How to Break Free From Chronic Anxiety - Martha Beck

Martha Beck is a sociologist, life coach, and an author. Why is anxiety so widespread today? It feels like nearly everyone is struggling with it in some form, but where does it come from, and what are the most effective ways to manage it or overcome it completely? Expect to learn why anxiety always lies, what most people misunderstand about how anxiety works, the true tension between anxiety and creativity and the role creativity plays in anxiety expression, how to overcome your negative inner voice, why most people get stuck when undergoing a personal transformation, how to become your trust and most authentic self, how to overcome trauma and resentment and much more… - 00:00 Anxiety Always Lies 05:33 Are We Designed to Be Anxious? 15:22 Overcoming the Anxiety Spiral 27:30 How Anxiety Impacts Creativity 30:26 Activating the Right Side of Your Brain 34:00 The Role of Courage in Pursuing Creativity 39:35 Effective Interventions For Anxious People 43:20 Martha’s Autoimmune Issues 47:47 Advice For People With Chronic Illness 51:33 The Most Common Limiting Beliefs 57:01 Pay Attention to Your Fleeting Thoughts 1:02:51 Where to Find Martha - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  You say anxiety always lies, always. Why?

• 0:05Speaker 01

  I say that at the end of the book.

• 0:07Chris Williamson?

  Spoiler alert, sorry about that.

• 0:09Speaker 01

  Boom, come at me with the biggest. No, here's the thing. We have brains that are very prone to anxiety and we have a culture that magnifies our proneness to anxiety. But anxiety, unlike fear, which is a very, a response, a visceral response to a danger that is present in the physical moment. There's a surge of adrenaline, a surge of activity, and then boom, it's gone. Anxiety comes from the way we perseverate and tell stories to ourselves in our heads about the things that may or may not happen. As Mark Twain said, I'm an old man and I have lived through many troubles, but most of them never happened. So anxiety is like being haunted.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  And if you sit with it, you will see that it is never with you in the room. It is never in a form that you can address in the present. It's always saying about the things about something that are something that's happening somewhere else, somewhere on the line of time. And for that reason, it's never real. It's never present and it's never true.

• 1:14Chris Williamson?

  This interesting cocktail between our brains predisposition and our modern society's reinforcement of that, I suppose. Yeah, I

• 1:28Chris Williamson?

  it's an interesting one talking about anxiety because it's become so pattern matched. People have used, I feel uncertain or I am worried. And the term has sort of concept creeped itself out to encompass all of this. So I wonder, I wonder how much of it is people giving a name which sounds way more pathological to something which is a normal part of the human experience, you know?

• 1:51Speaker 01

  Well, there is that, no question. We are like over diagnosing ourselves and over assigning diagnoses to everything that happens. But it's also true that even like the World Health Organization, looking with, with fairly objective tests, as objective as you can get, has shown a dramatic rise in the number of people who are suffering crippling clinical levels of anxiety.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  As diagnosed by independent observers. So that went up by 25% during the pandemic and has continued to rise since the pandemic. The reason for that, as I found when I started to study it, is that anxiety only goes in one direction. It always goes up. It never reverses for reasons very particular to the human brain.

• 2:39Chris Williamson?

  Dig into that. What do you mean anxiety only ever goes up? It never reverses?

• 2:43Speaker 01

  Right. So if you've gone over a tire ripper, leaving a parking lot and it's a, there are these teeth and when you go forward, they, they get smooshed under your wheels, but if you go back, they'll rip you apart. So it's a one-way process. In our brains, we have two things that make us capable of spinning anxiety up and up and up and largely unable to bring it down, down, down, although that is possible, eminently possible. And the, the two things are something called the negativity bias, which I also call it 15 puppies and a cobra syndrome. If you went into a room and noticed 15 puppies and a cobra, where would all your attention go? It would go to the most frightening thing in the room

• 3:26Speaker 01

  because that's an evolutionary survival adaptation. Now, the problem is that when you see anything in your environment at all, you are likely to interpret it as something dangerous or negative because all brains have that, all mammalian brains have that negativity bias. But in humans, it snags on the other capacity and that is the ability to tell ourselves stories about what might happen, what could happen, what may have happened elsewhere that are so frightening to us that we actually, at a fairly regular rate, certain humans take their own lives rather than face what the story in their heads is telling them about a possible future.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  So you take the negativity bias, it sees the most negative thing in the room or online. The algorithms are written to give us more of whatever our attentions last, lives on the longest, you know, when we fixate attention, it gears those algorithms to give us similar material, which is an externalization of what's going on in our brains. We see something negative, we think it's gone wrong, we smell something, oh, that's strange, then immediately it's, oh goodness, what if there's a gas leak? Oh my God, I know somebody who died in a gas leak. Oh, and that story, instead of being seen as fantasy, which it is, is reinterpreted by the primitive levels of the brain as an actual environment.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  So when you say, oh my God, the IRS is coming to take everything, your amygdala responds as if you are actively physically being attacked, and it can stay in that high fight or flight excitation level for literally years, while you slowly die of degenerative illness because you were never meant to live in that high state of fear arousal. So yeah, it's, it's a one way, it's what scientists call an unregulated feedback system. It goes in, it feeds on itself, it drives itself higher and higher, and unless you actively diffuse it, to mix a bunch of metaphors, it's just going to keep going up and up and up.

• 5:34Chris Williamson?

  I'm interested in why, and I agree, I, I, I think it would have been very maladaptive ancestrally for our, uh, great, great, great, great, great grandparents to have been stricken with anxiety and been unable to move and unable to think and permanently worried about going outside of the cave. But it does seem so universal to the human experience in the modern world.

• 6:02Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 6:04Chris Williamson?

  It, it almost seems surprising to me to think that we weren't designed to be this way. It almost looks like we were the anxious creature, you know?

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Hmm. Yeah, I, I used to think that too. But I am a sociologist by training. And when I started looking at the difference between a healthy fear response and chronic anxiety, I saw basically that we have come from a place of anxiety and fear, and we have created institutions, media, and all kinds of other devices that are designed to reflect our obsession with what is dangerous.

• 6:39Speaker 01

  In the, even 300 years ago, you or I might have woken up in a village where we heard mainly winds, water running, trees rustling, each other's voices, birdsong. We would get up and we would do things all day that we had evolved to interact with, animals, plants, each other. And it's interesting that in the modern society, the things that we do on vacation, hunting, fishing, basket weaving, whatever it is, the reason we enjoy them so much is that they are what we evolved to do and they are highly regulating to our

• 7:18Speaker 01

  nervous systems. But we don't live that way. We get up into a world that is very, to cite the work of the wonderful Ian McGilchrist, who you may have heard of, brilliant Oxford neurologist and philosopher. He says, we're, we kind of, we live in a world created by only the left hemisphere, which loves things it can grasp and things it can build and things it can predict and measure. And it loves to have things and it's highly anxious. And we never get back, many of us never get back into the environmental situations that are meant to pitch our nervous systems where they really belong. And then we call that

• 8:01Speaker 01

  normal. And nothing about the world that you and I live in would be normal to a human 100 years ago. And humans have lived for hundreds of thousands of years.

• 8:14Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 8:14Speaker 01

  We are in a wildly aberrant moment. And there are ways you have to deal with that, that we can't wait to evolve, to adopt them.

• 8:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's going to be a slow, a slow, long wait. So the, the main difference here between healthy fear and anxiety is the duration of it.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Partly, I mean, the the reality of it. We were just talking before we started recording about how I once tracked up way too close to a rhinoceros. And then really, truly, when I looked up and saw this rhinoceros right in front of me, wild rhinoceros, really, truly thought I was going to die. And it came as a wave of clarity and exhilaration and peace, but also acute, intense, sort of visceral knowing that if I did certain things, that if I kept my body soft and slow and low, I would be less likely to be attacked. And I don't know where those deeper things came from. I hadn't been trained to feel them. But that kind of clean fear.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  There's a psychologist named Stephen Hayes, who talks about clean pain and dirty pain. And fear goes the same way. Clean pain or clean fear, it's about something that is right there, that is real, that we can work with. And it it rises and falls very quickly. When the danger is gone, it goes away. I have watched a lion attack an antelope and had the antelope speed up to levels the lion wasn't willing to reach. And so the lion stopped and the antelope stopped on a dime and started grazing, completely relaxed, with the lion still there. Because he knew there would be no attack. That's how quickly a fear response is meant to fall.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  But this ongoing, brooding anxiety that we have that makes us, it makes us insane, frankly. It makes us act, McGill Chris says, like people who've had a massive right hemisphere stroke. We don't know anything to do but to try to ensure our survival and our victory over the oppressors, whatever we see as the oppressor. And the whole time, we're just sort of sitting in a chair somewhere.

• 10:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's not the... Well, so I'm wondering, how do you think our ancestors? Because people would look at the way a gazelle operates and think, well, that's not us. That's our nervous system. So how do you think humans would have dealt with this ancestrally?

• 10:47Speaker 01

  I think that they knew what they were dealing with much more intimately. So my friend Boyd Vardy, who was with me tracking that rhinoceros and would never have let me get close enough for it to kill me, but I didn't know that. I've watched him in situations where I was completely freaked out. And he is completely relaxed because he grew up in the African bush, interacting with all these animals, with weather situations, with fires, with, you know, all manner of natural disasters. And there's a kind of, there's a kind of harmony to them all. And you can kind of tune into them, but you can't do it if you're anxious.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  I once watched three or four horses that were tied to a post get into a fight. They were all tied to the post and they started to fight and kick each other. And then they started like screaming, horses can scream very loudly. And one of them kicked another one and fell down. And then they all got tangled and fell down. There are all these guys, grooms, who were there, whose business it was to watch the horses. And as they spiked this intense adrenaline surge, I watched all these men get very soft, very gentle and very slow. These, you know, tough cowboys, very, their body language became kind of languorous

• 12:10Speaker 01

  and they moved in so gently and so calmly. And they got those horses right. They knew that if you are actually able to calm your own anxiety, your own fear, you can actually entrain other creatures, including other humans, into a state of calm. That's what I saw Boyd knowing because he grew up surrounded by the environment we evolved to live in. And it does not work in what we call the civilized world. Tension and pressure and anxiety actually drive us to fulfill our society's sort of brief, but it's not good for us.

• 12:50Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, talk about what anxiety does to our abilities in the moment.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  Oh, my gosh, it makes everybody who's ever studied creativity knows that any anxiety at all just shuts it down immediately. Even telling people who are solving a creativity problem that if they do it right, they'll be paid, creates enough anxiety that they can't think, they just can't think anymore. When we get anxious, we can't relate to other people. We project our fear of danger on to them. And as a coach, I'm often on the receiving end of this. So I had a woman who was criticized by both her parents, growing up very traumatized by it. And at a certain point, we were doing something outside. And I said, are you an athlete? Because you move really beautifully.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  It's a pleasure to watch you move. You're so athletic. And she got very silent. And for the rest of the day, she wouldn't, she wouldn't talk. She sort of hunkered away from the group. And finally, I said, what, what happened? And she said, well, I was fine until you told me I should have been an athlete. Like, that's how our relationships start to go when we're living in a state of continuous anxiety. It's horrible. And then we go to work and we can't tune into our customers or into the efficient processing of physical objects or into our coworkers. It's just very counterproductive. And yet we see it as a driver of productivity.

• 14:20Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, very interesting.

• 14:24Chris Williamson?

  It's strange. It's strange to think about how much anxiety

• 14:31Chris Williamson?

  sort of reshapes people over time. If you, if you keep doing that, this way of seeing the world actually becomes your personality.

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 14:40Chris Williamson?

  You start to look for it. You start to look for the, the red car that you just bought, but it's the equivalent intersocially with all of the people that are around you.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it absolutely what wires, what fires together, wires together in the brain. So if we're constantly being shunted by the negativity bias into the left hemisphere of the brain, where most of the storytelling goes on, the right hemisphere doesn't really use language much. And that story keeps feeding back to our amygdala. We are living in a fundamentally different brain than if we knew how to let anxiety subside and bring ourselves into a regulated nervous system.

• 15:22Chris Williamson?

  Something else that I think everyone is very common with is getting anxious about your anxiety.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:27Chris Williamson?

  The story that you tell yourself about how you feel and your frustration at the story that you tell yourself and your... How do you come to think about the sort of fear of anxiety and the anxiousness is anxiousness?

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, I call it the anxiety spiral because ultimately, I mean, what people who have phobias become more afraid of, they may be afraid of going outside, but what they're really afraid of is the panic attack that once got to them outside. So it's this really intense escalated sense of fear in the brain that actually frightens us the most, as well it should. It's actually the creator of most of our suffering around anxiety. Very little of it is based on actual circumstances. So, yeah, it spirals up and up and up and up until people... Well, it's, the New York Times called it the inner pandemic.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  It's become so, such an egregiously dominant characteristic for people worldwide that that's why I started studying it and that's why the World Health Organization is saying we should look more closely at it.

• 16:36Chris Williamson?

  How do you come to think about interjecting into that spiral, about putting the brakes on it?

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Well, there was something I stumbled into once during a very intense panic attack that I had, because I had, I had two, well, I had one serious bout of anxiety. It lasted, it started at birth and it lasted till I was about 60. But there were...

• 17:00Chris Williamson?

  That's a pretty serious, yeah, that's a pretty serious bout.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  I was born with a very sensitive nervous system and did not set it up very well. Until I actually started reading, writing this book, I had never actually thought that I could bring it down to zero. Now I believe that we can bring it down to zero. I've experienced that and I know that it's reliable. So how do we do it?

• 17:24Speaker 01

  The first thing is something I call Kind Internal Self Talk. Now, the acronym for that, K I S T, is K I S T, which, you know, I went to Harvard. I don't, three times, I don't like walk around saying, we should all kiss ourselves on the brain, it's really good. But Kind Internal Self Talk is something that I learned by studying the Tibetan Buddhist practice of Metta meditation, or loving kindness meditation. Many monks, before they do any other form of meditation, do a year of loving kindness meditation toward the self.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  So, all it is, is looking at any part of you that you can observe from the short distance of your mind, and saying to any frightened parts of yourself, may you be well, may you be happy, may you be free from suffering, may you feel safe and protected, may you be happy, or even more, like, simply, I've got you, I'm here, you're all right, there's no danger in the room, we're okay, may you be happy, may you be well. I took myself from a point of maximum anxiety, this was in my early 50s, I used that K I S T technique to bring it down, down, down, down, until it only rose periodically, and

• 18:48Speaker 01

  then, that was my first step away from the spiral of anxiety. And then when I started researching it, I found ways of sort of hooking my thoughts to a very different spiral, and by doing that, I managed to pull myself almost completely out of anxiety at a time when the world was getting increasingly anxious. So, yeah, but the self-talk is absolutely critical.

• 19:14Chris Williamson?

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• 19:57Chris Williamson?

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• 20:14Speaker 01

  You have to love that too. So, um, one of the people whose work I cited in this book is Chris Voss. He was a hostage, the head hostage negotiator for the FBI for many years. Brilliant, brilliant negotiator. And he was dealing with like psychopathic terrorists who were holding hostages with guns to their heads. These were not nice people. And, uh, what he knew was that no matter how crazy the person you're talking to is, especially if it's yourself, you're always at the basis dealing with an overcharged amygdala, an amygdala that sees fear where there is none. And the amygdala is

• 20:56Speaker 01

  cued to certain ways of reacting to it. So he says, you adopt the late night DJ voice. You're like, hi, I'm here. And then you start empathizing with it. I see you. I hear you. Tell me everything. I'm right here. He's great at it. Um, so if you have a critical voice and it's saying, you stupid lump of lard, why are you wasting space by existing? I've heard that one many times inside my own head. What you have to do is not say, shut up, but to say to that critical voice, tell me everything. I see you. You're okay. I'm right here.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  You're going to be all right because it's always a frightened self trying to keep you from being destroyed. And it takes anything bad that ever happened to you, projects it into the future and says, I will make you so fearful that you will run from every danger before it even has a chance to get near us. And I will do that by screaming and yelling horrible things at you.

• 22:00Chris Williamson?

  And then you mentioned this K I S T, which is loving kindness meditation. How long were your sessions? How frequently were you doing them? How long did you need to do them for?

• 22:09Speaker 01

  When I was in a panic attack, I did it for, I'd been in absolute, like, take me to the psychiatric hospital panic for like 72 hours. I think I kept it up for like eight hours before I came completely into calm, which was pretty amazing because I'd been given drugs that weren't working and hypnosis. Nothing worked until I did the kind, the loving kindness meditations. How often do you do it? It, it's like breath. It gets to the point where every single moment of your day, there's a part of you saying, maybe, well, I'm right here. I've got you.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  In I F S therapy, they call this self with a capital S. And it's this part of the self that's always compassionate, always curious, always creative, always courageous. And once it starts to gently talk to you, you're, you're out of the woods already.

• 23:10Chris Williamson?

  And then you said you learned how to hook your thoughts to a different type of spiral. So it seems like the first step is to befriend the negative voice. Then it's to try and turn the volume down on that a little bit by putting some other positive voices in a little bit more.

• 23:28Chris Williamson?

  And then.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I didn't give you what you very reasonably asked for, which is a practice. Like I, you get to the point where loving kindness becomes the way you think. But at first I would give it, if you can do it for 10 minutes a day, three times every day, like morning, noon and night, I think that would give you a really strong contrasting experience of what the rest of your day is like versus the time that you're doing the loving kindness. That's a great motivator to, to lengthen those and then string them together because you can do it while you're doing anything else. It doesn't take extra time from your day. It's just a change of perspective. And it doesn't actually turn down the volume.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  It, it doesn't smother or reduce your anxiety. It befriends it.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  Always think of your anxiety as an animal because that is literally what it is. In our culture, we treat an anxious brain as though it's a broken machine. That's how we treat our bodies. But it's not a broken machine. It's a frightened animal. And it's so interesting to me. Everyone I've ever met, if they found, if you found a really bedraggled, scared, shivering puppy or horse or whatever, and you were, and it was very afraid and you decided to calm it, you know how. Like, we learn all these advanced therapies and stuff, but all of us are born knowing how to calm a frightened animal. And Chris Voss just made it a profession, right?

• 25:07Speaker 01

  So like, what would you do if you found a grungy little puppy that was terrified and you decided, it was on your doorstep and you decided to like, take pity on it? How would you approach it?

• 25:18Chris Williamson?

  Slowly, softly, gently.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  Yep. Yep. You're off, you can go like that into the energy that changes anxiety into calm. And it's not turning down the volume. It's more like satisfying a thirst. The anxious part of us is desperate to be told it can take a break. It can take a rest. And then there's this huge, huge sense of relief when it starts to let go. And then you can start to move from initial sensation going into fear, which is the left hemisphere reaction, to an amygdala reaction that moves you toward curiosity. That's the first step that is really going to take you away from anxiety completely.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  And it's, it's closely linked. It's like, do you ever, have you ever rubber necked at an accident site? You drive by?

• 26:13Chris Williamson?

  I try not to, but yeah.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  We all try not to, but we all want to. And, you know, and we're, we're, we watch so many murders. The average American child, by the time they go to college, has watched 16,000 murder shows of one kind or another. Murder mysteries, movies about it, stories about it. Everything, we're, we're fixated on things that make us afraid. And the reason for that is evolutionary. Again, I was once in a field where a bobcat was hunting and he caught a ground squirrel, killed it and ran up a tree. And from all around the field, deer came bounding onto the field and ran to the base

• 26:58Speaker 01

  of the tree and just stood there looking up, like riveted on the bobcat eating this ground squirrel. And I learned that's, that's a very common prey animal reaction. They're studying the scenario so they can try to avoid it later.

• 27:14Chris Williamson?

  Oh, wow.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  And that's curiosity. And when you start to get curious, there's a great psychiatrist named Judson Brewer, who takes anxious patients out into the, he takes them on hikes, get them in nature. It helps the nervous system, but then he'll stop at a certain place and say, hmm. And sometimes he even has another doctor go with him and they both look in the same direction and go, hmm. And immediately the depressed anxious people with them go, what, what, what, what? And there's a palpable mood, mood shift away from anxiety and into curiosity.

• 27:54Speaker 01

  And he, he said, he writes about doing this with a, an athletic team, an Olympic team. And they were training to bring down their anxiety and when it would start to go up, they would all just say, huh. And then immediately it would trigger a curiosity reaction and they could get away, they could get some distance from the anxiety. And that's the first step toward, toward what I call the creativity spiral, which I see as the antithesis of the anxiety spiral.

• 28:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Talk to me about this tension between creativity and anxiety.

• 28:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Here's the thing, the left hemisphere has this strange.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  Tendency known as hemispatial neglect. And what that means is that it doesn't believe that anything except itself is real, itself and its own perceptions. So if someone has a right hemisphere stroke and they only are working with their left hemisphere, that that's the part that runs the right side of the body, right hand and leg and side of the face. And they may shave or put makeup on only that side of their face. They ignore everybody who is on their left. Only the only things that matter are on their right. If you ask them to draw a clock, they'll fill in all the numbers on the right and leave the rest blank. It's very bizarre.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Oliver Sacks, the great writer and psychiatrist, once went into a hospital where there was a man who'd woken up and had a right hemisphere stroke in his sleep. And he was screaming that the nurses had put a severed leg into bed with him as a kind of sick joke. And he was screaming and yelling and pointing at his own left leg. And Oliver Sacks came in and and the guy picked up his own leg and threw it out of the bed. He said, if nobody will get rid of this thing, I will.

• 29:50Chris Williamson?

  How do you throw your own leg out of the bed?

• 29:52Speaker 01

  Well, it turns out you're attached.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  So he's lying there going, oh, my God, it's attached to me. Get it off, get it off. And and Oliver Sacks said, well, if that's not your leg, where is your left leg? And he just stopped and he looked around and went, it's completely gone. It's nowhere to be seen.

• 30:12Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  Total irrationality. The right side of the brain does not have this capacity. Where the left hemisphere excludes things, the right hemisphere includes things. So when the whole brain is working or when the right brain is dominant, it's fully aware of all the data brought in by the left hemisphere. It can track the dangers and measure the things and know the words. But it's grounded in something more present, more meaningful, more in self, capital S. It's basically in the right sides of our brains. So it's able to contextualize everything. If we're stuck in anxiety, we truly believe that nothing else exists.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  But when you get out of anxiety, you see so much more, but you also see the part of you that's anxious and you can include it in a sort of circle of compassion. And that's, that makes the brain balance. And then you can use your left hemisphere for data to make and learn things that only human brains can learn. And that is a joyride.

• 31:21Chris Williamson?

  What are your favorite? Well, I don't know how to activate my left versus right hemisphere. What are some of the proximate ways for me to try and get that to get started?

• 31:30Speaker 01

  Well, one thing you can do, if you have a pen and paper there, is write your name.

• 31:37Chris Williamson?

  And then Unfortunately, I'll

• 31:39Speaker 01

  Okay. Oh, I don't have a piece of paper here.

• 31:44Speaker 01

  Okay, you write your name forward. Then, this is in the book as well. Then you go to the left side of it. Oh, here's a piece of paper I could use. And you write your name backwards. So I'm going to do this here. All right, Martha. And then I'll go to the other side. It's not as, it's not as clear, but I can do it.

• 32:08Chris Williamson?

  That's unbelievably impressive.

• 32:10Speaker 01

  And then, well, it, it comes from learning to open your right hemisphere. I actually taught in the art department at Harvard under a brilliant professor named Will Reiman. And he did lots of these exercises to help awaken the right side of the brain. And this was one of the things that he did. And you can do it upside down. You can, now, as I'm doing this, I'm writing my name upside down, and then upside down and backwards. I am less able to talk to you because I just lost it completely. You can't talk and do this

• 32:47Speaker 01

  at the same time, because the right hemisphere doesn't talk. As it says in my favorite book, the Tao Te Ching, the Chinese Tao Te Ching, that which talks does not know, that which knows does not talk.

• 33:04Chris Williamson?

  Very interesting. Okay, so.

• 33:08Speaker 01

  So that's one way.

• 33:09Chris Williamson?

  Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  Drawing anything is helpful. Drawing with your non-dominant hand, with your left hand, if you're right-handed.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  Any kind of motion through nature, tracking that we were talking about earlier is one of the most powerful ways to wake up your right hemisphere that I have ever experienced.

• 33:31Speaker 01

  It's, I had a client once who was, he ran a sports empire and he specialized in what he called the spiritual sports. And these were skiing, surfing, golfing, oddly enough. I know, sailing, rock climbing, things that demand extremely focused attention on the body kinesthetically moving through space. That is, you have to drive hard into your right hemisphere to make that work. Left hemisphere cannot do it. And that's why, I don't know if you do any of those things, but if you do, you may have found them almost

• 34:11Speaker 01

  addictive. Like, like, people just, I've never surfed, but people will, like, they live to surf. I used to live to ski. Now I live to do so many things because I have a list of activities that turn on the right side of my brain and I can always access one or more of them on any day.

• 34:31Chris Williamson?

  What are the ones that you do the most?

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Drawing and painting. Yeah. So this painting behind me.

• 34:40Chris Williamson?

  Oh, very nice.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  It's just, it's a painting of, I went on a walk with some friends through the Cotswolds last October, and that was a real place where we stopped and I took a picture and did a painting.

• 34:55Chris Williamson?

  What role do you think courage has when it comes to pursuing your creative purpose in this way?

• 35:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, just to say I am going to step out and be creative in our cultural context and with the anxiety most of us carry is an act of courage. And most of us have been shamed for trying to do creative things and not doing them well enough. And if we're really good at them, we got praised for them. But as I told you a little while ago, even being praised for doing something creative or being told that you'll be paid for it increases anxiety. So courage, it takes courage to say, I'm going to try this at all. And then it takes courage to know that you will fail to achieve the sort of surrounding

• 35:43Speaker 01

  culture's definition of what's impressive and that that is not the point. I throw away hundreds of paintings because the point is not the painting. The point is painting. You don't go to the gym to steal all the equipment. You go to the gym or to lift it up in the air and let it stay there. You lift it and let it fall. You lift it and let it fall again over and over because what you take out of the gym is a different body because it has been involved in, has been engaged in that activity. Anything you do that's creative, and everything we do is creative. Getting dressed or buying our clothes is a creative act.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  It involves aesthetic choices. Making food is a creative act. A conversation can be a creative act, a dinner party. Pretty much everything humans do can be seen as creative. And if we go into that mode, everything becomes suffused with a sense of beauty and presence and even awe, which is why in Zen they say, before enlightenment, chop wood carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood carry water. But the same activities are imbued with a kind of sacred astonishment to the one who has left anxiety behind.

• 37:11Chris Williamson?

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• 37:52Chris Williamson?

  Right now, you can get the brand new Whoop 5.0 by going to the link in the description below. I'm heading to join.whoop.com/modernwisdom. That's join.whoop.com/modernwisdom. What if someone doesn't feel very creative or like they have much room for creativity in their life? How do you think about awakening your inner creative if it's something that's been hidden for a long time?

• 38:14Speaker 01

  The first thing is that most people are exhausted. And the first act of creativity the brain will undertake is returning us to homeostasis, to health. So if you are exhausted by years of anxiety and pushing your body to go against its circadian rhythms and its ultradian rhythms and basically all its rhythms. If you've been robbed of peace and the kind of creativity children engage in, which is without any particular objective, you will first probably need to rest for a long time. Not that long, four days. That's what it takes usually when someone's totally exhausted.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Four days of absolutely no agenda. Like lie on the couch, eating ice cream and watching, you know, reruns of The White Lotus or whatever. And on the third day, there will be a return of a flicker of hope. The first two days, you're just like, I'm a waste of space and I hate myself. The third day, you're like, oh, I remember life. It wasn't that bad. And on the fourth day, you'll think, huh.

• 39:29Speaker 01

  Maybe there's something I could do. I want to make, I want to like,

• 39:36Speaker 01

  build, to make pottery after watching the Great Pottery Throwdown. Like, you start to get spontaneously creative after four days of rest.

• 39:45Chris Williamson?

  Right. So you are, it's a battle of attrition, of boredom, to give yourself so little to do that you've got nothing, no other choice than to become creative. Is that what we're doing here?

• 39:56Speaker 01

  No, no, no. I think of it more as filling the well. You want to consume pleasures. And we're so resistant, resistant to this, especially, you know, you're the kind of person who works out hard and performs at high levels in everything he does. And everything in the culture says that's the right way to do it. But you will destroy yourself if you do nothing else. And for all that effort you put out, you have to drink in what is around you, in nature, but also what's created by the creativity of other people, which has sort of a profound frequency of peace, delight, merriment. The right hemisphere only uses language for songs, poems, and jokes.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  You know, if you sat and watched, I remember when Boyd Farby, I thought he was very, sorry to name you Boyd. But I met him at a time when he was completely physically and mentally exhausted. And he came to see me in the US. And I made him lie down and watch Eddie Izzard routines, the comedian Eddie Izzard,

• 41:04Speaker 01

  for three days. And he was like, and I brought him ice cream. He and his sister were there. And I brought them ice cream and told them, no, more comedy, more comedy. You haven't done your comedy today.

• 41:14Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  And they talk about that as a kind of turning point. Because no one ever told him that was okay. And I was telling him, no, it's required.

• 41:23Chris Williamson?

  What else is there to say about interventions that you found successful for the perennially anxious person?

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Sometimes it can help to plug into the energy or the presence of someone who's already gotten over the hurdle of conformity to the culture. So if you can be with someone who is a great meditation teacher, or a poet, or a musician, and if you can be with them in this field of, you can actually experience almost tangibly a field of stillness. And again, this phenomenon of entrainment, it may be partly because we have mirror neurons in our brains. We reflect each other's brain patterns. So when I look at you and you look at me, our brains are actually moving to be more alike. So if you're with someone who's profoundly calm, it can really help you entrain.

• 42:18Speaker 01

  But I actually think it's more than the mirror neurons. I think it's probably something to do with electromagnetism. We have electrical systems made of meat, our nervous systems. And we all know that electrical things can communicate without wires. So you feel things, you pick up things, and you become much more intuitive in those spaces as well, which makes it extra fun.

• 42:45Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so you're using the social pressure of being around people who appear to have already done that work to help you to do yours?

• 42:54Speaker 01

  No.

• 42:58Speaker 01

  No, I would prefer that you be in a small room on this, you know, with a door closed, and the enlightened person's in the other room doing something. And you just get to eat ice cream. It is not about, in one way of looking at things, nature is the opposite of culture. And so bringing culture in always, because we have an anxious culture, it's always going to spur that anxiety, which is the way it immediately turns into, oh, now I've got social pressure. No, there's no pressure whatsoever. It is like falling. When you are in the field of someone who's profoundly without anxiety, it actually can be disorienting and give you a bit of vertigo,

• 43:43Speaker 01

  but it's so delicious because your nervous system is finding its place again, probably after years of being jacked up and anxious.

• 43:53Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think my joke version of social pressure was talking about the way that mirror neurons work. If you hang around, if you hang around with happy people, you tend to be a little bit happier. If you hang around with sad people, you tend to be a little bit more sad. But yeah, whatever, whatever you want to call it, mirror neuron, social consistency bias, just the vibe of the room.

• 44:16Chris Williamson?

  All of those things are, so one thing I've got, I think about this quite a lot. I wonder whether mastering anxiety is a game of control or a game of acceptance.

• 44:28Speaker 01

  A hundred percent acceptance.

• 44:30Chris Williamson?

  It, it, it does seem to be the more that you fight it, the worse that it gets. That's where that anxiety spiral, the anxiety cycle comes in.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, we call it the fight flight system for a reason, although it's fight, flight, faint, freeze, flop, now they have all these other F words. But yeah, as long, if you go into fight mode to get rid of your fight or flight arousal, it's going to exacerbate your flight arousal.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's why they say fighting for peace is like fornicating for virginity.

• 45:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I didn't know that you'd had autoimmune issues for such a long time. Can you tell the story of that?

• 45:15Speaker 01

  Oh, my goodness, they started when I was 18. I was running about a hundred miles a week. I was running marathons, finishing my freshman year at Harvard and I got hit by a car. And it just dinged me on the hip and threw me into a snowbank. And then I ran 11 miles home, but the next day I was in a lot of pain, went to a doctor and the doctor said, well, we're going to immobilize you until the pain goes away. And it was 12 years later that the pain went away. It just, not only did it not get better, it got much worse and it started traveling. I started having very, very high levels of inflammation in all different areas of my body, different organ systems.

• 46:00Speaker 01

  By the end of 12 years, I'd largely given up on medical treatments because they all told me, we don't know what's wrong with you. But I was diagnosed with three measurable, observable autoimmune conditions, all of which they told me were poorly understood and incurable and progressive.

• 46:22Chris Williamson?

  Thanks, guys.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  Yay. Yeah, I actually, they gave me a pamphlet for one of the things, interstitial cystitis, all you IC people out there, three cheers. Constant internal pain. And they gave me a pamphlet when I was diagnosed and I opened it randomly and it said at the top of this one page, to keep yourself from committing suicide, remind yourself of your religious beliefs. And I was like, that's your treatment?

• 46:50Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was gnarly.

• 46:52Chris Williamson?

  Was that because of the impact? Was that because of the treatment? Was it because of being sedentary?

• 46:59Speaker 01

  All of the above. Yeah. What I had was, I think now I would probably call it tension myofascial syndrome, but it did reach levels in my organs where it caused other disease. But it's basically just a spasmodic tightening of different muscular systems in the body. They don't really know. But it actually, I finally got that diagnosis when I was 31. I was 18 when I got hit in 31. A doctor went out and came back with one of his med school books. He was just a newly fledged doctor and he goes through this huge book. He said,

• 47:37Speaker 01

  I think you have this. And it said, the only treatments they had were vacations and exercise. And I said, can I have a note to that effect? Oh, and massage, yes. And I went directly from there to the gym. And I was so weak, I couldn't lift a two pound leg extension weight. Leg extension, I couldn't lift two pounds. And it was excruciating, but I had learned it probably wasn't harming tissue. And so I, I found that exercise was actually a magic bullet for me, as long as I also stayed very relaxed as I could. And, this

• 48:22Speaker 01

  is the key, only did things I enjoyed.

• 48:27Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 48:28Speaker 01

  Because anything else, you know, the reason lie detectors work is that when we, when we say things that we know aren't true, everything in the body reacts against that. Our muscles tighten, our perspiration increases, our blink rate, um, our, you know, hand sweat, they can measure immediately. All these things happen when we lie and they can pick that up on a machine. Well, when you do something you don't enjoy and you show up without protest, you're kind of lying with your life. You're lying with your actions and little kids won't do that. They will scream their lungs out if they're taken to a place they hate and

• 49:11Speaker 01

  we just beat it out of them. Well, don't beat them anymore, but a lot of people have been beaten for it. And it's ironic because what they're doing is they're following an evolutionary imperative to find what's right for them by following a sense of enjoyment. It's that simple. But the culture we live in does not really teach us to do that.

• 49:35Chris Williamson?

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• 50:19Chris Williamson?

  thousand Modern Wisdom listeners, you get a hundred dollars off, making it only 399 bucks. So, right now, you can get the exact same blood panels that I get and save a hundred dollars by going to the link in the description below or heading to functionhealth.com/modernd wisdom. That's functionhealth.com/modernd wisdom.

• 50:36Chris Williamson?

  What would be your advice to someone that's going through a protracted period of chronic illness? I mean, you were bed bound for a very long time.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  Like 12 years, yeah.

• 50:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I mean, that's, it's a special kind of living hell with even less happening. So it's like boring hell. Yeah, what, how did you get through that stuff? And in retrospect, what do you wish that someone had told you sort of during that period of your life?

• 51:05Speaker 01

  Hmm. The first thing is that, um, please direct compassion to the parts of yourself that are in pain. I was at war with the, with my own pain. I was so angry at it for keeping me, because I was highly active before that. And, um, I directed hatred and violence at it internally. When I learned to meditate, which is, that's another thing that I would really, really advise. The one thing I, I decided I could do in that situation, the one thing I could learn was meditation. And so I started and I sort of got into it before the general public sort of adopted it in the United States. And I'm really grateful that I did.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  What I would say to another person though is first be kind, be kind, be kind to the parts of you that are hurting. And secondly, realize that there is the capacity to increase your life's value and experience by going outward for experience. And then there is also the capacity to go infinitely inward. And when you are forced to go infinitely inward, you find that the inner space is as vast and interesting and full of information and experience as the outer world in which your body lives. It can be quite trippy and it's worth doing.

• 52:32Chris Williamson?

  So you learned to meditate. What, what about when it comes to a, don't rail, don't sort of fight, don't have violence against the parts of you that are the ones that are struggling or the ones that are falling behind? What else, what else sort of have you come to reflect on about that period?

• 52:53Speaker 01

  I want to tweak that a tiny bit. So love the parts of your body that are hurting and also love the part of you that hates it. The part of you that that hates the pain, that hates the restriction. Say, I get it. I'm here. I'm, I hear you. Tell me everything. And just allow yourself to, I poured it all out in journals when my hands worked, which wasn't always. And self-expression is another way that has been shown very effectively to reduce levels of stress and anxiety, especially when you're in a tough situation. Does that answer the question?

• 53:30Chris Williamson?

  Self-expression is in journaling, just being able to get your words out in a relatively judgment-free way?

• 53:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you don't even have to use words. You could draw pictures. You could use music, play songs that help convey your emotions. It's almost as if getting the experience of all the difficulty of human life into a state where it can be communicated is not only

• 53:59Speaker 01

  a really, really positive way to get out of suffering, but also an incentive to connect with the world and other people in a deeply authentic way, which again, we're not taught to do. And unless we're in a lot of suffering, most of us never even think of doing it. So I'm really grateful for that horrible experience.

• 54:22Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. What are the, for the people, whether they're sick or not, what are the most common limiting beliefs that the people who you work with tend to have? I think a lot of the time when we look at our

• 54:37Chris Williamson?

  inner landscape as kind of like a personal curse or blessing in some way, but no matter what, we think of it as unique to us and

• 54:47Chris Williamson?

  Upon hearing the way that other people think or feel, you realize that this is probably much more of a feature of being a sensitive human than it is a bug of being broken into you. So I'm just interested in what those common self-limiting beliefs are.

• 55:01Speaker 01

  The first one is I'm not good enough. There's something wrong with me. I'm not enough. I'm too much. It's about the quality of the being you essentially are, being mal-adapted to the world and unacceptable. That is universal. And I think it's because you have these, we're born with really, really active brains. I mean, we have so much going on inside our brains when we're just born. And if we're cared for by people who are really tuned into our needs, that is great for us and we develop brains that trust the world. But the moment the person we are inside starts to run into contradiction

• 55:44Speaker 01

  or social pressure, for example, they don't like it when I cry all the time. We, when we get that socialized pressure, we instantly sell out our true nature and do what people want us to do. And then there's something called the just world hypothesis, which almost all children have, which is being misunderstood by adults who frankly, don't even know how to connect with you because you can't talk or make, you know, it's, it's a ridiculous fail, fail situation. The parents can't win. The baby can't win. It's bizarre. But the baby has this conception of the world that says, well, these people that are supporting me are absolutely necessary to my well-being.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  So if I've got a problem with them, the world is full of demons and I cannot bear to exist. So what must be going on here is that I'm not good enough for them. I did something wrong. There's something bad about me. I need too much. I'm not giving enough. And, you know, the twig gets bent in the first months of life. And then we all bump into various small and large traumas along the way and internalize all of those into our self-concept. It's always this shame-based feeling of the S, the essential self that I am is somehow just wrong.

• 57:05Chris Williamson?

  How do you advise? I mean, this seems like such a a basic assumption that people have about themselves, so much so that it's it's not even an assumption. It's more like the physics

• 57:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:18Chris Williamson?

  of their system. You know, the thermodynamics of the inside of their mind.

• 57:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:24Chris Williamson?

  What sort of wormhole do you need to break through in order to change that?

• 57:29Speaker 01

  It's funny that you use the term physics, because I wrote a book called The Way of Integrity, where I said, you have to be in the truth, the truth of your own experience. And integrity was not meant in a moral sense, but in a structural sense. A plane that's in structural integrity can fly. A plane that's not in integrity often can't fly or will crash or whatever. So what happens, I think, is that you you start to look at. And I said in the book, it's not morality, it's just physics. So here you have a worldview and a set of beliefs. And if it's in perfect integrity, that is all your sense of what is true at all levels of your body, mind, heart, soul. If they're all in alignment,

• 58:12Speaker 01

  there is no psychological suffering. If you have psychological suffering, if there's anything wrong with your your mood, your relationships, your career, anything, the physics are off. And in there somewhere is something that's out of true. And that will always 100% of the time. Sometimes it's a trauma, an internalized trauma that happens at a very physical level. But most of the time, it's a story held in the brain very deeply. And it gives us a message that we're not safe and things are not okay. And that's out of alignment with the truth. It may be absolutely in accord with what we're taught in in our culture, in school.

• 58:55Speaker 01

  You know, a kid is dyslexic and he's failing at everything. The school will say, yeah, you're wrong. Something's, if they don't know he has dyslexia, you're not trying enough, you're not working up to potential. And he internalizes that as self hatred and shame. But it's wrong. So the physics won't work. So he can't move forward. He can't feel at peace. He can't be settled. He can't. And it will not leave us alone. Any failure of integrity causes structural issues that make our lives unable to work well. So if you have something that's wrong, go in and find the physics of belief.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  Find the belief that you are holding that is not in accordance with what you feel to be true at the very deepest level. And anxiety is one of the things that is most often out of true, especially in our culture.

• 59:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there's, it's strange thinking about digging a little bit deeper and working out sort of who you truly are, what integrity looks like, because I think it's very easy to distract, swipe, dopamine your way out of hearing that. That voice in the back of your mind, I did a lot of therapy last year, and one of the best things that my therapist taught me was pay attention to fleeting thoughts.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  Oh, I love that.

• 1:00:19Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's gorgeous. And I don't think she means fleeting as in flimsy or as in fickle, but fleeting is in quiet, but typically repetitive, right? It's the same thing that you've heard a few times over and over again.

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  I love that.

• 1:00:34Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's great. Pay attention to fleeting thoughts, but the problem is, and I noticed this, you know, as I was heavily caffeinated in a car, just having finished an episode, or, you know, I'm on Slack, but I've taken a call at the same time. And then I'd get in and there's just this huge deceleration. Okay, now, now I'm on the cushion and let's see what happens for 50 minutes. And it would be, you know, there would, the first 20 minute, kind of like meditation.

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:01:04Chris Williamson?

  Almost all of the overhead that you're paying is getting into the process of meditation, which is one of the disadvantages of only doing 10 minute sessions or 15 minute sessions. You spend all of these, pay all of the overhead to get into it, none of the sort of profit of being in it. And then, yeah, after a little while, fleeting thoughts would be a little bit louder, but it just, that comparison between how I was when I was going in and how I was when I was first there and how I was toward the end of the session before I got, I tended to sort of run out of gas. It's so funny, you think, you look at 50 minutes, you think, I can't achieve anything in 50 minutes. And if you're 45 minutes into a therapy session, you actually think, yeah, I'm ready to be done now, typically. So it is, it is a good length.

• 1:01:47Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, just that, that.

• 1:01:50Chris Williamson?

  Quiet voice in the back of your mind isn't able to shout all that loud.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:56Chris Williamson?

  I get the sense that if you have got to the stage where it is shouting quite loud, it was quiet for a much longer time before that.

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:05Chris Williamson?

  You could have learned this lesson probably half a decade ago.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  Yep, I learned that from no less than Oprah herself. She talks about how, she says, first, something comes to you as a whisper. Like, you might want to do this, but you, very rarely do we hear that. Then it starts to be a message where it's like something tapping us on the head going, hello, hello, you may want to do this.

• 1:02:27Speaker 01

  You may want to like fireproof your house or something. Then if you don't listen to the message, you get a lesson. Oops, something set fire to the drapes. Okay, lesson. If you don't pay attention to the lesson, you get a problem. And if you don't pay attention to the problem, you get a crisis. And if you don't pay attention to the crisis, you're dead. So, yeah, and I notice when you're talking about the fleeting thoughts, repeatedly, you've brought your right hand up and gestured toward the back right side of your head. And that is a physiological communication that anyone would understand in any culture, because it comes from the right sides of our brains. And you're sort of indicating the area where the fleeting thoughts are connecting with the rest of your cognition.

• 1:03:13Speaker 01

  And it's, it's a lot like I used to, once I, I moved to California in my 50s, and I had this craving to do long meditations. So I'd go into the forest and cover myself with bird seed. And then I would just sit there unmoving for hours to see what would come. It was awesome.

• 1:03:32Chris Williamson?

  Why were you covered in bird seed?

• 1:03:34Speaker 01

  To attract animals, of course.

• 1:03:36Chris Williamson?

  But, well, I'm, I don't understand, is that a performance enhancer?

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  Oh, my goodness. No, it's to have a bird land in your hand, to have chipmunks. I had two chipmunks, these little soft, warm furry things, have an actual territorial battle in my hands, like two tiny little sumo wrestlers. See, for me, that, it's like Emerson said, beauty is its own excuse for being. Two chipmunks wrestling in your hands, that is its own excuse for existing. That is just fun. That is pure fun. I figured as long as I'm holding perfectly still, why not get them to think of me as a source of nourishment? And they did. And, and what happened was I could feel the energy of an animal coming in that very

• 1:04:23Speaker 01

  part of my, not just my brain, but my whole right backside would sort of tingle. And I could actually tell what sort of animal was approaching me before it reached me. And what kind of birds were planning to stop and they just fall on you. And now, when I'm looking for creative thoughts or ideas about how to cope with a disaster or a personality clash or anything, I, I remember that, how the energy sort of tickled the, the field of my awareness as a fleeting thought. And I learned to be more and more still. They didn't come and climb on me for weeks. I had to be there every day, perfectly still.

• 1:05:07Speaker 01

  And I had to keep myself from getting excited when they actually decided to come visit. Because they can tell when your adrenaline goes up, they don't want any part of that. And I, now I do the same thing with my whole life. And it really is that the brilliant ideas and the loves and the, the experiences that are waiting to, to like, light you up, they come as those fleeting thoughts. And if you hold very still and allow them, they will come to stay.

• 1:05:38Chris Williamson?

  Heck, yeah. Martha Beck, ladies and gentlemen. Martha, let's bring this one into line. That was so beautiful. Uh, where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all the stuff you're doing?

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  Uh, just marthabeck.com. I also run an online, um, community called WilderCommunity.com. So if you want to like, hang out with people who think like this. Yeah. It's fun. It's weird, but it's fun. Our motto is feeling good by looking weird.

• 1:06:04Chris Williamson?

  Okay. Yeah, good. I like that. Uh, that's cool. Martha, I really appreciate you. Until next time.

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  Thank you so much. Take care.

• 1:06:12Speaker 02

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