Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Martha Beck.
Dr. Martha Beck is an undergraduate master's in PhD training at Harvard University. She is also considered one of the foremost experts in the personal development field, having authored many best-selling books, including her upcoming book Beyond Anxiety, Curiosity, Creativity and Finding Your Life's Purpose. I must say that today's discussion is a truly special one.
I've long benefited from Martha's teachings and I assure you that during today's episode you will benefit from Martha's teachings. She describes and we explore practices in real time that will allow you to truly understand what is most important to you and what you ought to spend your time pursuing. You'll hear a rich discussion about how to frame the thoughts and the emotions around any topic, including pain points in life, as well as your goals and the things that you are in pursuit of. You will also learn how to figure out exactly what is most essential to you and indeed how to explore what Dr.
Martha Beck calls your essential self, those deep-rooted desires that are unique to you and your history and what will make your life most fulfilling. By the end of today's episode you will be armed with new intellectual and practical knowledge and you will be able to adopt the best possible stance for you as you navigate forward in your life. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public.
In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. I've been doing weekly therapy for well over 30 years.
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Again, that's HelixSleep.com.com.com. To get 25% off and two free pillows. Today's episode is also brought to us by Elements. Elements is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't.
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And now for my discussion with Dr. Martha Beck. Dr. Martha Beck, welcome.
Oh, it's so good to be here, Andrew. Thank you. I'm so excited. I mean, I don't know how to convey to the people listening and watching just how excited I am.
I have very few heroes in life, but you are one of them. It's true. It does not compute. It's true.
I won't name all of them, but you know, you, the great Oliver Sacks are among the people that have really influenced me so much in terms of the things I do, the ways I try and think, the ways I try to not think at times. And your life story is an amazing one. So we have a lot to cover today. So I'm not going to spend any more time talking about why I feel that way because it's going to just become apparent in our discussion.
But I do want to say that you have really been ahead of your time. I mean, you're triple degree from Harvard. You have these academic credentials. And yet you were one of the first people to be public facing about the mind-body connection in a way that is operationalized, what we sometimes call an in and around this podcast, protocols.
And you offered some practices that have absolutely transformed my life in other people's lives. And again, I'm through reading your books and that's not a standard book advertisement, but all of your books have been transformative for me. One of the exercises that has had a profound effect on my life is the perfect day exercise. Oh, yeah.
And when I first read about it, I thought, you know, what could this possibly be? And as I recall, it involved taking a little bit of time, maybe 10 minutes, maybe 30 minutes, and just sitting there lying down, closing one's eyes, and just imagining with no limitations once per day. And what's so wild about this exercise is that several, not all, but several of the things that I imagined in that exercise have amazingly come to be reality. It works.
I don't know how or why it works, but I used to have people send me a postcard. This is how long I've been doing this stuff. Now it's emails and texts that I say, okay, we just did your ideal day. You've got it all written down.
Now, send me a notification when that day happens. And I get a lot of notifications. I've notifications. Okay.
Well, I'm giving you a notification right now because at the end of that exercise, and I ended up doing it several times. I do it all the time. Okay. That's good to know.
I want to know about the frequency there was, you know, I'd love to sit down and talk to Martha Beck. What I wouldn't do. So I'm in a pinch me moment right now. It's wild.
It's like reality weaving back on itself. I wasn't doing podcast. I thought that guy's really cool. I'm here.
I don't think I'm moved by that. So let's just talk about this exercise for a second. Oh, yeah. Clearly we could come up with scientific explanations for why it would work, you know, the brain is a predictive machine.
You know, once it understands that something might be possible, maybe it looks for avenues where that unconsciously, we could come up with a whole narrative around that. But just for sake of those listening, what is this exercise? How would you suggest somebody try it? So the first thing is that you don't make up something.
People would always tell me they'd make up a day where they woke up in a white room with white sheets and windows with white curtains. And then they would put on white clothes and drift around. And I realized, finally, that these people were just tired. And they were, they could not project anything but a sort of blankness that I finally realized, meant that they just pushed themselves too hard.
And then they would stop doing this with people until they were well rested. Then you don't make it up. You see it happen. That's the key thing.
You allow it into your mind, not as though you're reaching with your imagination, just as though it emerges. So I talk people through it. You, the first thing is you wake up in the morning, you're perfectly refreshed by a beautiful sleep. In your imagination, don't open your eyes, but listen.
What do you hear? So you don't make it up. You listen for it. What do you hear?
For me, the first thing I hear is like just feeling how comfortable my body is on the bed. Something that I don't do enough. What about the sound of someone or someone's breathing? Yeah, someone next to me breathing and they're still asleep.
Lovely. Is there a dog breathing on the foot of the bed? Well, it was like my Bulldog Costello that's snoring. I'm not going to get another dog soon.
So I would like a dog that breathes with less snoring than Costello. Although I must say I miss his like incredibly deep snores. The early versions of this podcast, the early episodes, we kept him in the room snoring. And by the way, the watering up of my eyes, these are truly tears of joy.
And I said, at the beginning of the podcast, I said, listen, I have a Bulldog. He's getting toward the end of his life. So we're going to keep him in the room. And so when you hear that breathing in the background, that snoring, call it what it is, he's in here.
Like, so sorry, not sorry. So anyway, so yeah, so there's some Bulldog breathing. You can have as many dogs in the room as you want. Just listen.
And maybe you hear birds outside, maybe you hear the ocean, maybe you hear wind, maybe you hear people talking or the noise of traffic. Just listen for a minute and tell you're pretty sure you've heard everything there is to hear. I like the sounds of kids playing. Sweet.
Okay. So smell the air. What's it like? How humid is it?
What's the temperature? You know, I'm a California hard. I like it in the 70s and 80s. Perfect.
Not too humid. And I don't, it's weird that it don't jumps in, but there's something about the sound of airplanes flying over. Interesting. It always depresses me.
It must be some paired association. Sometimes I don't like that. Okay, no planes. So birds, bird chirping, who doesn't like birds chirping?
And by the way, for our listeners, this is not one magical day that you'll never live again. This is a typical day, but your life is not perfect. So it's an ordinary day. What in your perfect life?
So we'll put it out three years, five years, whatever makes it possible for you to allow that your ideal life could form in that time. You'll find as you do it many times, the time necessary for it to happen becomes much shorter. Anyway, so you get up, look around, you sit up in the bed, look around. Who's next to you?
What does the dog look like? What does the room look like? It's my partner next to me. My dog is...
I told myself I wasn't going to get another bulldog. You are. They're the best. They're like the essence of efficiency of metabolism, meaning they do as little as possible, and they experience as much joy as possible.
They're hedonists. You need a wise hedonist in your life. And they are capable of protecting if they need to, but I honestly don't care about that. All that stuff, like all that, like my bulldogs, I don't care about any of that.
Something tells me you could protect yourself for telling me. I'm good there. I look around the room, like how the walls, what pictures are hanging there, if any? Yeah, I'm a wyath fan.
Which one? And do we see? Well, recently I saw a caption. I don't know if this is true, because it was an Instagram post, that the woman in the field image is interesting as well.
I didn't know the name of it. Thank you. This was a neighbor of theirs that had a degenerative neural condition. Rather than use a wheelchair of sorts, she insisted on crawling everywhere.
And so that image is actually crawling out into the field happily to enjoy the field. I know. Because my impression of the painting before was that somehow because she's seated out there, it looks like in my mind I projected onto it that there's some desperation there or something to get back to the house. But that's not it at all.
It turns out this is a woman who preferred to move with her own agency, even if it meant crawling to enjoy nature. It's a magnificent painting. So it's on the wall there? Yes.
Maybe not the original. Although that would be awesome. Why not? It's your perfect alignment.
Then I'm waking up in the Met. And also just notice that you're creating a theme, which is the theme is I will go out as myself and I will reach and strive for things. And I'm not here to be helped. I'm here to do hard things and to do them for the joy of it.
So that painting is a strong symbol of who you are. So get out of the bed and your partner's still sleeping. The dog's still sleeping. Go look out the window.
Where are you? And you can be anywhere. I'm a mountains guy. As much as I love California, you know, I've realized that I just went out to Boulder, Colorado for the first time for a week just by myself.
And I fell in love with it. So I'm in the mountains. Colorado feels right to me. And there's water.
Like a river. They've got great rivers there. They're little streams. I like the little streams that they have there.
Because the rivers are so loud. The rivers are really loud when they get going. So are you looking at a small town? A city?
Do you live out of the mountains by yourself? Definitely small town. I can't be too isolated. If I'm going to be in a city, I'm going to be in Manhattan.
It's like it's all or none. So if I'm going to be in nature, I want to be in nature. So a small town. Beautiful.
So just look around. Smell that pine aspen and air. And then you go into your perfect bathroom. It's beautiful.
You can go through a lot of description if you wanted to. But I'm going to rush through that to get to the interesting cards. So you take a look at yourself in the mirror. Your body is absolutely perfect.
Of course, in your case, that's not an aspirational thing. You're already there. But make it even better. Yeah, for me, that means being clear eyed.
People who listen to this podcast know that I came up through neuroscience studying a number of things but the visual system. These two bits in the front of our skull are pieces of our brain. They only pieces of our brain outside of our skull. Yes, they may be the windows to the soul if people want to refer to them that way.
But to me, I just feel like my eyes are clear. Yeah. And there's a certain tone or something that I'm like, okay, like I'm all there. There's a real clarity.
I've seen it. I don't know if you've worked with people who are dying or who are really ill. Sometimes you'll see a shift in the transparency of their eyes. It actually seems to be a radiance coming from the eyes or gathered around the eyes.
That's what I'm thinking as you talk. Yeah. And I think it's the Buddhist that talked about someone who's at the level of their skin. So right there, as opposed to someone who's back into their eyes.
And then of course, some people are really forward leaning. And I also have been working on the intersection between the visual system and the autonomic system. So stress or calm. And I think what that's referring to and I'm speculating here is where we are alert.
So we're present alert, but calm. And of course, that controls people's eyes. And all this stuff, I do believe has been understood in other traditions and ancient traditions through what kind of unconscious genius where they're recognizing all the symbols integrated of clarity of the eyes and level of the skin. And of course, we can measure the stuff in the lab, but that's just isolating variables.
So for me, it's looking in the mirror and like, okay, my eyes are clear. This is so interesting because my friend Liz Gilbert of Eat Pray Love fame that she wrote something before she was famous where she dressed as a man for a week and walked around. And then she had a friend in Broadshoulder and has, you know, great chin. So she could get away.
She could look male and she got herself all dressed up male and they faked a beard and everything. And then she had her friends come and the male friends said to her, no, Liz, pull your eye, pull yourself back six inches away from your own eyes. And she did it. And he said, now you're looking like a man.
And she walked around the way and she said it was the loneliest, saddest week she's ever experienced. Like, yeah, people gave her more respect in certain ways. But she said when they told me to back away from my own eyes, it was like my soul went dim. That's really, really interesting that you would say that exact distance.
It's like a retraction of our humanness. I mean, I don't ever recall as a kid, you know, my dad or my mom or anyone telling me where to place my vision. I'm probably guilty of being more expressive, emotional, effusive than certainly the traditional male stereotype. If I love something, people are going to hear about it.
And I'm not shy about the fact that thinking about Costello or my graduate advisor or people I love, I'm all well up and I'm okay with that. But I think, well, to flip that one around, do you think that that's a real thing that they're cultural conditioning, that men and women tend to kind of be either more, I don't know, there's no language for this. I have an N of two, you and Liz Gilbert. But I think it's very interesting that you said that, that you're forward in your eyes.
And the idea that the eyes are the parts of our brains that are showing. It's fascinating that she had that experience too. So I would love to, I'll be asking people from now on, if you're designated male, identified male, do you feel you have to pull your sort of vitality back from the world? And I suspect it's true.
I suspect it's true just from interacting with people. And ask women if they, I think it's more vulnerable to be right on the surface of your life and the surface of your eyes. But it's also much more, there's sensuousness to the world when you're fully present. That I know I had to shut down, like when I was in the Ivy League, I had to pull myself back and sink down.
And that's a typically male environment. I think it's about materialism and conquest and oppositional thinking as much as gender. Very tactical. Yes.
It's like taking what's out there and holding it in. I actually can do it. I know how to do this. You just did it.
It's like visible. Yeah, I probably just learned how to do it. Right. Because I'm comfortable in a lot of different environments.
Right. There's certainly environments I don't want to find myself in again or in the future for the first time. But yeah, I'm very, very aware with that distinct change in internal state that accompanies that. So that was so interesting that you just did that.
Wow. Okay. I love that. I love that.
ADHD, which means I pay attention to things that interest me, which means that I literally follow swirls away from business meetings. I have paper and pen here. Okay. Because the art of podcasting, in my opinion, is that we can spend a couple different plates in return to them because it's like conversation.
Otherwise, we might as well be on a highly produced traditional media show and that's not what this is. Sure. I say. So we're back.
So I look in the mirror and I see. Yeah. You are clear. I'm clear and present.
Okay. And of course, for those listening, you should all be doing this exercise for you. So I'm going to go to the closet and you're going to get dressed. Open your closet, which is the closet of clothing you have in your ideal life.
And just look at the different outfits you have, the different, like how many kinds of shoes are there? It's just very funny because I definitely have my ideal wardrobe, which is very sparse. I've always owned 20 or so of these buttoned down black shirts for work purposes. I like t-shirts that are super soft and because I have a short torso and long arms like they have to like fit right.
And so I find the ones that fit right. It's a nightmare trying to get them. The ones I get them, I adore them because I always own two belts or so. One watch.
Black jeans, the shorts I like I get teas for wearing mailman shorts, but they're actually the cost-co purchase or like Kmart purchase, like mail person shorts. They fit best for me. And I've always worn Adidas. So I'm happy there.
I'm happy there. Oh yeah. I own a pair of leather shoes. I have a suit.
I actually own a tuxedo. I own those things. And I like my closet. I've always liked it.
It feels very safe in there. I like it. And then I've always kept a couple of photographs of people that I love in my closet. Oh sweet.
So whose photographs are there? Do you see any photographs you don't recognize at this moment? That's my sister. It's my grandfather.
And then that's it. Apologies to my parents. Yeah. Apologies to my parents and anyone else.
Forgive me. Okay. Okay. So then you go through the whole day and I can spend at least an hour going through this with someone.
An important thing is that you do something I call the three ends. You notice what comes into the field of your imagination, but you don't try too hard to see it specifically. And then as you go through, you sort of narrow down what it might be. And if the name of that thing comes up, you can then name it.
But for example, in one of my ideal days, I was writing short pieces of writing and I was interacting with people very regularly about it. And I couldn't even imagine what kind of job that was. And then an editor in Manhattan knocked over a manuscript I'd written and she got, she was the editor of a women's magazine. And she called me and asked me to be a columnist.
And I was like, I was a magazine columnist for like 20 years. And it was exactly what was in the ideal thing, but I had not named it. I didn't know that you could live in Phoenix and be a columnist for New York Magazine. So notice what you're doing.
You put on your very comfy t-shirt, very cool black jeans. Your one wants your belt, your ideas. And you go do something really fun with people you really love in a place you really enjoy. The work part of my life quote unquote work is like reading and teaching and talking about stuff on the internet, which is podcasting.
But what I got a flash of is I want to work on my fish tanks with my kids. Oh yeah, it's now ice skitter thing. You're supposed to go down to breakfast and see if you've got a family. I do.
I've always wanted kids and trying to time that correctly and with the right person. So I like tending to my fish tanks. I have kept fish tanks since I was a kid. I haven't had one for a few years now, but I'm always setting them up for other people.
It's interesting. I always go in real life. I go, I see people on my foot. I'm a fish tank there.
My interest based decision system just went, oh, really? You do it for other people? I'll go off. I got it.
Will you let me in? And then I'll set it up. And I love setting up fish tanks. It's like the who knows?
Kids are helping you. How many kids are there? I'm in your imagination. You're in 20 if you want.
Two. Two. For some reason I got obsessed with numbers for a while, but I was thinking like five or something. No, two.
You never know. It could happen. The important thing about this exercise is you don't get logical about it. You don't think what's manageable and what's probable.
You just see who's there. Yeah, two feels good. All right. Fair enough.
Two feels good. And yeah, there's so much life in a fish tank. The plants, there's the food, there's how the fish are interacting with one another who's chasing who's nibbling, who's hiding, who's dominant, who's being unruly. And I must have seen the Finding Nemo movie, especially the second one, like 12 times.
Fabulous. Like 12 times. It's crazy. As an adult.
It's not crazy. This is wonderful. I just love the personalities. I mean, any movie where Willem Dafoe, the voice of a fish, you're like, okay.
So we tend to the fish tanks, which is great, which is great pleasure. And then for me, it's, I've become here and sit down with you and hang out with these guys and my team and share what I know to be really cool, a truly useful practices. Fabulous. So you're very, very close to your idea right now.
And as you said, I don't know the mechanisms that get put in play. Certainly directed attention. You're now like a guided missile that knows where its target is, or at least what the target looks like. And we all make countless decisions every day.
And you can think of it as a lot of little whys branching out. And if you've got this in your mind really clearly, you're going to take the option that leads to it. That's what I tell people. It's logical, directed attention, except that in many cases I have to say a miracle occurs.
You know, my favorite cartoon is this physics equation with these two physicists. And they're all these symbols on both sides of the board in the middle and brackets as a miracle occurs. My dad's a theoretical physicist. But he will delight in that.
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They'll give you five free travel packs with your order plus a year supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, that's drinkagone.com slash-huberman. There was something that popped to mind. I mean, there are all these little things that also go into my perfect day that we don't have to go into every detail that I'm working out.
But I just want to maybe mention a point of contrast that served as one of the reasons why I did this practice in the first place was that in real life, I was waking up and sometimes still do wake up with this underlying tension, like something's not right. I don't feel good. I wasn't anxious. I wasn't like, but like something's not right.
And I went through years of gnawing and scratching at different things that I quickly discovered going out for a couple of drinks with people made me feel worse. I don't judge people who drink whatsoever. I don't like this. I just, but this unease, it's like a restlessness that lived inside of me for so long and still can surface as a signal that this is not the right life.
And at that point, at a laboratory, grants, republishing papers, all these things that I loved doing and that I loved the trajectory that I took to arrive there and the people that were in my life. I just knew I could just say something's not right. And I felt terribly guilty. The reason I'm telling this is I felt terribly guilty.
Like, I owned a home. I was in my mid 30s and it wasn't an expensive home. It's not like today's standards, but I was able to buy a home on my own. I was my dog.
I had, you know, people in my life, but it was like this. It was almost like a gear that was grinding. And that was the stimulus for exploring this perfect day. My life looks completely different now.
And it's far from, quote unquote, perfect, meaning there's still work to do in a lot of domains a lot. But I feel like the trajectory is right. Yeah. I believe the source of all my work, you know, I was getting my doctorate, Harvard.
I'd gotten my bachelor's there. I'd been there since I was 17. And halfway through my doctorate, I during that time, I'd gotten married, had a child. My second child was prenatally diagnosed with Down Syndrome.
And that was six months into the pregnancy almost. And I had like two weeks to make a decision and I'm politically very pro-choice. And I would again, never judge anyone who made the other decision, but I couldn't do it. I was already sort of bonded to him.
And I kept asking the question of myself, what makes a human life worth living? Because the doctors at the Harvard Medical Clinic and all my advisors told me, you have got to at the very least institutionalize this child, the second he's born. Institutionalize? Oh, yeah, for sure.
They said you're throwing your career away. The head of the obstetrics committee, there were five obstetricians. And the chief dude came in and there I was sitting on a bed in my little hospital napkin. And he said, this is like a cancerous tumor.
You've got to let us take it out. It will ruin your life. And I just looked at him and I had the weirdest experience. I looked at this very intimidating guy.
I'm there sort of young and naked and pregnant. And suddenly it was like I could see two faces on him. And one was this very stern, knowledgeable doctor. And the other one was a terrified child.
Terrified. And it was so striking that I started looking at him strangely. I'm sure he thought it was completely nuts. But I looked at him and I thought, you're afraid.
You're afraid of this baby. And I realized that's when I realized that a lot of people don't go to Harvard because they know they're smart. They go there because they're afraid they're stupid. And he was...
Probably true for a lot of higher education institutions. I thought he's afraid of the, in quotes, stupid little boy inside me because he's afraid of the stupid little boy inside him. He's terrified of being the person he's worked so hard not to be. He's afraid of being like my son.
And he thinks that should be thrown away. And that was the point of which I said, I will not make my decisions based on social pressure. I have to do something from a very, very deep place within. And so I kept that running.
He's home right now. You know, we're having a great time. Adam, right. Adam, my son Adam.
I only know his name through your books of course. I feel like I know him a little bit because I love the story about him peeing on the doctor. Yes, the very first thing I ever did in this life was the doctor pulled him out of my body and I saw this arc of urine go straight into the doctor's face. And I was like, so proud of my child.
I thought if only I thought to do that. I want to just, for lack of a better way to put it, double click on two things. First of all, I wonder if we're going to speculate no need to, but if the perfect day exercises really about accessing the subconscious. That's why I told that long story.
When I had to make that decision, it was the first time I had dropped everything conscious and logical from my mind and come from a place that was, I believe it's part of our neurological apparatus, but the cognitive structure is just a tiny fraction of what our whole nervous systems are able to detect and tell us. And for the first time I was making a decision from every cell in my body instead of just my neocortex. And I realized my life is not meant to go like his life. And the person in the next bed, their life isn't meant to be like mine.
But we all have this programmed into us somehow. And when we start to leave it, in my last book I called it leaving our integrity because to be an integrity just means to be one thing. It doesn't have any moral implications in the original, like Latin, it just means integer. One thing.
So if we were born knowing who we are, but at some point, usually not long after birth, we get socialized away from what, from expressing exactly what our own truth is telling us. We get socialized to behave in ways that please other people, very simple. And as you're describing it, I had a great life. I had a love.
I had a dog. Those are all socially recognized items that say your life is working, but they have nothing to do with your personal destiny. Right. And in my case, again, I loved, and I still love doing science.
I mean, my lab is certainly strong. I got it made sure people got placed in jobs and faculty positions, et cetera, still involved in some clinical trials. But, you know, one thing that pained to me about the work, I've just come clean about this. I said, thanks my throat.
Lock up a bit is I've been an animal lover since I was a kid. I do eat meat from sustainable sources, but you know, not all but a lot of the work that I did in my laboratory was on animals. And at some point, it was approximately halfway through my first position, I realized that I was like, I don't like this. And we could talk all day about animal research and on animal research.
I decided to work on humans instead because they can consent and they house themselves. But you know, so there were some pain points, but I think my unconscious was pulling at me. Yeah. Like, this isn't good.
This isn't good. And for me. And I do think that the conscious mind and the logical mind is you're referring to it. It's very tactical.
And part of the problem is it works so well, works in quotes to move us forward on metrics related to that. But I mean, there are very few people that I know who are truly aligned with their, I guess what you call, essential self. One who I'm fortunate to be good friends with, he just so happens to be famous for lack of a better word, who resonates with a lot of what we're discussing is the great Rick Rubin, the music producer who's produced all these different types of music. And one thing that's really interesting about Rick, I've spent a lot of time with Rick and communicate all the time.
And one thing that is very interesting about him is he has incredible powers of observation. He can really feel the energy of a musical artist or any of his produced other things too. He does great documentary. He's got his own great podcast.
But he doesn't get absorbed by it. And I wanted to talk to you about this because I, you know, I think for people that are very feeling, very sentient or really in touch with that, the ability to like feel music, to feel other people's emotions to really, that's a beautiful life to taste food. But there's a threshold beyond which we kind of lose ourselves in the experience of others and what's going on. Yes.
Rick can go right up to that line and really see it and enjoy it. But it doesn't absorb him in a way that he has a place that he returns to that's in him. And the reason I discovered this is I said, wait, you don't drink alcohol. I said, no, I said no drugs.
He said, no, doesn't judge it. But he doesn't do it. I said, did you ever, he said no. And I said, who comes up through music and never takes a sip of alcohol, goes to college and never took a sip of alcohol, tried any drug.
And again, you know, I don't judge. I've talked about psychedelics on this podcast. I talked about my own relationship to those, what I think are very interesting, clinical trials and that sort. I think there's tremendous potential there.
I agree. But what is it to be able to experience life in the richest way, but make sure that we don't get lost in feeling or in thought. It's like this ability to move back and forth seems to be the most, the best definition of like a great life, in my opinion, because we need to do things each day. I would say you don't even have to go back and forth.
You can do it all at once. You can feel, you can think and you can stay in the driver's seat and not be overwhelmed, either intellectually or emotionally. But I think it has a lot to do with you talking about Asian Eastern meditation practices. There's a little exercise I like to do with people where if they're struggling with a bad habit, I say, imagine the part of you that is always doing the bad thing, smoking 20 packs a day or whatever, imagine them as a wild thing in your left hand.
And then imagine the part of you that hates them and says, stop smoking in your right hand and look at them and begin to see that they're both well-meaning. They're both exhausted and you can wish them both well. So the wild child part is not thinking, it's just feeling. The controlling part is not feeling, it's just thinking.
And if I can get people, and I haven't put their hands out because I know it's going to activate both sides of their brains, and then I have them wish these people well, maybe well-made and happy. And they can feel compassion for both sides of themselves, then I ask them, so who are you? And who they've become is a compassionate witness, which is not thinking. And it's not feeling in the way it's not emotional.
The word emotion means movement disturbance. This part of one's being is not ever disturbed or moved, it's totally still and totally peaceful and completely compassionate. It's like the ultimate parent. Yes, it is.
And Dick Schwartz, who came up with the model of internal family systems theory, I don't know if you've had him on the show. Have not, but I'm learning more about internal family systems models. I'm not about this first in the context of visiting a trauma healing center. That's great.
And then people are now applying this to addiction as well. I'll get his name from you later. Yeah, Richard Schwartz. Anyway, I was talking to him and he said, we all have different parts.
There's a part of you that feels like a little kid and wants to curl up in bed. There's a part of you that wants to go, whatever your parts are. So he talks to people about these different parts. And then sometimes they say, oh, I've just come up against, there's someone here who's very still, who's very huge, who's very kind.
And he calls itself with a capital S and he says, after thousands of patients, they'll say, what part of you is that? And they say, oh, this isn't a part like the others. This is who I am. This is who I am.
And he believes it's just one unified self. And for me, if I don't find and lock into that self, I am immediately swept away by my emotions in my brain, just like in a gale force wins. So I have to be very not grounded, but centered and identified with this self before I can even leave the house. How do you go about doing that?
And one of the reasons I'm asking this is because I think everyone, including myself, would do well to be able to access this compassionate witness self, but also because so many people are on social media nowadays where you can almost feel yourself getting pulled down these trajectories, like the gravitational pull of a battle or a video or even something that's delightful. But then you find like two hours went by and you were over consumed and under created and sometimes food. It tastes delicious. But then you feel like that goes nowhere.
Yeah. You know, this sort of goes nowhere. So do you have a practice that you use to make sure that you're in that place? I do and it's called suffering.
It's very reliable. My best friend suffering. I have a deeply love relationship with suffering. If I, for example, I can barely look at Instagram because I will watch a monkey nursing a kitten and then I will be down that rabbit hole so far eight hours later.
But I will start to suffer. I will start to physically feel cramped. My eyes will start to hurt and water and I will start to feel what you were saying, the grinding of the gear that is wrong. The machine isn't, it's not in structural integrity.
It's like when your car starts making a funny sound and you're like, I should not ignore that. And it always feels like discomfort, tension, anxiety, anger, any of those things. And then the practice of my life is to notice those sensations at a finer and more granular level so that the moment I'm off true, I can stop and say, Oh, out integrity. Okay.
Now I'm into anxiety because a divided person is always anxious. So to get away from that from anxiety and back to true, I use the body, sit back straight in my spine, take a deep breath, do all the things that I'm sure you do when you meditate. And I sink into that part of myself that I was just trying to pull up for people with the two hands exercise. And I believe you could probably tell me the truth of this.
I believe that I've wired a pretty strong super high way in my brain that goes, oops, suffering, find self with the capital S and I've done it so many thousands of times that I think I have like a highly myelinated circuit that just goes there and then no matter what's happening, I can usually just find it, feel it and it's exquisite sensation. It's like coming home completely over and over again. And now when I do an ideal day, everything else is incidental. The key is I'm in that self.
So the state is what's key. Yes. And it is so it has so much fun in this world. And so you can walk around in that state.
Oh, yeah. You can. So to be sure I understand, so say I wake up in the morning and I'm just like not feeling right or something triggers me or I don't know, just like I'm off center. You take that sensation of suffering and you don't fear it.
You don't amplify it. You just pay attention to it. You pay attention to it. And here is the key thing.
This is in my new book. I kept this secret because it sounded so silly and I thought this would never go in the Ivy League. But there's something I call kissed KIST and it stands for kind internal self talk. So what do you call yourself when you think to yourself?
Andrew, Andy, what do you call yourself? You. Okay. So you'd be sitting there and you don't feel good.
You don't feel right. The first thing you do is allow yourself to register every sensation without pushing back, without restricting it. People talk to me about bringing down their anxiety and I say, how do you feel if I told you I was going to bring you down? That's not a nice thing to say.
If I told you I'm here to understand you and care about you better. So just allow yourself to feel all the suffering and then start saying kind things to the one who is suffering. Even if it's just tiny suffering, just go, how are you? How are you doing?
Not great. Okay. So there's some anxiety. Oh, your sinuses are blocked too.
Let's see what can we do for you. Let's get you a hot drink and like a call with a good friend or a book or something. And you just actively work as your own caregiver from the moment you are conscious in the morning. And what that does, it makes you so compassionate to other people because you're not fighting the suffering in yourself.
Yeah. People in pain are usually agitated and grumpy. So it's the inverse of that. Yeah.
Yeah. I love this. I mean, in some sense that the words like self parenting keep coming up in mind because a lot of this is about learning to parent ourselves from the inside. Yeah.
And I do think that most, you know, we hear about inner child stuff and I think inner child work is very interesting. I also think that as a biologist who spent the early part of my career on developmental biology, like the same neural stuff is repurposed. Yeah. And adulthood.
That's something that's kind of obvious, but we overlook. Right. I'm like, I've got some inner adults here who aren't very happy too. Right.
Right. You know, but the notion that like our attachments when we're young somehow that like those neural circuits are set aside, so then we can form more mature adult attachments. You know, it's like, no, it's crazy. We repurposed them.
Absolutely. So we're working in an adult landscape with child based algorithms. Yeah. And depending on how childhood went, you know, that either can be spectacular or so-so or complete disaster.
Usually it's a combination. That obstetrician at Harvard, I would bet my last dime that he was still working on the same circuits he used when he was five and they were pretty scary, you know? Like, so yeah, we all have multiple causes of suffering, but we also have, I wouldn't actually call it inner parenting because that basically implies that only parents give that to children. And I think it's just humaning.
If you were truly humane, if you are truly in a state of self with a capital S, there is nothing in you that wants to cause suffering for any other being. And there's nothing in you that doesn't want to help ease the suffering of the entire world. So again, now I'm into a kind of Asian modality of there's this Bodhisattva prayer that goes for as long as space and duers and as long as sentient beings exist. May I also abide that I might heal with my heart, the miseries of the world.
And that part of us is in everyone. And if we become those people, it won't just be parents being kind to children. It will be humans being kind to each other, the earth and all other beings. And we may actually make it into another century.
Yeah. It's looking a little sketchy right now. I mean, things are tense. It sounds like it starts with self love, compassion, like only from that place of compassionate witness, self with the capital S, excuse me, can we be at our best for others?
I believe it's actually the only part of us that's real. I talked a minute ago about people who are dying. They drop the pretense. They don't need the pretense of belonging to the material world or the material body anymore.
And that radiance begins to gather in their eyes. And it's not new. It's what they came in with. If you've looked into the eyes of a young child, a little baby, you see the same thing.
And it's only when people die that they put down everything else. Unless, as Eckhart told us, you die before you die and learn that there is no death. Because that self does not feel physical. It feels metaphysical.
Let's drill into this a little bit more. Because this is a high level, but at the same time, basic and yet abstract concept. And it's not often on this podcast that we talk about abstract concepts. We probably don't do it enough.
I like to talk about protocols, your sunlight on clear days. And I love that stuff too. But as probably people realize by now, I think a great life is bridging as many things, at least for me as possible, and seeing the overlap in the Venn diagrams. So it's the only part of us that's real, meaning the other parts are just conditioned.
I think you said... The other parts are impermanent. They will vanish. Everything, as Shakespeare says, everything will just disappear and leave not a wreck behind.
We are such stuff as dreams are made on. There is an experience that is common to individuals all over the world in different cultures at different times where they start to say they feel that they've awakened from a dream. Plato did it with his cave analogy. He said, imagine that we all live chained in a cave and there's a fire behind us and we see shadows on the wall and that's what we call reality.
And then someone gets out of the cave and goes outside and sees this three-dimensional world where everything's bright and mobile and goes back and says, the shadows on the wall are real. They're real shadows. But they're not the ultimate reality. You should come outside and play with us and everybody would say he was crazy.
And that's what academia says now. You're crazy. If you've ever had an experience where you felt like there was something realer than your physical self, you're crazy. Like read Plato.