52: Martha Beck on Enlightenment and Messages our Bodies Send

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Hello everybody. Welcome to the Pivot Podcast. I am in fact falling out of my chair, which is actually a bouncy yoga ball today, to have one of my personal heroes, as Martha Beck herself would call them, an author angel in my life. And that is Martha Beck, who is the author of several memoirs and self help books, some of which are mega bestsellers including Expecting Adam, Finding your Own, North Star, Steering by Starlight, Finding youg Way in a Wild New World. Martha also wrote a book about leaving the Mormon Church called Leaving the Saints, and her newest book is her first fiction book. It's called Diana An Allegory of Awakening and is the first installment of her Bewilderment Chronicles trilogy. You can also find her unique blend of wit and wisdom every month in O the Oprah Magazine where she's the resident life coach. And this is among many other thanks. Martha does a big coach training program and I just attended her event in Austin, Texas. So Martha, it is such an honor to have you here today. Welcome to the show.

Oh, the honor is all mine.

I've read all eight of your books, many of them twice and they've been a huge inspiration. I got a kick when Jen from your team scheduled this podcast. I have a field where I ask anything that you're particularly excited to talk about and she wrote her new book Diana comma Enlightenment, and I just got a kick out of that like. Okay, enlightenment. Let's start there.

Yeah. I am very big into the enlightenment thing these days.

How do you define enlightenment?

That's a very good question. It's something that I get out of.

The writers and the people who've inspired me the most. There's a certain energy around people like Eckhart Tolle or Byron, Katie and or Nisargadatta Maharaj or Ramana Maharshi, people who aren't as known in the western world. But there's an energy that is beyond suffering and completely without attachments to ego. And now I'm immediately becoming unable to express it because there's no language for it. But it's a letting go of ego and an identification of self with everything, with consciousness. So I think realizing what we are as consciousness beyond any physical reality, that's what I would. How I kind of sum it up. But that's so lame. I mean, the Buddha upon his enlightenment said the first words he said were this cannot be taught. So it's really difficult to.

Even put words on it for a podcast.

Right. Naturally. I know we started as big as one could even try and start concept wise.

Enlightenment. Give me a precis in two minutes, sum it up and take us all to enlightenment.

Yeah, exactly. And then can you just teach us how to all get there by the time we're done with this podcast?

I think we'll see you over there.

Yeah. Well, I like how one of the things that you say is actually that it's not a rock, but a river, that it's a flow that we can lean into, as you say, a current that flows through us when we allow it. And I think that's a beautiful way of describing this thing that cannot be described.

Yeah. And you can also create images, circumstances. Any sense impression that takes you toward it is helpful. And then it drops you off short of the actual understanding of what it is, because it is that in which everything happens, but it doesn't happen. I am again, you get stuck in paradoxical language immediately. And that's why I decided to write a novel, because what can't be done. For example, I could tell you about a piece of music that is emotionally moving. I could describe it all to you. Oh yeah, there's a, you know, there's a high desk hand and there's this beautiful bass note and. Big deal. But if you heard the music, you'd understand, like without any words at all. So fiction is just a way of making language more musical than expository. Does that make sense?

Absolutely. Yeah. One of the things. Well, I love how in Diana herself you use the phrase bewilderment and that the book is this exploration of getting wilder and wilder.

Yeah. So it's be. You can pronounce it be Wilder mentioned. That's the whole premise. And all my self help is based on this idea that there's a sort of underlying, almost biological self that knows what you want and what your life should be. And that tuning into that is the only way to get instructions for moving forward to a better, like, realization of who you're meant to be. So that's all my self help. And I've talked about it in terms of being your essential self or, you know, stargazer. I've used a lot of metaphors, and in this book it just happens to be wildness. Like, you drop all socialization and become who you would be if you'd been raised without any strictures at all. So that's be wilderment.

Bewilderment. I love it. And it's not always an easy thing to do. What you just described. And my friend and I, as soon as we read Steering by Starlight, and that was probably five or six years ago, have since we said this thing is really shackly. We're using your language of shackles on shackles off to kind of gauge a party, an event, a friendship, anything.

That's so awesome. Yeah. Making language. Because my belief is. And I've already said this, so pardon the repetition, everybody, but I always felt like I would be participating in a very important change in the way humans exist on the earth. And I didn't. I came to call it the transformation of consciousness. All of this time never reading New Age literature. I did not know there were other people talking like this. I was at Harvard trying to be myself, and weird stuff just kept happening to me. And then I'd make up language for it. And then later I found out that New Age people had been saying it all along, but I didn't know what the transformation of consciousness would look like. And then a couple of years, I started feeling obsessively compelled to read writing by people who were. Who had this experience called awakening. And that's when I thought, oh, that's what we're supposed to be doing. That's the transformation of consciousness right there. So, yes, this book is about how I think many of us may begin to experience the world. I'm just crazy enough to really believe it.

You said this book is the most fun you've had writing of all your books. Why do you think that Was the case.

Two reasons. The first one was that I had, I removed myself from publishing. I didn't have a book contract hanging over me. I didn't have another book to write. I just was going to do this for fun. And that's a huge privilege that, you know, a lot of people don't. Earlier in my career, I was much more worried about, you know, getting my kids in college or whatever. But the other reason, speaking of my kids, was that I began sending pages to my oldest daughter, who's 30 now, and she turned out to be the best editor I've ever had. And that is no insult to any of my other editors because they're all good. But she, I guess she just liked me because we started talking about it together and she just knocked my socks off. And to be playing that way with my own child was like magical. The first book is, you know, this woman has to go off into the woods and find out who she really is. The second book is about coming into community and adding other people into the equation. And it felt as though I was being shown a way to do everything that I'd always been alone in, that I was being shown how to do it with other people. And that just keeps progressing as I write the second book. So been really amazing. Wow. So much fun.

One of the things I admire most about you and that has come through your writing is the courage to blaze your own trail. At times where it seemed to people in your community insane. There was, you know, you were in the process of three degrees at Harvard. You found out you were pregnant with Adam, your son who has down syndrome. You're not going to keep him, are you? And you did. And it's the most beautiful story. And leaving the Mormon church and having your friends and family not speak to you, I mean, it's been incredible to me to read your books and see this courage. And I think you would even say we're not just born with that courage. There's a way. Like I'm curious to hear you sort of talk about how you found the courage to blaze your own trail even when it was excruciatingly difficult or your community was rejecting it in those moments.

Yeah, thank you. That's so kind of you.

I don't tolerate suffering all that well. And when I'm in enough pain, I will pretty much do anything to stop hurting. And I was in a lot of pain for a lot of years. Emotional pain, physical pain. And. And then I had a near death experience where I saw the light everyone talks about and it said, I'd been waiting to die. And it just said, no, no, you're supposed to feel this way while you're alive.

If something feels this way, do it, and if it doesn't feel this way, don't do it. And the feeling that came with that, the felt experience of that was so overwhelming. I had been in a lot of various kinds of pain for a very long time, and suddenly that was replaced by this unbelievable level of peace and joy and love. And that was it. Like, I just. I did not have the wherewithal to move away from that feeling ever again. And, yeah, it moved me away from a lot of other things, but I just didn't care. I couldn't handle not feeling that once I knew what it was. That's what it's all been about for me.

That's incredible. I mean, right? And there we go again. I mean, you did just put it into words beautifully. But I can imagine that that feeling was so visceral.

That there was something that changed in your body, probably even before your mind, that said, I'm not going to live the way I used to live anymore.

That's a really good point. Yeah. And I had fibromyalgia and a few other more sort of concrete but rarer disorders that weren't supposed to get better or go away. And my body reacted with incredible speed and intensity when I did something that was wrong for me. I mean, I didn't just hurt like a vague feeling in your. I was slammed to the floor by pain. You're not gonna go that way. We are gonna steer that crap out of you. I don't know who's saying that. It's random. It always feels like a wee.

So, yeah, I just. I don't tolerate pain well. And then I had a lot of pain. And between those two things, I thrashed around enough to get free.

It's so incredible. It was reading finding your own North Star. I was going through my own burnout experience. I had almost fainted at work. I was laying on the floor, couldn't even pick up the phone to cancel my meetings. And it was around the time I read finding your own North Star. And it was like, oh, my body will talk to me. I had no idea. My body will throw a temper tantrum if I don't listen to what the signals are like. This was news to me. I was 24 or 25 at the time, but it just opened up a whole new world.

You know, I'll go work with a corporate group and I'll say Okay, now everybody remember a time when you were not happy in your life and now just like scan your body and tell me what it's feeling. And there are people who are like, this is just too woo woo. I can't do that. It's the, it's the most empirical thing you can do. It is the most like not woo woo physical thing you can do to say, what do you feel physically in your body right now? And they're like, no, this is too, this is too weird. I can't do that.

Anybody can do that. And a worm can do that.

Good. What's woo woo about that? There's nothing woo woo about that. But the culture will have none of it.

Right. Even the concept of intuition or hearing messages as we've talked about, this is such a source of intelligence that we have. We have. And so it's so easy to ignore it. Or at least until you, until you have heard it. And then I think it's hard not to listen to it.

As you said, you've heard it and you've heard it strongly.

Yeah. And suffered enough for ignoring it.

Yeah. And it's not even saying, you know, my body has a temper tantrum when I go the wrong way. Yeah, you're right the opposite way. Because it's actually the mind that is having a temper tantrum that it doesn't get to do what it thinks is it wants to do. Like fit in with everyone, do what people want. Please, people, don't rock the boat. The body just says, oh, no, this is the truth. And you are not going to pretend it isn't the truth. The body is actually the most level headed and compassionate teacher. It just is. It's relentless and pitiless in showing you how to be happy.

I'm really glad that you said that because.

Yes, as you said it, it's true. There was a day I got vertigo for three days, couldn't stand upright. Lordy, the first day I was pissed. You know, you're right. My mind was throwing the temper tantrum. And then by day two or three, I was so grateful because this happened, I slowed way down, canceled everything, started drinking only green juice. You know, it sparked all these wonderful changes. And ever since, when a body thing goes haywire, I'm actually so grateful. Like, oh, I kind of say my body has me on a short leash. Like the second I start veering, things go, you know, signals happen.

And have you noticed it's getting stronger?

Yes, yes.

Like I actually don't go deep enough into it to get physical pain Very much at all anymore. But what happens is I get symptoms like anxiety and if or distractedness. And I'm very good at paying attention because I don't want to get to the level of physical pain anymore. I am done with physical pain that I can possibly avoid, but now it's more psychological where I'll be unable to focus, I'll be unable to concentrate or remember, and I just know immediately. Okay. There's something. I can actually even tell when the PH balance of my body goes from alkaline to acidic. Alkaline is in a state of rest and acidic is in a state of unrest. And I can taste the hormones in my mouth.

Wow.

Like, the moment I go into a fight or flight state, I taste this bitter adrenaline taste. And I'm like, nope, gotta change.

That's incredible.

I will turn fast now because I am done with suffering.

You recently created something called the Integrity Cleanse, which I think some of your.

I'm obsessed with my Integrity Cleanse?

Yes. Like, I think some of your books have explored huge, sweeping changes. And then the Integrity Cleanse is now taking this to a daily level of, like, everything in our life.

My goodness. Goes so deep. It has changed so much. I've been on it for, like, 18 months now. And the idea is never, ever, ever to do something that's out of your integrity. So you're constantly checking with it. And, you know, I have little techniques for checking because sometimes it's hard, but.

You just never do anything even slightly out of. Like, if you're. If your facial expression doesn't match your feelings, you're out of integrity. It's that. Wow.

Oh. I'm just telling you it. When they say the truth will set you free, it's because you. If you were to dig almost all the way through a mountain and not come out into the light, it wouldn't be that different. But when you actually get to total truth, oh, my goodness. It does not sound like an absolute, like, magic. Magic, magic, magic. It is so magical. And it's so. I don't even have words for the way my life has changed since I started doing this thing. It's amazing. I'm writing a book about it now.

Oh, is this going in the second part of the trilogy?

I'm writing a whole. I'm writing two books at the same time right now, along with my Oprah column.

Oh, my goodness. Lucky us. So what are you writing about? The Integrity Cleanse?

Yeah. One is the Integrity Cleanse because it's very. It's straight up self help. Again, which I never thought I'd do. I thought, I have mined that vein for all the gold that's in it. No, Integrity Cleanse goes way deeper.

That is so amazing. One of the stories you shared at the Wayfinder Gathering in Austin was saying no to go to Oprah. There was like an Oprah request for some in person event. I don't remember the exact details. Well, I'm just wondering. Something like that seems like it would really test the Integrity Cleanse that it would be so tempting to say yes to. And I'm curious what your thought process was of how you came to the decision around that, because that's a pretty challenging one, it would seem. At least it would be. It would be for me.

Yeah, I mean, it kind of was for me. But I had brought some of my friends. I had some friends from Africa that I didn't think I would get many chances to see. Then we ended up being like all over each other, going back and forth, just like so bonded. But.

They'D come from Africa. And then I gathered a bunch of other people that I thought were part of this transformation of consciousness. We were all sort of aware of it and I didn't really know what to call any of it. I didn't know the language. I just knew that I felt connected to these people in that way. So we called it the Purpose Project. And we had no particular agenda. We just. Our agenda was we move at dawn. We have no idea where we're going, but we move at dawn. So they'd all gathered and we were going to go to Montana to like, learn to make fire with sticks and things. And as part of our search for purpose and the Oprah show called and asked me to be on it. And I. I looked at my friends and I thought, no, I'm not. No, I'm not turning this. I'm not changing my plans for Oprah. And my partner Karen said, you know, you'll never be on the show again. I said, well, too bad. I mean, that's how strong my feeling is about this. It's the meaning of my life. It's the reason I'm here. And if I'm making it up, I don't really care.

I respectfully do not care. And I've done the Oprah thing. And even though it's wonderful and I was so grateful and I always will be. No, no, it didn't. It doesn't have that intrinsic joy that I have when I'm headed straight toward my purpose.

It sounds like in that moment, your body Reading was pretty clear. Do you have times where you're not clear, your gut instinct feels fuzzy to you or is it your skill now, like, pretty honed around this?

It's pretty honed. I mean, the feeling that I get that is a sure sign that I'm going the wrong direction is anxiety, right? So Oprah calls or the show calls and I'm like, I start to get anxious immediately. What should I do? That feeling means not the right direction. And when you go the right direction, it's just clear, clear, clear, clear. And as long as you keep heading in the wrong direction, it gets muddier and more painful. And as soon as you turn in the direction that's right for you, it starts to get clear.

And yeah, as you get more and more detailed about it with the integrity cleanse, I mean, you think life is as full of magic as it can be and then stuff starts to happen that is just out of the realm of possibility. It's so amazing.

Have you had a moment like that even in recent weeks or since the book came out?

If not many moments?

Yeah, yeah, I've had many. I've had many.

A lot of it now has to do with the gathering of people. I always felt like I was part of this team, but I was mostly working alone. And then things like my daughter turning out to be the best editor I've ever had, that felt like a little miracle. And then the integrity cleanse. People. The people.

And the love, the incredible love that connects me to people who are not biological family and we're not, you know, getting married. And none of the social categories fit at all. Like there's no reason my, if I have a BFF, I have a lot of BFFs, but if I have one BFF that I would go to, it's my friend Boyd Vardy in Africa and he's like a 30 year old hard drinking African park ranger. And I'm a 53 year old American former Mormon housewife writer. And, and we are like besties and we just keep asking each other how is it that we are best friends.

But other things, like I'm not going to name any names because I don't want to name drop. But my favorite writers in the world, like people I worship, have just in the past little while become like the friends I call when I need to go to the dentist. Like that level of friendship. And I look at the books on my shelves and the people, because I'm very good about checking books that clutter my house because everything's available online. Anyway, and clutter is not in integrity for me. So I don't have many actual physical books, but I keep these precious few that I just read over and over because they're just these fonts of wisdom and inspiration. And I look at those books that I've had on my nightstand for, like, years and years and years, and the authors of those books are my best friends in real life.

How did that even happen?

That's incredible. Yeah, that's incredible.

It's mind blowing. And the love is so strong. There's none of that, oh, here's my celebrity friend. It's like, oh, my God, we're together again. What have you been doing for the last 53 years? Fill me in, Come on. Let me know everything I've got to hear. And the fact that it's mutual and that it's nuts. It's so.

Yeah, so often we talk about flow as. As far as work being in flow and. But what you're describing, I've felt recently, even doing this podcast is like a people flow, that when you're really following your destiny, the people are like, are you serious? I get to talk to this person right now, you know, or be friends or here in New York. I mean, it's kind of mind blowing just to look at the people flow of who comes in.

That's kind of what's up for me is that is incredible, improbable, like long distance connections with people on the other side of the world that are suddenly like, best, best.

There's not even a word for it. It's. Kinship is too shallow a word. It is unity. It's like, oh, my God, I found another piece of my own soul. It's, it's, it's. I was going to say insane, because the culture has no space for it, but I, you know, out beyond, out beyond concepts of right doing and wrongdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there is what Roomy says. And I feel like I'm out beyond concepts where it is pure love in action. And it doesn't make sense to my logical mind, but it's real.

Blowing me away.

I love how you describe in Diana herself, you say a surge of destiny so strong it made you believe in miracles.

You know, when I wrote that I hadn't experienced some of the miracles I've experienced since, and now it sounds even truer. That's really. I didn't realize that had happened.

And just this idea that it kind of even the word miracle. So speaking of just the difficulty in putting words the word miracle makes it sound like it's going to be a rare or highly coveted or you can only just get so lucky once or twice in your life. But what you're describing is different. You're describing, like, the field is out there and people are there. Like, maybe we may all be in the same field, which I think you would say, but everyone's also got their own field of their destiny, that there's lots of miracles to be had there. Actually.

Yeah, I think of it as fractals. A fractal is a shape that repeats itself over and over and over with small changes. So, like, every cloud is different, every snowflake is different, every leaf is different. But they're also all similar. They have similar patterns. And if you like, I like to do landscape painting. And you see that a leaf is the same shape as the clump of leaves, and the twig is the same shape as the branch, which is the same shape as the trunk. But they're all at different scales. So it's like every individual is a fractal form of this awakening consciousness. And every group of two is another fractal form. And every group of three. Three is another factual form. Then if you got a separate group of three that's similar but different, and it's like. And all together, they make a world. And yeah, you're right, the people are exquisite and even talk about it, I get emotional.

What were we talking about?

Well, you brought up fractals, which makes me think of. There was one time you did a call on and you mentioned the book Chaos by James Gleck. I don't know if I'm saying his last name right, but this book, Chaos, I have it now on my shelf. I haven't read it yet, but it was from your recommendation. Because I'm very fascinated by the idea of chaos. And something you've once said too, is if humans, if the only constant we have is change, if that's the only given change and birth and death, why haven't we adapted to be more comfortable with it? So I would love to just hear you riff on this idea of chaos, but also why haven't we adapted to change? But why does it cause so much anxiety for us? You would think we would be better at it by now.

Yeah, you'd think we would. And instead we're getting worse, the suffering is getting worse because we're supposed to break with it. So I would take your first point first. The chaos, we think of it as being this total randomness, like static, but in Fact, the mathematics of chaos show that the world arranges itself. Matter arranges itself in these fractal patterns. And that's what the math of chaos theory shows. And I remember reading that book and then going outside and it was, you know, it was fairly challenging for me at the time, but I sat with it until I really got the mathematical parts of it. And then I went outside and I remember looking at everything and thinking, I know why you're shaped that way. I know why the trees look kind of like clouds and the clouds look kind of like trees. And I know why we are bilaterally symmetrical. Like all this stuff, it was this beauty. There's a beauty in math that can't be really captured by anything else. So randomness or chaos is the way nature forms patterns and objects. It's not just static noise. It is the beauty of nature. Right? So that's what real chaos is. And we fear it because we think it's meaningless, but in fact, it's the very essence of meaning. So there's that. And then as far as the follow up, which is a little bit different, what was it that you asked me about chaos? And then one other thing.

Oh, about a change. Change. Because I think sometimes it feels chaotic.

To us, the way life formed on this planet. I believe. I think the evidence is pretty overwhelming that we evolved from organisms that don't think like we do. The interesting thing is that most people think that consciousness arose. Our type of consciousness arose out of matter. So you get an animal and, and it's evolving away, and at some point it creates this kind of intelligence. But the physics, Our Physics since 1927 have been based on the reality that consciousness is not created by matter. Matter is created by consciousness. Everything is just energy until consciousness observes it and at that point becomes solid, it becomes matter. And nobody I've asked physicists, you know, where is consciousness? In the equations of quantum mechanics, we know that consciousness is causing energy to become matter. Where is it in the math? And they've just said to me, well, at a certain point, it's not math, it's just physics. You have to look at what's actually happening. And we know it's true. We just don't know what to make of it. So what I make of it is that consciousness inhabits matter, that consciousness used evolution to create animals that could begin to awaken as consciousness in matter. And I see that as the big experiment of this planet. And I also think that there's been a continuous push toward awakening in an animal. That, number one, is Programmed biological to fear its own death more than anything else. And number two has the abstract thought capacity to know it is going to die, which creates a being who is so caught in fear that we can no longer tolerate living and preparing to die without transcending the merely physical level of consciousness. So that it's a way that consciousness is waking itself up in the physical by creating this animal that is tortured by its own death. And that's the impetus to wake up. But not many people have ever woken up to become fully conscious in a body. And now it's supposed to happen on a much larger scale. This is my. There. You just have my theory of the cosmos.

Yes. Well, it's amazing how you've articulated all that. It reminds me of dark matter and dark energy. We have no clue what it is, and yet it's 95% of the universe, the cosmos. But it's affecting us. It's there. We know it's having an impact. We just don't know what it is. And that sounds like how you've described consciousness in a sense, as well and as above. So below, I'm with you. We're all. Everything is a fractal of everything else. Even. Even. I read once that our earlobe is shaped like a newborn baby. Like a fetus. Yeah. I mean, this stuff is wild. It's wild, which is also your term for it.

It is incredibly wild. Wild is the right word for this.

Well, I love your perspective, too, that suffering is a sure sign that you're about to be woken up again. That this is like building a muscle. And it's not to say we'll never suffer again and again. To come full circle. We're not just going to reach enlightenment and check a box, but rather when we are suffering, as you've put it, when you even feel anxiety, it's this signal. Okay. Something's about to wake up again.

Yeah. If you allow it. There's a technique to allowing it. And the technique is called surrender. And you surrender not to suffering, but to whatever is trying to get you to wake up with suffering. You know, and there's a kind of you have to relax into it. And that's why I wrote the book. It's called an allegory. The subtitle is an allegory of awakening. Because the whole book is meant to help people relax into that experience.

I love the concept of surrender. And the more that I have surrendered, the more magic I experience and in my life too, in serendipity. And one thing I've grappled with is when I try and explain it or talk about it. Some people perceive it as too passive. What about. And I kind of got really tired of setting goals and making things happen. But I don't have a great answer for saying, oh, life still unfolds and pretty quickly and in pretty amazing ways through surrender. But. So I'm curious to hear your perspective on the balance between surrender and any kind of, like, visioning or creating in your mind first versus like, just receiving.

It's always active and creative. There's no passivity at all in it. It's more like the best. The best metaphor I can come up with is. And I use this often when people say, you know, they don't have the energy to do something. And I say, when you first fell in love, if you consummated the relationship, how did you force yourself to keep kissing?

You surrender the way you surrender to that kind of lovemaking. And it's used often, even in Catholic mystical literature with all the celibacy they had there. It's described the relationship with God. And reality is described, described as the relationship of lovemaking. And there's a surrender that happens there where you can't force something to happen, but you can allow it to happen. And as you do, it is very active and it is very. It is not in any way boring. Right. There's no. Just like, sitting there. It is rapture. And you surrender to rapture. And sometimes things are hurting and you surrender to pain, but you surrender to the force that wants to heal you. You stop fighting to believe it isn't happening, and you just let go. And people used to tell me that, and I'd be like, I don't know how, but practice makes perfect. You know, you can learn how.

It's separate, but somewhat related. I love, too, the way you describe talent, that talent is not being born with a sk, but almost a maddening desire for skill. And that, again, speaks. This maddening desire is like rapture that you describe in Diana herself. The moment she picks up the bow. You say a shock runs through her, explodes in her body like a bomb.

Yep. Yeah, that's happened to me a lot in my life. I get these obsessive desires to learn something, and it's just. And I never know what it's going to be, but when it hits me, it is irresistible.

Have you had one of those recently?

I mean, it happens with drawing and painting periodically where my partner becomes a painting widow and I see something I want to be able to do with art, with visual art. I Can just go like, wait for her to go to sleep, get up, sneak into the other room and paint for like six, eight hours every night. I've done it with playing the piano, I've done it with tracking animals, I've done it with computer programming. I mean, it's kind of this overwhelming force that just blasts through me periodically. And it's been that way since I was a baby.

Wow, it's amazing to feed that curiosity, not knowing exactly where it was lead. Like I. I'll get hit by a wave to understand everything about astrology and it'll have no relation to my actual. Well, it won't seem to, but things like that, that seem obscure. And it's an interesting leap of faith there as well. Although it is that rapturous desire. So it's almost like regardless of where it's going to lead, it's so enjoyable. But I find that interesting when those waves hit and they seem potentially unrelated but later have some kind of connection.

I'm still waiting to find out. Some of them. I mean, like my obsession with sociology, I think is directly connected to the transformation of consciousness. But when I was in graduate school, I had a seven month old baby. I was sleeping like two hours a night, I was completely exhausted and I would do all this very abstract reading for my doctoral programs and then stay up the entire night reading more. Wow. And they were like, oh, you're gonna make a great sociology professor. And I just look at him blankly and go, no, I'm not. Like, I had no intention of being a professor. And there is nothing else you can do with a PhD in sociology, but I just had to learn it. I love that. It's like, it's so, so fun when that happens. And since my integrity cleanse, it's gone completely off the scale.

What a fascinating connection that the integrity cleanse is happening in tandem with this thing going off the scale.

The Curiosity piece, it's not just in tandem, it is causal.

And everything good that's ever happened to me has come from this incredible push to do what makes me happy.

Sorry, I keep losing the thread.

Well, it frees up the integrity cleanse. You're 18 months in. I can only imagine how much. It's like freeing up space on a hard drive that got too full. But like how many little crevices it has freed up little and big to create so much space.

Yeah, yeah, I'm a little. I don't know if you can tell. Obviously I've been on this call really distracted because I actually, I've Started experiencing. Might as well talk about it. This physical heat that seems to be expanding in my chest, and it literally feels like I'm physically melting. Like, I've been wondering if this is how caterpillars feel when they melt, become butterflies. I would love to think that they did, because it's this unbelievably exquisite physical sensation and it's coming from my heart area, but I can, like, push it into different areas of my body, and it's so strong that it distracts me when I'm talking. I can't, like, follow conversations because this. I don't know what it is. It's just one of those weird things that starts to happen, but it feels.

So. I can't even describe how blissful it is. This is a weird thing to be talking about. But see, part of my integrity cleanse. If I'm distracted, I have to just tell you. And it doesn't matter if we're recording or anything. I have to tell you what I'm really thinking.

I love it. I'm so grateful. I'm so grateful that you to share something like that. And for you. Has it been happening a long time? Like, is it continuous? I'm just so curious how it's been showing up.

This is like, two weeks ago it started and I literally. I can push heat through my hands and warm things up with it. I mean, it's clearly got to do with qi, which is the, you know, the Chinese word for energy. And they can manipulate it, but I've never studied that stuff. I've never. I tried knocking things over with it from a distance. Like, I put up. They recommend online that you put up a piece of paper and just shoot this energy through your hand at it. See if you can move the paper. And I can. It's very weird.

Wow.

Just a little bit. But I can move it without touching it.

Fascinating.

I know. And a Chinese person would go, yeah, that's Qi, big deal. And I'm like, no, it's totally magnetic.

Oh, my gosh. And what do you think? Surge of cheese? Either where is it coming from or what's the purpose of it?

I don't know, but I've read about it in David Hawkins books. He was a psychologist who had an awakening experience and then he just went off to the woods, which is sort of what you do, I guess. Everybody who was awakened went off and he came back and never told anyone about it. And he got so successful as a psychologist or a psychiatrist that they had to put an extra wing on the. On the hospital where he was treating people, because they would just come and sit with him and they'd go away and they'd be fine. Like, like extremely mentally ill people would come, he'd sit with them for an hour, they'd leave, they'd be fine. And he describes this waves of heat coming up the spine and into the head. Mine feels like it's broadcasting from the heart up and down. But it's so physical and it's so preoccupying.

And I don't know, it's like getting a really, really wonderful massage all the time. You know how you just went, somebody starts rubbing your back, you're just like, you just don't want to focus on anything else.

How interesting.

That's what it's like. And I keep waiting for it to like go away and it keeps getting stronger. So that's happening. And this is how my whole life, weird stuff happens to me. And then I go to science looking for explanations. I don't see it theoretically and then go looking for it. I have to go, I have to go through the science to find out what is happening to me.

I know so much for you, so much of your life is the thing is happening and then it unfolds and is revealed. And I'll be so curious how this continues to unfold. And I'm sure in some way it is related to community or there's something about.

Your energy or how you're showing up or how you can hold space in the world and for others that perhaps this heat, this mode is going to help facilitate in some way.

I don't know. I think what I see around me and my friends, my children, everyone is a very rapid acceleration in changes that are mysterious and baffling, but clearly connected. It's like reading the best mystery story ever written.

We really are full circle to bewilderment and that it's wilder and wilder. And I love the Robert Frost quote. He says, I'm not a teacher, but an awakener. And I just love hearing about your process of this awakening as a verb, an ongoing adverb, not a one time experience.

Well, thank you very much. And I'm sorry, I have felt very like unable to be very coherent during this interview, but I feel like you completely get it.

So you've been wonderful. And me too. I'm like, how does one even begin to ask questions and try and sum up the years that I've been reading your work? And so similarly, I'll give my integrity cleanse, which is it feels fumbly. And awkward on my part just because of the scope of how much your work has meant so truly. Thank you for being here and doing this and being honest and living by example of what's going on for you in the moment. I really appreciate that and I'm so, so grateful for you and your work. And I cannot wait for the next two books. I'm eagerly awaiting them. Is there anything that you want to say or anywhere you would like people to go online as they're done listening to this call?

Just if they want the book, the only place it's available right now is Amazon.com so go there and like join the community of people who talk about this on Facebook and use those magical technologies to connect. Because it is the time of gathering.

Yes. And it is so much fun. Thank you again for creating the space Martha. And when can we do you know yet when the pub date will be for either of the next two books?

I'm trying to get them both done by the next book. Summer Solstice I started the day of the Summer Solstice. I said I'm going to do a Solstice to Solstice marathon where I'm going to try to write two completely different types of books in one year. So it should be shortly after that.

Amazing. Well, thank you again. Thank you so much for being here and we will look forward to reading the next ones whenever they're ready.

Thanks so much.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot Podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to, and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotlist get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter ennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.