Living In Integrity with Martha Beck

0:02 A listener production. This is Crappy to Happy, and I'm your host cast Done. I'm a clinical and coaching psychologist, a mindfulness meditation teacher, and author of the Crappy to Happy books. In this show, I bring you conversations with interesting, inspiring, intelligent people who are experts in their field and who have something of value to share that will help you feel less crappy and more happy. Martha Beck is a Harvard trained sociologist. She's a life coach, and she has often been referred to as Oprah Winfrey's life coach. She's contributed to OH magazine for many years, and she's written several New York Times best selling books, including her most recent, which is called The Way of Integrity. Martha has a way of honoring both science and spirituality, which is something I love about her. She makes no secret of the fact that she's had some pretty magical experiences. She leaves it up to you to believe whatever feels true for you.

1:03 And what I really enjoy about Martha is her humor. She's got a real wit about her in the way that she communicates very wise messages, and I think that you will enjoy that about her as well, Martha believes that living in integrity is the only way out of suffering, full stop, end of story. So I was delighted to have the opportunity to talk to her directly about what it means to live in integrity, what happens when we get out of integrity and why, and there's steps that we can all take to get back on track to living a life that is truly aligned with our values and our purpose so that we can all experience more joy and peace and freedom. In short, less crappy, more happy.

1:47 Here's my chat with Martha. Martha, I was just saying to you off air that I first came across you when I read Expecting Adam. I think it was around two thousand and three. When did that. Book Actually, yeah, yeah, it was two thousand and four, I think it, yes. Two thousand and four, which which was all about your experience of pregnancy with a down syndrome child, which was obviously really life changing experience for you. Yeah. Yeah, I was getting a doctorate at Harvard, my third degree there, and I was, you know, thoroughly into the whole intellectual game, and then my second child was diagnosed at about six months of pregnancy, with Down syndrome, and even though I'm pro choice, it was like I'd already bonded to him so intensely that it made me reevaluate what is the meaning of a human life? And I decided that it was the ability to experience joy, And as best I knew, people with Down syndrome can experience joy as much or more than the rest of us.

2:49 So he's Adam came along joined my life, and yeah, changed everything for the better. It feels like, I mean, that was my first introduction to you, But it is it fair to say that that is really what set you on this path that you have found yourself on. Now? Were you the whole life coaching? I don't know. I mean, I think I just I think I was just always destined to be to break out of culture. Like coin. I was raised very ambitious female in the most Mormon place in the universe. I don't even know if you guys even know what it's like to be a Mormon woman. I wrote a book about that where I said, and sorry if you're Mormon, but the only thing they require of women is that they breed well in captivity. Wow.

3:37 So I was raised there. Then I went after Harvard, which is really different, had a child with an intellectual disability, went back to Utah, the center of Mormonism, and to become a lesbian. And then people ask me for advice to become a lesbian. Yeah. Well, and things happen. These things do happen. And it's been so interesting to watch, to watch your journey. And you've just written a new book which I have been loving, called The Way of Integrity, and I you know, throughout the book, you make a lot of references back to that time. I guess that's what made me. You know, I've been thinking about that book expecting Adam as well. You make a lot of reference to that time in your life.

4:18 Yeah, especially early in the book, I kind of go through my whole life history of always, always, always deciding to do things that other people disapprove of. For good reason, for good reason, and we'll get to that. But I'm a total people pleaser. So it's been hell. I have to tell you that it gets to heaven, and I. Think that's that's exactly, and that's what I want to talk to you about. This is I do life coaching as well, and I do I started life coaching in two thousand and three, actually about shortly after I read your I read your book just as i was embarking on my coaching career, and I've since done my master's in clinical psychology, so I'm a clinical and coaching site. So I've worked with people in therapy and in coaching, right, so across the spectrum of people who who are experiencing suffering, you know, from the most mild dissatisfaction through to really big problems. Yeah, so, Martha, let's just get straight to the message of this new book, which is about living in integrity and how that is the way to joy and peace and freedom. What does it mean to live in integrity?

5:20 Well, it's not a sort of prim virtue. I'm not into churches, not for a long time. But integrity it comes from the Latin integer, which just means intact, undivided whole. And we're all born that way. We're born completely united. All our hopes and dreams are sort of programmed into us. But almost as soon as we're born, we start getting pressure from people around us socialization culture of some kind of family culture, school culture, religious culture, whatever, and we're so programmed to earn social approval. It's a basic existential need for humans that tip before we could even talk.

6:01 We sell out our nature to buy into what the culture wants of us. And so we're now not one thing integrity, but we're split in duplicity, which is two things. One of us is true or our true nature, and the other one is going with the culture. And I believe that all psychological suffering comes from that divide from the true self. So we have in a nature and then we ram up against culture essentially in many many ways. And I think you're right. I think I see this happen all of the time, and I think anybody listening would get that intuitively right. What are the signs that somebody is not living in integrity?

6:45 Well, there are six in this book. I because I have always read Dante's Divine Comedy as my favorite self help book. Starting long ago in a very troubled childhood, I followed Dante through The Divine common as a journey from crappy to happy, right from suffering psychological suffering all the way to paradise. And he starts out he says, in the middle of my life, I came to myself in a dark wood, and I didn't know how I got there and I was afraid and it was awful and I didn't know how to get out. So he kind of opens with a midlife crisis and then he tries to just scramble out of it somehow, but instead he gets no matter what he does, things go wrong.

7:28 And I call this dark Wood of Error syndrome. When you've lost the path of your life and you start, things just go wrong. So the first thing that happens to people there are six symptoms that I call the dark Wood of Error syndrome. The first thing is just losing your sense of purpose or not having a sense of purpose, like what is my life about? I don't even know what makes this worth it. The second one is that you start to have bad moods. You're sad, angry, irritable a lot, and it can go, as you said, from very mild to very intense. Then you get physical symptoms. There's a tremendous amount of research to show that when people depart from what's true for them, they immediately develop worse physical healths, those symptoms of all kinds, and then your relationships won't go right, your career decisions won't go right, and if you keep going, you may start to medicate yourself with something and create an addiction, which is a sixth symptoms. So when you've got a clutch of symptoms like that, you can pretty much bet you've lost your true nature, You've lost your integrity, and without ever intending to do anything wrong, you are now living split from yourself in duplicity.

8:38 Yeah, I have no doubt that there's people listening going tick tick. I've been there, done that, I know what, and we've all been there, And do you feel like this is? You know that we journey in and out of some of that, you know, we could we sort of find our way back, and then we go off track again. It feels like it's a life's work. A lot of us are just sort of bonking around haplessly waiting for conditions to match our true nature. And when we accidentally get into a condition, a situation that is right for us, we feel good and we think, oh, everything's going well, and then the situation shifts and without even knowing it, were pulled away from ourselves. So, like I track in the book, I track a couple of people that I coached who were or three of them actually in the book, but they were really good at their jobs. Like there was a forest ranger park ranger who went and lived in the national forest and she was really good at her job. She wanted to do things politically to help nature, so she ran for city council and got elected, and then she developed this awful, embarrassing habit. She would fall sound asleep in every meeting and she could not keep herself awake, and it was just it was appalling and embarrassing, and she was miserable and she never she didn't understand it is because she wanted to be in nature. She didn't want to be in a meeting. Then there was a guy who loved to be a writer, but then he was promoted to be an editor and a manager at a magazine and

10:09 he started drinking because it couldn't stand it. So these people get promotions, We get promoted, and it's all supposed to make us happy, but if it doesn't match our true nature, we unknowingly split ourselves even further. And then we're like, why why is everything? Why does everything suck? Yeah, exactly exactly, And you talk about that's culture, right, because culture says achieve more, get the promotion, get the pay rise, and we go for these things that we are conditioned are going to make us happy and ultimately than they don't. It never does. I mean I've had, you know, over the course of my career, I've coached people who are homeless on the streets, and I've coached people who are billionaires in penthouses. And I am here to tell you I've seen wealth, I've seen power, I've seen all the things that we think will make us happy. I've seen people who have achieved at the absolute epex, and they are as likely to be miserable as anyone else. In fact, I don't think I've worked with a really top achieving billionaire type who wasn't miserable really and they've got everything, They've got everything. And then you talk to somebody who's really really happy living a very ordinary life and is because it's true to their nature, and to me, that actually is far more desirable and leaves a legacy that's more powerful than being rich and powerful and miserable.

11:30 You know what I see a lot, and I wanted to talk to you about this is people who say who they may be feeling purposeless and they're feeling dissatisfied, and now you know they're drinking too much or eating too much or whatever they're doing. And they say, but I've got a great job, and I've got a family, and I've got a nice house, and why can't I I should just be grateful. There's this sense of I should just be happy. I think that is really powerful thing that gets in the way because we deny what we really feel because we should be grateful, we should be happy. That's just anything. Whenever you're saying I should to myself, you are reflecting the culture's desires back inside your own head.

12:13 Dante tries to get out of his dark wood by climbing this mountain that he calls Mountain Delectable, and it's all golden and shiny, and all the people are climbing it. But every time he tries to climb it, he's tired. They're a wild beasts. He's scared, he's depressed, he's irritable all the things happened to him. And then the ghost of the poet Virgil shows up and says, you know what, the only way out of here is through the inferno. So the second quarter of the book is about how if you are in the dark wood, you need to go inside to see. I see the inferno as a metaphor ferrari in ourselves and our inner demons. So Dante goes through and he talks to all these demons, each of us. If you have somebody in there screaming, a version of yourself screaming, you should be happy. You need to go meet that demon and question it until you can see past its lies, because it's lying to you.

13:08 Anything you tell yourself that makes you suffer is going to turn out to be untrue. So he goes all the way through with the inferno, and then going the same direction, he passes the center of the earth and suddenly he's going up and he gets to go to up the mountain of purgatory where his actions have to match his new truth, and then he ends up in Paradise. Spoiler, I haven't got to that part of the book yet. I haven't got I haven't got to purgatory yet in the book. That's when you have to walk your talk. Therapy is all very well, don't you have a bunch of therapy addicts though, who are like they come to therapy every week for years, but they never actually change their lives. Well, there are differently people who do that. Yeah, for sure, the chronic advice askers, but not advice your takers.

13:57 Yeah, now our seminar addicts, you know, and they go and they get I go to meditation retreats and they get their minds all clear. But ask them to do something their mother disapproves of and they just fall apart, right, I mean, And that's Dante comes out of the inferno and he's got to climb this mountain and at first it's really hard. And that's what it's like when we finally realized something's wrong for us, Like when all the doctors at Harvard and all my advisors told me that having a child with down center would ruin my life. They were putting as much as much pressure on me as they possibly could. And I had to get very honest and go in and look at my own beliefs and find out what made me tick. And then I had to go against everybody's advice, and then it was so difficult. That's why I sort of fled back to my home state to do my dissertation, because I thought, well, at least people will agree with my choice to keep the baby. And then I turned out to be gay and not believing in Mormonism at all, and so I became and I quote a hiss and a byword. They had just named the three greatest enemies of the Mormon Church in the latter days, and they were intellectuals, feminists, and gay people. And I was like, oops, sorry, let me just rethink this. I'm running for the border. So yeah, finally that cost me my family of origin, every friend i'd had before the age of seventeen or eighteen. I

15:28 left my job, obviously, I left my marriage because it changed sexual orientation. It basically cleared the decks of my life, and it was really super hard. And yet it all happened during one year when I decided I wouldn't tell a single lie for a full calendar year, and I did not, and everything fell apart supposedly from the external perspective, but on the inside, I started getting healthier and happier than i'd ever been before, and I thought, hmm, this is really interesting. Everything was going wrong. I'm losing everyone and everything, and I feel better. Wow. You make it sound really really scary and challenging, which no doubt it is. Having tough conversations right and making hard decisions.

16:14 I don't think most people are as far out of their integrity as I was. I mean, that's what I was joking a little bit when I said I was destined to be a misfit with the personality of a lap dog, like just just love me, I'll do anything you want. And then I didn't do the things that people wanted me to do. But most people have far less duplicity in their lives, right, you know, not everybody is a closeted gay person to themselves. Not everybody's gonna have to choose to have a child with Down syndrome in an intellectual environment or whatever, So it's not as scary. It probably won't be as scary for anyone out there. Oh and by the way I do it in the book, I've spent thirty years figuring out how to do this gradually and gently instead of basically just throwing myself into a volcano. So I hope it's a gentler thing. But yeah, it is scary.

17:13 I hope that you're enjoying this conversation and realizing the benefits of positivity in your own life. If you are enjoying the show, please be sure to like and subscribe so that you get notified when you EPs drop and head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen and leave us a rating and review. I wanted to pick up on you spending a year without telling any lies. I've been listening to Tara Browk too Radical self honesty, so it's like half the time I think, mostly we don't even realize necessarily that we're lying to ourselves. That's the challenging part, right, how do we start getting really honest with ourselves?

17:59 Well, one of the things I talk about in the book, which is a spoiler, I can't use this in public speaking, but there's no public speaking anymore, so it's okay. I speak a lot in public and I used to stop in the middle of his speech and say is everyone comfortable? And people would say yeah, and I'd really say, no, seriously, are you comfortable. They'd say, yes, we're completely comfortable. Get on with your speech, and then I would say, how many of you, if you were home alone, would be sitting in the position you're sitting in right now, And of course not a hand would go up, and I would say why not? And they would just sit there, going what And then someone would figure out, oh, this isn't really that comfortable. And that's not the problem. They weren't in that much pain. The problem is that they truly believed at one level that they were completely comfortable, and they absolutely knew at another level that they were not comfortable. And that's what you're talking about. This It happens so subtly, and it happens so early, and it's so pervasive in the culture that whatever our culture is, that we don't know we're split until we start to suffer.

19:09 So the sooner you can notice your own discomfort. My motto is cave early, you know, because the further you go into duplicity, the more you'll suffer. Suffering is our greatest ally. Well, it will not allow us to lie to ourselves indefinitely, and it will get worse and worse and worse until you sit down and say what is actually going on? And if you look at your own feelings with honesty and you go to Cass, who is a coach and a therapist, she will help you figure it out. You'll figure it out because your feelings and your body everything is designed to help lead you to your truth. And that's the key, isn't it. Because we are also like we will do anything to avoid suffering. Oh yeah, we will reach for the food or switch on Netflix, or have a drink, or stay busy, keep on running, anything to avoid aid, stopping and really looking hard and sitting.

20:04 I mean, I teach mindfulness that sitting with that discomfort and being willing to open yourself to what you might learn from that. Yeah, Pascal said, the source of all our misery is that we're unable to sit quietly alone in a room. And that is really all you have to do. It's not that complicated. The first time I tried it, when I was twenty three, I thought I will learn this weird thing called meditation. I was going to Japan, and I sat down, and within three minutes I had a raging fever. My throat had almost closed. I was having like an anaphylactic reaction to my own like inactivity. And I literally jumped up to my feet and said, I will never do that again. And now, of course I meditate at least an hour a day.

20:48 So exactly, And that's it. I'm glad that you said that, because I think a lot of people who could benefit so much from sitting quietly with themselves in a room are the ones who will do anything to avoid it, or they tell themselves that I can't do this, or this is not for me, or I just I've got one of those minds that doesn't doesn't get me right, you know. But what you said a minute ago, we'll do anything to avoid suffering. We eat, we drink, we keep busy. But the thing is, it doesn't avoid suffering. Before we know it, our lives are falling apart because we're alcoholics, or we never sleep, or we're just you know, like I was. By the time I took that vow not to lie for a year, I was almost completely incapacitated by autoimmune diseases. You know. I was in a back brace I had, I couldn't use my hands. I was a complete wreck. I was depressed, I was anxious, and just learning not to lie fixed it all, just in a very dramatic way.

21:44 I think that's such an important point too, because there are so many people who experience all of these physical ailments and would never necessarily or would take a long time to make that connection. Yeah, and yet I mean there's one study I said in the book where people were just asked to lie alone less for a few weeks, and there was no one checking on them. They just said, okay, that sounds like a plan. So they came back and compared to a control group, they had fewer doctor's visits, they had fewer symptoms of illness, their mood was better, their relationships were going better, every they were performing better at work because they had just said, Okay, I'll lie a little less for a couple of weeks. It's incredible how powerful integrity or oneness wholeness is for every system in our body, our mind, our soul. It's amazing.

22:33 Yeah, I wanted to talk to you about. So when we're in integrity, you know what's in our true in our mind and our heart and our body. When we listen to ourselves and we I really feel like it's like, you know, giving ourselves ultimate self care right and giving ourselves what we need in any moment. The people that I work with, and I work mostly online and in groups and things these days rather than one on one, but women particularly, I've got all of these stories about how selfish it is, how they can't take time for themselves. It would be they're too busy, and I mean legitimately some of them have got little kids at their feet. You know, but there's all of these things that get in the way, but mostly it's guilt about doing something that feels good for them.

23:18 Yeah. Yeah. The culture really leans hard, especially on women, to give up our happiness for ourselves to make other people happy, which basically sets them an example. It sets our kids the example of abandoning their true selves because that's what they see us doing. So as to do as I say, not as I do, your kids will treat themselves the way you treat yourself, not the way you treat them. But the culture is always pressuring people. It pressures men to like, you have to have a certain type of living and you can't leave this job. And I mean there are tremendous pressures on people in any situation. There literally is no social situation that is not pressuring people to leave their true selves at least a little bit. But what you just said about I can't do this, I have to do that if you change nothing else. Don't use the phrase I have to or the phrase I can't unless they're literally true, because they're almost always culture. They're almost always lies, Like I have to go to my mother's party, I can't hurt her feelings. Oh yes, you physically can go to your mother's party and you definitely can hurt her feelings. She'll tell you that all the time. I mean, she won't like it, but you can do it. The moment you stop those two lies I have to and I can't, It's like you're holding two bars up to your own face and pretending it's a prison window. One says I have to when one says I can't. And just dropping those two phrases from your vocabulary, that will set you

24:51 free to do things completely different ways, and you can start doing more self care. You can start to feel what you're feeling and feel what you feel. I know what you know, say what you mean, and do what you really believe is right. That's integrity. I tried that for the first time last night. You'll be proud of me, Martha. I had to go to listen to me had to. I was booked in to attend an information evening at my daughter's school because she's going to senior and they're planning pathways, and you know, we were all supposed to go. She didn't want to go, Nobody wanted to go, and I was like, well, but we have to go, Like we have to go, and in the end I did go, but I changed. I questioned myself, I said, I actually don't have to go.

25:35 Good for you. There's a lot of people not going, and I could get this information somewhere else, but it's important for me to go, and that's why I'm choosing. I'm choosing to go. That's the truth. It shifted my whole energy about the whole thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they've shown Actually one of the therapists who trained me way back I had done all her research around using literally true language and how it sets us free. Because the moment you start to see I've chosen to do this instead of I have to do this, you've not only made yourself more honest, you have taken yourself out of the victim role. And there's a whole place where Dante really in the Divine Comedy, he actually identifies that the thing that makes us most angry and violent is feeling like a victim. So there's a whole segment of the Divine Comedy that says you can get out of rage and violence by it knowing that you have the free will to choose your own path, and that thing right there, it puts all the responsibility for your life in your own lab but it also sets you free.

26:38 And that's a really powerful turning point was for me in my life, and I hope it is for people who read the book. Yeah, I have no doubt it will be. Yeah. Well, I was thinking as I was reading a book about the people who are drawn to work situations, particularly professions that they truly feel cool to. So the people who go into medicine or law or whatever. No, not before the prestige and the status, but because they genuinely called to do good work in the world. They've got, you know, really want to do heal people and make things right. And then they get into that situation and they find themselves in this again culture. But you know, in a workplace that they get bound up having to deal with bureaucracy, or there's a toxic culture, or there's you know, bullying and hierarchy and all of these things that suck the joy out of that. So how do those people stay in integrity in the you know what I mean, in that sort of environment that really sucks the joy?

27:40 Yeah, Well, you have to make a choice whether to do it your own way and let the chips fall where they may or to leave the system like I left Mormonism. I didn't. There was no way I was going to change that, and so the system was just too toxic to my truth and I had to leave. I just worked with about one hundred doctors. We did a virtual seminar, and it was so interesting how many of them were in that kind of toxic culture, and they were choosing to do medicine in different ways. And actually the pandemic gave us this backhanded gift of saying, rethink the way you do work, because the way we typically work is based on a factory model, which has only existed since the Industrial Revolution. But you know, we put kids at desks, same age, same work that was meant to create factory workers. The school system, and everything's run as if it's a factory. You go to a place, you put things together, you work, you see the other people you're working with. But information can be traded electronically, and so much of any profession can happen in different ways.

28:48 Now people have the power to give information to a whole like to billions of people. One hundred years ago that would have taken the wealth of kings, and now anyone can do it. So there are new creative ways to do things. And once you free yourself and you get back into integrity. I compare it to an airplane. When it's in structural integrity, all its parts work together and it can fly. If it falls out of integrity, if its parts aren't working correctly and they're not engaged, it will crash. So your life will crash. To give you the gift of reassembling yourself in structural integrity, and then I promise you can fly.

29:28 And that leads me to when we've done all this hard work and ask ourselves the hard questions and how the difficult conversations and set the boundaries and all of those things like what becomes available, Like what's the prize matha for? Oh my gosh, the world just opens itself to you. You know, I did this. I used to go on while I'm on an integrity cleanse where I try to cleanse away anything that is not integrity. So it's been five years since I took my most recent no life I vow and I've slipped a few times, but not very often. So I just did this integrity cleanse that I'm on for the last five years because I wanted to get down to the actual, like scientific truth. I was a little frustrated by all the New Age magical, like all you think it and it will appear. Well, then everyone would win the lottery, So what's the truth?

30:24 I was trained well to look at actual truth evidence, So I just said, I'm gonna go on a really really rigorous integrity cleanse, and I just started telling the absolute truth to myself and everyone else, and a lot of Again, there was a lot of reshuffling in my life, and then like all these crazy magical things started happening to me, the very things that I had thought were fictitious. And Dante says the same thing. He gets to Paradise, where all he's in harmony. Now every part is working together, and he says, you will not believe what happens next, so stop reading, and that He's like, okay, all right, UK, here's what happens. And suddenly, like everything he thinks about is instantly brought to him. He's surrounded by beings of love and light. You know, he ends up magically being wherever he wants to go. And it felt like that to me as I got more and more into total integrity, crazy like wild animals would come up to me. It was it's been crazy and it still is. I mean, it's it's magical. It's magical. Integrity takes you to a magical place.

31:35 I think there is so many magical things available if we're open to seeing them too, you know, like it's when you start to notice those synchronicities and those coin and you pay attention and they happen. More and more and more. Can I tell you one? I'll let me tell you one, okay, please. So fifteen years ago, through Special Olympics because of my son, I'm at Maria Shriver, who is the she's the niece of like John F. Kennedy and her mother started Special Olympics. She was the first Lady of California. Anyway, we got to know each other and one day we sat and we said, I said to her, we should make a vision board. And she was like, oh please, And I was like no, we're both feeling like unsure about where our lives are going. We need to make vision boards.

32:22 And she was just she was so she humored me. We sat down with all these magazines. We're going to cut out pictures and put them on a board. All the things we wanted she just kept going through magazines and she said, you know, I've had a very full life. What appeals to me is the poet room. He says, out beyond judgments of right doing and wrong doing, there is a field. I'll meet you there. And she cut out this picture of just an open field, and she said, that's the open field. And she put a horse in there because she loves She loved her horse when she was growing up, so she just put the open field on it. Fifteen years later, I had sold this book and written it and was in the process of publishing it when Maria got her own imprint at the publisher that was publishing my book, and she is now the publisher, and I want you to see the imprint the open field of and both of us are just like, how the hell did that happen? Like it's not like we planned this out. The way it all came together was so mind blowing. But I'm telling you, it's everything works that way when you're in integrity. It's crazy. You don't need magic. When you realize how reality works, it's amazing, it's amazing, but it's.

33:37 True integrity, right, Like it's not just that I think if what I think about will magically be like what I'm saying, it's not. Really getting messing over all kinds of you know, places where we're split from ourselves. And here's what I say in the book, this is what I think. The moment we ask for something that is truly heartfelt, and I don't care if you're three years older, thirty, or ninety, the universe immediately sends it to you. The answer is always yes, and it always gets sent right to you. But the one phrase that I have found rings the chime of truth in people's hearts more than anything else that I've ever tried, is I am meant to live in peace. I've asked murderers, I've asked beggars, I've asked billionaires.

34:23 I am meant to live in peace. Everyone feels like, well, that feels true. So when the universe answers your prayers or whatever, it sends your stuff to your real home address, which is peace. If it sent everything to desperation, you'd just be motivated to stay in desperation. And that's not what we're meant to do. We're meant to find peace. So one sentence in the book is piece is are home. Integrity is the path to it, and everything you long for will meet you there. That's what I think, that's my experience. I love that. I just wanted to quickly. I saw Maria Shriver post something on her Facebook page just last night for the supermoon, talking about the energy of the supermoon, and people were saying, Maria, we've never seen this sight of you before, this magical, mystical, and she was like, this is who I am.

35:17 Yeah, and she is. She's a tough customer, like she does not buy into any old fluffy thing, but you know, she lives in integrity. I mean, she is one of my examples in my life of somebody who has come into such integrity despite tremendous pressure, and so magic happens to her all the time. What is the one thing that you would like people to apart from by the book, which I would recommend. And I've never read Dante's Divine Comedy, but I feel like I want to read it just hearing you talk about it. But I don't think it would be as enjoyable a reader as your version. It's difficult to decode. He uses a lot of like fourteenth century metaphors that are like. I love your version. It's and and it's very it's very entertaining too. You have a wit and a way of sharing ideas in a way that are very accessible and very entertaining to read. So I thank you Martha for the book. And I was going to say, what's one thing you would like people to go away and do to take themselves closer to their own path of integrity after they listen to this episode.

36:24 I just want to repeat something that the German poet Gurtez said once, which is, when you trust yourself, you will know how to live. It's really that simple. Thank you so much, Martha for your time today. This has been an absolute joy and I so appreciate you being here. The pleasure is all mine. I love the podcast and I love Australians. If you're like me and you've never read Dante's Inferno or The Divine Comedy, I highly recommend that you read Martha's version. It's called The Day of Integrity. It is both enlightening and entertaining. There is so much wisdom that she shares in that book. You can find out more about Martha at her website Marthabeck dot com, follow her on social media. She's on Facebook and Instagram. Of course, come over and say hi to me on Instagram. I'm cast done, Underscore XO, or visit my website cast done dot com. I look forward to catching up with you on the next episode of Crappy to Happy Listener