Martha Beck, THE WAY OF INTEGRITY: Finding the Path to Your True Self

[2:14]Zibby Owens: Hi. This is Zoe Owens, and you're listening to the award winning podcast, Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. I'm also the host of Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology, which you should run out and buy, called Moms Don't Have Time To, a Quarantine Anthology. All proceeds of that book go to COVID nineteen vaccine research. And I'm the editor in chief of Moms Don't Have Time To Write, a new publication on Medium, and we're accepting submissions. So please send your personal essays there. And if all that isn't enough you can follow me on Instagram ZibbyOwens and my website is zibbyowens.com. Okay, now back to this amazing podcast. Martha Beck is the author of The Way of Finding the Path to Your True Self. Martha is a bestselling author, life coach, speaker who specializes in helping individuals and groups achieve greater levels of personal and professional success. She is the author of nine non fiction books and one novel and has contributed monthly to OW the Oprah Magazine since its inception and I think I've read like 87,000 of those articles. Anyway, she holds a PhD in sociology from Harvard. Welcome, Martha. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books.

[3:24]Martha Beck: Oh, it's my pleasure. Moms barely have time to make podcasts. Yes. That's true too.

[3:29]Zibby Owens: Very true. Well, I was so excited to get the chance to interview you having read your column in Oh, the Oprah Magazine for so many years and it's just such a treat. And now we're gonna talk about your new book, The Way of Integrity, Finding the Path to Your True Self, which was amazing. I read it with a pen in hand. I took all the quizzes. I was like, pulling Oh everything my gosh. It was so much fun. It was like a I

[3:56]Martha Beck: felt like it was like the best women's magazine thing ever, you know, with all the Oh, thank you. Anyway. A women's magazine article that's three fifty pages long, which is what everyone wants

[4:07]Zibby Owens: when they're trying to raise kids. Yeah. No, it was great, though, because you gave such specific feedback. Anyway, why don't you tell listeners what this book is about and what inspired you to write this one, especially how you linked it with Dante's Inferno, which was like a genius way to structure that which I was like, wow, hats off.

[4:30]Martha Beck: Well, thank you very much. Yeah, after thirty years of writing self help and coaching people and everything, I came to the conclusion that the single cause of psychological suffering is a loss of integrity. And what I mean by that is like structural integrity, like an airplane when everything's aligned, all the parts are in their places, it can fly. If it falls out of structural integrity, it crashes. So this is not a moralizing thing. This is about unity and alignment with yourself. So I'd been working on this since I was, when I was 29, I took a vow not to tell a single lie for a full year and I didn't. And I do not advise that in the book. It's like, yeah, you want to just jump off a cliff naked? That's a really good way to go. But if you'd rather walk, use the techniques in this book. But what I realized then when I came into full integrity, I was really out of integrity. Was, I'd been raised, you know, very fervently dogmatically Mormon, and I'd been educated at Harvard, which is not firmly dogmatically Mormon. I don't know if people really get that, but yeah, it's not. So I had these different cultures and I was trying to get approval in both of them and they were completely dissimilar. So it was split in half. And also neither one of them had anything to do with me. What I thought was true. So when I went for a year without telling a single lie, all my truths came up and included among that was like the truth that I'd been sexually abused as a child. The truth that the way people did things at Harvard gave no respect and honor to my child with Down syndrome, all these different things. So I either walked away from or lost during that year, my home, the place where I'd grown up, my entire community of origin, my huge extended family, my marriage, my home as in my house, fled the stakes. I was living in Utah at the time. Left the career I'd chosen and the job I was in. I mean, like everything went into the furnace. I had also been chronically ill for twelve years. And as everything fell apart around me, everything healed inside me. Psychologically, physically in this chaos of loss, everything came together and I felt happier than I'd ever felt. I felt more whole. So I've done periodically since then, I've done these integrity cleanses where I get really rigorous. And the last one started about seven years ago and I was like, Oh my gosh, this is really working. Cause I was getting closer to real pure integrity

[7:05]Zibby Owens: and everything in my life started to be so wonderful. And I thought I got to write this down. It's a big challenge, but people are ready for it. Especially during a pandemic. So that's why I wrote it. Thank you very much. Wow. Yes. Well, one of the many things I loved reading about, and now I wanna go back and read the memoir that you referenced in this book was which you wrote during your pregnancy with your son, Adam, who has was born with Down syndrome, is how you included that throughout this book and how what it felt like to have the community at large kind of dissuading you, trying to get you not to do what in your heart and and all of your anxiety about it and your thoughts about it. And then that moment that you came to when you were like, I can't do this. I can't do this. And then you were like, maybe I can. Like, are you sure? I just love how you have to question all of your beliefs about something and that's what informs how you approach it. So tell me a little more about that. Yeah.

[8:02]Martha Beck: So the suffering you go into when you split from yourself is based on virtually always on socialization. We don't leave ourselves. We're born with our true nature and integrity. And then our culture hits us and it starts to pull us away, condition us away from integrity immediately, even before we can talk. And then we just, we lose ourselves and we go off to try to please people for the rest of our lives. When my son, Adam was born, this was at Harvard. Not only did people dissuade me, the five doctors on the staff at Harvard University Health Services strongly disagreed with my decision at twenty four weeks along to continue the pregnancy. And by the way, I've given people the advice to maybe not continue such a pregnancy. I'm very pro choice. That was not the deal. It's just like, I looked inside myself for the first time. I'll tell you a story that isn't in the book. When they called me to give me the news, I'd had a special, I'd had an amniocentesis because I was caught in a fire and inhaled a lot of smoke. It was a really fun year, but I was only 25. So it wasn't like I was at any kind of high risk. So they did an amnio and they called me back and it was, I did not expect this news. And I picked up the phone and the nurse said, I have some not so good news for you. And I heard a voice say, Don't be afraid. And I think that was my true self or whatever you want to call it. It was really distracting. And the nurse said, The fetus you're carrying has Down syndrome. And I said, What? But I wasn't talking to her. I was talking to the voice because it was like, Where did that come from? Right? And the voice said, Martha, are you happy? And I was like, What? And the nurse said, Oh, Down syndrome, trisomy twenty three, blah, blah, blah. I was, sorry, trisomy twenty one. I was like, Not you, shut up. I'm listening to the voice. And I thought, am I happy? I know. And nobody, lot of people, like none of the doctors that I see at Harvard appear to be completely happy either. And I said, I've heard that people with Down syndrome can be happy. And the voice said, that is right. And the nurse said, I don't think so. So that shook me up. And again, I'm not saying that's what everyone should do, but it brought, that was the voice of my integrity. It was bringing me to the truth that these people who didn't have children with Down syndrome, they didn't know what that would be like for me. For me, it felt like part of my life's mission. Same thing. So I went back to Utah where everyone would approve of my choice. I've got this little baby and everybody told me I'd get extra stars in my crown for keeping him. And I was like, that does not float my boat. And then in the whole Mormonism thing just blew up and I'm like, this does not feel true to me. So I left and they literally, Mormons believe that's the sin worse than murder. And you're going to be separated and float in outer darkness, completely isolated for all eternity. And so I got strongly pressured and I was like, nah, I don't think so. And so by confronting, you know, it was two decisions and there were more in my life that were similar that just gotten a whole culture oriented against me. And through that, saw, I found where I stood and it wasn't where anyone around me was telling me I should stand, but it was my truth. And the only way to be whole was to follow it, was to stay in my integrity. And that's pretty much, you know, with

[11:32]Zibby Owens: two steps forward, one step back, that's pretty much how I tried to live my life. Wow. And then you ended up coming out as gay on and seeing it on the Oprah show live. The way you describe it in the book was hilarious. You're like, oh, yes. There I was. Yes. Live TV. I just decided to say it. It wasn't planned. What was that moment that you're like? Like, oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Well, they give you a script and they'd written out a script and it was about, I was doing a live

[11:59]Martha Beck: webcast with Oprah and I forget the topic, but I talked to the producers beforehand and I said, you know, should I talk about being gay? And they were like, no, no, no. She's in the middle of dealing with the Ellen DeGeneres thing. So she doesn't need that issue on the webcast. So don't talk about it. I was like, okay. And then we get into it and there's a live audience and a woman in the audience raises her hand. And she said, and Oprah called on her and she said, I am married with three children and I've realized I'm gay and I don't know what to do and how it will affect my children. And I thought I could stay on my, from my ivory tower and say, well, from what I've observed among my clients, why that, you know, I could have been there. Or I could go completely off script and do what they hadn't told me to. Now it is intimidating to be at the Oprah machine, right? Like all these producers and Oprah herself is so powerful. And I just thought I can't stay honest and tell this woman that I haven't been through this. So I said to her, Well, experience is exactly like mine. So let me speak to it from there. And I started talking and Oprah kind of reared back and said, Wait a minute, you're gay? You're gay? And that beautiful voice of hers. And I was like, yes. It was live. It was national. There were millions of people watching and coming out is always hard, always scary. You feel very exposed to all kinds of people who may, again, the culture may not like you, but I had to, I had to. And so, yeah, I'm not sure what the crowd thought of it, but I knew what I had to do. And it a refining fire moment for me to be sure. But because I've been practicing integrity for so long, I knew what my path had to be. Wow. Well, you do have this whole part about secrets in the book. Let me see if I can find the book. That basically

[13:50]Zibby Owens: having secrets and here, I found it. Wow. It's a miracle. Wow. I know. Have like 57 things dog eared, but, you know, sometimes I actually find the things I need. You said let me just read this little thing. You said, speaking of science, solid research shows all sorts of links between living in harmony with our truth and maintaining good health. There's a whole field of medicine, psychoneuroimmunology, that focuses on the way psychological stress, including the stress of lying or keeping secrets contributes to illness. Studies have linked deception and secret keeping to elevated heart rate and blood pressure, increased stress hormones, higher bad cholesterol and glucose levels, and reduced immune responses. The more significant our deceptive behavior, the worse the effect on health, which I found so fascinating as so many people are out there keeping secrets of one kind or another. I feel like most novels and memoirs are based around sort of this corrosive effect of secrets and that impact on their lives. So that is fascinating research. Yeah. I mean, look, and comedies too, they're always based either on misunderstanding or a secret someone's trying to keep and hilarity ensues. Because

[14:56]Martha Beck: in our, we feel in our psyches that lying is destabilizing for ourselves and everyone around us. So wherever you get to the edge of uncomfortable, that's where laughter happens. And that's where drama happens. And that's where we're all focused. And some people, anthropologists actually think that the proclivity of humans to gossip is related to the fact that there are psychopaths, sociopaths in the community. The only psychopaths and sociopaths, they live in secrecy because they're doing whatever, serial killing, smoking pipe cleaner. I don't know what, but whatever they're doing, they keep secrets. There is nothing more dangerous to a human being than another human being who is keeping secrets. And that's, they think that's why we evolved with so much white in our eyes, unlike other animals where it's mostly brown or whatever, because you can see when we lie, there's a jitter in the eyes and we don't even know that that's what we're seeing, but we pick it up and we start to feel uneasy because the single most dangerous thing to us is another human being who is lying or keeping secrets. So we sort of compulsively gossip about what's really going on. What's really going on. What's the cover up because we're always looking for the truth, for our own truth, for the community truth, to stand in our truth. And yeah, the way it corrodes health is instantly visible, instantly. I do stuff with clients all the time where I say, you've been holding onto this secret or this lie, hold it. Tell me about a time when you were keeping it inside and tell me what it does to you. And immediately they lose energy. They lose muscle strength. I mean, it's instantaneous. People who just promise researchers that they'll lie a little less for three weeks, have fewer doctor visits to your illnesses, their relationships go better, their careers go better. I mean, just because they sort of try not to be so deceptive. So yeah, I mean, the research on this is overwhelming and the relief when you get your secrets out and you don't have to carry that burden. I can't even describe it. It's so much better. Today's episode is sponsored by Quince.

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[19:15]Martha Beck: Wow.

[19:17]Zibby Owens: So your book is basically, I mean, I think perfect for anybody who's just and as you position it yourself, I'm not like making this up, but just people who feel unfulfilled, like things are fine, but they're not great. And I feel like there's so many ways people and experts have come after this issue, which is so pervasive, right? How can we make life better? And you give all sorts of skills. But tell me why

[19:42]Martha Beck: you did this in the context of Dante's Inferno and how you did purgatory and all the different stages and and how you take take the reader through all of this. Like, how did you come up with that idea? Were you just like, this is perfect? Like, tell me about that. When I was 18, I read the Divine Comedy for the first time and I thought this is weird. This is fourteenth century European politics. Why am I reading But then I got to the place in Dante's famous inferno, where he's going down through hell and it gets worse and worse and worse. And at the center of hell, which is the center of the earth, because they knew the earth was round, they get to the rock bottom, which is the monster Lucifer in case He's locked in a lake of ice. And his guide tells Dante, we have to keep going down. And Dante's like, there's no more down. And he says, no, you have to. So they climb on the body of Lucifer, the monster and they lower themselves by his moldy hair to the point where his hips are encased in ice. And at that point they have to turn 180 degrees because they passed the center of the earth and what was down becomes up. In other words, if you're going through hell, keep going. And when I was a depressed 18 year old, this really spoke to me. And I kept going into the depression I was suffering. And I went in and I went in and I went in. And as Carl Jung said, he who looks out is dreaming and he looks within awakens. If you get past your worst point, your rock bottom and keep going, the AA people have stuff to say about this too. You've gone through hell, but you're headed toward paradise. So the beginning of Dante's Inferno, he says, the first line say something like, In the midst of, right in the middle of my life, I came to myself in a dark wood for the true path had been lost. He said, I don't even know how I got here. Everything's foggy. Everything's murky. I'm afraid of everything. What am I doing here? And that rang true to me as a young adult. I mean, I was like, what? Why am I not happy? I've got a lovely family. I've got a prestigious degree. I have a job track laid out in front of me. I didn't feel good. It wasn't working right. And people who come to me to be coached, the number one reason is they just feel purposeless and meaningless. The reason is they've allowed themselves to be unlittingly, innocently, to be socialized away from their true nature. And you just end up wandering in what Dante calls the dark wood of error. So I started going back to the Divine Comedy. And I believe it is the first great self help book, all in metaphor. So he's in the dark wood, he meets a teacher. They say, you gotta go through health to get out of this. It's kind of like entering therapy and going inside yourself. Then the third part is purgatory. And that simply means cleansing. So my integrity cleanses where I cleanse away everything about integrity. It's a mountain that Dante has to climb where every lie he untold in himself. Like any lie that culture tells you, like rich people are better than poor people. That's a lie. So you have to unsee all that. Are you sure? Are you sure? You go through hell by questioning those, but then you get out on the other side and you're in a situation where you're with rich people and you're poor. Now you have to walk your talk. Now you have to walk steady in the belief that all men are created equal and women too, and everybody of every gender. And you have to like hang in there and it's really hard at first, but you climb and you climb and it gets easier. When you get to the point where you're really clear and you're really in full alignment with yourself or integrity, you just start to rise magically into paradise. And I really went through the system while I was writing the book. When I got to the paradise part, you know, people talk about the secret and magic and miracles and I kinda, yeah, all right. I kind of believe in it. Well, it turns out that when you do intentional thinking from the perspective of perfect or near perfect clarity, what you want manifests so fast. It's crazy. And I actually thought, you know, I came into peace and everything I ever wanted was waiting for me there, which was interesting because everyone I've ever coached feels the phrase, I am meant to live in peace as a home, as something that's deeply true. So my theory is that when we beg for something from the universe, it sends us, sends it to us. The answer is always yes. And it's always sent immediately, but it's sent to our real home address, which is peace. And everything's waiting for us there. And Dante basically lets us see how that works. So yeah, I wanted to sort of decode it for everybody. Wow. The image of like a mailbox of all this unopened

[24:30]Zibby Owens: mail of your perfect life just sitting there waiting for you.

[24:35]Martha Beck: Boxes and packages. A pony over there. Pony. Yeah. Everything.

[24:41]Zibby Owens: And I loved your idea of these soul teachers. Is that what you call them? Let me make sure. Yeah. Right? A soul soul teacher and who that is in your life and having, you know, sort of guides who who you find and maybe they're not who you expect, but they're they're out there waiting for you to,

[24:57]Martha Beck: you know, make you and take you out of the woods. Yeah. I used to hear the phrase when the student is ready, the teacher appears. And I look around and go, I don't have any teachers that I can see. I'm very much an introvert. But what I found is that the student being ready simply means coming into full integrity in the dark wood of error. And all you have to do to make that is to say, I'm lost. I'm really lost and I can't get out by myself. I've tried and I don't know what to do next. And then maybe you call a therapist and that's the way the teacher shows up for you. Maybe you start reading self help books and that's how I did. I started reading self help books and I moved on to books on spirituality and my whole life unfolded through book teachers. Sometimes it's a situation that comes to inform you and it seems perfectly designed to show you where your blind spots are and push you through hell. So yeah, the teacher does appear and the way you make the student ready is just as deeply acknowledged the truth. I am not sure where I am and I don't know how to get out and I don't like it. The moment you're in integrity, what you look for manifests.

[26:07]Zibby Owens: So you have written many bestselling books and a novel, and yet you say on your website that writing for you is just a means to communicate the information. Like you're like astounded that you're a bestselling author. Is that really true? Tell me about that.

[26:24]Martha Beck: I just was, I mean, I wanted to write about my experience with Adam because it was so weird at the time, nobody had a diagnosis of a cognitive disability and then kept the baby. When I had him, many people had since. So I was just like, I'm just going to do this to like talk about how weird it was and how I had all these magical experiences around it that made it a good experience. And he's still like that, a really magical dude. But that was the only book I wanted to write. And I wrote it and it took me, wrote the first version, got it rejected by every one of the dozens of agents I sent it to, wrote another book just to kick the door open saying, I have a PhD from Harvard. Do you want to hear my research? And everybody was like, yeah. And I wrote a book that sold like no copies. But then the publisher was like, okay, we'll take another look at your memoir or your, I'd written it as a novel cause it was so weird and magical. And they looked at it and they said, well, this is all true. Why don't you write it as a memoir? And I was like, sorry, but I wrote that. Yeah. And they said, okay. So I wrote the true story and they took it and it became a New York Times bestseller. And then they came back and said, what's the next book? And I'm like, I have a next book. I'm not a writer. I'm a sociology professor, leave me alone. But people had started asking me about my philosophy of life. Wrote everything they asked me about in a book and I'm like, here, take it, leave me alone. And it really backfired because the book became another bestseller and people just started flocking. I thought once they had the book, would literally have no reason to think about me or talk to me or remember my name, but not everyone thinks that way. So then it basically launched my career and they just keep asking for the next book. All right, beats working.

[28:14]Zibby Owens: Wow. You are definitely the first person who considers their bestseller to be, you know, a bummer or not a bummer, but you know, a negative side effect of what you were doing. It's so funny. You know, I loved selling books. I just, it was like, Why are you coming to see No, no, I get it. Get it. Now you've built like this whole empire and you have courses and podcasts and books and coaching. And how do you manage all of your time? How do you fit all this into a given day?

[28:43]Martha Beck: Well, fortunately, one of the things that happens when you come into integrity as an individual, even partially, is that there's a phenomenon called fractaling, a geometrical phenomenon, and it's everywhere in nature. It's like, it's a shape that repeats itself at different sizes. So if you look at a river delta from the air, it looks almost exactly like the nerve branching and the veins and arteries branching in your system. If you look at the rings on a tree, they look almost exactly like your fingerprints, like all these patterns in nature replicate. And I believe that whoever you are as an individual, and you heard it said that the five people who are you deal with the most or think about the most, that's a three-dimensional self portrait of what you are because you pick people and they pick you based on what you're living. So one of the incredible blessings of trying to live this way is that you attract people who are similar. And that means that as I got too much to do, I was trying to do one woman show, right? Entrepreneurialism. And people started showing up to help. And I was like, I never meant to be an entrepreneur. I never meant to have a company. All these things I never meant to do. I just wanted to be happy. And now I have this incredible, beautiful team of people who really live their integrity as well. We run this company and

[30:10]Zibby Owens: it just keeps going. Miracles never cease. They literally never cease. That's amazing. How old is your son, Adam, now, by the way? And I know you have three kids, but He is 33.

[30:19]Martha Beck: Wow. And I am a 12.

[30:25]Zibby Owens: So what advice would you have for aspiring authors?

[30:28]Martha Beck: You know what? Write. And I know everybody's heard this. Write like a fountain and not like an oil well. You know, an oil well, they put the plunger in and they suck things out of you because it's gonna be worth money. But if you find a spring that's bubbling out naturally, it gives people what's really necessary. Know, what we do without oil is stop ruining the earth. What we do without water is die immediately. So if you go out suctioning to try to make money, especially today, but when everybody can read everything they want on the internet, it's not going to make for a good career as a writer. So go to the place where your own integrity has a story to tell. Peel away everything. Believe me, if you start living in integrity and not telling lies and not human secrets, the reaction of the culture around you will give you so much material to write about. I think that may be part of what happened with the Black Lives Matter movement and the Me Too movement is that people, they calmed down, they had to go to their houses because of the pandemic. They sat quietly in a room. Pascal said, The reason we're miserable is that we're unable to sit quietly alone in a room. And their truth came up and they had things to say, some nonfiction like anti racist books or anti sexist books, some fiction. Here's a novel that will really drive this home, this point, but there's fire in it because it's the author's truth. And that comes from peeling away culture and getting to the true nature of you. And then writing the story of claiming your truth in the middle of a culture that pressures you to leave your truth, because that is the central story of human psychology. Dante knew that. And there are a million ways, there are 8,000,000,000 ways to write it as many ways as there are people on the planet. And so you can write it as Glennon Doyle writing Untamed, exactly that. Or you could write it as Liz Gilbert memoir Eat Pray Love, or as The Color Purple Alice Walker. You can like all of these come from that central dynamic and make for absolutely spectacular reading.

[32:40]Zibby Owens: Wow. Amazing. Martha, thank you. Thank you so much for coming on Moms No Time to Read Books. Thank you for helping so many people in the world that must feel amazing and for sharing all of these great tips and just the way to sort of self actualize. So it's amazing.

[32:58]Martha Beck: And how cool is it that you and I have a podcast and maybe somebody will listen to this that is gravitate that gravitates toward it who never knew I existed, but they're into you. And so your fractal, my fractal, we meet each other and the fractal keeps getting bigger, more people, more minds, more lives coming into harmony. And that is super cool. I have to say. So thank you.

[33:19]Zibby Owens: Oh, that gave me the chills. Thank you.

[33:22]Martha Beck: Okay. Well, have a great day. Thank you so much. Thank you. Lovely to meet you. You too. Bye. Bye bye.

[33:28]Zibby Owens: Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram Zibby Owens and at moms don't have time to read books. Also sign up for my newsletter at zibbyowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.