed k i t and it's stands for kind internal selft talk so what do you call yourself when you think to yourself Andrew Andy what you call yourself you yeah just yeah so you'd be sitting there and you get you don't feel good you don't feel right the first thing you do is allow your self to register every sensation without pushing back without restricting it people talk to me about bringing down their anxiety and I say how'd you feel if I told you I was going to bring you down that's not a nice thing to say if I told you I'm here to understand you and care about you better so just allow yourself to feel all the suffering and then start saying kind things to the one who is suffering even if it's just tiny suffering just go how are you how you doing not great ah okay so there's some anxiety oh your sinuses are blocked too let's see what could we do for you what let's get you a hot drink and like a a call with a good friend or a book or something and you just actively work as your own caregiver from the moment you are conscious in the morning and what that does is it makes you so compassionate to other people because you're not fighting the suffering in yourself yeah people in pain um are usually agitated and grumpy and so it's the uh inverse of that yeah yeah I I love this I mean in some sense the the words like self-parenting keep coming up in my mind because a lot of this is about learning to parent ourselves from the inside yeah and I and I do think that most you know we hear about inner child stuff and I think inner child work is very interesting I also think that as a biologist who spent the early part of my Care on developmental neurobiology like the same neural stuff is repurposed in adulthood like that's that's something that it's kind of obvious but we Overlook right I'm like I've got some inner adults here who aren't very happy too you know right right right you know that but the notion that like our attachments when we're young somehow that like those neural circuits are set aside so then we can form more mature adult attachments you know it's like no that's crazy we repurpose them so we're working we're working in an adult landscape with child based algorithms and depending on how childhood went you know that either can be spectacular or so so or complete disaster usually it's a combination that obstetrician at Harvard I would bet my last dime that he was still working on the same circuits he used when he was five and they were pretty scary you know like so yeah we all have um multiple causes of suffering but we also have I wouldn't actually call it inner parenting because that basically implies that only parents give that to to children and I think it's just humaning if you are truly Humane if you are truly in a in a state of self with a capital S there is nothing in you that wants to cause suffering for any other being right and there's nothing in you that doesn't want to help ease the suffering of the entire world so again now I'm into a kind of Asian modality of there's this bodh SBA prayer that goes um for as long as space endures and as long as sensient beings exist may I also abide that I might heal with my heart the miseries of the world and that part of us is in everyone and if we become those people it won't just be parents being kind to Children it will be humans being kind to each other the Earth and other all other beings and we may actually make it into another Century yeah no it's looking a it's looking a little sketchy right now I mean things are are tense it sounds like it starts with um self love compassion like like only from that place of compassionate witness self with a cap capital S excuse me can we be at our best for others I believe it's actually the only part of us that's real I talked a minute ago about people who are dying they they drop the pretense they don't need the pretense of belonging to the material world or the material body anymore and they that Radiance begins to gather in their eyes and it's not new it's what they came in with if you've looked into the eyes of a young child a little baby you see the same thing and it's only when people die that they put down everything else unless as aart says you die before you die and learn that there is no death because that self does not feel physical it feels metaphysical let's um if you would let's drill into this a little bit more because this is a high level but at the same time basic and yet abstract yeah concept and um it's not often on this podcast that we talk about abstract Concepts um we probably don't do it enough we get like I like talk about protocols you get your sunlight you know and I love that stuff too but as probably people Realize by now I I think a great life is is bridging as many things at least for me as as possible and seeing the overlap in the ven diagrams um so it's the only part of us that's real um meaning the other parts are just conditioned I think you've said parts are impermanent they will vanish everything as Shakespeare says every will just disappear and leave not a wreck behind we are such stuff as dreams are made on um there is an experience that is common to individuals all over the world in different cultures at different times where they start to say they feel as if they've awakened from a dream Plato did it with his cave analogy he said you know imagine that we all live chained in a cave and there's a fire behind us and we see Shadows on the wall and that's what we call re and then someone gets out of the cave and goes outside and sees this three-dimensional world where everything's bright and mobile and goes back and says people that this is the Shadows on the wall are real they're real Shadows but they're not the Ultimate Reality you should come outside and see it and Plato said everybody would see say he was crazy and that's what Academia says now you're crazy if you've ever had an experience where you felt like there was something realer than your physical self you're crazy like read Playdoh well it's interesting because a few years ago um so many Concepts that I was intrigued by um breath work for instance um psychedelics yep um meditation I mean now people get federal grants to study this stuff yeah and we do reductionist work to try and understand in fact I had to disguise breath work as respiration physiology um which we did and we did a clinical trial you know lo and behold certain patterns of breathing shift your internal State and your sleep and your anxiety it's like a du it's like a giant duh but it was it was scary territory for a while and um and now you know psychedelics have kind of broken through as I mean I had I mean I just have to say this with like while touching my forehead and like like that they adjust neuromodulators just like but differently than certain drugs that adjust neuromodulators and everyone accepted so the changing neuromodulators to change conscious experience and in that altered experience to be able to achieve neuroplasticity is like a it's also a big duh of course it works that way but six years ago you'd get fired I know from University if you said well maybe psilocybin could be an interesting compound for you know depressed people but and by the way I'm not suggesting everyone run out and take a bunch of psilocybin especially if you're depressed but there and not without supervision but if you can got somebody really good at it yeah I'm not saying do it either but I'm not saying don't do it right and and there and if you're you know um more gunshy31 know somebody who achieved some relief through meditation or some benefits of meditation so now you know everyone I think accepts like meditation can be very useful for lowering stress and altering conscious experience this is not new stuff as as everyone knows it's gone back thousands of years so it sounds like getting into the capital S self the compassionate witness is Step number one and so I just want to make sure that we make clear how one does that yeah it's not step step number one is suffering okay we all have that you may have never felt good in your life listener but you have suffered that's for sure that's the first Noble Truth of Buddhism there is suffering in this life pay attention to your suffering without fighting it allow it to be there I do this meditation if something's physically painful or emotionally painful I used to say let go let go to myself didn't work so one day I said all right you can stay let it stay and so I do a let stay meditation if there's pain let it stay if there's sorrow let it stay and as soon as I let it stay it begins to change so first step is suffering second step is compassionate attention to one's suffering with no resistance and the third step is to follow the compassion that is naturally being directed toward that suffering until you find yourself centered in it and that is a huge relief and I've done this in massive physical pain I've done it when I just lost people I loved it it's a very powerful maybe not a Panacea but not that far from it if you can get there you're still suffering but there's a peace that holds the suffering so lovingly that it it no longer concerns you so on one level that you're suffering and on a different level which feels more real to me there's only peace and compassion and wonder and joy and somebody asked me once if there's a metaphysical reality why is there suffering and I just heard coming out of my mouth because um because the self loves experience and is not afraid to suffer it's not afraid so then staying in that is highly motivated by the suffering you feel when you leave so to me that's First Step suffer Second Step pay attention to suffering third step follow compassion to its origin fourth step never stop doing that and every day every minute yeah yeah this is very relevant to me I I have always wondered about like do you push back against the feeling do you live with the feeling do you let it amplify it's there's so much contradiction yeah in inside of the typical discussion of these kinds of things that's one of the reasons I love your work so much is that um you don't tell people what to do but you provide paths yeah absolutely you do um absolutely I'd like to talk about um two things you know before I came in here I did a little meditation I do this before every episode but today I I just it like took only like a minute cuz it came to me so fast which is the two words that PO to mind were you know what's real what is true I mean I think so much of what we're talking about and so much of life is like what's real what's true yeah um certainly out in the world but like in US yeah like what I'm hearing is that at some level we need to not trust our thinking but of course there are times when we need to trust our thinking yeah and then of course we're receiving messages about what's real what's not real what's true what's not true sometimes about us I mean there's all this childhood programming right right how do we start to sort through this this I I'm guessing that it has something to do with being in that compassionate witness place but but let's say well you've experienced in your life I know because you've written and talked about this and I certainly have now that by some interesting twist of fate I'm a public facing person people saying things about you or about me that are not true yeah or that are judgments that don't feel good yeah um and we are not alone in this right you don't have to be facing in order to experience this people all the time are being told they are stupid sometimes they're being told they are brilliant and they know they're not brilliant you know this can go in every direction how are we supposed to hold the narratives the voices that we hear in our head and outside us in a way that really allows us to be our best essential selves well I would can I reverse it and talk about what's true first um so I remember sitting when I was 17 in the Lamont library at Harvard contemplating ending my life and like actually ending your oh yes yes um and looking at the equally miserable scratchings that other teenagers had put in the wood there and I thought okay they say the truth will set you free all right I'll give it a try and I just started trying to find out what was true and I I read through all the works of the of the greatest philosophers until I got to Emanuel Kant who says everything is screened through our perceptions so we can't know that anything is true for certain and I was I felt such relief okay I can't intellectually know what's true then if it's not true uh if I can't intellectually know something's true because everything's subjective what's useful what feels like truth to the body and I was interested uh that for example polygraph machines work uh because the body hates to lie um it it starts to send up a whole bunch of you know activation of stress systems and puts you in fight ORF flight and everything when you tell a lie or when you keep a secret so I just started thinking all right what makes my body contract and and weaken and what makes my body feel peaceful centered and grounded and you do so much work with the body I love that you're a brain body scientist because the body is incredibly wise so I just started letting myself test things like I was raised Mormon and uh very very Mormon so okay Mormonism oh boy that doesn't make me feel good at all it wasn't for you no and okay so God is not a white man who lives near the planet cob uh okay that is not true okay that feels better okay so I started following what made my body relax because my whole body as I said a few minutes ago is far more sophisticated has spent far more time being uh tinkered with by Evolution than my human ability to think in language so it has a response to truth or falsehood that's more subtle and sophisticated than my intellectual knowledge that's how I made the decision to keep my son that's how I've made almost all my decisions does it make my body relax and then does the mind come to the party and make the math work okay Mormonism says that all the American Indians are descended from a group of Israelites who came across in 600 BC in a boat to the Americas okay does the math work what does the genetic evidence say no they came over the illusion Straits and down um into the Americas when I was living in Utah they excommunicated a a DNA expert from the Mormon church for doing the the the data for finding the data that said the Mormon is that mormonism's claims were wrong so something that makes my body relax where it's also logically coherent that's the first thing and then what you find is if you really pursue that what is true what is true what is true everything that makes you suffer turns out to have flaws in the logic including I will die because I can't know I have no idea so to say that I will go out like a candle when my body dies is just as fundamentalist as saying I'm going to go sit on a cloud and play a harp I don't know Miss Arad Maharaj one of my favorite Yogi says the only true assertion that the mind can make is I do not know but you can feel what feels right to you so that's what ends up being real what's left over when you're eliminate all the things that feel deeply untrue to your body and don't make logical sense and some of those are things that our culture is very very fond of like everything has to be measured or it's not real is that true right so it's sounds like challenging or sitting with Doctrine and labels and stories that we've heard and that maybe we've internalized and just oh we've internalized them yeah yeah and and systematically exploring how those make us feel in our body yeah I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge one of our sponsors waking up waking up is a meditation app that offers hundreds of guided meditation programs mindfulness trainings yoga NRA sessions and more I started practicing meditation when I was about 15 years old and it made a profound impact on my life and by now there are thousands of quality peer reviewed studies that emphasize how useful mindfulness meditation can be for improving our Focus managing stress and anxiety improving our mood and much more in recent years I started using the waking up app for my meditations because I find it to be a terrific resource for allowing me to really be consistent with my meditation practice many people start a meditation practice and experience some benefits but but many people also have challenges keeping up with that practice what I and so many other people love about the waking up app is that it has a lot of different meditations to choose from and those meditations are of different durations so it makes it very easy to keep up with your meditation practice both from the perspective of novelty you never get tired of those meditations there's always something new to explore and to learn about yourself and about the effectiveness of meditation and you can always fit meditation into your schedule even if you only have two or three minutes per day in which to meditate I also really like doing Yoga Nidra or what is sometimes called non-sleep deep rest for about 10 or 20 minutes because it is a great way to restore mental and physical figure without the tiredness that some people experience when they wake up from a conventional nap if you'd like to try the waking up app please go to waking up.com huberman where you can access a free 30-day trial again that's waking up.com huberman to access a free 30-day trial I recall um the inverse of the perfect day exercise was another one that I I did which was like just call it what it was it was like the the sucky day like the shitty day right like or just where you'd imagine something really terrible and then how it would cause the body to contract oh yeah and to recognize you know the other side of the coin yeah right and and just learning of that relationship between the body and thought yeah I mean I can say from my own experience that one of the biggest mistakes I ever made was teaching myself to be more resilient to certain forms of stress really one of the worst mistakes I ever made I mean I and my lab studies stress and I talk about stress relief and physiological size are a great way to you know reduce real- time stress and I I stand by that so I'm not talking about that I stand by meditation and saunas and all the things that make us feel vacation the things that relax us so I'm not saying the ability to modulate stress is is incredibly powerful and useful I believe that yeah um for sure but um when I was a kid I wasn't the kid that was going to hold the firecracker till the last second right I wasn't the kid that would um do the really daring thing I had friends like that and I felt um kind of sheepish about that those friends are probably dead by now they're not doing well they're not doing that's true and and I grew up um in the then very parentless community of of skateboarders that we a lot of us were really wild we were very free which I love the freedom part but there was a lot of Mayhem and craziness especially back then yeah um and it's a beautiful culture I'm still friends with a lot of those folks um but those cultures yeah split off basically into thirds over time about a third dead are in jail about a third doing incredibly well personally and professionally incredibly well and then the third like doing well but they're not like um still as ambitious about that they're more focused on their personal lives and I hope that's what they want to be doing so um that's kind of how it broke down but I remember as a young kid and then in that culture like learning to push myself yeah past the feeling of like this is dangerous to the point where as I got older and my body eventually got stronger because back then I was always getting hurt which is why I left that uh sport wasn't very good I for the record wasn't very good um good enough but not not not where I wanted to that over time I remember when I started doing science I realized this is crazy skateboarding you fall you hurt yourself so badly you can't do it anymore that doesn't happen with studying so I'll just study Until I Collapse yeah I'll just work until I'm sick I'll just you know like that person down the hall puts in 80 hours well then I'll do a 100 and I'm not a competitive person by nature and or even worse you know in my in my mid-40s getting into like stupid stuff like kit great white shark diving to the point where I had an air failure oh my God this is all you know this whole thing and then coming back from them like like what am I doing and what I what had happened is I learned to override the signals of the body right and it was like when is enough enough it's like when the reap when the reaper comes you know um and so I think that if we don't listen to the signals that our body sends and we learn to override them repeatedly and systematically we can place ourselves into real psychological emotional and physical danger and and and I just like I don't know why I just felt like this was a need to do this in order to grow up and now I try and do the exact opposite it's like and then I feel bad I feel kind of lazy I'm like I'm not like running at 500 a.m. I'm like sleeping at 5 a.m. I'm doing yoga NRA I'm doing Yoga Nidra at 7:00 a.m. CU I didn't feel I slept enough and then I have friends in the public facing health health space they're like they push so hard I'm I'm lazy and then um so it can go too far well we have this culture of push push push produce produce produce one of my favorite Heroes along with Oliver saxs is uh Ian mcgilchrist at Oxford I love that man I may someday he may wake up someday just just find me crouched on his bed watching him sleep he's like he's not just a neurologist don't be not in a creepy way not in a creepy way sir um but he talks about how our particular culture for the last few hundred years has veered towards stuff that is preferentially favored by the left hemisphere of the brain and it has to do with grasping things and producing physical things and getting things to happen controlling them where the right side of the brain and of course it's all I'm oversimplifying massively but functions like meaning synthesis combinations of uh different bits of knowledge we're moving away from those and one of my good friends is Jill bolty Taylor who had she was a Harvard neuroanatomist and she had a massive left hemisphere stroke right and so she suddenly she watched her left hemisphere go off the she had a brain bleed and it would pulse so her left hemisphere would be there and she'd see everything as solid and measurable and all verbal and then it would go off and she was in a world where she was like a fluid the of the universe and she would watch she was in the shower and she watched her hand on the tiles dissolve into fields of energy and you were talking about energy earlier she said by the time her left hemisphere had shut down completely she managed to get a phone call made she couldn't talk by the time the phone call went through she got to a hospital took her eight years to come back to full functioning but she said during that time I did not know people's name names I didn't know the word person but boy could I feel people's energy and as she healed she didn't bother to get rid of her ability to feel People's Energy so she she's a great fan of using the whole brain whole brain living is her latest book and it's great um but Ian mcgilchrist talks about how when we don't use the whole brain his book The Master and his Emissary says the part of the brain that knows meaning should be the master and the data collector is just the emissary but the data collector has taken over in Western um Society um Western educated industrialized Rich Democratic if you want to get technical um and so what you were doing to yourself was completely irrational completely you should you should get the Darwin Award for taking yourself out of the gene pool it was like the stupidest thing I remember thinking like what am I doing and of course we used it to get virtual reality for our lab we did a bunch of things that I thought were useful that we transmuted into studies on stress and um so there was always a a purpose in a story that could justify being there oh there is yeah um and one that was really rooted in goodness and Adventure I love adventure and I'm super curious I think it's cool that you did that I think it's really useful I mean there are many situations where your ability to do that could be really useful um like a pair of scissors could be really useful but when you're like trying to reder the baby you put the scissors down it's a tool that you can use and it's fascinating I did martial arts for eight years and I loved pushing myself to the point where I was bruised and bleeding and my doctor thought I was a victim of domestic abuse I think it's useful and even fun but you have to know when your heart's in it and when your heart is not in it when your self is delighting in the adventure and when self says no Andrew peace be still you know enough yeah yeah I mean that's a perfect segue uh but before I move on um I want to make sure that I linked back what you said because I I think it's exceptionally valuable about what's real what's true so to really evaluate what's true you need to sit or maybe one can learn to do this while in motion and sense within one's body what feels liberating opening versus what feels Contracting is that right yeah the Buddha used to say he said this often that wherever you find um the ocean whatever it looks like you can know it because the ocean always tastes of salt and wherever you find a wakening or Enlightenment no matter what it looks like you will know it because it always tastes of Freedom so not it's not that you stop suffering it's that you are free you are free to in interact with your own suffering in a new way and that is peace so you look and it literally physically affects the body as not free free and if every anybody out there listening go to a really rough time in your life and imagine it I mean go to that time in your life when you were pushing yourself and you can actually remember the tightness in your throat in your back and your it's contracted and then remember the best moment of your life and what was happening then and all your muscles will loosen relax and open and that is my gauge of Truth does it Set Me Free the truth sets you free so whatever sets you free is the truth um then reality is going to start changing for you with or without psychedelics and I remember sitting in the I had this overwhelming obsession with meditation when I turned 50 and I just bought this place in the woods in central California and I'd go out and sprinkle myself with bird seed and meditate in the forest all day while the Chipmunks came and the birds would land on me nice oh it was amazing and about six months into really meditating for hours every day I kind of had an experience like Jill bti tayor in the shower where I was in the forest with the Chipmunks and birds and then it was just light and it was like it was so startling it was like I'd fallen off a cliff like I couldn't see the ground I couldn't I and then so and then everything was back and then it started happening a lot and I read in shamanic Traditions they call this experience stopping the world and it can happen through the guidance of a you Shaman or a plant or whatever it was happening to me through meditation and in that space of Light which I stopped fearing after a while it looked as if this thing we're doing now is a video game if you and I were sitting and playing a video game you would choose a character I would choose a character you'd stab me with a sword I'd hit you with a mace and we would say you are hurting me you are killing me but really we'd be talking about characters in a video game and then somebody would come say let's go get lunch and we would put it down and go stop stabbing each other and be friends um it feels to me as if this is more like a game than reality the whole physical everything and I call this you me and you call that me and I call it you and when the Game Stops however that happens there's a level of reality as different from this one as a video game is from threedimensional life there's a world outside the cave and I don't know what it is and I may be wrong I don't care I love it um I'm gonna mention Rick ruin again a few years back um I called him up and I just said like Rick you're not going to believe this and I relayed to him a story about someone that I knew really well and this like very like just kind of wild set of discoveries that someone else had Unearthed about their life being completely different than it had been presented and their business was a they failed like the whole thing just collapsed and and Rick just wrote back he said um Back To Nature the only truth oh yeah like that's very Rick like he's you know that's how he talk rela exactly he said um he said well I actually sorry it was preceded by he said um I said did you read this do you see this like I can't believe this and I like know this person really well and like can't like for a very long time and he just said it's all lies Back To Nature the only truth and I just like and that just like got like tattooed in my brain because so much of what we see and like and the shock and like I can't believe it and I think he was referring to something similar um he also has said and you're going to get a kick out of this I think so Rick loves professional wrestling he watches 10 hours a week of professional wrestling why well first of all he believes that it's the the only thing that humans have created that's real why because everyone agrees that it's not real fake it's fake and that he likes that no one gets hurt actually I mean people actually can get hurt but that no one's trying to actually hurt the other person they're collaborating in this kind of Shakespearean dance that they do and you have the different characters and so I went to see professional wrestling with Rick thinking like what am I doing here like it was like loud in the flames and all like not a scene I would normally take myself to on a Friday and it was so much fun mostly because of how delighted Rick was in sing and his son as well so we can distinguish or like really identify what's true through this practice as close as we we can't ever know completely what's true the whole the bonian method is accept nothing until it's proven true well we can't prove anything true we could all be dreaming this so I decided that I would would accept everything until I'm convinced that it's false so I don't really believe anything but I'm willing to like a scientist yeah I don't believe anything because I can't nothing can be absolutely proven but I do know what's most useful to me what makes me healthy I've had a really really um sick weak body most of my life and it became a big part of my navigational system I now think I have um the the MCAS uh Mass Cell Activation Syndrome you put out a podcast on that my daughter's been diag iagnosed with it I probably have it and it's just this weird random thing where you get symptoms in different parts of your body it's overactive immune system yeah and um it'll protect you from cancer does it really well it turns out that people that run kind of more towards autoimmune conditions like people who have skin conditions that are autoimmune based have fewer skin cancers yay because the immune system is combating all these Invaders com everything so there's a yeah if there's if there's an upside I is the basis of a lot of the logic related to immunotherapies for cancers is trying to have the immune system fight off these mutations that are always occurring in the background so I'm not I'm not trying to take away from the suffering it's created but but that's an upside and my mother had it and I just wish she had lived to see the um the diagnosis even exists but my daughter called me from England the other day and we were talking about the fact that she has that diagnosis and she said I am I am allergic to my own godamn emotions and I was like yeah we both are and my whole journey has been really really accelerated by the fact that if I go off true for myself emotionally psychologically metaphysically whatever I immediately get physical symptoms of some kind but when I am true to myself they all subside and I get this unbelievable health so I've been told that I had five different Progressive incurable diseases I don't have any symptoms but if I allow myself to be untrue to myself if I allow allow myself to get out of Integrity I suffer intensely and immediately and in a very real way so I don't know what's true but I know what keeps me healthy and I know it feels like freedom and if I hit a thought like um there is nothing to us but physical matter and it feels like tension like when I put down my dog and I felt something go through me as she died um it was like I don't know whether that I was feeling something that was real but that's as close to the truth as I can get and if I see right now what what's happening to me I'm getting into this self thing and as I'm talking about this dog I feel that dog and I can feel I'm going to sound crazy no you can't not not if you're talking about dogs and feeling I know right you might make me cry cuz I'm thinking about no CU I think I can sense it yeah I think I can sense it and forgive me if I'm I'm like you know like like now sounding like totally crazy if anyone's listening like this I will say and I have a I'm just going to be blunt I got a lot of training in Neuroscience I got Decades of training in it and I'll tell you the notion of energy is not mysterious at all I mean neurons are electricity and chemical exchange and that happens locally and it happens at a distance yeah we our phones are electronic circuits that communicate at a distance we are electronic circuits why shouldn't we communicate at a distance that's right and the Really Forward Thinking neuroscientists are starting to put multiple people into scanners and putting people in Scanners in different locations and I know it sounds like people are oh no like what are you talking about this is like spoon bending stuff no the idea that thought and emotion at one location can impact thought and location at another one is act Magneto reception has been published in the journal science yeah so we're not outside the bounds of reality we are like actually finally as a field starting to acknowledge that this stuff exists and starting to to poke and prod around in there but people have known about this so for you the the sensing of your dog passing or you can feel them present that my dog was physical entity but my dog was also an energetic entity and that entity was something I could feel and this is I don't know how many a couple years later I start talking about that dog I feel it again and it is a I have okay so when I was pregnant with my son Adam the one of the big reasons I chose to keep the baby is that from the moment he was conceived I started having experiences that completely blew apart my understanding of reality my husband at the time was traveling in Asia a lot and when I would think about him it happen a lot at night for me I'd be like lying in bed and I would think about him and it would be daytime in Asia and I would suddenly be like in a three-dimensional movie where I'd be walking down a street in Japan or flying over a thunderstorm in an airplane and I'd see these very specific things very specific and then he would call me like the next day and say oh I was walking down this street in Japan and I saw this very specific banner and I flew over a thunderstorm and I the lightning was amazing and I started to realize I was picking up information that he was seeing and it was testable it kept happening so what is that it would have been so nonscientific of me to say that is completely insignificant don't pay any attention it it just was too weird and so that's when I decided I'll believe anything until I'm convinced it's false and that throws your whole mind open to understanding the universe as being far more mysterious than we than our culture likes to say it is and yes there's a danger of getting woo woo and crazy but as I said the math has to work too and you're just telling us how the neurophysics of energy are being tested and shown to be operative it is it's not woooo it's just at the outside edge of what our culture is willing to accept yeah and the instruments we have to measure things are just not there yet um but the same was said about most everything that has been clearly discovered and is Rock Solid over the last 50 plus years at least in Neuroscience um I can't help but uh just briefly share when I put Costello down because I did that myself a which sucked yeah but I didn't want to I didn't I mean so I the Vets they came to the house but it was at home and I was right there I didn't do I didn't do the injection okay good um no no no originally I I thought I would because unfortunately because of my previous job I had to do that a number of times yeah um that is not an accident no so but what was interesting is you know like he let out a big like sigh right there at the end but the wildest part of it was and I I swear it sounds like I'm making this up but I F at the moment he went I felt my heart heat up I thought I was going to be crushed like a broken heart and it and I swear it felt as if he was giving me all this energy back and it's because I had been spending so much time he was up in the middle of the night a lot he I he must have had some Dementia or that kind of thing and I mean I had that dog on everything I was injecting him with testosterone for the last part made him a lot healthier folks um don't let your dog breed you know indiscriminately but like I've got my theories about you know all the stuff at hormones and animals that a lot of the Vets are aligned with me on this one um talk to your vet talk to a progressive vet um you know I had him on a bunch of different drugs I had him you know he was he was really unhappy so letting it it was the right thing to do and uh I'll stop talking about it because I'll get i'll get too worked up but um forgive me but the um but that feeling it was like whoa and I can still feel it it's like he gave something back that now I think enough time pass I go get another dog and like it was it was almost like here here's all this resource and um and like gratitude and so these things sound kind of woo right could you do an experiment where you put me in the lab while I go through that sure would you see huge physiological changes sure I don't see the point of that kind of experiment because I think enough people have experienced these kinds of things that it's not necessary yeah in any case I want to talk about integrity and your way of Integrity you ran a very interesting experiment that um frankly it's going to sound a little scary to some people and maybe have to do it and maybe reflexive to other people um which is I think it was one year of no lying yes but like no lying of any kind not even to yourself no and especially not to myself yeah right um and previously on the podcast we had my colleague Dr Anna lmy who runs our dual diagnosis addiction Clinic she's done a tremendous service to the world talking about all the various kinds of addiction addiction as a disease yes but also something that people can overcome and one of the things that I love so much about Anna's message she wrote the book dopamine Nation but oh I love that yeah wonderful book is she talks about how recovered addicts are actually her Heroes because they've learned to navigate this internal process that most people perhaps who aren't addicts or don't think they are are constantly being yanked around by these dopamine systems but they've learned to conquer their own dopamine system right so they represent the heroes of of her world and I love that model because we tend to look at addicts and think about is like like we there's all this judgment on it but no I think they're I think it's amazing I think addicts are people who are hyp sensitive to the suffering that they are told to accept and so they're trying to medicate the suffering that comes from being out of integrity and and the society says you know um like I I talked to people I interviewed people who for this book who would go to their this one woman went with her husband to the psychiatrist and H they they said you know she's not happy doing the traditional wife role and they sat there and talked about what medication would enable her to fulfill this social role that she just didn't like and it never occurred to anybody to say say you know maybe don't do it if you don't like it that much and people are medicating themselves into a Conformity with social systems that are not in line with their true nature and addicts hurt and they sometimes they find a substance or they find an activity that gives them relief and so they use it because they're in a lot of pain and one until it becomes the source of pain yeah and it it always does and it's horrible but addiction specialist I know says it's like they're standing on a nail and trying to take enough drugs to stop the pain but that is not what you need to do when you're standing on a nail you need to take the nail out and the nail is the part of your life that you're living that's out of Integrity with your true nature because other people want you to live that way and they will force themselves they want to stay in the position of pain or fear push past it be stronger yeah I've spent a lot of my life there I'll confess and it's super un Pleasant and it's always led to like shitty things but how how laudable is it that you took what the culture told you was good and by God you learned to do it and we tell ourselves stories like well we if we achieve certain things then we'll be in a better position to do more for other people like there's the the martyrdom version of it too the reason I brought up Anna was she was the first to alert me to these studies that have been done about how myelination and growth of the prefrontal cortex is actually accelerated when people tell the truth truth especially around truths that are somewhat uncomfortable um and it's a beautiful literature that's small but starting to really emerge yeah and um and the big part of the recovery from addiction is people first like acknowledging the truth to themselves yeah and then to other people and you know again it's all of that's kind of shrouded by how we think about addicts like you know sadly in any major City and even small towns now you can see the the bent over you know like fenel ad and like we we judge we're like oh you know or we say it's so sad or um but that's just um you know an example of how far gone people can get in that particular addiction Anna offers an interesting idea which is that the more we tell these little micr truths the more connected to reality we are yes and in the way of Integrity you talk about this experiment that you did my question Integrity cleanse what so an Integrity cleanse so maybe you could explain what it is and um it sounds incredibly scary um it's not just the telling the truth part it's the realizing the truth part yeah yeah um I guess I'm going to start with the woo story um I was very sick and at one point they rushed me into surgery didn't know what was wrong with me I had some internal bleeding going on that's a long story wrote about it in another book point is during the surgery I regained conscious and sat up and looked at them operating on me which was surprising because I was lying down there and so I was like very disconcerted and I lay back down and I looked up between the surgical lights and between them appeared this ball of light that was much much much brighter than the surgical lights which are very bright and it was so beautiful I you just you can't describe it it's outside the cave and I was just completely obsessed by it and then it started to grow and when it touched me and it filled things it didn't bounce off things it filled them when it touched me this incredible joy and love and warmth flooded my body and I started to cry and my body was crying and the surgeons noticed these tears coming out of my eyes and they freaked out because they thought that I was feeling the surgery and crying was the only thing I could do about it so they were panicking and the anesthesiologist they told him you know bump up the medication later because I I grilled him later what did you give me what are the side effects what happens can I have some more um he he said afterward that when he went to increase the medication he said a voice said to him don't she's crying because she's happy and he said I just did what it said and he was white and shaking and he said did I do the right thing so I kind of told him a little of the story anyway this light was there wild yeah and I was just like home home home and it said yeah okay so this is this is what you really are and you're about to have a pretty tough time for a while um but just remember I'm always here even though you can't see me this and so I came out of that surgery and I thought I will not allow anything to my life that doesn't feel like that light oh that's what it it wasn't like it used language but it said this is not the way you feel after you die this is the way you're supposed to learn to feel all the time so in your body out of your body doesn't matter this is how you're meant to feel and believe me when I worked with heroin addicts they would describe their first high and it was as close to that as anything I'd heard people describe and I would say I believe you're meant to feel that way and also keep your teeth you know but um so I didn't tell a lie for a year I came out of it and Li I thought well lying is definitely not going to feel like that that light does not lie so no lies ever of any kind even the little micro like like when are you going to be home and you know it's 12 minutes and um and you say 10 can't say that say 12 do you like my my outfit no I do not I mean I found ways to I I would sort of try to soften the truth did it mean also telling every truth that was in your head you would keep certain things to yourself No in fact it felt untrue to say certain things to certain people it felt invasive or offensive and that didn't feel true sometimes silence was the greatest truth I could tell but I W I didn't even know that that was the case until I started my experiment so I did not lie for that year and I've done it many many times since but I would not recommend jumping into it 100% from a life that hasn't already been pretty examined what Anna has said and I think in the backdrop of what you're saying is that everybody does these little micro adjustments or um and you've said constantly and you've said that this is largely to smooth social interactions that most of lying is to smooth social interaction the research shows that most people lie at least three times within 10 minutes of meeting another person they lie to them and men are socially conditioned to tell lies that make them seem a little bit cooler than they maybe think they are for real and women people identified as women are socialized to tell lies that make other people feel good about themselves so it takes you in different directions um but I just wasn't going to tell any lie at all and let me just say that that year I it's not like I could say I lost these things but the fact is I dropped them I walked away from them my religion my uh with the religion went the family of origin um every friend I had growing up because to leave Mormonism is worse than murder in that Community I was cast into outer Darkness uh my marriage realized I was gay oops I hadn't figured that out at 29 came to you as a realization in that year yeah okay it must have been in your unconscious someplace prior there had never been there never been a like knock knock hey no I was so bent on being a good person according to my socialization the same way you were bent on being a a brave strong male according to the skateboarding culture I I would never have let that anywhere near my Consciousness and it had to be a series of experiences and my ex-husband was gay as well so um I'd known that about him for a while and so and I knew he was his best self when he was his gay self so that kind of helped but the marriage ended because of that um let's see what else happened oh oh yeah I quit Academia so my industry the thing I'd gone to all those years of school for my job means of support uh left my I was living in Utah at the time and I sort of fled for the border so I lost my home how were you feeling during this time better and better and better I think I expected you to be like it was horrible you're like no better and better it kind of was but not as horrible as staying in all those things and um the part that intrigues me um at the moment is like the losing of friends like losing of people and the structures that we relied on also for safety yeah that's got to be hard oh it's it's very yeah for the for parts of the psyche that are um you know very attached to socialization and and attached to people that are familiar to you it's heartbreaking really heartbreaking but that light gave me a full-on experience of the self and that I just I what it told me was it's always there my son who has Down syndrome one day told me um after his friend's mother died we're coming home from the funeral and he said I didn't cry and I said it's okay if you CED strong men cry and this is a sad time and he said it's not as hard after the light comes and opens your heart and he can barely talk and and so it was very garbled and I was like what a light came and opened your heart he said mhm I said when did this happen he said May 10th I was like this year no I was 13 wow and I was like you're holding out on me so this light had appeared in his room when he was having a really hard time kids with Down Syndrome don't have easy lives and it touched his heart and he said since then nothing was as hard and I said you know I saw it too and it said to me that it's always with us even though we can't see it and he said oh I can see it and I I was like you can and he was like yeah like he was sort of disappointed in me and I said well where is it is like up there down here in your head in your heart and he just looked at me and he said mom is everywhere he just sees the whole world illuminated and I think that's what I saw in the forest when suddenly the world would just turn to light it was that light so that was the field and as I lost each friendship as I lost each job as I faced the fear and the Heartbreak and everything those parts of me were dissolving and I was becoming more identified with that light and I that was the thing I was it was completely selfish I was not going back to the way I felt before I felt that light never going back there did you feel as if you had to accomplish certain things degrees Etc first in order to allow yourself this um because I hear this a lot you know and in the backdrop of this entire conversation I have um one little piece of neural real estate which is like devoted to the audience that is saying okay can do this things once I have a job once I have blank once I have the resources but at the same time I do want to highlight for people that everything that we've talked about in terms of practices and things to do like you just do them there there's no there's no purchase like it's inside of us right like there's no looking to something um in a package or in a even a program it it's all within us like so it can be done at really anywhere and with any resources or or lack thereof but but be gentle with yourself don't quit your job I mean I was very violent I was quite a lot like you you know the way I got to Harvard was I had a part of myself called fang that did not care what hurt me I'd go running in the snow I I remember once I bought running shoes that were too small and all my toenails came off during that run and I just kept running and I'd stop and take off another toenail and keep running I was able to be very brutal to myself living in Boston is brutal to me well you know on the plus side my feet were completely numb because of the cold so okay there's that but so you have some you have the capacity for extreme resilience yeah and it and it perhaps took took you too far yeah and I think that's why I did I did this massive Integrity cleanse when I was at a place where I was far far away from my true self and because of that it was a kind of violent breaking of connections so now if I'm coaching somebody I'm like be very gentle take the I call it one degree turns if you're flying a plane and you turn one degree North every half hour you won't even notice it's turning but you'll end up someplace very different so just gently move away from what causes you to suffer get yourself the hot cup of tea in the morning to soothe your throat listen to your own sorrow cancel a meeting because you just don't feel like doing it you know these are the things that bring you back to your truth and it's always loving and it's not loving necessarily to just say I'm going I'm going to say the truth about everything and I don't care who hates me for it that was just my way and inevitably a much Kinder more generous version of ourselves emerges when we're living our truth I mean it's for a foregone conclusion but still worth stating um yeah I can um personally say that most of my suffering has been the consequence of the fact that I am I love love yeah and um and I'm blessed with many great friends and uh things of that sort um business partners Etc but I have a tendency to get into relationships quickly and ending them feels near impossible and this has caused me and you know and also others too much suffering yeah you know and so a lot of that is the reason I raised this is that um it's about holding two truths at the same time which are feel incompatible on the one hand really loving and caring about someone yeah and at the same time knowing that the loving caring thing to do is to go separate ways and it's this relationship to loss that I sort of can't accept yeah or haven't been able to like I can accept that people die uhhuh um all three of my academic advisers wonderful people suicide cancer cancer like so I had to come to the conclusion pretty early on in my academic career like wow like I'm the common denominator I joke you know like and it got took me a long time to realize like this might not be my fault you know I know it's crazy like how how would that you know but I think that it also woke me up to the idea you know like Life as we know it in this life ends and so to try and make the most of it but the idea that people would move apart yeah even um in circumstances where death doesn't separate them to me it's like it's so painful yeah was it Keats who said that of all the ways there are to lose a person death is the kindest like that yeah yeah and this has roots and in in all sorts of things in me of course but the reason I raise it is that I think that when we have two incompatible truths yeah that's when we feel stuck like we love people we want to take care of them maybe we want them to remain in our lives but we have to like the Letting Go process sucks there can't be incompatible truths I think what happens is that you and just tell me where I'm wrong okay I could be completely full of crap it sounds to me like you're one of the people who who have a huge heart who sometimes confuse love with self-abandonment who loves so deeply that you want the joy of the of the Beloved more than you want your own Joy 100% and that is not love that is a hostage situation okay like um there's something I call spider love if you say to a spider how do you feel about flies it would say oh I love them and it expresses that love by immobilizing them wrapping them up and injecting them with poison and then sucking out their life force whenever it needs them and it loves those flies yum but love always sets the Beloved fre okay so there's a consumptive love and when you are a fly and you meet a spider um and you give your whole self to this person who goes yum yum yum yum yum I really want that you find yourself starved of your own uh your own validation your kindness to your true self and you've given it all to the other person and that's when it will not work and you may be missing the people who aren't looking for flies or who want to just I'm not going to extend this metaphor any further who just want to be with you as a whole human who want to know what your limitations are as well as their own who will say to you I have a new friend who uh had pneumonia and I wanted to talk to her on the phone and I told my assistant I don't care if I have pneumonia and she C she wrote me a text and she said do not impinge on your own health because you want me to feel loved I don't like it I want you to be healthy and I was like well so I would examine the moment where you become so entranced with another that you stop caring about yourself and try to feed your whole life to them because that's not love it's something our culture defines as love a lot of parents love their children that way but you have to be able to know exactly what you want to communicate to the other person and to have them say I completely respect that or you don't have a love situation you have codependency that's very useful thank you and I know it will be very useful to many people what um what is the suggestion for people um that are trying to figure out what they want or need or both um I'll I'll relate it to this relationship thing thing because it's it applies across everything but it's hardest in relationships and that is start to notice the first moment when part of you a deep part of you knew you were losing your threat you were losing your integrity so if you think about a relationship you had that ended poorly where you love the other person by giving your whole self to them which you've been taught is called love even though I don't think it is called love so and then look back on the first moment that she wanted something and you abandoned yourself to give it to her and it's usually very early in the relationship like day one yeah it's like this isn't safe exactly and you you just crushed right over that boundary that very sensitive inner vigilance that's saying this is how we stay whole and this is how we stay in integrity so most people with a job with a relationship with any choice they make they can trace it back when I pick up the pieces for them years later they're like oh that I knew that the first week and I stayed in there for 20 years so it's about as I said earlier being really granular in your experience of your own suffering and knowing that you are not here to suffer there's this big thing that men in our society are taught that if you know there are love songs like I would the the um I can't remember his name he won the Nobel Prize for literature and you know I would crawl down the Avenue black and blue to show My Love To Make You Feel My Love and it's like okay that's not showing me love you don't have to hurt yourself to show me love but maybe that's why you have to pull back six inches from your own eyes to brutalize yourself for other people that martyr uh archetype it's no it doesn't work yeah it's caused me and and I think others a lot of suffering because I think what ends up happening is that um when we get separation from that person then we do a little bit of self-recovery but then it it's it's like all fractured and repeat yeah and repeat right exactly what you just described as um extremely helpful I'm curious in your uh role as a coach to many people um how often are romantic relationships partnership type things whatever form that takes for people how often is that like the the bulk of what people struggle with at least in terms of what they bring to the table or is it more often I don't like my job I'm in the wrong life professionally you know if you had to give us like the the non peer-reviewed study but like kind of crude breakdown yeah I think because they Iden ify me as a coach they go to a therapist with relationship things but people come to me with my life's just not working that feeling whole thing oh great not working but in my job I need to change my job I need to get my purpose I need to have my life's meaning and it always ends up ending up to be about the relationship as well you know but it anybody anything we do that's dysfunctional for any part of ourselves is dysfunctional for every part of ourselves the way we do anything is the way we do everything so if you come in with a job issue because you're you know you've got a horrible boss but you never complain you're going to end up telling me that you're in a horrible marriage with a spouse who's awful but you never complain the same issues come forward as a kind of gift to show us over and over not that way no okay see that pattern no see that pattern no well it's interesting that you say that CU I feel like professionally it's like there's like a gravitation P like I wanted to get into tropical fish when I was a kid and I was like tropical fish I would spend all day at the tropical fish store then it was Birds then it was skateboarding then it was you know I want to be a firefighter like whatever eventually it was Neuroscience then it was podcasting you know it's just like I can't miss when I say that I mean I can't keep myself from doing what I really want yeah I would say likewise with friendships I'm fortunate to have a great relationship to my biological family it was Rock really Rocky for a lot of years but it's like cool the work has paid off and they've done a lot of work um in romantic partnership it's like a carve out it's been much more challenging I've had some amazing Partners in Partnerships like amazing um still on excellent terms with many of them yeah and then I've had some like really really brutal like barbed wire just like and you know I've had to take a look at my role on that too right right so in this case for me it's like a carve out I think of it as like this like wedge shaped carve out it just seems so much more challenging but I think in talking with you today it's clear that it's because of this thing of like it's not I'm not approaching it from the standpoint of like I want to do this and it's good for me yeah to be frank um whereas in the work domain it's like what feels good ends up being really good for me cuz for a while you did things that hurt you and then you realized no the things that hurt me I'm not going to do that I'm going to do the things I like when you bring another human being into it when it's a romantic partnership I think you still have the pattern of I will do things that hurt me I will abandon my sense of safety I will go over my own experienced internal boundary and you just haven't you've done it in other areas of your life but this is yeah this is a big one for you where you just haven't applied the same wisdom you've learned in other areas and I would guess that it's because you don't feel that that's loving to the other person if you decide you're not going to kill animals at your job you know the people at your lab aren't going to get be heartbroken but if you decide you don't want to live a certain kind of life with a another person that person's heart could get broken or at least they could feel that way they could genuinely feel pain so I think maybe that's why it's a cutout thing because this changing your job doesn't hurt someone but changing your relationship pattern somebody could get hurt and if you don't change your P pattern someone will also get hurt right well and that's often the case right and I think so this notion of others getting hurt when we make the choice that's most in line with our own Integrity whether it's relationship or family or the decision to move or leave a job how do you sit with that I mean I mean how do how does one sit with that I mean I think I have clearly internalized some script that says if someone else is really upset even you know and obviously the right thing is often not the thing that makes people feel best etc etc you know but um how do you work with that so there are different ways of reframing it and one example since you know a lot about addiction um if if somebody is Addicted to You pleasing them um you're pleasing them and going out of your inte Integrity to please them to give them whatever they want that pleases them your addiction as a codependent is giving them that emotional energy whatever they whatever gets them high and their their absorption of that energy and the imbalance that results it's as if they are getting high on you and an alcoholic if you take away the bottle of booze will tell you you are hurting me this is the worst thing you could ever do to you have no idea how much I'm suffering and the thing you have to do in an intervention is no it's the alcohol that's doing the hurting you know it's the overgiving it's allowing someone to consume your energy and to get high on it that is an addiction I will not let you do it I will separate from you person to person if you continue in your addictive pattern doesn't mean that we won't be together in the great self and that we're all on self and we can all love each other for ever but it is not kind to feed someone's addiction to eating your energy does that make sense yes it's not you have to do some tough love yeah the compassionate thing is to do the right thing yeah this is not helping you and they say but I want more of you and you say no no you really don't you want something false I was creating for you and it's actually not me you know my friends who why would you leave the church now you're lost to us and I was like no I was always a gay non Mormon you know I was just feeding you the story that I was a straight Mormon girl you know and I can't feed you that anymore it's making you sick it's making me sick it's not true and some of them I never saw again and some of them came around years later and said oh I figured it out and some probably still are really happy and think I'm going hell sorry I didn't to laugh at that but I did I don't know um I find it hilarious I mean sorry uh not sorry no that was I just nothing to do but laugh there um goodness yeah the I think this notion of things ending because we realized that we were telling lies yeah and gosh it even hurts to say yeah you know it's like because we weren't trying to tell lies we didn't we didn't know we were telling lies yeah it's an innocent mistake to me that often grows from what I think of as empathy probably not certainly not the best form of empathy yeah but I think that there's a a human phenotype that I'm familiar with where we we feel other people's emotions which I think is healthy can be healthy yeah and we love seeing people enjoy Y and we delighted it so it feels good to us yeah to you know feed this addiction oh I know the feeling it's it's not like it's like oh here I am marom like I'm bleeding out Bleeding Out bleeding out but it's not in line with this essential self and here I guess the the little vignette that's related to this is that I do think there's one very healthy form of this which is I believe at least for me with a dog I like other animals too but with a dog when we love them uh-huh we are seamlessly attached to their love of us and so loving them and empathizing with them means like double the love like we love them and we can feel their love and it's like a perfect it just sound feels like a perfect circle and with people that can happen too I imagine um felt that a few times I certainly feel that in my friendships I feel that with my sister um and I've felt it in a few of my romantic relationships but the empathy for the others pleasure can go too far yeah and then we when we quote unquote lose ourselves I think it's because there's a component of ourselves that's like not attached to the part that still has our own needs does that resonate oh totally yeah here's the thing you don't your dog expect your dog to pretend it's not a dog you don't deserve you don't expect your dog to stop loving walks and chasing a ball and just being a dog and when it's tired it'll go to sleep but often when we fall fall in love we try to make ourselves not who we are and try to become the person that will make the other maximally thrilled with us and I know exactly what you're talking about I have thrown like I love to give money to people makes them happy and then it never works well it works out only in cases where it feels true in my in my heart if I give if I overg give because someone's they're saying I need and doesn't feel good in the giving I am not being a dog a dog would say no this is where my limits are I'm going to go lie down on the floor and sleep but I will get an extra job to give money to people that I don't want to give money to after the first little while so we Bend ourselves out of our true being and I think the reason we love dogs so much is that they love but they love truly they love honestly they don't pretend to be something they're not and they don't have the empathy that says if your leg is broken I will break my own leg and lie down next to you so that I feel exactly the same pain you're feeling it is not empathy to feel everything the other person is feeling if they then take the broken leg example if you got hit by a car you're lying there screaming in anguish and I felt your feeling so strongly that I couldn't cope and I lay you know fell down in a faint um I had a client once who has passed away now so I'll tell this anecdote in her husband was like you he would give himself away and she gladly consumed all his life energy and one day he had a heart attack a near fatal heart attack and she called me and said I couldn't get him to take care of my needs while he was having this heart attack he just had it and I was like yeah he couldn't help that and she said well I told him he said I can't be there for you right now I'm having a heart attack and she said you're not the one whose husband may be dying from a heart attack she was so into consuming his energy that she actually said that with a straight face unbelievable she was expecting him to give empathy that's not empathy that's selling yourself out empathy acknowledges self other awareness they four components to a real empathy self other awareness I am not you as Byron Katie one of my favorites spiritual teacher says my favorite thing about separate bodies is that when you hurt I don't it's not my turn so good so good yeah another one is emotion regulation so you see something that's horrific and you can like this is where you can use your skills dealing with your emotions you bring it down okay I'm I'm a surgeon I'm dealing with a horrible ER accident I can't feel that I have to get to work so that's emotion regulation you can do that that um self- other awareness emotion regulation um are two other components but those are the two that I think we really need to focus on if you heard I don't it's not my turn and when you're hurting and I start to hurt too much because you're hurting I can bring myself back into my own body relax and be be contented in my own skin so that I can be present for you so here's the thing I love it's a short quote from a poem by haiz who was a 13th century Persian poet it's so simple remember it though troubled then stay with me for I am not I love that yeah that's being yourself in a relationship then stay with me for I am not but I'm really really unhappy I see that and I'm not unhappy but I really really want to be together I really see that that's how you feel and I don't want it it's so interesting because I I feel like in in the domain of work um and with my friends and largely with family um you know like giving feels great and then people are like saded and then they go on their way but I noticed the contrast um with romantic Partnerships when as I've said I I maintain good relationships with a couple of girlfriends that I had you know in some cases I'm good friends with her husbands like they actually one just came and visited with her sister and her kid recently and like on just great platonic terms but for years I like I didn't worry about them but I felt like I could still feel the energetic pull even though they weren't asking for anything right and then when I attended their wedding this particular person's wedding I was like I was like my work is done and I got to enjoy and still get to enjoy the friendship with the family yeah but it really showed me how much the the whole relation so much of the relationship had been about like trying to make sure the other person was okay you make it your job to make them happy and it is never your job to make another person happy you can not do it happiness is an inside job you cannot make another person happy you can't be you can't go far enough into someone else's sadness to make them happy you can't go far enough into their sickness to make them well you have to get out of your own sadness and your own sickness and then stay in your integrity with love for them and model what it is to be in your own skin which is the only one you're ever going to have my oldest child as a teenager I was so over involved in everything and uh they gave me a a song called Let Me Fall by a man who had fallen from a tree and been he broke his spine he was a paraplegic and he just says the one I will become will catch me don't catch me anymore and it was so hard as a parent to like let my child have you know suffer the slings and arrows of Outrageous Fortune and what they were telling me they're they them pronouns um was that this is my life and my suffering is my Birthright and am here to figure it out as I go and you are not loving me when you shove yourself into my Affairs to try to take away my suffering let me fall what a mature and um generous thing for them to say yeah they are iary it sounds like it this is your oldest the contrast and I think what drives a lot of what we're really talking about here is codependency oh yes yeah um for for those that don't know that we haven't caught on right exactly um is that sometimes when we cut people off or we just say hey I can give but only to this point yeah or you can get this aspect of me but not these other aspects especially if they've been receiving them before they get oh yes pissed I mean this I mean and it's unclear especially if the relationship had been different up until then that um you know like it that's why it sometimes feels unfair to do it's like oh yeah you know it's one thing to invite someone over for a drink then to discover that they're an alcoholic continue to fill their glass enjoy the exchange and then one day realize they're an alcoholic yeah and I guess that term isn't used anymore I've been told by many audience members forgive me it's alcohol use disorder I said that too I'm sorry no quite all right um I think that field of addiction medicine is nent enough that we're still making the transition and I don't say this by the way for political correctness I'm not a politically correct person it's just I've had to learn to reframe these things for the specific purpose of trying to be more to bring more people into the conversation also right I like the the sound of um I don't like the idea but the words alcohol use disorder the disorder piece is also controversial but what I love is that as soon as we start to name things and rename things we're all talking about those things and then there's no way out of the conversation so that's my that's my like kind of Jiu-Jitsu out of uh that so that means we have to talk about it just like autism spectrum disorder or Autism or or um neurotypical atypical well guess what folks now we're all talking about it and it needs to be talked about so in any case at some point there's the idea like I'm cutting you off and the person says but this is what we do yeah this is the the kind of promise that you made yeah and so then we find ourselves in like the other scripts of like well now I'm like being bad I'm CH I'm doing the right thing but I'm breaking a promise which we were told from like the time we're little like you don't do but only in the eyes of the other person if you come back into your own Integrity okay is did I promise to always give more than I can well I did by my actions I established a precedent isn't that a promise they say it's a promise no or if I did make a promise I was in error I apologize I made a mistake I I promised something I couldn't really give have you heard the term distinction burst um in the notion of uh galaxies developing or something like that no it's when pigeons are well awesome I am way off gtic I'm like trying to be Elon Musk here and and you're no it's about pigeons cool um it's about any animal I love pigeons I even have a pigeon tattoo I love yeah I do I love all the animals um anyway uh if you give pigeons they they Peck a lever and they get a pallet and you know unpredictable intervals which is highly motivating it's the most highly motivating thing they can do so and then if the pellets stop coming the pigeons go bananas they pick it a lot more they pick it angrily um they insist that the researchers promis them those pellets and then they just give up and go away cuz the pellets stopped coming when you have been giving too much and you realize that that and you say to stay in my Integrity I have to pull back and care for myself and that's where I stop and um the other person will put on an Extinction burst for sure and you your job is to stay inside your integrity until they stop pecking and they'll be much more healthy I had a golden retriever once who would just come and bark to be petted big huge dog but he was young and it was so annoying and we had to get a dog behaviorist to come in because he was just barking at everybody constantly to be petted and she said when he does that get up walk across the room go into another room and shut the door in his face and we were like that would be cruel she's like it's not cruel he'll understand it and I'll never forget watching him bark at and they got up walked out shut the door in his face he went he stood by the door then he went he went over and lay down he was like all right well that didn't work and you know that's ultimately what happens when you stay inside your integrity and don't let people play with you that way don't let them tug you around yeah yeah it's interesting because with work it's like I love learning organizing information having conversations like this and sharing them with the world it feels kind of like the relationship to a dog it's like this reciprocity and if people don't like it okay and if you like it great and if you love it even better but I would be doing it anyway that's like I'd be doing it anyway like there's no there's no feeling of of of loss there's no metabolizing of self any of that yeah I know and I call it what I what I in the book that I just wrote called Beyond anxiety I talk about when people like you live that way from their Joy they begin to create economic ecosystems you create so much value that in multiple ways people start to um you can get streams of income mult people pay me to do this and I still can't believe it I come in here and I talk to my producer who's also my business partner and my closest friend Rob and I I'm like I can't believe they pay us to do this I can't believe it and that's also how I felt about science the first time I looked down the microscope and saw a slice of a particular brain area called the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus and we had labeled this and I turned to Barbara Chapman my graduate advisor there and I was like this is amazing and her response was so funny she was also Harvard trained Radcliffe um to be specific and she said yeah brains are really cool they're kind of like Little W nuts and I was like so Barbara one the smartest people I ever met she was just like and I was like and I thought and then I looked around her lab I was doing rotations where you get to sample different labs and you hope they'll take you and and she had green counters in her lab instead of black counters oh cool and she had pictures of mushrooms M and she had picture this picture of a cat coming out of a farm silo it's like it's hat and I thought I really like this lady I want to work here I want to do my PhD here yeah and I had already committed to another lab and I started sneaking into her laboratory at night to do bre the heart of the other lab I she got over it so in the professional domain I'm a completely different animal when it comes to these things I walked into the other woman's lab I she's done tremendously well without me so I just said listen I'm going to join this other lab but um like I have no trouble doing that in in the work domain none it's like you know when I started the podcast sure there were these voices in my head one of my colleagues going to think this and that and you know I was like nah I hope they're living their best life I'm going to live mine yeah like and I see them and some love it some hate it and some you know like really I can tell like I hear the judgments and I also hear the like I love it you know that kind of thing it's it's a mix um because public facing anything is going to evoke different responses from people and but I'm sort of like you do you I'll do me and um we'll both be good we live in this weird economy where you're supposed to get a job and it's all based on factory work you're suppos go to a place and do something you don't really like to get your little allowance and then you go home and that has only existed for the last couple hundred years since the Industrial Revolution before that people existed for hundreds of thousands of years doing what Hunting Fishing gardening weaving um singing songs telling stories doing the things that we do as Hobbies but we have this weird mindset that says no if I do things that bring me joy like a hobby does the things that people have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years if I just put my joy out there and see what I can do with the wild New Creations of our particular time um if I don't do the job I'm being weird somehow and it won't work but what I'm seeing is the economic structures of this Society are all being fractured they're falling apart around us and it's people who are afraid I used to watch this video of a of a tsunami that hit Sendai Japan in 2011 I think it was and it this wave comes in and it eats a city in 6 minutes this one wave and you watch the whole city like be ripped to shreds in six minutes and people are running into the buildings and then the buildings start to collapse and you know there are people in there and I I watched this and I thought there is so much change in our culture it's like that wave has hit us and then accidentally I hit something in YouTube or whatever and it switched to Mike Parson's surfing one of the biggest waves ever filmed it was a rogue wave and it went up like 70 feet and the camera pulls back and here's this a man a naked basically naked man on a board with a wave that is like the wrath of God and he's this tiny little figure the wave is seven stories tall and he comes riding down the face of that and it breaks over him and you think oh he's dead and then he shoots out of the spray just like shouting and I thought those are the choices we have right now we can run into the institutions that we think will keep us safe and change will crush us and drown us and kill us or we can deal with the fact that there's a huge wave of change in our society right now and everything's changing at an accelerating rate and we can risk running out naked and just with our joy and just balance on our joy and let the wave take us for a run you're surfing that's you know you are an example to the world of someone who is balanced in his Joy except in relationships but you'll get over that anyway she's taking some work he taking some work there's a woman hanging on to the end of your surfboard it's not going to unfortunately it's a lot more complicated than that but I am seeing a portal toward I guess what you're calling like true Integrity where in the back of my mind I I have this like very um vestigial understanding of what all of that relationship stuff actually looks like when it and feels like when it's right for me I just I think it's not going to look like the way I try to script it out do an ideal day with that relationship and it could be the weirdest thing you've ever heard of it will work I promise you I have a very weird relationship life that's reassuring to me I can't believe I'm going to say this on this podcast so I have two partners your partner is awesome oh I met well one I just met one of them uh one was the very first relationship I ever had with a woman that was 20 some years ago and then I was living on my Ranch and meditating all day and uh my partner Karen came to me and uh this Australian poet Rowan was staying on our ranch with some other people and Karen sat me down she said Marty I have to tell you I'm having very strong I don't know maybe maternal feelings toward Rowan I was like no they're not maternal I'm not getting a maternal energy and I got hit by this blast of joy joy joy it was like that white light thing it was like and I said you're in love with her this is amazing tell her to come in um I'll go I'll go to the guest room you guys can have the I was just like happy happy happy and I looked for jealousy and I looked for I was said this isn't supposed to work this way so Rowan came up and we all sat around talking and we sat around talking a lot more and we all sat on the same couch talking going this isn't weird is it and after a couple of weeks we realized everybody was in love with everybody and we couldn't live without each other and so that's how you that was eight years ago and we have a three-year-old named La lla who's delightful awesome and it is we call it Feeling Good by looking weird and you can cut it out on the podcast if it's too no we have no we have no no master no Overlord are you kidding me I mean what we're not I mean what we're talking about here is love first of all like I mean let's just be you know of all the of all the things to cut out of a podcast um we're not GNA cut love out of a podcast oh I love that about this podcast because a lot of people would yeah well not me um and for people that like bulk at that or or creates internal in them then I just invite you to um I don't know visit your um compassionate witness self see if it's still there and if it's still there then you know hey I I actually believe that humans partially based on developmental wiring P like experiences but also just differences in wiring I could just fundamentally believe in this you know I mean my one of my closest friends my third postto my third adviser who is my postdoc adviser at Stanford is the now unfortunately he died of pancreatic cancer the late Ben Baris he was born an identical twin girl wow okay then went up through Medical School living as a woman MH graduate school as a woman and then transitioned to Ben um pretty late in life so I only met Ben Ben was a close friend and then unfortunately had probably because he had the braat two mutation oh died of multiple cancers but that initiated by pancreatic cancer first transgender member of the national Academy of Sciences wow um I wrote his obituary for the journal Nature we were very very close and just an amazing very quirky dude you know um and didn't have a romantic partner at least not at the time when uh he passed or in the time that I knew him to my knowledge um and you know Ben used to say like there are components of our wiring that are ubiquitous yeah the parts that control breathing you know the parts that control heart and then there are part of our wiring that are just different and to me as a scientist like it makes perfect sense like the notion that any of that would be controversial is like what like it doesn't make any sense whatsoever that one would like not believe that people have differences in wiring because most people want to believe in differences in wiring when it's like convenient for their for themselves so I really appreciate that that you're sharing this and um because yeah the Every Which version works and I also learned from my graduate adviser Barbara Chapman she used to say Toler has to go both ways yes so I also like love and applaud like the whatever traditional nuclear family is still called that AB oh my gosh yes you know so but I would love you to really sit down get incredibly authentic with yourself and say honestly if I had the perfect romantic life what would it look like and be what you will call very selfish what I will call very much in your integrity don't tell yourself any lies about what you really want yeah it's it's very strange but both Karen and I felt like there was a tremendous absence before in the a couple of years before row came into our life and and we're just it's like we're a three-legged stool two-legged stools do not make sense to us they fall down um whatever comes into your vision of Joy whatever makes you feel free write it down and cons read it often and when you get into a relationship read it even more often maybe have the other person read and let the other person read it totally that would be that I can do as difficult as is to have certain conversations I could certainly write things down and just like slide an envelope what I'm after don't let me do the things in column B it won't end well I love it and I really appreciate that you shared that and I know people listening will as well I hope so and if not I read a book by Samantha BB be a wonderful comedian and she says here's what you say when people tell you that you're horrible and you're doing something awful you say I like it that's well one of the reasons I oriented very young towards and still love punk rock music like that genre is because to me could be wrong maybe classical music being an exception but to me it's the only genre of music where all the versions of self and emotions are welcome there's angry music there's like political music there's sad music there's um you know music about friendship and camaraderie about loss and you look at the community like I I'm really into this stuff so look at the community like that my good friend Tim Armstrong has created around certain bands he's going to be on the Mount Rushmore punk rocker the great Joe Strummer from The Clash political music yeah yeah you know or Laura Jane Grace like one of the first transgendered like outwardly facing transgender uh people in in the punk rock community and does Amazing Music was against me and then Laura Jan Grace I'm like she's a hero of mine one of my short list of here I love love love her what she's done uh at so many levels and it's like there's like this tapestry of all the different humans and human experiences in a in a kind of sing Single genre yeah and I don't know much about other genas of music but I don't see that yeah I don't see that like maybe across the totality of rock and roll or what but you know and so like if ever there was a a sector of life that's like allinclusive yeah it's that but not because it's loud it's fast and it's anti it's like so much of it is like pro-social right you know so I think there's a big misunderstanding around that so that ethos is something that's always resonated and um and I feel the same way about like relationships or on social media one of the reasons I can go on social media and not have it like Spike My cortisol constantly is I'm there and I'm like okay there's some like mentally healthy people here some mentally unhealthy people here people are here to fight people are here to love people are here to find Partners people are here to flirt people are and you know what people are here to attack me like cool I'm glad I'm giving you a purpose for your morning you know that kind of thing I try and just approach it all that way where you just made all of this very clear in a much more succinct way where you just said like great I like it yeah I like it it's awesome yeah yours with with a with a re real genuine sense of Joy yeah like no like well I like it there's no there's no friction in that statement it's just I like it yeah I really like it I like a lot I love that you like it a lot and you can say it that way who can't like if it's all love nobody can really you can out love almost anything you're you're furious at me I like it I just out loved you and I I think that's why Jesus said you know charity never faileth it's not that you're going to win everything if you are a loving person is that no matter what happens it's like that self your suffering your pain your codependency whatever it loves it all bring it it loves it all and that means that no matter what you come at me with I can hold that in a field of love and my experience is love what was the quote from Jesus um it's I don't know if it's from Jesus but in I think it's in Paul says charity never faileth you know love never fails and it's because I can say I hate myself yes but I love the part of me that hates myself just out loved you were you all well of course the answer is going to be yes I was going to ask were you always like this meaning that you could hold this position on the balance beam and then I feel like you've taken this balance beam and like created this big Mesa for for others to stand on so so because it's a really stable place to be once you're there but getting to this place of like essential self and um the path to inte it I mean can I just say it the way I I feel it yeah yeah it's [ __ ] difficult yeah that's what I was I was about to use that same word I I think in order to be to become stable um I always say that the raw material for any good experience is its opposite so I was messed I was effed up beyond belief there snafu these are both military terms snafu means situation normal [ __ ] up Fubar means [ __ ] up beyond all recognition I was Fubar now I occasionally get snafu um but I was so Fubar the the suffering was so intense that when I learned to come home the contrast was very sharp and I never ever want to I never want to leave the Consciousness that that light is always with us and we can feel it If we're honest and that's all we have to do be honest and there it is Boom it's goddess I feel like it starts with the scope of self like we have to do this for ourselves before we can do this with and for other people yeah and then at some point the the fantasy in my mind right like it sounds like my mother my mother um from the youngest age I can remember in myself was talking about like trying to heal the world yeah and I've seen the toll it's taken on her like she'll call sometimes I'll be like how's it going and like something will have happened in the news like I can just tell like it it really wears on her yeah and it's hard for me to to hear and see cuz I've you know like I feel it too it's like goodness like do you feel like there's hope for our species I mean I'm trying to not throw the whole the whole problems of the world at you but no thinking about it I mean like what I'm almost 50 I feel like at this point I've seen enough like there's so much goodness in people yeah but there's also like the capacity for so much like misunderstanding bad you got the developmental wiring you got the hurt people hurt people we're all everyone's doing the best they can everyone wants safety and acceptance and they're just trying to find it this and like and then there are your truly Bad actors because they're either miswired or whatever and they're like creating Havoc like is there any real hope for like a different version of things that's persistent the first time I remember worrying about this I was four and I'm 10 years older than you are but I knew at four that I was here to try to help with something and um as I grew up it just wouldn't go away this feeling that I was supposed to help with something and in my teens it became I need to help change the way people think I don't know and then I started noticing other people who seem to be like me and I would be like I think they're on the same team I'm on and I was like What team what am I talking about and it all came to my head when I was in South Africa in the wilderness and I had a dream that my ancestors were coming to visit me and um I thought it was funny so I told it to some friends from the shangan tribe who reacted like this and then they ran and I was like what did I do wrong and later that night we're all sitting around the fire there are lions roaring they bring this little woman from mosan Beek and she's the S she's a shaman and she did her divinatory system which is she threw the bones for me because if you had dream I had you have to see a Sona right away or bad things will happen so she said stuff about me that was true but she could have Googled it you know and it was weird when she looked at me I felt like these ice needles going through me it was not cute but it was very int tense and what she said was there are people being born to be healers all over the world just like there are in the traditional tribes you need to go find them and tell them what they're here to do they're here to heal the world and they need the wisdom that the traditional people had and they need their technology and it was so interesting because she was like confused she acted very frightened and confused by what she was saying to me she had to get a group of people behind her who would chant we agree we agree because she was freaked out um but I think that in every traditional group of 100 to 150 people there were a few healers that were recognized by the elders as people who were the they were highly sensitive they were interested in Nature and Science they were interested in animals they were interested in the mystery they were interested in the Arts they were performers but they were also very like um introverted thinky thinky it's an archetype of healing of medicine person the coaches I coach I call it wayfinders which is a term from an anthropologist if you're born in that archetype if you have that phenotype I believe it's a phenotype and I believe it crops up in every 100 to 150 people several times and our culture has no word for it and no path for it but if we are going to save the world we will draw on whatever was born into us that makes us want to heal things and we will use the Technologies we've developed and we will use our joy and our refusal to participate in the nonsense of our culture and we will hold firm and we will try to change the way Humanity lives on this planet and I don't know which way it's going to go but I'm in the game and I kind of think you are too I have a feeling I am too and I'm certain that I'm in it thanks to you oh and seriously in in large part you know I told the story earlier that the patham on and the fact that anyone's listening to this and uh watching it is the consequence of having read your books and done the exercises and um and we'll continue to do them so I I must say um there really aren't words to express how much um this means to me that you would come here um take the time to share with us your your wisdom and to delve into some topics that are of particular interest to me um because I like everyone else I'm a work in progress who's curious about the best ways to to move forward and um yeah every time you speak um and just when you show up someplace it it's um an incredible thing everybody learns everybody gets better and everyone walks away with tools and um empowerment um and I just um just want to say thank you so much there's really not a whole lot else same to you you're just looking in the mirror thank you thank you that might be the only podcast ever end in tears thank you so much thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Dr Martha Beck I hope you found it to be as informative and as meaningful as I did to learn more about her work and to find links to her many excellent books please see the 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sleep to exercise to Stress Control protocol related to focus and motivation and of course I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included the book is now available by pre-sale at protocols book.com there you can find links to various vendors you can pick the one that you like best again the book is called protocols an operating manual for the human body if you're not already following me on social media I am huberman lab on all social media platforms so that's Instagram Twitter now known as X threads Facebook and Linkedin and on all those platforms I discuss science and science related tools some of which overlap with the contents of the huberman Lab podcast but much of which is distinct from the contents of the huberman Lab podcast again that's huberman lab on all social media platforms if you haven't already subscribed to our neural network newsletter our neural network newsletter is a zeroc cost monthly newsletter that includes what we call protocols which are brief 1 to three page PDFs that cover things such as neuroplasticity and learning dopamine optimization how to get better sleep things like deliberate cold exposure we have a foundational Fitness protocol we have a protocol all about habit forming and much more to sign up again at completely zero cost you simply go to huberman lab.com go to the menu function in the corner scroll down to newsletter and you provide your email I should point out that we do not share your email with anybody thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion with Dr Martha Beck and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in science [Music]