The Stillness Cannot Be Beaten: A Conversation with Martha Beck, Part II
On kindness, magic, inner stillness, the importance of breath, how love will get us to a better place, becoming water, and beavers.
Intimate conversations with our greatest heart-centered minds.
As promised, here’s Part II of the interview with the spectacularly wise and visionary Martha Beck.
It picks up exactly where we left off so if you need a review of Part I or haven’t yet read it, you can check it out here.
Next week, I’ll be sharing writing advice from Martha. She rarely gets asked craft questions, so I’m excited to share! It’s so good!
I was changed by this beautiful conversation with Martha. I think you will feel the same! Let me know what you think in the comments! ❤️
xJane
If you feel comfortable sharing, what is your relationship like with yourself these days? How good are you at being kind and gentle with yourself?
I'm better and better and better at it. For years, I meditated in the morning, and I was always trying to get to a clear mind, which is amazing. I’ve had psychedelic, wonderful experiences, but they will always tell you in meditation those just happen—don’t worry about it. That’s not the point. It's just like watching the fireworks. It's pretty, but so what?
But I shifted after I wrote this book so that I spend the same time, but instead of going to clear mind, I try to go to pure kindness. Just be like, “What can I do for you? How are you feeling today? Tell me more.” I’m constantly becoming the self that is watching the mind, but this time not with total expressionlessness, but with active kindness.
It's really powerful. It's the strongest magic I have ever known.
I love that. Is it contained to words and thoughts, or are there actions that you're taking?
I find that inner stillness is the doorway through which this really pure compassion can enter my whole sense of being. I used to say kind things like, “May you be well, may you be happy!” But in the last few months, it's been going to a place beyond language. It feels like I sink into a depth of something so loving, it doesn't feel like myself, but it doesn't feel separate from myself. It is so loving that to express it in language is like trying to fit the sky in a teacup. There is no way to describe the intensity of this kindness, this sweetness, and I run out of words.
I absolutely love that. You write about glimmers, which are an extension of creativity and the opposite of triggers.
Deb Dana had that brilliant insight and used the word “glimmer” that way. I just grabbed the ball from Deb and ran with it because it works so nicely.
A trigger is something associated with a negative experience that at a subconscious level causes the negative emotion of the original experience to replay in the nervous system. So if you see a red balloon, and then your car runs into someone, the next time you see a red balloon, you may freak out and not know why. A glimmer works on the same principle.
There are positive things that happen to us that are also associated with the stimuli we experienced around that time. Since fear is very attention-grabbing, the trigger can ambush us. Glimmers are much easier to ignore. So you have to set yourself to notice them. You can find them without moving wherever you are. I guarantee there are objects around you that have positive associations.
I have this pencil in front of me. I had just taken it out of its box and sharpened it with my special sharpener. It was given to me by my wife for Christmas, a little box of them, and they’re the best pencils ever. It reminds me of how she always knows what I want and looks for things to give me. We have three people in our relationship, and it reminds me how we're all always trying to do that with each other, and how we're going to be sitting by the fire together soon, and oh, my god, what a privilege that is! Pretty soon as I focus on this glimmer, I can barely breathe, I feel so grateful.
Beautiful. You talk to so many anxious and otherwise struggling people who are coming to you for help. How do you not absorb that energy?
It's so simple. It's just breath. The breath is connected to the deepest neural tissue. The brainstem is what keeps us breathing. It’s below any sort of lobes at all. The ability to regulate breath is very rare in the animal kingdom, and usually it's only animals that live in the water that have the ability to hold their breath. Some people think that humans were once aquatic apes because we can hold our breath.
That means that we are one of the few animal species on the planet who can control the breath to create a mood state instead of letting a mood state control our breath. So if I'm around somebody who’s anxious, I start to feel it in my body; I can feel where they've got it. I let them talk, and then I pay attention to my breath. I slow it way down, and I start to enjoy simply having free, clear breaths. Immediately that tells the brain there's nothing wrong here. You're fine. It's just like I'm watching a TV show: I see how this person is feeling so much intense emotion, and I’m fascinated by it. But I'm not there.
That's amazing. Connected with that, you write, “When we come home to ourselves, there is no difference between you and the rest of the world.” I love that. How do you experience that on a daily basis? Do you experience that on a daily basis?
Yes, more and more and more and more and more. There's something in physics called the hard problem, and it’s the problem of explaining what the hell consciousness is. Because nobody knows how the hell these physical bodies are animated by consciousness, or even what consciousness is.
One philosopher said, “consciousness is an illusion.” The problem with that is to have an illusion, you have to be conscious. So he's back to the problem of how are we conscious in the first place. There are some very well-known scientists and philosophers who are pantheists, who believe that everything is conscious: electrons, stars, this pencil here that I'm so fond of.
I believe that the universe is an artifact of consciousness, that consciousness is what creates the appearance of a physical universe. I read a lot of physics, and the more you read it, the more you start to feel that there is no difference. There’s no barrier.
There is an apparent barrier, but it feels to me like a video game being played by beings who are not separate from each other. But we're playing with a game that makes it seem like we're separate from each other because there's fun in that. And there’s adventure, and there's compassion, and there’s learning, and there’s growing. It's all about the joy of it. So when something bad happens in the game, I feel bad, but only in the game.
When somebody says, “Let’s go get lunch,” and we stop playing the game, then I realize everything's been fine all along. Walt Whitman wrote about this sense that life is a game, not our ultimate reality. He wrote, “Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am…Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it.”
I feel like I could take us on a huge tangent now with things that have happened with my brain that parallel what you’re describing. But I do want to talk about what’s happening in our world right now.
You write: “When European explorers encountered people with different values and lifestyles, they got right to enslaving, exploiting, or simply killing as many of these people as possible, grabbing all their stuff, including their bodies and their children. Anyone from the conquered cultures who survived had to adopt Western values to navigate their new world. To the left hemisphere, this just made sense. It was all Progress! Divine Right! Manifest Destiny!” And later you write: “But producing extreme wealth for a few people by terrifying almost everyone else isn’t natural law. It’s something we’ve made, following our left hemisphere’s most materialistic, frightened, and controlling tendencies.” Is this what’s happening in our country now? Has the left brain simply taken over with Trump and Musk and many of his supporters? Or is it more complicated than that?