Martha Beck, PhD: Living Without Lying

“I've won arm wrestles with big muscular men, right out of prison because you align the energy. Everything wants to harmonize with it and things start to flow with you and it's silent and it's, it's quiet, it's gentle, but it's incredibly powerful. The strength you can access when you're in a state of integrity. So as that starts to grow, we're seeing the Putins and we're seeing the Trumps because they are so freaking loud. And we don't even know that in the silence all over the world, there's another power rising and rising and rising and looking at what's happening in Ukraine and looking at the atrocities and saying, okay, we're not going, we're not gonna do this anymore.”

So says Martha Beck, a Harvard-trained sociologist and life coach who is the author of many incredible books, including the just-released, The Way of Integrity, an Oprah bookclub pick that just might change your life. Martha describes integrity as that sense of wholeness that we can all tap into when we are aligned and attuned to our true selves on the deepest level. It is from that place that we feel unrestricted and safe—like we are at one with the world and each other, and that we no longer feel compelled to control our own behavior in order to earn acceptance and belonging. It is a place of strength, freedom, and radical honesty.

The book, which is a mixture of memoir, anecdotes from her own, fascinating practice, research, and worksheets, uses Dante’s Inferno as a guide to healing. As with any heroic quest, you must go down before you can go up, and Martha walks you there, hand-in-hand until you reach the place of Satori, or enlightenment, which is really another word for the state of integrity. If you can’t tell, I really loved this book–and I loved our conversation.

TRANSCRIPT:

(Edited slightly for clarity.)

ELISE:

I loved the construct of your book because I'm writing a book about the sins. And mine is not a deep text on Danté, but obviously I reference, I mean, that’s cultural milestone. So yeah, I'm in the land of the familiar in a brilliant way.

MARTHA:

Lovely. Not many people left around who are into literature, you know, like is Danté on TikTok? I did not see Danté's TikTok.

ELISE:

How many people have read Danté? You inspired me. I need to go and reread Danté.

MARTHA:

No, you actually really don't. I read it like 9,000 times in all these different translations. Because I don't speak Italian. And you know, there's a lot of medieval Italian politics that you can just like. But literally the metaphor that I started with, I just had an overall sense that there was a heroes journey, like integrity thing in, in The Divine Comedy. And as I really dug into it while writing the book, oh my God, like little details that he puts in are absolutely perfectly placed. I mean, he was such a psychologist. It's amazing. It really is.

ELISE:

Well that's what I think is so interesting going back into who's somewhat mystical or the desert monks, et cetera, who are creating these concepts, is that they were trying to create psychological systems. Really. It was often grounded in, in religion and morality where it can get a little skewed, but really they were trying to codify and understand humanity.

MARTHA:

Who hasn't wondered what's happening to me, you know? Like what, what sense is this? Why am I, I mean, in the Old Testament, it's like, I've seen everything under the sun and it's all futility. You know, what am I doing here? So yeah, they were all wondering about it like thousands of years before Freud or anybody.

ELISE:

We'll go through the book in an organized way, but this idea, I've never heard the word satori and the way that you, and I'm probably mispronouncing it, but this idea of revelation or an understanding that Dante seems to express that you've experienced in your life. Like you talk about Byron Katie, I love her work as well, but the way that some of these people are articulating a version of the universe that aligns with an understanding that some of us have had, and some others haven't. And it feels too ephemeral to put into words, but I loved that idea that that's where he is writing from.

MARTHA:

Yeah, and I love the idea that it's a brain state. They can see on an FMRI, like actually show that these two sections of the brains go brain go quiet and people experience this explosion of joy and illumination that the Japanese call satori. And people have been doing it all along in all kinds of different cultures. It's a really recognizable moment of explosive awareness, and it can happen to everybody and afterward you don't suffer as much. And I'm like, oh, please gimme some of that.

ELISE:

I know it's true. And I loved how personal the book was in times. And the way that you, you describe the visitation of light and sort of your own emergent intuition, and trying to recognize and integrate what that even is, which I guess was your own Satori.

MARTHA:

I think there are several, I don't think I've had like the big Kahuna, from which you never returned, where. Although I do think, you know, I look around at the world and it does look like a projection of consciousness. But I've also read a lot of physics, you know, and what was really interesting to, to me again about Danté was that I read a lot of physics and then had this really different way of seeing the universe. And it came in pieces partly because of what I was learning, partly because of meditation, partly because of suffering. But I read quantum mechanics and then had the experience of the universe being that way, where Danté gets himself to the place where his brain is seeing things differently and describes quantum mechanics. In 1320 something. So yeah, I've had a series and some come through the thinking mind, and some come through the emotions, and some come from some other place, you know, just pure consciousness.

ELISE:

It’ss interesting, like something that we perceive as a dichotomy, like the rules of the universe and physics, and then this sense of a deeper system, quantum physics, which obviously is way beyond my understanding beyond the rudimentary basics and that we've always maintained, like you're a material scientist grounded in reality, or you're whack, like you're woo, woo. And then we're sort of coming at the same truth from two different directions. And there is this idea that actually these things overlap, and we're only now starting to have the scientific language to understand what has been sensed by some people as an extra perceptory understanding of the lay of the land. So it's a fascinating time to be alive.

MARTHA:

And the key word that you just said is the same truth from different angles, because that was my whole point in trying to, well in my own life, before I wrote this book, it was about what actually is the truth. Because I was raised very religious, in a very cult-like religion, and then at 17, I was exposed to Harvard where I stayed for another 10 years. So it was about as different as you can be, but both those threads, I said, you know, what is the truth? People are claiming truth on both sides of this. And so I started going at it in any way I could, just to find out what felt true to me. And what ended up happen was a total revision of my entire life into something much more joyful, much more grounded. And I thought to myself, I'm going to write this down in a book so that other people can do it.

ELISE:

And just to clarify, people don't need to be familiar with Danté to exact 99.9% of the value from your book. But how was that? Did you stumble upon that as a framework? Like how long have you been working with that as a concept.

MARTHA:

Since I was about 18.

ELISE:

Wow.

MARTHA:

I was depressed. And I had an eating disorder, and I was in therapy, and in Dante's Inferno and he goes, the process is that he's miserable. He's lost. He doesn't know what's go happening to his life. And he finds out that the only way he can leave this place of being lost is to go through hell, the Inferno. And I always read everything as a psychological self portrait of the author. And I just always did. I just always felt like I was looking at the inside of the author's head. So as I read the Inferno, I was seeing him go down through his internal hell, looking at his demons, just like I was doing in therapy. And when he got to the very bottom where it's, so he's going down through the center of the earth and there he finds Lucifer, the monster.

He actually, he calls him diss, which means divided, which is the opposite of integrity, which just means whole. And his guide says, you have to keep going down. And he's like, I can't go down anymore. I'm at the absolute center of the earth. And his teacher says, go on down. And he goes through the center of the earth and suddenly a direction that used to be down is now up. And from there, it's a very quick trip back to the surface of the earth. And I experienced my therapy the same way. When you get to the rock bottom and you keep going in the same direction without resistance, when you surrender to the fact that you're gonna keep going down, it suddenly becomes up. And from then on, I was kind of hooked on Danté.

ELISE:

And so that did that become when you, as you've coached. And by the way, I just need to flag here, your practice as a coach and the people that you have coached, I was like, this is every page. I was like, wait, like a serial killer. I mean, it was so wild. The spectrum of people who you've worked with murders, bestselling authors…

MARTHA:

Billionaires and beggars.

ELISE:

Billionaires and beggars. So just caveating that I was, I found that fascinating. It's not just the same person working their way through your program with you. But is this how you've taught it? Or is each person, is this how you coach, or is each person distinct?

MARTHA:

Everybody's distinct and everybody follows similar patterns. So the reason I deliberately went seeking a lot of variety and different national cultures, different world cultures, different everything, is that my PhD is in sociology. And I remember I took my PhD dissertation and it was about gender role conflict in American women. And I gave it to my advisor who was a Danish man. And he read, he said, I don't care about this. It has to be, it has to be interesting. You have to think of something that affects a Danish man. And I was just like hubris much?

I remember going back to my apartment going, no, he's right. I have to find common threads in this experience that will resonate with everyone, or I'm not really doing the work. So I set out to find the same types of experience in different populations. And that's actually where I first encountered the sort of event of mysticism, because I was dealing with all these women who were very, very conflicted. It was the 1980s, and they were trying to do a family and home, and they couldn't because those two roles are incompatible. And when I went looking, I found the same thing in populations where Western culture had been superimposed on the traditional culture. And they were being torn apart psychologically the same way. And the only escape from this was to have a mystical experience. So that's where I found the word satori and started using it. All of us when we're in conflicted situations where we feel torn apart, are being cracked open so that something can make its way in that will take us right out of our social context. And give us the truth about life.

So when I'm talking to an African beggar, that's what I'm looking for. When I'm talking to an American billionaire, I'm looking for the same thing. I'm just looking for, what are the things in their life that are pulling them apart, or as Leonard Cohen says that there's a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in. So everyone's different, and yet we all follow similar patterns and that's Danté's journey down into hell up through walking your talk through purgatory and finally to paradise where you start to have joy and inside and all that.

ELISE:

You write: Cultures need our cooperation to survive, so they're designed to control our behavior.” And then you cite Mario Martinez, the three archetypal wounds, abandonment, betrayal, and shame. It’s such a bummer that culture is so toxic and insidious. And, and so often, I mean, obviously there's, there's beautiful components of it and we need to organize ourselves in some ways, but we, many of us have been fed a lot of myths with long teeth.

MARTHA:

We all have, and everything is putting hierarchies, which are by nature destructive. And the culture we have now is such a product of the medieval, like pyramid shape thing that happened when merchants and the church and the monarchies got together and formed this pyramid. And we think that's the way things have always been. Absolutely not true. Many, many cultures didn't have that. And when you start to find yourself, like I saw this with American women. Some were very divided, but those who had been through their own personal hell, they might be living completely different lives, but they understood the process of being cracked open and then lifted. And because of that, I could get an 80-year-old woman who always lived on a farm and an 18-year-old, New York lesbian. And if they'd been through that experience, they were so fully accepting of each other's particularity. And those people create structures that are not pyramids. I call it the pyramid in the pool. It's like a pool of water where everyone is equally represented. The amount of …you create waves depending on how much presence you can bring to your life and those waves interacting form the society, the social model. So I think that we're on the very cusp of a massive shattering of the pyramid structures, and the alternative where we're concerned as individuals is integrity.

ELISE:

And as you point out, you know, you sort of open the book, explaining the science and the research that suggests that when we're in disharmony, out of integrity, or out of this idea of wholeness, which is how so many of us have been raised and exist today. It shows up in our lives in physical symptoms beyond sort of like the lack of ease or lack of feeling good. And then that breaking, that moment of clarity, when you're like, oh, I could be in a different way, which would feel so much better is our call to ourselves.

MARTHA:

Let me just for people who don't know the book or anything, integrity, the word just means intact or whole. It doesn't mean virtuous. It means whole. And if you have the sense that you have lost yourself, it's usually because you've been socialize to abandon pieces of yourself that are very necessary to your wholeness. And given that choice, the vast majority of us split away from our nature and go with our culture. So we basically sell ourselves out. We do a kind of soul splitting. And if we could be content with that, it would be fine. We'd just all be little robots in culture. But nature doesn't give up without a fight. So when we are divided, like even when people just tell little lies, if they ask people, this one study, they said to some people just don't lie quite as much for a couple of weeks. And they had no way of policing it. They just suggested this. At the end of those weeks, the people who had lied less than the control group had fewer physical symptoms of illness. They had fewer doctor visits, they had better relationship quality going on. They had a better time at their work. Everything started to feel better when they just started checking to see what was true for them, and then staying with what was true for them instead of selling themselves out again.

ELISE:

Oh, I loved that whole discussion, both going into white lie, black lie. And then this idea of gray lies, which I went you to define for us. But even backing up to, you know, I think we all know white lies, butler lies like, oh, I'd love to, but I can't, I'm too busy. Is that true? Who knows? But the way that we betray ourselves, the sort of continual lying that you talk about, too, like when you ask the audience, how many of you are uncomfortable, and no one would acknowledge that. Of course they're physically uncomfortable sitting in stadium seats. So can you talk a little bit about that? Like the, the ongoing sort of aversion we have to actually understanding how we feel in any moment?

MARTHA:

Yeah. If you're taught to be quiet, and polite, and sweet, or bold, and brave, and fearless, depending on what your immediate culture is, you will so embrace that role identity that you forget to notice that it doesn't, it's not true for you. So what you're talking about is when I would stop in a speech and say to the audience, are you comfortable? Is everyone comfortable? And they would look at me like I was crazy and I'd keep asking them, no, seriously, are you comfortable until they were like, shouting at me, I'm completely comfortable. And then I'd say, so if you were at home alone right now, how many of you would be sitting in this exact position? And no one would raise their hand. And then I would say, why not? And it would take them like, you'd see all these brilliant people with their brows furrowed and thinking, why would I not be sitting like this at home?

And after about three minutes, you'd go, oh, I'm really uncomfortable. And the problem wasn't the discomfort. The problem was that they looked me in the eyes and swore they were comfortable while at the same time, knowing in a physical felt sense that they were uncomfortable. That's duplicity, not integrity. And it's a gray lie, or a white lie to me is like, that's a white lie. It's fine to say, yeah, I'm comfortable go on with the speech. It starts to get a little brave when you become really physically uncomfortable and you're still lying and you still, and you start to know that you're lying. In white lies we often don't even recognize it, it is part of culture, but when you are really starting to hurt and you're still telling people, no, I'm fine. Or I love this job or whatever it is, the lie starts to get grayer. And the more you sell yourself out, the more you will sell anything out until it gets to the point where some of the people that I've worked with have done things they are very, very, very sorry they did, because they were suffering so much. They were trying to become whole again. So they became heroin addicts or whatever. It hurts so much to be split that pretty much everyone is on the hunt for wholeness, only we don't wanna do anything that would rock anybody's boat. And unfortunately that's the only way.

ELISE:

Yeah. Or, and I would, and I loved this if you don't mind me reading to you from your own book, because I have a question I wanna ask you about it. So you write, um, this is this, I think truth telling exercise: “Oten my clients feel a bit unmoored or even offended by this exercise, the unpleasant things they're forcing themselves to do, the areas where they lie about their feelings. The times they obey shame or threats of punishment are the very aspects of their behavior. They believe to be most virtuous. If you're a stay at home mother who's never really enjoyed being around children, a firefighter who longs for quiet intellectual work, or a soldier who doesn't thrive on routine, you may be proud that you forced yourself to go against your nature and do what appears righteous to your culture. Now I'm telling you that this admirable effort is out of integrity.”

It's interesting.I couldn't be a stay at home mother. It's too hard. It's too difficult. Everyone would suffer. But so often we have to sometimes go against our nature. Is one way to at least acknowledge the truth of how you feel and then take action anyway. Or is that also duplicitous?

MARTHA:

No, it's not as duplicitous because you are being clear with yourself. So the, the most important person you need to be in integrity with is you. So for example, if your kid is throwing up all night and of course, you'd rather not disturb your own sleep and go clean vomit in the middle of the night. But if you tell yourself I have to like this, this is what I live for. And I have met mothers who feel that way. Like really like it is a huge, precious honor to be with that child and to do that job, it's an honor. And even though it's not pleasant, they are absolutely in their integrity. But for me, I had to say to myself, this sucks. I really do not enjoy cleaning up vomit. I I'm gonna do it because in the service of my values, this is a good idea.

But then I also had to think as my kids got older, like, is it better? Like the struggle with do I put my youngest in Montessori classes? Because in my growing up culture, Mormonism, that was no, you didn't do that. But she was desperate for more entertaining days. And I was desperate for her not to be there for a couple of hours every day. And her first day of Montessori school was like the happiest day of both our lives. So I had to like face the fact that I wasn't the mother my culture told me to be. But when I was the mother that I was meant to be, there was just love. There was just joy.

ELISE:

Right. No, it's true. And I think we get, it's understandable why we get so twisted both from the programming of the culture at large, and then the way that it feels like it doesn't fit. And I certainly, I mean, I think men are so wound by the patriarchy, women obviously are its victims as well. But you look at what's happening with men and the way that they are, you know, you look at someone like Putin, right? It's like the distortions are so extreme. That was sort of a right turn to Putin from stay at home moms. But like,

MARTHA:

He's not a good babysitter. I'm just gonna say that.

ELISE:

But yeah, you think about sort of how this is showing up culturally and it's very devastating from the micro to the macro.

MARTHA:

Absolutely. And what he's doing is he's living out the, he is becoming the monster in the center of hell and the monster in the center of hell, unlike a fiery hell that most of us think about Danté put the Satan figure in a lake of ice where he was frozen in place. He couldn't move, he couldn't relate. All he could do is hate and destroy. And because he wouldn't go through his own suffering into the embrace of his hurt self, which leads to compassion, he just becomes a generator of evil. And we've kind of up upended the pyramid in our culture. And it's not so much that Vladimir Putin creates an evil culture. It's that we have a culture that is bumping people like Putin and Trump, and you know, a lot of other people through the ages, you know, Dracula, whoever, they rise to the top of this pyramid because of the design of the pyramid itself. And people with integrity shatter those pyramids, the way Nelson Mandela did in South Africa, for example.

ELISE:

It’s really interesting to watch, too. And I feel like, culturally, that people are now, I'm sure people were doing this before too, but are able to also start to distinguish between people behavior then peoples right. So this idea that like, we're really talking about Putin, we're talking about a, a toxic man, more so than a people.

MARTHA:

It's always, the emperor has no clothes. And what's fascinating from the perspective from my sort of sociology perspective, going into look at integrity is why we don't say the emperor has no clothes. And you will be penalized if you're that person. I mean when I left Mormonism and then wrote a book about why I left, I got death threats for years. I had special security and everything. Because if you say the emperor has no clothes and you go right at the surrounding culture, it will fight you and it will try to destroy you. And it may succeed, you know, Gandhi got killed. So did Jesus. Like a lot of these people who have gone through enlightenment experiences and tried to bring that into society have actually been killed for it. But as Jesus himself said, what does it profit you if you gain the whole world and lose your soul?

Get your soul on board. And here's the thing I think, I think now for the first time, and I've read a lot of thinkers who agree with me on this. The culture, the global culture has reached a point of such toxicity. That what used to be a very rare event that would happen to a Buddha or a Jesus or a Gandhi has become more common. More people are being well that's what I saw studying women. They were being torn apart and then sort of thrown into this state of being more awake. Now men are being crushed. Women were torn between two roles, but men are being crushed by the pyramid and they're starting to break, too. And for the first time in world history, I think we may see a massive shift that might just keep us alive on the planet for a while, because it would lead to an ethos of care and nurturing life instead of getting power by killing.

ELISE:

I'm with you. I feel like we're at this a very intense deciding point of like, is this gonna hold, you know, in a different way? Or are we gonna sort of rise here, and you can sense it sort of within people, this desire to sort of like, it feels like a line, right? And we're sort of like, can we pull this up? Like get this density moving up. Rather than letting it pull us off.

MARTHA:

Here's the wonderful thing. The people who are making that shift and coming into integrity and becoming, there's a kind of power that one gains, when you're in this awakened integris state. When you're whole, you, you actually become stronger. I learned this studying Aikido. When I get my, my Akido means the way of the harmonious spirit. So when I align all the parts of myself in integrity, suddenly if you were here, I could show you, you become physically capable of like throwing people. I've won arm wrestles with big muscular men, right out of prison because you align the energy, everything wants to harmonize with it. And things start to flow with you and it's silent and it's quiet, it's gentle, but it's incredibly powerful. The strength you can access when you're in a state of integrity. So as that starts to grow, we're seeing the Putins and we're seeing the Trumps because they are so freaking loud. And we don't even know that in the silence all over the world, there's another power rising and rising and rising and looking at what's happening in Ukraine, and looking at the atrocities, and saying, okay, we're not going, we're not gonna do this anymore.

ELISE:

I love that. And it feels that way, but it is sort of that commingling. I mean, you can think of it too, not to go all over the place, but like the Internal Family Systems and Richard Schwartz and his parts system of like figuring out where those little parts of self that you abandon as a child are sort of littered along the way, then doing that work to reintegrate them and bring them back. It's almost like Avenger style.

MARTHA:

I went and got an IFS therapist and started doing that because of did. Yeah. I'm like, oh my gosh, this guy has, and I talked to Richard sort Schwartz, have you interviewed him?

ELISE:

I have, I love him. He's so wonderful. He's had a satori experience, too.

MARTHA:

Yes. And like we had this interesting cagey conversation where everybody who does this kind of work experiences, things that our culture does not smile upon, or it doesn't believe in. I start to have, to me, honestly, it's more like a shamanic ceremony than therapy. I go in my therapist says, okay, take a few deep breaths and tell me what you see. And suddenly I'm seeing all these vivid pictures that are giving me messages very much the way it would happen if I were in a sweat lodge or a shamanic journey in Africa, which I've done. And so again, science is coming at different science, social sciences is coming at this issue of wholeness and finding new ways to bring us together as individuals. And when we come together in ourselves, then the mass integrity of people who are in harmony with each other…oooh that’s very magical.

ELISE:

Speaking of Richard Schwartz or your book, which is also partly a workbook, and it's a process that you go through, I loved the conversation that you had about, you know, you cite Joseph Campbell in The Hero’s Way and how the teacher presents itself at this moment when you need them. And then similarly, like that need to kill the Buddha, right? Like do not attach to any, I mean, you can work a system for a long time until you sort of extract the value that you need. Because we’re seeing a rise of sort of like this and it's been around, but the guruification and these people who report to have all the answers and that, that the fact that this is hard work and yes, you need a, you need a teacher, you need a, someone to walk with you for parts of the path and the way that Virgil did that for Danté. But they can't do the work for you and they can only take you so far. Can you talk about that? Like the role of teachers and how to not get so attached?

MARTHA:

Yeah. In Buddhism, they call it the golden chains. When you start to believe that you've got the answer and you decide this is it and you hang onto it and it can be solid gold. Another Buddhist metaphor is somebody trying to reach enlightenment symbolize by the top of a mountain. And he's going through a forest, comes to a river and he stops and builds a raft to get across the river. And then he tries to pick up the raft and carry it with him up the mountain because that's what got him where he is. And the point is it doesn't work anymore. And so the, in the heroes saga, one of the very first things that happens after you accept your adventure is that you get a magical teacher. And in my life that the teacher has often been a book. Sometimes it's a human.

Sometimes it's a situation. Sometimes it's a song, you know, like it can come in any form, but it will always tell you that the finger that points to the moon is not the moon and the, the truth for you is to drop all. And I know this sounds bizarre in our culture to drop all belief and go to a place that where you accept that you do not know anything for certain. Naar Mahara says the only state, the only true statement the mine can make is “I do not know,” because ultimately we have no idea. We could be dreaming this whole experience. When you get there, you talked about Byron Katie earlier, and she talks about the incredible joy she's experienced ever since she stopped believing anything. And when you don't believe anything, you're like a, a creature, a cat, a dog that just shows up and is available to whatever is…I call it being in continuous creative response to whatever is present.

And that's what they mean by awake because you have to be very curious and very alert to constantly see every situation as brand-new, and go on what comes from within you instead of some set of golden chains of beliefs that used to work.

ELISE:

Yeah. Oh, I think that's such a profound idea and I loved, you explored this in the book and, and it felt sort of, I had had a similar experience where you talk about like, if we can just bring ourselves back to this moment and obviously a lot of people talk about this: Like everything's in some way survivable until it's not, but we find that we're coping in this moment. And I was thinking, I mean, this is sort of a silly example, but when I got engaged to my husband whom I love dearly and we have, we've been through it, but we have a pretty strong relationship. But when I got engaged, I had an abundance of fear. Like it just stoked so much anxiety. And I was like, oh my God, you know, this is so big. What am I doing? And I was like, well, the way I talked to myself off that cliff, because it didn’t reflect how I felt about him. But I was like, if we're happy today, we're like functioning today, like we're probably gonna be pretty good tomorrow. And stuff's gonna come up. But like this is a day by day process. This isn't like you don't sign and then you're done. I don't know, I was sort of getting at that same idea of like, I love him in this moment. I'll probably love him in 60 seconds, too.

MARTHA:

Probably. Byron Katie again, she and her husband, Steven Mitchell, who's one of the greatest translators into English of spiritual texts. These two got married, and they're very unusual, and their entire wedding ceremony, the vows were, “I promise to love you until I don't.” That was it. And the person who married them felt compelled to make a little speech and about love lasting. And Steven had to like take him out back and talk some stuff here like this. These are our wedding vows. I promised to love you until I don’t. She wears the wedding ring until she wants to give it to someone and that's, and she will, she's done it several times and then they've given it back.

ELISE:

I mean, that's amazing.

MARTHA:

Oh my God. Like you wanna see a they're almost, I think they're both 79 years old and they are passionately in love, because there's no cultural structure holding them into the relationship. It's chosen moment to moment to moment. It really genuinely. And the love available when you are that present, and someone's in that present moment with you is inexpressible. I mean, my God, if we can get that going at any level in the culture, like if 10% of people were free to be themselves like that and then connect with each other like that, it would be a golden age. It would change everything.

ELISE:

But so many of us really struggle with that ambiguity, right? Like that. That's a lot of pressure to sort of in that moment continually to cast spells of love with your partner, to not ever be able to take their partnership for granted even for a day.

MARTHA:

There's no stress around no, there's no pressure and no stress. You get to do whatever you want whenever you want it. When you're in total integrity, the next step arises from within. And you don't even feel like you're doing it. The two parts of the brain that shut down when people achieve this thing called enlightenment, when they do studies on Tibetan monks, for example, are this part that feels separate from the world. Like here's my body and I, anything else is the other. That shuts down, so there's no division between self and other. And then the sense of controlling your own behavior or anything else goes silent. And what you do then comes from some wellspring of goodness that just, you don't have to do anything. It gets done. In the Tao te Ching, it says, “In the pursuit of knowledge, every day something is added; in the pursuit of enlightenment, everyday something is dropped. Less and less you have to force things until you arrive at non-action. When nothing is done, nothing remains undone.” And that's because the force, the Tao, the way, whatever it's moving, all of us, it moves us. Like the wind moves, moves the trees and you find yourself doing something and you don't even remember choosing it, but it brings you enormous joy and there's no pressure to sustain it. It just sustains.

ELISE:

Oh Martha, when you just said, when you stop controlling your behavior, I almost started crying. I mean, not just like hit something so sad and true, at least for me. I'm sure I'm not alone.

MARTHA:

This is the belief in you that you have to control it everything or, or all will be lost. And what the sorrow is telling you is that for you, super simple, that isn't actually true at the deepest level. And the sadness is coming from having lost the part that knows that she never has to control anything.

ELISE:

Yeah. Oh God. It's when you're writing about sort of C.S. Lewis, like you talk about how you write, “I must remind you here that being out of integrity, isn't a sign you’re bad, only that you've internalized false assumptions, usually in an effort to be good. The most moral well-meaning people often have the biggest and frontal landscape filled with the most frightening demons.” Is that just because all of this cultural programming, like those maybe sensitive people who are more sensitive or engineered towards, I don't know that it really works on it's the most intense with people like us.

MARTHA:

If you try very hard to be good and you really you're a loving person, so you really wanna make other people happy. You will absorb more of the culture’s musts and have-tos, and you will leave more and more of yourself behind. So, and some people like crack under the weight of that and do become addicts or something. The six things people tell me is number one, they've lost their sense of purpose. This is when you embrace the culture's attitude about what you should be rather than going from within. Then there's emotional devastation, then physical illness, then your relationships fall apart. Then you don't know what to do at work with your career. And then you may get an addiction and it's kind of the better you are. The more you want to please others, the faster, those, and most more intensely, those things happen to you.

ELISE:

What's the underlying fear that drives that fear of disconnection, not belong. Like what is, what is it?

MARTHA:

Yes. The single fear is I am not loved. I am alone. I'm not okay. I'm not good. I'm not lovable. That is at the, that is what Satan is thinking at the base of hell in Dante's Inferno. I am wrong. And that's why he calls diss, just divided from the truth. Yeah. Because he also calls him Lucifer for the angel of light. And the moment the angel of light splits and rejects itself, it becomes the darkest dark.

ELISE:

Let's talk a little bit, speaking of along these lines about you, you call it inner violence. And I remember reading, you know, reading this with Byron Katie as well, where she talks about this false belief that so many of us have that without that cudgel really like, we won't be good. We won't recycle. We won't care about injustice, or be moved to action without that sort of internal lash. How do we break that dependence?

MARTHA:

Well, so we have this internal violence. It's usually our internalization, our in projects of things people have told us, you know, in our families, churches, whatever, in college, wherever you got an ideological education. And the false assumption is that it's that carrot and stick driver that keeps you moving at all. And when the carrot and stick are completely gone, especially the stick, you won't do anything. But love is a verb. And as Katie herself says, do you think love just sits there in the presence of suffering? Love acts. That's what love is. And we think we will be nothing without the carrot or the stick. But in fact, what we are is love. That's why our greatest fear is I'm not lovable. I am not love. That's the deepest lie. So when you let go of all the other lies and you get rid of the lie, I am not love, you go like an arrow, wherever love sends you.

And you will gladly go into your own death. You will do anything, but not because you think you have to, because there's an inherent joy and it seems to be happening almost by itself. And I know that sounds really weird. It's very counter-cultural in our culture, but even though I don't, don't consider myself enlightened I can tell you that is true. I don't remember like deciding to write this book. I don't remember deciding to use Danté. I don't remember because it just, I just did it. I just sort of sat down and there it was. And that's all I do is like get up and meditate. And other things seem to happen.

ELISE:

But I, and I love the, you know, sort of the back third of you, your book, where you're really talking about that part of your life and this idea of, I think you talk about, I think you were pregnant with Adam when you became psychic.

MARTHA:

We are all a little psychic. I noticed it when I was pregnant.

ELISE:

Yeah. Yeah. No, but so much of it, you know, you talk a about, um, not knowing, I, I feel the same in my own creative process where I'm like, um, I, this is so silly really, but as we were saying at the beginning, I'm writing this book about the sins and patriarchy. And I thought it was this novel idea. Like it came to me, like oh, this is my book. Like I, and then I was like, oh, wait in college I majored in English and fine arts. And my fine arts thing was about fairy tales, archetypes, and like these ideas of women. And then my English thesis was about John Milton and Andrew Marvell and the Garden of Eden in and the loss of innocence. And it's like, oh wait, the universe is pushing us, and bringing this back to us. And so often we're impervious to its nudges.

MARTHA:

Yeah. And I don't even think of it. It's something outside mean nudging me anymore. And I don't think it's coming back because I think it's always, it is in its essence what we are. When you strip away that's not true. You become the same thing that wrote Milton's poetry. But the same thing that wrote Dante's poetry. When I was writing the last chapter of the book. The Divine Comedy is all in past tense until Danté actually reaches the source of the universe, which is this unfolding flower, like light. In Asia, it's a Lotus. He describes it as a rose. And then he he's been experiencing more and more joy and illumination and this explosive understanding of reality. And then he gets there and he's ready to go into that light. And he switches into the present tense.

And then he says, “And now I become one with the love that moves the sun and the other stars.” I was reading that again, after many times, and I felt this shock go through me. And I felt like I had seen pictures of Danté in profile, a famous portrait of him profile that came into my head. And then it turned and I was looking straight into these eyes and they were looking straight at mine. And I knew there was no difference between him and me. No difference in time. No difference in space. We were the same consciousness looking through two sets of eyes. And he was in the present tense. He was in my room with me and I was there with him and everyone else was there, too. It was this mind-blowing experience. I've never taken a lot of drugs, but that I would take a drug that may not happen.

ELISE:

That's amazing.

MARTHA:

It was.

ELISE:

Yeah. And, but I think it's like we can talk about satori experiences, or those like full body resonance moments when you're, or just this, like, like you're having a conversation with someone, they mention something, and then suddenly it's relevant and applicable, and the key to what you need, you know, that I think happens to people all the time. And it's like, in your experience, the more you become attuned to that, the more you pick up those threads, do you feel it gets stronger?

MARTHA:

All I wanted to do when I set out to be in integrity myself, was I just wanted to get the crazy differences inside me. You know, the Mormon girl and the Harvard student and this, and gay straight, all these different roles I've played in my life. I just wanted to know what was real. So I just started telling the, playing an honest truth, and doing what felt right all the time. And I wasn't even trying to be virtuous. I was just on this journey. Well, the closer I got to being true to myself and my thoughts and my actions, I did not want to have woo-woo experiences. I thought no magical thinking. People put that on self-help stuff and I don't like it. Well, when you just set out to be honest, the matrix is wildly alive around you.

And it throws things at you. I mean, I'll give you an example. I was living in California. There was a terrible drought, as you know, and one day I just couldn't take it. And I was like, I just need someone. I was living in the woods. I need someone to tell me something about the drought, somebody who knows something. And we were living in the woods out in the middle of nowhere. And that later that day, I had not watched television at all in that house. And somebody was watching a football game and the news was coming on. And I saw said, I wanna watch the news in case I wanna watch the weather. And she said, well, in that case, we should switch to this other channel. We switched to another channel. And what I saw was my own face.

This woman from that station had come out and interviewed me like months earlier. And I don't know why the delay was there, but there I was. And, so they did a story about me moving to California, and then the anchor woman bumps to the weatherman, she said, you know, Martha told me, she's really worried about the drought, it's like somebody dying of thirst in front of her. And the weatherman looks at me out of the wall and says, “well, I probably shouldn't give advice to a life coach, but Martha, stop worrying about the drought. It's gonna be okay.” And the drought wasn't over, but like it really wasn't that unusual for me to get that weird an event. Like that stuff happens to me all the freaking time. And it means, I just believe in magic.

ELISE

I believe in magic too. And I think that this idea, you know, your book takes people through a journey and through a series of exercises, but even just that the radical truth telling yeah required of like, am I comfortable right now? Do I actually wanna go to drinks at this point? You write about the, you write: “It isn't just our brains that struggle when we lie, our bodies weaken and falter as well. One study showed that people who present an idealized image of themselves had higher blood pressure and heart rates, greater hormonal reactions to stress, elevated cortisol, glucose and cholesterol levels and reduced immune system functioning. Lying, and keeping secrets have been linked to heart disease, certain cancers, and a host of emotional symptoms like depression, anxiety, and free floating hostility.” For people who are listening, is that the place to start that recognition of…and probably all of us are in some parts, except for you out of integrity a little bit.

MARTHA:

Believe me, I'm not home yet.

ELISE:

You're not home. But is radical truth telling even if we only express it to ourselves, is that where we start?

MARTHA:

It's nice to ask yourself. Yeah. Is this true? Is true. Is this true? That's really, really helpful. For people who are just beginning or who are listening to this, I'd really like to point you first toward the truth that kindness toward everyone is your nature. And that it must start with kindness toward the self. So I've been reading a lot, I'm writing another book. And, one of the things I've realized is, and found through research is that fear and physical pain are very often linked to self-criticism or self-attack. So the last thing I want is for people to go, I'm not in integrity, I need to be better, I'm a bad person. Start by sitting there and saying, okay, where am I lying? And then, oh, alright, I went to coffee with this person. I really didn't want to, and then say, why did you do that?

You know, that's understandable. Everybody has done that. How did it feel? Do you really wanna do it again? What could we say next time? So what you wanna do is come into your truth-telling the way you would sit with a three-year-old who you love very much, and say, wow, I really understand why you would do that. And lots of other people do it too, but did it feel okay? Because if it doesn't, let's think of a new way, that's the level of, that's the highest level of self-attack, a self-attack you should ever, ever, ever resort to. Kindness is the first truth. And you, if you start from that, the rest is much easier.

ELISE:

Yeah. And I mean, your story, your personal story is so intense and profound and difficult and such a model, I think for someone being able to do that. And come back to yourself, it's very inspirational. But that love, I mean, so much that idea of re-parenting or identifying that core belief, I'm not lovable. Do we all have some version of that? Some of it's more performative?

MARTHA:

Yeah. I think almost everyone does everyone over the age of like six months. My son with down syndrome has less of it, far less of it than most people. So he's been an incredible teacher for me. Like he just doesn't…if somebody calls him and he doesn't wanna talk, he'll just say no. And I'll say, well, your friend really wants to talk to you. He's very upset. And Adam's like, no, I'm relaxing. So yeah, not now. You know, that's why I'm not home yet. I still have these cultural pressures that I buy into. But Adam is a very happy person.And it's not just because he doesn't have the, the IQ that some people do. It's because of his honesty, really?

ELISE:

When you think about parenting, I have two little boys and it's, it's like, how do you not? How do even if it makes you uncomfortable, like, they'll, they'll get on like a, on their iPad, like a FaceTime call with like a friend play Minecraft, and then they'll be like, I don't wanna talk anymore. You know, it's similar. It's like, I'm done. Don't call me again. I'm like, like you're gonna call it's so crushing. And I'm like, but I shouldn't be telling them to prioritize. I don't know. It's really hard. It's hard to know.

MARTHA:

And that's why the guide is always kindness. That's where I come to is the truth is very difficult to suss out when you have all these conflicting messages is, and for me, I had to spend a lot of time alone looking inward. And not everybody like a, a mother of young kids doesn't have that kind of free time to meditate. So the first thing you wanna do is take some time alone. Even if you just go into the bathroom and lock the door, sit down and think what would feel like a kindness to myself. Could I let myself off a hook that would feel not sleazy, but Ugh, like I really don't have to control them, or they're gonna grow up who they're gonna be, who they're meant to be pretty much, no matter what I do. So what can I do to make myself like, wouldn't it be an interesting thing to give my little boys a happy mother? A relaxed mother who doesn't try to control them.

ELISE:

Yeah. It’s so contrary to all of our cultural programming. It's so hard. It's really hard. And it's, there's no AB test, you know, for parenting. There's no, like we'll try this and we'll try that, and then we'll pick the best path. Like it is such a crap shoot.

MARTHA:

It's such a crap shoot. My grown kids. They'll be like, yeah, she, she is not home yet. At least we know talk about it. And here's so much joy and connection when you've grown up saying to your kids. I don't know. I think I did that wrong. I'm a try something else. Like just out there, honest.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, for, for sure. And my final question, you talk about not being home, but like, are any of us home until we die? You know, until we see that light, isn't this all iterative and hard?

MARTHA:

The irony is that we're always home all the time. And that in the pursuit of enlightenment every day something has dropped. And when I say I'm not at home, it's because I sometimes grab little cultural things and, and like, hold them up and say, okay, I'm actually not going to just wear pajamas in a bathrobe to the store. I'm gonna put some clothes on. But you know, Byron, Katie would just wander down the street after her enlightenment. And if, and she'd go up to people and say, I need to be hugged, and no one ever refused to hug her. So when she dropped it all, the world was incredibly kind. But that's all she did. She dropped all her acculturated beliefs and she became what we all are in essence, which is pure…and there's no word, there are no words for this, but the most exquisite peace, love, joy, creativity, humor, delight, fascination, everything. Like we are always home. Always. We just distract ourselves from it. And the more lies you drop, the more it shines.

ELISE:

I’m going to try to be more truthful in my life, because the person that I continually betray, as we got to in this conversation, is myself. And over-running what I want to do, or who I want to see, and continually undermining my own desires. I don’t think I’m unusual, I think that’s so much of life. And really we have to do a lot of things we don’t want to do, that’s also part of life. But I think being conscious of that, and allowing that I’m going to be really considerate to myself in what I choose to do, knowing that there’s a certain amount of stuff I don’t have choice about, feels like an essential hug really, a moment of kindness to myself. There were a few moments during our conversation when I felt really emotional, and I also feel called to listen to that. Obviously, I’m very interested in the ways that culture has informed the way we control our behavior, to abide by ideas of being good, behaving, doing what others need us to do, that is, as Martha would say, not in integrity. And abandoning ourselves continually is not okay. And we know this collectively. We look around, we understand how sky-high anxiety levels, increasing rates of cancer, auto-immune disease, heart disease, and obviously there are environmental factors for all of this as well, it’s a complicated stew. But, there certainly something about this moment of being alive where we are creating a lot of dis-ease in our bodies—that lack of ease. Her book is incredible; it’s a great process, for any of you who are looking for a process to follow. And I also love that she doesn’t insist that she has really any answers. And no teacher should. The best teachers really allow you to figure out your own truth, and that’s internal work that no one can do for you.