Martha Beck: What Happens When Home Isn’t Safe?

24:01I remember one day I was sitting and I was the sort of witness, what I now call the compassionate witness, this sort of level-headed, peaceful being that is not emotional and not intellectual, but something other. I've had a sense of becoming that and watching myself as if I were a tiny animal in a round cage that just was running, running, running, running in terror for its life. But I was not the animal only. I was the watcher. And I thought, oh, the watcher isn't terrified. The watcher is not in pain. The watcher is quiet and still. It was home, Matt. It was home. I found home just for a few seconds at first, right?

24:53But then, of course, that's where I set out to go. And I went there again and again and again until my brain, I believe, started rewiring itself to go there instead of going into panic and hypervigilance.

25:07Martha Beck:That's so brilliant. I am someone who would describe themselves as not really able to meditate, right? I'm that person that you started out as, you know, not as extreme as that, but still fidgety, you know, can't bear to be alone in my own thoughts in that way. You know, and I'm sure a lot of people are like that. So if you're quite a restless spirit what would you would you say that it's how would you say that you kind of get to the point that you got to and and I guess the follow-up question is you know what why should we like is it worth doing is it worth persevering yeah the first thing I would do is to make things soft so because I was in pain I gradually created an environment of physical objects that helped me not be in pain, which meant like a good bed, soft blankets, soft pillows.

26:06As I said, I had three children and that there's a deep emotional softness that comes from that connection. And their skin is so beautifully soft. Babies were very healing to me, my babies. And if I were to do this again, I would, and what I do with clients as I coach them is create softness in your physical environment and then start to create softness in your self-talk. So if you find yourself thinking cruel, sharp, negative thoughts about yourself to yourself, you are locked in with your worst enemy. So it can happen. Like, you know, I think, oh, I'm such a loser. And then if I catch it, I say, all right, sorry about that.

26:52There's part of me that thinks I'm a loser, but none of us is a loser in the end. Like point me to the baby in the nursery who's a born loser. Everybody's perfect. Just softening the way you talk to yourself and the way in which you go through the physical day. And then within that container of softness and sanctuary, take five minutes and say, terrified self, I know you're not going to like this, but I'm going to sit still because I want you to be able to rest. And for me, being able to rest was the key to healing my body, ultimately healing my psychological problems, and going more and more deeply into the sense of home, which I think you celebrate on the podcast.

27:42But when it comes, there was this moment when I was meditating in the woods in California, because I moved to the woods at a certain point. I was in a house almost completely glass, where I just was in a forest all day. and I remember sitting there and I'd been meditating for hours I would put bird seed on myself and sit there immobile and then the birds would land on me and the chipmunks and the foxes would come to check me out and I would just sit there absolutely still they knew I was alive but they learned I wouldn't move so they just came and one day I was sitting there and I was just in love with these little animals and with the forest itself and then it was like I had been drilling down in some kind of bedrock inside me that I thought was eternal, like it went forever.

28:30And something punched through. It was almost audible. Boom. And from that perforation emerged a sense of sweetness, this delicious, incredible blend of love and connection and peace and the celebration of the beauty of the planet and of being human. And it reminded me of sacred texts connecting a state of spiritual centeredness to water. I think in the New Testament, it's called a well of living water. It felt like water to me. And it was so quenching and so cooling. And yeah, I would say, I know a lot of people who have done many substances anti-anxiety stuff, psychedelic stuff, heroin, all kinds of drugs.

29:26I haven't taken all those drugs, but I suspect they're trying to feel the way that feels. So yeah, it's worth it.

29:37Martha Beck:That's how amazing. Is that something that you've felt numerous times or is that kind of a one occasion thing? No, no, you can go back. It's all about wiring your brain to go there. Your brain is capable of all these emotional states. It's a physiological instrument, but we're constantly doing our own brain surgery because any thought we think, especially if we think it with strong emotion, will create literal wiring that enables us to think that thought, again, more easily and with more of a sense of conviction, of belief. So if you say I'm a loser a thousand times a day, that's a very strong connection and very believable.

30:19But if you return to the place where you are infinite and unspeakably peaceful over and over and over again, that's the nerve path that gets myelinated. It's wrapped in this fatty substance called myelin, which is like the way we put rubber or plastic on an electric cord. and the more myelination you have the easier it is to go back okay i mean what i picked up on as

30:48Martha Beck:well based on what you said is is quite a lot of this is environmental because you've talked about connecting with nature being outside being outside when you're a child was your happy place and it sounds like just the act of being in the soil lying down you know touching the earth is a massive thing. And then you also said, you know, making the place where you meditate or rest as comfortable as possible using soft materials. Is there anything else environmentally that you think about that sort of helps you on a daily or weekly basis just to kind of enter that state or just generally makes your life better within or outside the home?

31:28I'll just always, always, always be on a search for beauty. Felt beauty, beautiful music, but for me, visual beauty is very powerful. So it's not just the softness of the textures, but I would also put physical objects that make you think it's its own excuse for being. That's why I love stained glass windows. I see them and I go, and that right there, this sort of gasp of admiration, that if you can bring everything you can into your environment that makes you feel like that, you start to weed out the things that are less beautiful. And so it's this constant, I think life is this constant slow evolution of my physical space where it keeps getting more beautiful because I find objects that are meaningful to me, visually emotionally um they just ring the chimes inside me and as you start to put those all around you that becomes your inner life okay and with those things is it because they're beautiful

32:33Martha Beck:or is it also because they tell you a story about someone you know or a place that you've been what do you think absolutely i was very influenced by a book called care of the soul by thomas moore when I was finishing graduate school. He was a monk, not the old-timey Thomas More monk, but a more recent one. And he lived for 20 years with like a cup and a spoon, and that was it. You know, he was in his little monk cell. But then he left the monkhood and became a psychiatrist. And when he went to furnish his first apartment, because he was a contemplative, he noticed that every time he made a choice, he had to choose one bar of soap out of many bars of soap.

33:17He noticed that the choice reflected something inside him, why he chose a blue soap instead of a yellow one, for example. And he noticed that everything he put in that space was a kind of three-dimensional self-portrait. And he started going into his clients' homes to read their inner lives. And I thought about my childhood and how, you know, everybody was in inner chaos and despair and depression and madness and how that was reflected in our home, how everything changed. I really think you can't change your inner life without changing your living space and vice versa. If you make a change in your living space, something changes in here and they're always reflecting each other.

34:03Martha Beck:Yeah. I mean, that's obviously in the context of this podcast, that's a fantastic statement. And I really agree with it. Out of interest then, in your childhood home, how did that sort of disorder manifest itself? What did it look like? What was going on? You know what? It's always a chicken and egg process. One thing creates the other. So living there was not a fun experience, but the despair that everyone seemed to be feeling was reflected back in an inability to create order. It was a profoundly disordered place. It wasn't just cluttered. There was something despairing about it. And I think both my parents were in a kind of existential despair.

34:52Both of them had given their lives to this faith, which I think literally drove my father mad and sent my mother into a lifelong depression. so they reflected that in the way they arranged the space and then the space affected everyone else so that we felt more that way it was just yeah everything's cyclical but the good news is the moment you start to make a change in a direction that improves things that initiates a cyclical

35:21Martha Beck:change in a different direction so can you give us an insight into your current home that you live in now then and how from from a sort of orderliness perspective what's that like? It's so funny because I always lived in very new houses that were immaculately clean and then last year my family and I moved to a place in upstate New York which is about 10 acres of forest and like garden beds. It's a beautiful property, but the house on it was quite old. And when we moved in and I had to be around like surfaces that weren't absolutely clean, the woman who sold it to us was a house flipper. So she bought it, painted everything white without sweeping the floor and then sold it again.

36:12At one point, Matt, she painted over a dead mouse. Like this was not an orderly experience for us. I went into an absolute depression. I was like, this is so pathetic. I write self-help and I am just descending into madness again because it reminded me I had nightmares about it. I was just, you know, more panic, the whole thing. But it's been profoundly beneficial because as we've started to make the home more beautiful, I've watched it transform. and the best thing, the best, best, best, best thing. I have my own studio for the first time in a life of painting and drawing. And it used to be a chapel.

36:52We have an actual chapel with a stained glass window, which is this huge, airy space. The previous owner had, for some reason, built another room inside that room. It was bizarre. I smashed it down with a sledgehammer and that was very therapeutic. got myself a 40 pound sledgehammer named it Dr. Love Taps and just smashed that thing and and now it's like I walk in there as this huge bright airy space with a stained glass window where I go to paint and it it feels as though the world has given me this incredible gift because that's what I was creating inside it's a perfect reflection of that place inside myself where that quenching sensation occurs.

37:40And it's just, I didn't really know that that's what I was moving into. I had to create it when I got here. But the more I discover about this house, you know, we cleared away all this, you know, brambles and things. And underneath it are these sacred sites and statues of the Buddha and Guan Yin. It's the place turned out to be a bonanza for my soul. But I also had to learn that you can clean up, I can clean up a mess and be okay.

38:16Martha Beck:So what's it like for you now, if things are a bit disordered or a bit chaotic in your home environment, what's that like for you? Oh, my gosh. I mean, we had one of the worst winters in upstate New York history, which is saying something. And we had something called an ice dam where these huge icicles formed all around the house. And it was so cold, they didn't melt for weeks, but the house is warm. So the icicles started melting into the walls, into the electrical system, into the roofing, and the whole house started to rain inside. And we weren't allowed to mess with it because of the electrical stuff, right?

38:54It was ridiculous. And I was so angry. I was like, Like, what did I? I'm like in my 60s and this is where I end up. And then I realized that the parts of the house that were melting were the parts I hated. And I was like, oh, my God, I am somehow paranormally, metaphysically melting the house, the part of the house I don't like. This is astonishing. And because of that, we get some insurance to redo those very spaces. And as we rebuild them and just fill them with beauty and with, it actually is better than some sterile new house. It is integrated with the landscape. It's filled with peace, harmony, beauty, freedom, belonging.

39:47Yeah.

39:48Martha Beck:It's very cinematic the way you've described that, the melting away of the bits that you didn't like. That's serious manifestation, isn't it? It was like a horror movie. And it exactly mirrored what was in my head. I'm telling you, you can't change your insides without changing your house. So interesting. So you've talked about being a painter and an artist. You talk in your book about the left and the right side of the brain. And that kind of the way they toggle, right? So could you just tell us about that? So I, a few years ago, did a seminar on creativity and researched all the neuroscience of what makes people creative.

40:25then after the pandemic people's anxiety worldwide skyrocketed it went up by a full 25 percent during one year and when the pandemic sort of eased off the anxiety did not it's continued to rise and they call it the inner pandemic so I wanted to figure this out and I started reading the neuroscience of anxiety and about halfway through my reading I realized that the same brain structures that I had been reading about being involved in creativity, but they were on the right, in the right half of the brain, those structures in the left side of the brain were actually creating and sustaining anxiety.

41:07So we have this very primitive little part of the brain named the amygdala. And there are actually two, one on the right, one on the left. The whole brain is basically mirror structures, but they're not exact mirrors. For example, the right hemisphere of the brain is a different color than the left hemisphere because the left hemisphere is doing analytical thinking, and it creates a lot of gray matter. On the right side, you get these long neuron connections associated with creativity, and because they take so much myelin to sustain, it makes that side of the brain paler. It's more white than gray.

41:40Anyway, the amygdala is in there, and its only job, it's very ancient, it's in all animals, is to keep you safe by being alarmed by anything unusual. So you get this jolt when you see something unusual. Now, on the left hemisphere of the brain, this fear signal gets picked up by the neocortex, which is the part that talks. And even though both sides of the brain are involved in everything, if you lose the left hemisphere of your brain to a stroke, you will not be able to talk. And if you have a stroke on the right side, you will still be able to talk. So it's fair to say that it's divided that way.

42:17So if the amygdala is alarmed, oh no, it sends a fear impulse to the neocortex. The neocortex's job is to tell stories to string together meaning for us. And it believes that the fear coming from the amygdala is real, even if there's nothing frightening around us. So we can be lying in bed, perfectly safe and warm, and we think about taxes or something, and there's a jolt of fear. And instead of looking around and saying, well, there is nothing in the room that's going to hurt me right now. I might as well go to sleep. Instead, we pick that up as a story. Oh my God, taxes. What am I going to do?

42:53Like, what was this going to do to my fortunes? And how, what if I get audited? And different stories come back. That feeds back, that storytelling feeds back to the amygdala the way an amplifier can feed sound back into a microphone and create something called an auditory screech. So the amygdala says, be afraid. The neocortex says, oh, there are many reasons to be afraid. Then the amygdala goes, oh my gosh, it reads the story as reality. And it says, oh, be very afraid. Then it sends that back to the brain, feedback screech. That's what it's called. and you get panic and you get long-term anxiety.

43:35Now, on the other side of the brain, the amygdala goes, ah, something unusual. But instead of wanting to run from it, it wants to find out about it because there are two evolutionary advantages when you see something strange. One is to look out and be very careful. The other one is to figure out what's going on. So if you've ever passed an accident and found yourself wanting to look like rubbernecking, that's a very strong evolutionary drive because understanding that is important so curiosity is what happens on the right side of the brain predominantly and then it goes to the neocortex on the right side of the brain which is not verbal but it's very present and it likes to observe i think it's the part of my brain that i that was watching the panicky self and it says oh what are the connections i can make with this what is the meaning i can make about what does this mean so it's calmer than the left side one of my friends uh was a neuroanatomist who had a massive left hemisphere stroke and she said without the left hemisphere there was nothing but beauty peace awe presence um and that feeds back to the amygdala as oh keep going forward and that pushes us into new territory that ultimately makes us very creative What I realized reading the literature was that we know from lots of research that anxiety shuts down creativity.

45:03If you make someone even slightly anxious, they cannot solve creativity-based problems. But there was no research to address the idea that maybe creativity can shut down anxiety. I think anxiety wins and we stop doing research. So I started doing my own research. I was doing Zoom calls with sometimes thousands of people during the pandemic. And I would have everybody put in the chat a number reflecting their level of anxiety, one to 10. And it would be 10, nine, 10, eight, very high numbers. Then we would do some exercises to help shift the locus of thought to the right side of the brain. Very simple things like vividly remember three things you love to taste.

45:49and then vividly remember three things you love to hear and then go through each of your senses and try to imagine all of them present at once. There's no neurological energy left for the anxiety spiral in the left hemisphere. And then I'd say, okay, so now everybody rate your level of anxiety.

46:09Martha Beck:Zero, zero, zero, zero, zero. So it was not a formal bit of research, but I was trained as a sociologist and I like big numbers and I was getting them this incredible response when people went to the creative part of the brain that their anxiety disappeared. And that's why I wrote the book. I thought that was worth knowing. It's absolutely fantastic. And you talk about doing something called the right hemisphere month. Oh, yes. Tell us about that. What was that? What did you learn from that? You can tell by the way I'm talking. It was a wonderful. I got up. It was January. It was the middle of the pandemic.

46:49Nobody was coming in. Nobody was going out. It was perfect for an experiment. So I thought I am going to do, and I hadn't been drawing or painting as much as I had as a child for a long time, because it doesn't make money and you have to make money. So I thought, I'm just going to give myself a month to just activate the right hemisphere of my brain. And I'll start with drawing and I'll move on to other things. and I never moved on to other things. And I, I, I just got in the first couple of days, I was a little rusty. And then I went into a state of absolute giddy joy. That was just, whoa. I mean, it was just, it's, it's, you can't, you cannot keep it from bubbling up when you're creating like that.

47:35Sometimes I get very angry at the drawing or painting. Why can't I make this work? But the joy was just incredible. Then I get to the next month and I couldn't stop. I was supposed to stop and write the book. And part of me was going, no, no, I will never stop. Never. So I actually called a therapist and she taught me about this one type of therapy. I said, I need some therapy on this. I've been painting and drawing every day and I can't stop. And she's like, well, how do you feel about that? All this stuff. I feel wonderful about it but it's the wrong thing to do I know it is and she after about half an hour this very academic very professional woman says full transparency I am taking an oil painting class and I also cannot stop really so Matt I never stopped I never stopped I had to wash the oil paint off my hands

48:27Martha Beck:to do this interview um really yeah so do you have any formal training in it or is just something you took up? No, I did. My first year at Harvard, I took a drawing class and the next year they hired me to help teach it. So most of my training was as a teaching fellow at Harvard in the art department, working under this brilliant professor, but I was mainly just self-taught. Amazing. So obviously the thing about creating in that way is it's playful, isn't it? And I think what you're describing is getting into a state where as an adult you're playing a little bit more like you did as a child so why do we lose that instinct when we get older do you think well I think you know there's a brilliant neurologist and philosopher named Ian McGilchrist of your great country and he has looked at these vast issues of anxiety the hemispheres of the brain, the arts.

49:27And he says our entire modern society behaves like a person who's had a bad right hemisphere stroke. The way I put it myself is we're like a huge ship that has fed all of its maps and compasses into the engine. We've burned our sense of direction and meaning and purpose and goals in order to just move forward, move forward, produce, produce, produce this massive amount of wealth that is going preferentially to just a few people. And it's a very, very dysfunctional system. And it's what the left hemisphere of the brain does, according to McGilchrist, when the right hemisphere isn't getting to come to the table.

50:07It's cultural.

50:08Martha Beck:Yeah. What about children as well in this? Because how do we encourage them to be creative and to be playful in a world that is very distracted, in a world that's full of technology. And technology has huge benefits, we all know, but there is obviously drawbacks as well. So yeah, do you advise people or work with people with their kids and trying to engage them in that way a bit more? Yeah, I do. And I think there are two ways we can go off course. And the first one is to treat creativity as a nice, fun thing we get to do after the real work is done. Because if you look around you right now, everything that exists in both our spaces exists because someone was creative.

50:50It is not like the factory version of work has only existed for the last few hundred years, couple of hundred years. And it's absolutely inhuman, but it's come to dominate everything. Schools were set up like factories, same size children learning the same task at the same desk in order explicitly to create factory workers who would just sit and do the same tasks. so saying to our kids that's the real work and over on the sides we do these frilly little things with like music or acting or art or whatever and treat it as something marginalized that's one way to go wrong and the other way is to say to the child just move your body just put color on the page you don't need to make it look the way you're thinking in your head just you know, do something crazy and it'll make you feel good.

51:41No, art, the way children feel about it, the way I remember feeling about it and the way my clients still feel about it is a really intense, joyful, but also very directive effort to create home, to find home in the world, to make things of beauty and peace to express whatever's going on inside us. But I think a bad artist makes everything look fuzzy and fun. A good artist can show you the difficulty and pain of the world, and a great artist can show you the difficulty and pain of the world and find the beauty that goes beyond it. And that is something, that is a noble effort, and it's hard. And to be able to say to your child, I had one child who's, she's 30 something, but she was a piano prodigy.

52:35She begged for lessons when she was four and it was not enough to just make a sound. She wanted to make a specific sound. And I gave her all the space and all the time that she, I even put a piano in her room, even though I couldn't afford it because I didn't want her, I wanted her to be able to practice without feeling embarrassed that she wasn't perfect yet. I would do anything to give someone the means of creating beauty.

53:02Martha Beck:That's great. You put me in mind of my own eldest daughter who's 13, so a bit younger. But she is a really brilliant artist and it's innate. You can see it in her. She needs to create stuff, which is wonderful. But there's also an element where she does it for external validation because what she'll do is she'll make a drawing or a painting and then she'll leave it on the kitchen table. Yes. She'll wait for you to come across it and then she'll gauge the reaction, right? And what she wants is a big reaction. Sure. I'm always conflicted about how to react because as a parent, I want her just to enjoy it for doing it.

53:41Martha Beck:I want her to enjoy the process equally. I think it looks great. So I say it looks great. But if the reaction is not strong enough, she picks up on that and goes, oh, you don't like it. I identify with that. Try this question. I look at something and say, how did you do that? Because we all, when we create something, I could say that about you in this podcast. How did you do that? You know, it's not by accident. You've crafted this thing and you create it. And you're very careful about like the techniques, technicals of it. And also the prep, everything. You're a real artist of podcasting. and so if I just said wow that's amazing it's kind of deflating in one way because you're not understood if I don't comment at all you're like what do I have to do to get a good word but if I say oh my god I've listened to so many podcasts and yours was did this better than anything else how then you're engaging in the creative conversation then you're artists together whatever you're doing even if it's computer code or math it is and that I think is part of the joy of being together to be creating instead of frightening each other yeah that's a fantastic observation I really like that you also talk in in Beyond Anxiety about squirrel interests which is which is such a funny phrase what does that mean and how do those help us I was working with a client who had a chemical sensitivity and it could have killed her, but she had a service dog that was trained to sniff the chemicals and literally physically drag her away from them.

55:24And this dog was so well trained. It was at a seminar and they came up on the stage and he was absolutely sphinx-like, just still. And then she said, you know, the only thing we can't get him to stop doing is chasing squirrels. He loves squirrels. And we had this conversation about how frightened she was of the world. and I said well what do you think this dog is trying to tell you about squirrels and she said maybe that there's danger everywhere but there's also fun and the dog quipped his head around just going from absolute stillness to and just stared at her face and she said yeah I guess there is fun there is beauty there is and the dog went nuts she started to laugh he jumped onto her lap and licked her face.

56:11Then he jumped onto my lap and licked my face. And we have film of this. The dog went nuts. And I realized for me, like when I started, when I painted for a month and then couldn't stop, I was chasing my own brand of squirrel, right? Like that's what I want to do. And I think we all have squirrel interests. I hope we do. And if you don't have any meditate for a while maybe you'll find them that's really good if someone who's listening is

56:43Martha Beck:is feeling quite anxious they're feeling quite disconnected from their inner self somehow what would be your advice to them through the lens of the home I mean thinking about you know we all we all exist in a in a space a living space of some sort um what sort of one thing would you encourage them to do or to think about in relation to their home? Be gentle. So many of us try, even when I say to people, creativity shuts down anxiety, they try to push themselves to be creative. So their anxiety will go away, which creates more anxiety. But if you say to this, if you're in a place and you don't have the energy to clean your house because you're sick, which was often true for me, be gentle, clean off one surface, a few centimeters and say, that's enough for today.

57:30You did well. Now rest. You don't like the way that looks. All right. We can talk about that, but just breathe first. It's not an emergency. Everything is always changing. The physical world, everything comes and goes, even mountains come and go. It's safe to be where you are. And then as you start to feel safe, you'll find yourself moving things, objects and that cyclical thing begins where the gentleness toward your own amygdala is creating a calm response which is causing you to make things calmer around you which then increases the calm response for your amygdala and you get a benevolent cycle going yeah that's good

58:15Martha Beck:advice so you you described at the start of this conversation a very difficult first home a very difficult childhood experience of home and you've also and I'm really pleased about this described a really positive current situation with your home which sounds like it stimulates you creatively it's it's a safe space right um so through that through that journey you know how would you summarize what you've learned about the importance of home in your life would you say I think that we lose the sense of home the moment we come out of the womb. And I think we spend the rest of our lives trying to find it again.

59:03And the one thing I would say is that we don't do that because it's meaningless. My own personal belief system is that we do that because it is the great adventure. It is the hero's search through the underworld for the apotheosis, the sense of what is sacred and what is holy. And when we go on that journey ourselves, then we find the gift of the underworld, which is anything that is that sanctuary of beauty, peace, harmony, love. And our job in life is to bring that back to the upper world, where we can make it physically real, and then bring those we love to share it. And that, I believe, is pretty much the meaning of my life.

59:50Brilliant.

59:51Martha Beck:Thank you so much, Martha. You're such an incredibly wise soul. And I think you're very generous with sharing your story, which is endlessly fascinating. Thank you. But yeah, thanks for all of your work. I love your podcast. Your recent book, as I say, was brilliant. So yeah, thank you. Thank you for everything you put out into the world. It's just made everything so much more rich and yummy for me too. Oh, thank you.

1:00:21Martha Beck:Huge thanks to Martha and thanks to all of you for listening along. A special shout out this week to everyone who's joined as a homing member on Patreon. The Ginny Blonde episode really seemed to resonate with you and I've had a lot of new subscribers. So big, big thanks for that. Lots of love to everyone who's joined. I really appreciate it. My wife Faye kindly listens along to every episode of the podcast, or perhaps tolerates it is the best word, I don't know. but she decided to watch Ginny's one on YouTube for the first time and she said that she found it really really interesting so I guess there's something about being able to see the guest's facial expressions that makes it quite a different experience.

1:01:02Martha Beck:So I mention that because most of the homing episodes can be watched on our YouTube channel in case you wanted to take a look so if you go onto YouTube and search for homing with Matt you can find it that way. All that remains is to say thanks to the producers of the show, Podshot, and also to Simeon Walker for making the original music. I'll be back again next week, so look forward to talking to you then. Bye-bye.