There’s a moment in Scott Britton’s recent podcast with Martha Beck when everything quietly falls into place.
You feel it. Not because she says something persuasive—but because her joy begins spilling through the screen, and then through your chest, until you remember something you didn’t know you had forgotten:
The analytical, logical left side of your brain will not guide you safely through life. It won’t connect you with the love and joy you’re seeking.
But your right brain might.
This is my favorite episode of Scott’s podcast—by far. And that’s saying a lot. He’s a former tech entrepreneur who’s spent the last six or seven years actively seeking a higher level of consciousness.
Martha, a Harvard-trained sociologist who has had more out-of-body, psychic, and reality-bending experiences than most mystics, does something astonishing: she bridges two worlds that rarely meet. She takes the mystical and makes it practical. She wraps love around suffering. She talks about bending time—not as theory, but as lived truth.
At one point, Scott says:
“Imagine that… I know what I'm supposed to be doing, and I'm doing it. But for whatever reason, life still feels kind of hard—like the fruit isn’t ready to harvest yet.”
He asks Martha what advice she has for people who feel like they’re in integrity… but life still isn’t clicking.
Here’s where it gets beautiful.
Martha responds with a series of statements that gently dismantle our most basic assumptions about time:
“Examine very, very closely your beliefs about time… If you look at the physics of it, nobody understands why it only seems to run in one direction. And we do know it’s highly malleable. That’s what Einstein said—it actually does stretch and collapse.”
“Time is something our culture believes in absolutely. And because of that, a lot of us think we’re in the wrong place in time…. It’s not happening fast enough. My God, I’m too late. I’m too old.”
“If I had just reached through time to the place where I knew I was supposed to end up—and felt that it had already happened, from a perspective outside of time—I would have been as satisfied through the whole run-up as I was after I received what I was asking for.”
It’s hard to fully grok this part of the conversation without listening to the 57 minutes that come before it, but please trust me: it will make sense.
What struck me most is this:
Martha doesn’t dismiss or bypass our suffering. She honors it. And then gently invites us to let it guide us home.
“Wherever you find psychological suffering, there you will find a misalignment between your beliefs and your deepest truth. Pain is pain. But suffering? Suffering is the whisper of your soul saying, ‘Not this way.’”
She also says we live in “the most frightened culture in the history of the world—a society that teaches fear is productive, even virtuous. That fear keeps us anxious, distracted, and disconnected from presence.
“So I came to think that the awakened mind is simply a functioning human brain that has completely gone past fear and anxiety. And if you can do that, it just opens for you like a flower.”
She even calls out Amazon’s culture of fear as a prime example of how our left-brained systems are actively stoking panic as a business strategy.
“Every Amazon employee has to wake up terrified and stay terrified all day because that’s how you get productivity,” Martha quotes Jeff Bezos as saying—and she’s not okay with that logic.
“Thousands of people who are barely making ends meet are being told to live in fear—not to become wealthy themselves, but so one of the wealthiest people in the world can become wealthier still.”
If you enjoy living in fear, go ahead and delete this email.
But if you’re ready to experience love and joy every day—even in an imperfect world—I urge you to listen to this extraordinary conversation between two people who’ve walked the path, and want to show you how to do the same.
Personally, this episode has me focused on ways to turn off my left brain more often. Over the past three days, I have walked about nine miles a day, simply wandering through Manhattan; late yesterday afternoon, I took the photo in at the top of this issue.