The Stillness Cannot Be Beaten: A Conversation with Martha Beck, Part I
On health, anxiety, shamans, sleep, animals, money, belief systems, and, of course, love.
Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds.
Dr. Martha Beck, PhD is the most fantastic combination of brilliance, kindness, humor, vision, curiosity, and wisdom — plus the mountains of lived experience necessary to shape all this into wildly accessible, compelling, and life-changing books, talks, podcasts, and more. If that seems like a lot to pack into an opening sentence that’s because Martha offers so much practical insight to the world!
For starters, she’s written eleven books — the most recent of which is Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life's Purpose. It picks up where her international bestseller and Oprah’s Book Club pick The Way of Integrity leaves off. We are in a worldwide epidemic of anxiety and whilst most of us think we need to fight our anxiety, Martha suggests that instead we need to love it. The best way to get ourselves out of an anxiety spiral? A creativity spiral! Much more fun!
Martha holds three Harvard degrees in social science, has two podcasts (Bewildered and The Gathering Room), is a much revered life coach, has written countless magazine articles, including two decades worth for O, The Oprah Magazine, is an inspiring public speaker, runs self-transformation retreats in South Africa and Costa Rica, and is a devoted mother, life partner, and all-round good egg.
My kitty Rudy Lu picked up on this in no time. The minute Martha appeared on my computer screen, he woke from a deep nap, stretched, and then proceeded to circle the room and yowl and circle and yowl, drawing closer and closer to the computer until he was right up against it. Confirming the good vibes coming off Martha are real!
We got on such a roll, we ended up with too much wonderfulness for one interview. So I’ve split it into two parts. The second part will run tomorrow.
I loved speaking with this wise, gentle, and visionary soul. I hope you enjoy reading it!
xJane
What’s your definition of health – mental, emotional, physical, spiritual?
The word “health” is related to the word “whole.” The last book I wrote was called The Way of Integrity. I didn't mean moral virtue. I meant the literal meaning of integrity, which is to be one thing, whole and undivided. My premise in that book and in life is that when you are whole your heart, your mind, your body, and your soul are all basically in agreement.
I have been really, really ill in my life, but healthy – because I was relaxed into the situation that was happening. I wasn’t deluding myself or fighting what was happening in the present moment. I was present. I was living the serenity prayer: Changing the things I could, accepting the things I couldn’t, and having the wisdom to know the difference.
To me, that’s healthy.
I’ve had it when I’ve been physically sick. I’ve had it when I’ve been depressed, I’ve had it when I’ve been anxious. But when I get into that state of alignment, the weird thing is, I get well. I get happy, and I get calm really quickly. So I come out of the negativity.
This is so interesting. You're saying you can be physically sick and still be healthy because of being in alignment?
Yes, I have at least three formally diagnosed, incurable, progressive autoimmune diseases. When I relax into making every choice in my life based on what feels resonant with what I believe at the deepest level, I have no symptoms to speak of. That is not supposed to happen with these diseases.
But even when I do get symptoms, I know that that’s just a sign that I’m out of alignment with a part of myself. It could be my body—I'm not getting enough rest, I’m meant to lie down and pay attention more. When I do, something comes into my mind that I hadn’t let myself be aware of.
I think you can tell I have a version of the world that is highly teleological. In other words, nothing is meaningless to me. So I think when you're sick, it's a way that your wonderful, incredible system has of getting your attention so that you can bring yourself into an understanding of something you need to understand. I don’t think any suffering is useless.
Symptoms often resolve when you get the underlying message, but not always. And we're all going to die, so it's not like we're supposed to be healing ourselves of everything. It’s just that we don’t need to suffer psychologically, even if we’re suffering physically. But we do need to know what's true for us, and it's the search for what's true that I think is guided sometimes by symptoms that are unpleasant.
I’ve never felt more mentally, emotionally, and spiritually healthy than I do now. But whilst my physical health has improved, I still struggle with it. I spend so much time going, “Am I thinking the wrong thoughts? Am I believing the wrong beliefs?” That’s not healthy for me, either.
Play with the thought that you might have been given what, in traditional cultures all over the world, is called a Shaman sickness. That’s what anthropologists call it. It’s the healer, mystic, psychologist, naturalist of the tribe who happens to have this call toward healing and is therefore given the gift of an illness that makes it impossible to take life for granted or to stop paying attention to what's real and true for us. You can only tolerate so much when you've got physical illness, so you have to find your integrity and stay in it to be happy while you've got symptoms.
You become much better than other people at finding happiness, because you have to do it just to tolerate the pain; they don’t have to do it, or they can do it with a drink, or whatever.
Can people in that position still get physically healthy?
Oh, absolutely! Read Dying to Be Myself by Anita Morjani.
I read that! Such an extraordinary story.
I’ve met her, and she’s a lovely person. She was about as sick as you can get, and she came out of a literal death spiral. She was just a skeleton with tumors, and in nine days she was cancer free.
I remember how she wrote about hearing conversations in rooms down the hall whilst she was in a coma. You’ve been on quite a healing journey with your body. When you were younger, you struggled with autoimmune diseases, fibro, heaps of pain, and your organs were deteriorating. You also have vaginal scarring from sexual abuse. How did living through all of these physical challenges shape the way you see the world and what you see as your place in it?
The whole thing I just told you about Shaman sicknesses—I did not know that when I got sick, and I wasn’t looking for it as I sought a way to tolerate my illness. But when I did run across that concept, it felt resonant with me. So I learned to treat my body as an incredibly sophisticated barometer to help me find the particular path through life that was my optimal path.
I think there are infinite paths we can take, but to take an optimal path means that when I make a choice that's right for me, I feel my body relaxing. I feel my symptoms disappearing. But if I’m not true to myself, I feel a symptom start to come on, though it’s nothing that knocks me down anymore.
When I talk to groups of people, I’ll say to them, “Are you physically comfortable right now?” And they’ll say, “Yes, yes,” and I say, “But if you were at home, would you be in this position?” And they’re like, “No.” And I say, “Why not?” And they gradually figure out it’s because they’re not that comfortable. I say, “So, okay, you didn’t know that you weren’t comfortable when I asked you this, even though your body knew you weren’t comfortable.”
The mismatch between thought and body sensation is very strongly reinforced in our culture. You are not supposed to be connected to your body according to our culture. When I say this to doctors, they’ll say, “We don’t want to do that airy-fairy woo-woo new age stuff.” I’m talking about their physical bodies, the single most empirical thing about them.
In our culture, you’re not supposed to live in your body. What the hell is that? It’s nonsense. It’s insanity. My illness, which had me pretty much bed bound for twelve years, really reinforced to me that that is nonsense. I don’t care what the culture says. They can say it to me all day long. I know it’s not true. Our bodies are there to help guide us in every way. And if we listen to them, they will be very kind to us.
What do you do to care for your body? Are there certain foods you eat? Exercise? Supplements?
Sleep. And sleep. And sleep. And sleep. Sleep is the magical elixir.
There’s no coincidence in our culture of denying the body, and also being “the city that never sleeps,” and making doctors do 72-hour shifts, and using sleep deprivation as a mark of honor in companies. You know, “I haven’t been sleeping because I’ve been working so hard.” It’s ridiculous, it’s unhealthy, it’s unwise. It’s metaphorically fractal to us destroying our own planet. It’s nonsense, and I won’t do it.
How much do you sleep a night?
When I’m well-rested, which is usually—I sleep eight hours. I learned to sleep from a group of three medical women in Canada, who run a practice called Sleep Works. They taught me simple things like wearing amber-colored glasses when the sun goes down, so that electric light doesn’t overstimulate my circadian rhythm.
When they started working with me, I’d had insomnia for forty years. They said, “Well, you really only need about eight hours a night.” And I was like, “Not me, honey, I need twelve.” And they’re like, “That’s because you’re chronically sleep deprived. When you start sleeping every night, you’ll find it’s about eight,” and I was like, “You don’t know anything.”
Then they started doing these little things with light and with temperature. I slept twelve to fifteen hours a night for two or three months. Then I went to eight hours, regular as clockwork.
Are you able to just go to bed and sleep? Or do you need to use something like melatonin or follow a ritual?
I have to do my routine very scrupulously or my body gets off-key so fast. I use light. I use temperature. I use a bright light in the morning. I have to get a lot of exercise, which for a long time, I couldn't do. It's funny, now that you're mentioning it, my mind and my day revolve around taking care of this body.
Same. Do you ever get concerned you might slip back on any of these things? Like, I have sleep trauma.
Oh, yes. Of all the things that have happened to me, and I've had a few, the biggest trauma is around insomnia. It’s horrible! People die of it.
If you have a night where you go off, do you get scared that you're going to slip back into a bad cycle again?
No, because it's happened so many times, and then I've re-established the rhythm. So my trauma is level going down, down, down. You have to go to the place of the anxiety and have it end differently over and over and over to heal a trauma. I've done that with sleep now.
I did get long-term insomnia; it came back at the beginning of the pandemic. Because I was hiding my own anxiety from myself. I barely slept for two weeks, and I was begging my doctor for sleeping pills, and she wouldn't give them to me.
Then I started doing a different kind of meditation where it was all about letting my muscles relax. It was very physical. I would go into the muscles, let them relax, and I learned to sleep again. That was a bad scare, but that's, touch wood, the last one I've had.
You have so many people who look to you for guidance on a variety of things. Does that ever feel like pressure to always be healthy and capable and grounded, more so than the rest of us?