This movie is based on the book Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn, which I think all humans should read. The film has powerful implications about the 20th century, especially the great machine of industry that is our economy. If someone you love (possibly you!) is caught in a stifling system, being torn from their true nature and being forced to act as a cog in the machine, buy this movie and watch it together. The filmmakers’ symbol for society is a prison for the insane known as “Harmony Bay.” In it, you will see every horrible boss, every stupid meeting, every injustice and every suffocating separation from nature that corporate life inflicts on so many people.
 
Sorry to spoil the surprise, but Anthony Hopkins eventually frees not only himself but Cuba Gooding, Jr. and a lot of the other prisoners. Freedom looks different for each of these people. For some, it is simply the power the say no to a bully. For others, it’s the creation of loving relationships. But for still others, it is almost complete separation from all human structures. Every character is liberated from some sort of cage, and the key to the cage is always the courage to use all one’s available power and freedom to choose what most nourishes the heart.
 
Today, you can use the same key to unlock any prisons in which you feel confined. Freedom can start as simply as wearing the clothes you really like instead of what your friends will really admire. It can be standing up for a stranger who’s unfairly bumped out of line at the post office. It can be structuring your schedule to suit the wildest part of yourself, instead of the most docile and broken. We all have freedoms we have not yet explored.
 
Today, break a few bars and venture into territory that initially makes you say, “Oh no, I could never.” That phrase is a sign that you have bumped up against the bars of your cage. Notice if it comes with a nervous laugh instead of genuine revulsion (because of course if you are cruel or unkind, those bars are there for good reason.) Do something today that you think is too delicious, too selfish, too wacky to fit within the rules of your life.  
 
After my family watched Instinct, I told my partner Karen I wished every man in America would watch it. Men in particular are trapped these days in the image of themselves as cogs in the great economic machine. So, Karen began telling people “Have you seen Basic Instinct? It’s amazing! Every man in America should watch it.” People began giving Karen strange looks. Eventually, someone told her why. But Karen did not suffer because she’d been recommending soft core porn rather than a fabulous drama. She did not disintegrate because of the head scratching and raised eyebrows of the people who now think she’s an obsessive Sharon Stone fan. A 55-year-old woman earnestly recommending smut to all her dearest friends is not a problem for her.
 
When you break your rules, when you act “crazy,” you won’t disintegrate, either. You will just join those of us who like to play outside our cages and respectfully do not care what anybody thinks.
 
Good luck and bon voyage!

P.S. For extra credit take a picture of yourself breaking one of your rules and post it on our Facebook page. (Just remember that “Martha told me to” does not a plea bargain make.)

For all of you that also took the time to submit your name for the drawing via email or snail mail, wow! Thank you for sending verifiable proof that you value Martha’s work! We were all so giddy, receiving your receipts or postcards, it felt a little like being Santa Claus on Christmas morning: the anticipation and excitement of selecting the winners was practically killing us!

So without further delay, here are the winners of our “Martha Beck Collection” drawing*…

Grand Prize Winner: Elizabeth Morant
Elizabeth will get a free, 60-minute phone session with Martha Beck herself. Enjoy, Elizabeth!

Second Prize Winners: 

• Amy Pearson
• Anna Brindley
• Kate DeSmet Kulka
• Stephannie McGohan
• Wendy Allen

These lucky folks win a copy of Martha’s entire digital audio library,  which includes over 50 hours of content with Martha and her Master Coaches. If the winners start listening now, they can create a better life by Friday!

Thank you again for your ongoing dedication and support to creating your right life. We love the Team and are so glad to share this journey with all of you!

Much love,

~The Martha Beck Inc. Team

Martha, Bridgette, Jessica S., Jessica R., Sandra, Abigail, Jennifer, and Jill

 * Winners were selected using a sophisticated random number generator. Getting to use it was the highlight of our geeky lives.

Why is it that most of us, like these women, obsess about our own appearance? Even my most gorgeous friends feel depressingly imperfect, while the rest of us sit around contemplating either a makeover or suicide, depending on how far we stray from our physical ideal. 

These self-judgments can’t be mere aesthetics, or we’d evaluate ourselves and others on the same objective criteria. More likely, it’s a social impulse, born of every person’s longing for acceptance and fear of rejection. Something in the human psyche confuses beauty with the right to be loved. The briefest glance at human folly reveals that good looks and worthiness operate independently. Yet countless socializing forces, from Aunt Clara to the latest perfume ad, reinforce beliefs like “If I were pretty enough, I would be loved.” Or the converse: “If I feel unlovable, I must not be pretty enough.” 

Such thoughts are seductive because they relieve us of the responsibility of developing self-worth (turning it over to some longed-for or long-suffering lover). Inevitably, though, that someone—parent, friend, partner—doesn’t love us enough, or we somehow fail to sense their love. We feel rejected, abandoned, alone. It’s unbearable. Realizing that we’ve surrendered our self-esteem to others and choosing to be accountable for our own self-worth would mean absorbing the terrifying fact that we’re always vulnerable to pain and loss. As long as we think the problem is our bodies’ failure to meet a certain physical standard, we have something concrete that we (or our local plastic surgeon, who does a fabulous tummy tuck) can work on. 

And so we dive headfirst into the endless project of improving our physical selves. No cosmetic strategy ever fulfills our hopes, since what we hope for—the knowledge that we’re acceptable—is almost completely unrelated to physical appearance. We begin to think thoughts like If only someone loved me, I could accept myself. It’s a Catch-22: Before we can feel loved, we must feel beautiful, but before we can feel beautiful, we must feel loved. You can swim down that spiral for decades, maybe all the way to your grave (from which you can brood about your sudden realization that your looks were actually okay all along). There’s another way to go, and I suggest you use it.

You may have noticed that all the “defects” I’ve been discussing are located not in the body but in the mind. It’s the mind that mixes up beauty and acceptability, that misperceives the cause of emotional pain, and that sends us down the class IV rapids of self-loathing. Your mind creates a lot of your supposed appearance problems, and it can resolve them, almost instantaneously, if you’ll let it. 

The Big “If”

Our ideas about love and attractiveness are so primal, our need for belonging so intense, that most of us are loath to abandon our favorite beliefs on these issues. If you’ve ever let yourself feel lovable and lovely, only to be deeply hurt, you may see accepting your own body as a setup for severe emotional wounding. After all, you let down your guard before and look what happened! You’ll never go there again. I understand your resistance. That’s why the first step in changing your self-evaluation is careful, logical risk assessment. 

What Could Possibly Go Wrong? 
The strategy of feeling physically unattractive actually does preclude the pain of (a) naively trusting that we’re good enough, (b) being horribly wounded, and (c) feeling alone, unacceptable, and hideous. Believing we’re ugly cuts straight to the chase, making sure we feel alone, unacceptable, and hideous right from the get-go, and without reprieve. If you don’t believe me, you have only to look back at your own history. How many times have you told yourself you’re unacceptable? How many times did this lead to happiness, freedom, and perfect relationships? All right, then. 

Here’s a new hypothesis: There’s no risk-free way to love. The possibility of being devastated is always there, but the possibility of joy exists only when you put your battered heart right on the table by trusting that you’re lovable. I’m not asking you to do this all the time, or even in large doses—at first, anyway. I’d just like you to experiment with a new mind-set, a few minutes at a time. 

Find a Way to Change Your Mind 
Even though believing in your own adequacy is actually less risky than feeling unacceptable (haven’t we just proved this with the mighty power of logic?), this thought can still be terrifying—or, if you’re the cynical sort, impossible to get your head around, logic be damned. That’s okay. You just need to set clear, safe-feeling time boundaries within which to demo this idea. Find a place where you’ll be undisturbed for ten minutes. During this brief time, push your mind to attack its own protective strategy of self-denigration. Write down several examples of:

• Occasions when someone loved or praised you, even though you didn’t look perfect.
• People you’ve loved even though they didn’t look perfect.
• Stunning people who act so awful they begin to appear ugly.
• Famous people who are dazzling despite physical imperfections.
• Artists’ work that reveals charm and grace in places many people see ugliness.
• Women who are so perfectly at ease with themselves that they set a new cultural standard of goddessness.

If you’re deeply mired in self-loathing, it might take you a while to come up with examples for a given topic. Stick with it. You’re pushing yourself to make new associations, to jump the tracks of your habitual protective self-condemnation. You’re not just thinking new thoughts but actively unthinking the illogical, painful, imprisoning thoughts you’re used to. This is difficult. So what. Do it anyway—for ten lousy minutes. Tomorrow, do it again. 

Experiment with Dope (As In Dopamine) 
If you attack your preconceptions for just ten minutes at a time, you’ll eventually feel a subtle loosening, a little wiggle room as your mind begins relaxing its grip on the idea that you’re not so hot and not so lovable. Before moving on, it helps to add some psychoactive chemicals. Some people achieve social confidence only when they use alcohol or drugs. I can never remember to buy these things, but I always have a few mood-altering substances on hand—or rather, in my head—and so do you. 

For example, dopamine increases when we face something unfamiliar and difficult: working a crossword puzzle, knitting a complicated sweater. Epinephrine is released when we sustain moderate exercise. When we take a chance (for example, by expressing an unpopular opinion or displaying something we’ve created), we produce more epinephrine. All of these hormones can increase our confidence enough to help us release our old, supposedly protective thoughts and behaviors. 

So once you’re used to unthinking your physical self-image, give yourself a little chemical boost to compensate for the emotional shields you’ll be dropping. Complete a challenging task, work out until you sweat a bit, take a risk that makes your heart speed up, or all three. You’ll feel more confident for several hours. Use that time for real-world experimentation. 

Test-Drive a New Self-Concept 
With a head full of crumbling misperceptions and happy hormones, go out in public and pretend for, say, half an hour that you’re lovely enough to be loved. Now go to a coffee shop and have a tasty beverage. Notice how your body moves when you trust that you’re good enough. Not America’s Next Top Model good enough, just good enough. Feel the difference in your facial expression—or if you can’t get a handle on that, then try to gauge the energy you exchange with other customers or the barista. Most important, pay attention to how other people are reacting to you. 

If you’ve done the homework (steps 1 through 3), you’ll find something miraculous beginning, like the first tiny green crocus shoots emerging from snowy earth: Most people will accept you. They’ll be attracted to you in a variety of ways. The more you release your defensive, self-conscious inner critic, the more you’ll get smiles, courtesy, friendliness, all kinds of positive attention—not from everyone, but from most people. From enough people. 

Yet this connection between self-acceptance and attractiveness become an upward spiral, just as the conflation of rejection and ugliness has been a downward one. After some practice in coffee shops, try accepting yourself while chatting with a friend, then a colleague, then someone who intimidates you. One crucial caveat: Save your family of origin for last, possibly for never. Much protective self-criticism stems from growing up around people who wouldn’t or couldn’t love you, and it’s likely they still can’t or won’t. In general, however, the more you let go of the tedious delusion of your own unattractiveness, the easier it will be for others to connect with you, and the more accepted you’ll feel. 

Understanding and dismantling defensive beliefs about your own ugliness is a process that frees you to unreservedly accept yourself, your body, and other people. The resulting open heart is the one perfect feature that really will protect you emotionally by giving you a sustained sense of belonging. While not everyone will always love you, you will see abundant, observable evidence that you’re always lovable. That means the skin you’re in has always been, and will always be, beautiful enough.

I have always had a troubled relationship with time. I don’t like the way it passes, taking every material form along with it. I don’t like the way it pushes me, requiring that I put aside one joyful or necessary action to perform another. I don’t like the way it tires my body, and I fully resent the fact that it means I will not be a concert pianist, a circus acrobat, a wild animal tracker, and a neuroscientist during this lifetime.

Speaking of neuroscientists, I’ve been prepping for a workshop with 15 medical doctors who are frustrated with the way medicine is constructed by our culture. Led by the inimitable Lissa Rankin, MD, these brilliant physicians are coming here to begin forming new ideas about how they can run their lives and careers. As I read the entry forms for this corps of doctors, I am astonished and appalled by the brutal way their training has taught them to deal with their time. All of them crush more activity into an hour than most people do all day. But what gets crushed includes activities such as being present with the person who is dying, or eating a nutritious meal leisurely, or assuming an easy, relaxed pace as they open a human body and tinker with the mechanisms inside. How ironic those our culture considers healers of the body are forced to drive themselves without enough sleep, food, or play to keep their own bodies healthy. As we say in my coaching system, how can you give what you cannot live? 

But whether or not you are a medical doctor, the tyranny of time very likely dominates your life. Our clocks, our calendars, our associations drive us like overburdened pack mules from one hurried task to another. Right now, if I let myself worry about the amount of work I think I must do this very day, I will topple off the tightrope of inner peace and into a full-on panic. I suspect the same may be true of you—if not today, then soon. One of the most essential tasks for living a life of purpose and joy is to command your time, rather than let it command you.

This will require that you steel yourself for enormous disapproval. Yesterday, I was torn between the conflicting demands of a friend who needed support and an appointment at an unknown destination. I left myself just enough time to get to the interview, but since it was at an unfamiliar location and I have the navigational skills of a cashew, I was late. The interviewer at the studio was not amused. He was testy and frustrated, as I would have been in his place. As I apologized, I realized I was facing a choice: beat myself up for misusing my time, or hold fast to my decision to be present for my friend and allow the interviewer his anger without changing my commitment to scheduling myself in the way that feels most soulful and authentic to me.

For a while I chose door #1. I got out my patented self-flagellation whip (no, it’s not real, you perv, it’s a metaphor) and told myself that somehow, next time, I would have to be less emotional, more professional, in my scheduling choices. Just as everyone has always predicted, I went straight to hell. Fortunately, I left right away. By the time I got home, I had reconnected myself to what is true for me at the deepest level. That is that no professional obligation is remotely as significant as one moment that bonds two human hearts and lives. I turned on a Bob Marley song and bellowed along at the top of my voice—”Don’t worry about a thing, ‘cause every little thing’s gonna be all right”—and it was. 

This little story sums up all the steps to taking command of your own time. One: Set your schedule according to your deepest priorities. Two: When others object to this scheduling, respectfully decline to give a crap. Three: When you receive negative feedback for your scheduling choices, allow any feelings you may have; then sing and dance to Bob Marley until the bad feelings go away. (You may substitute Bach or ABBA or Usher for Bob Marley, although I would suggest that you avoid Enya as this could put you into an irreversible trance.)

This process is not for the faint of heart. It scares the willies out of me. But when I do it, something miraculous occurs. Time—which physicists know to be elastic—begins to bend and stretch for me. Tasks I thought would occupy hours get done in minutes. Helpers show up out of nowhere to help things go more quickly. And the things I do become so interesting that the timekeeper in my head stops altogether. Running your life by your heart, rather than your schedule, is the only method I know that is efficient enough to help us get everything done that we need to do. 

I’ll tell you what it’s time to do right now. It’s time to set your schedule in order so that you don’t look back on the day of your death and wonder why you never really lived. It’s time to ignore the opinions of those who think your life should be all about their cause, their rules, their agenda, and not your soul’s desire. It’s time to stop flagellating and start dancing. If you wish to argue about this, I must respectfully decline. I simply do not have the time.

There’s another form of cardio that works much the same way, though it affects the emotional heart rather than the one made of auricles and ventricles. This workout consists of deliberately cultivating empathy. To empathize literally means “to suffer with,” to share the pain of other beings so entirely that their agony becomes our own. I know this sounds like a terrific hobby for a masochistic moron, but hear me out.

The reason to develop a capacity for empathy, and then exercise it regularly, is that only a heart strengthened by this kind of understanding can effectively deliver the oxygen of the spirit: love. 

Emotional Cardio

Love requires connection between lover and beloved, and empathy is the quiet miracle by which this connection is forged. When you share others’ suffering, you also share their experience of receiving your gift—the gift of being accompanied into grief or anguish rather than bearing it alone. Naturally, almost involuntarily, people will love you for this. If you’re in a state of empathy, you’ll feel their love for you as your own emotion, thus coming to understand what it means to love yourself. This will make you love the other person even more, and of course you’ll receive that love even as you give it, which makes it even deeper, and…well, you can see where this is going. Become an expert at it, and soon your life will be absolutely lousy with love. 

I know one wise old man who has been working at empathy every day since becoming a meditation master early in his life. He matter-of-factly describes a state of complete empathic fitness as a “continuous emotional orgasm.” Who’s with me now? All right, then. Let’s talk about your exciting new cardio workout—but first, a crucial warning. 

Caveat Empathor

Many people, especially those of us who’ve had a little bit of therapy, fall into an emotional trap Buddhists call “idiot compassion.” At first glance, this looks like empathy, but it’s actually projection. It encourages us to condone harmful behavior by assuming that the perpetrator is acting out of pain and helplessness. 

“I know he’s just a hurting little boy inside,” says Jeanie, whose boyfriend, Hank, has just beaten the living tar out of her for the umpteenth time. “He’s so sensitive. His mama abandoned him. He even cries when he talks about it.” Because Jeanie herself would become violent only in the grip of intolerable torment, she thinks she understands Hank’s motivations—and so she excuses his behavior. Real empathy is not based on this kind of projection but on close observation. If she were a true empath, Jeanie would notice that Hank, while “so sensitive” to his own misery, never notices others’ distress. 

When Jeanie understands that no one who cares for her could act as he acts, she’ll drop the idiot compassion and get the hell out of Dodge. At that point, she’ll realize that real empathy doesn’t put us in harm’s way. It protects us. That’s just another reason to implement one of the following exercises: 

Exercise 1: Learning to Listen 

If you want to feel that you belong in the world, a family, or any relationship, you must tell your story. But if you want to see into the hearts of other beings, your first task is to hear their stories. Many people are gifted storytellers. Only the empathic are true storyhearers. 

To become one of these people, start with conversation. Once a day, ask a friend, “How are you?” in a way that says you mean it. If they give you a stock answer (“Fine”), repeat the question: “No, really. How are you?” 

You’ll soon realize that if your purpose is solely to understand, rather than to advise or protect, you can work a kind of magic: In the warmth of genuine caring, people open up like flowers. You’ll be amazed by the stories you’ll hear when you use this simple strategy with your children, your next-door neighbor, your aunt Flossie. You’ll learn things you never knew you never knew. 

Even if you’re not in the company of people, you can work to increase your storyhearing techniques. Here’s a snippet from English teacher Jane Juska’s wonderful memoir, A Round-Heeled Woman, in which she describes teaching creative writing to prisoners in San Quentin: 

Suddenly Steve, silent until now, speaks: “…when we used to have a really fine librarian here, he gave me this book. It was Les Misérables…. That book changed my life. It gave me feelings, gave me empathy…Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo.” He is wrapping up this gift and holding it close. It is his forever. 

Books, movies, songs—stories told in any artistic medium can give you an empathy workout. To grow stronger, find stories that are unfamiliar. If you read, watch, or hear only things you know well, you’re looking for validation, not an expansion of empathy. There’s nothing wrong with that, but to achieve high levels of fitness, focus once a week on the story of someone who seems utterly different from you.

Exercise 2: Reverse Engineering

Some mechanical engineers spend their time disassembling machines to see how they were originally put together. You can use a similar technique to develop empathy, by working backward from the observable effects of emotion to the emotion itself.

Think of someone you’d like to understand—your enigmatic boss, your distant mother, the romantic interest who may or may not return your affections. Remember a recent interaction you had with this person—especially one that left you baffled as to how they were really feeling. Now imitate, as closely as you can, the physical posture, facial expression, exact words, and vocal inflection they used during that encounter. Notice what emotions arise within you.

What you feel will probably be very close to whatever the other person was going through. For example, when I “reverse engineer” the behavior of people I experience as critical or aloof, I usually find myself flooded with feelings of shyness, shame, or fear. It’s a lesson that has saved me no end of worry and defensiveness.

I train life coaches to use reverse engineering in real time, by subtly matching clients’ body language, vocal tone, even breathing rate. It’s so effective that clients often think the coach must be psychic—how else could anyone “get them” so quickly and completely? Elementary, my dear Watson. The body shapes itself in response to emotion, and shaping one’s own body to match someone else’s is a quick ticket to empathy. 

Exercise 3: Shape-Shifting 

In folklore, shape-shifters are beings with the ability to become anyone or anything. As a child, I was fascinated by this concept, and used to pretend that I could instantaneously switch places with other people, animals, even inanimate objects. What if I woke up one morning in the body—and the life—of my best friend, or a bank robber, or the president? What if, like Kafka’s fictional Gregor, I suddenly became a cockroach? (You could find people who think I’ve actually done this.) My point is, what would it feel like to be them? How would I cope? What would I do next?

I still play this game, especially in public places. I recommend you try it, soon. See that strange man in the orange polyester suit putting 37 packets of sweetener into his extra-grande mochaccino with soy milk? What if—zap!—you suddenly switched bodies with him? What would it be like to wear that suit, that face, that physique? What impulse would lead to sugaring a cup of coffee like that, let alone drinking it?

I can feel this shape-shifting developing my empathy. It gives my heart a stretch, makes me entertain unfamiliar thoughts and feelings, leaves me with the sensation that I’ve completed a stomp session on an emotional StairMaster. And if I want to ramp up my workout, it’s just a short hop to some practices that work even better, and have been tested for centuries.

Exercise 4: Metta-tation 

World-class empathizers like my friend the meditation master (he of the continuous emotional orgasm) conduct a daily regimen of metta, or lovingkindness, meditation. This involves focusing all of one’s attention on a certain individual and offering loving wishes to that person with each breath you take, for several minutes at a time.

Classic metta practice starts with your own sweet self. For five minutes, with each breath, offer yourself kind thoughts (May I be happy, may I feel joy, etc.). Taking these few minutes every day can put you on the road to complete, uncritical acceptance—the foundation on which all empathy is based. (Reaching that point, admittedly, takes years for most of us incomplete and self-critical people.)

Then switch the focus of your kind thoughts onto a friend or family member. When you feel a sense of emotional union with that person, target someone you barely know. As a final, black-belt exercise, project metta thoughts onto one of your worst enemies until you can begin to feel for them. Don’t rush this process, or (God forbid) fake it. You’ll only become a saccharine pseudo-empathizer, wearing the plastic smile of a fitness model from Neptune. 

The Payoff

The thing about cardio is that once you get used to it, you can feel it making you stronger, calming you down, improving your quality of life. Regular empathy practice keeps you on the edge of your emotional fitness, but the benefits are enormous: an awareness of union that banishes loneliness, a natural ability to connect and relate to others, protection from idiot compassion, a wider, deeper life. As your empathy grows, you’ll find that it’s infinite and that through it, you transcend your isolation and find yourself at home in the universe. I promise, it’ll do your heart good.

I don’t love this because the author and photographer who created it are some of my dearest friends. It’s actually the other way around; they are two of my dearest friends because they create things like this book.

Zainab Salbi is a gifted author who created Women for Women International, an organization to help female survivors of war. If it’s true that a picture is worth a thousand words, then photographer Rennio Maifredi provides the equivalent of a million poignant words with his stunning portraits of the women whose stories Zainab has so beautifully written.

I’ve pre-ordered ten copies of this book. If you want to understand how much one person can change the world, please order it yourself. It will link you to the beautiful organic organization we like to call “The Team” with a kind of golden spider silk: beautiful, delicate, and indestructible. This is one of those books that I can’t really describe to you. You have to see it to know how much it means. Get it, page through it, read it. You will never forget it.

I told a friend about this on the phone and she said, “I know how to solve those. You just keep your hand on one wall, and you’ll find your way out.” She thought I meant a maze. This is how our culture sees things: you’re in a place full of tricks and blind alleys, but if you’re clever enough, you’ll “solve” it and get out. That’s not what a labyrinth is. It’s a path you walk as a kind of meditative practice. You could walk out of it at any time, but you follow the patterns at your feet while releasing the patterns in your mind. Walking labyrinths is an ancient custom. Now I know why. I’ve walked my own labyrinth just a few times, and its curving lines have taken me straight to the truth about the way I live my life.

About halfway through my first walk, I found myself feeling terrified and angry. My thoughts went something like this: “This is such a waste of time. What am I doing here? I was two feet away from here before, now I’m doubling back for no reason—where is this taking me? What’s the goal? I can get there faster than this if I just jump….” on and on, ad nauseum.

As every life coach knows, the way we do anything is the way we do everything. The same thoughts that make me squirm in the labyrinth torture me when I’m writing, emailing, even sleeping. I should be going faster, getting somewhere. I should have more to show for this. I shouldn’t have to double back, to revisit old emotional issues, to wipe the same damn kitchen counter every day. These thoughts burble along just under the surface of my consciousness every day. They make me slightly anxious—okay, some days irrationally terrified—and lend a driven quality to moments when I could be relaxed and present.

I’ve heard the same comments from countless people, all schooled to the same obsession with forward progress. We set goals, draw flowcharts, march forward, criticize ourselves if we have to go back, if the same old stuff comes back to haunt us. We want to be DONE with things: the chronic pain, the haunting doubt, the bad relationship patterns, the grief of loss. We want to solve the maze and get out, to the place where we imagine there will be no problems to solve.

The labyrinth is teaching me to question the bits of driven, linear, achievement-based dysfunction that can make me miserable in a life of incredible blessings and good fortune. We didn’t enter life to get it done. There is no place not worth revisiting. We double back to find the pieces of ourselves that still clutch the same issues like a baby clutching its pacifier. Compassion invited us to this unbearably repetitive, slow, complex path of self-discovery, to show us that only when we surrender our idea of how things should be going do we notice that the entire thing is breathtakingly beautiful.

My loved ones and I are still building the labyrinth. Our land is not particularly rocky, so we’ve become obsessed with rocks the way a teenage starlet is obsessed with shopping. We cruise slowly past areas of nearby roads marked with “falling rock” warning signs, then stop the car, heave a few mini-boulders into the car, and speed off feeling the joy of acquisition. We have a goal (finish the labyrinth), we have a process (find rocks and arrange them), and the sense of purpose that comes with that is so familiar, so comfortingly linear. But in the end, what we’re building is a circuitous, contemplative, enfolded path that teaches us to be comfortable with the circuitous, repetitive, contemplative aspects of our lives.

Today, if you’re confronting an issue for the ten thousandth time, or feeling that your life is going nowhere, or panicking over how little you’ve achieved, stop and breathe. You’re not falling behind on some linear race through time. You’re walking the labyrinth of life. Yes, you’re meant to move forward, but almost never in a straight line. Yes, there’s an element of achievement, of beginning and ending, but those are minor compared to the element of being here now. In the moments you stop trying to conquer the labyrinth of life and simply inhabit it, you’ll realize it was designed to hold you safe as you explore what feels dangerous. You’ll see that you’re exactly where you’re meant to be, meandering along a crooked path that is meant to lead you not onward, but inward. 

As Proust wrote, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” Stop now, right now, and look around you. This is your place in the labyrinth. There is no place else you need to be. See with eyes that aren’t fixed on goals, or focused on flaws. You are part of the endless, winding beauty. And as you learn to see the dappled loveliness of your life, as your new eyes help you begin loving the labyrinth, you’ll slowly come to realize that the labyrinth was made solely for the purpose of loving you.

Ah, yes, the exquisite agony of heartbreak. We who have experienced it know that romantic love is a fall-in, crawl-out proposition: When you’re bonding with that special someone, everything is wondrously effortless; when the relationship hits the skids, getting through an ordinary day feels like climbing Everest without supplemental oxygen. But every instance of heartbreak can teach us powerful lessons about creating the kind of love we really want. 

Mind you, just having your heart broken won’t get you a degree in love-ology. If you learn nothing from heartbreak, you’ll keep repeating the same old painful subject matter in one bad relationship after another. If you refuse to love at all, you will guarantee isolation and pain, rather than preventing them. The only way to graduate from Heartbreak Academy is to really master the material, and that means absorbing crucial lessons about your true self, your true needs, and the nature of true love. 

Course offerings from the Heartbreak Academy of Emotional Pain

There are many ways to get your heart broken, all of them highly educational. Breakup 101 will teach you all about the discouragement and guilt that set in when you end a relationship that just isn’t working. In Situational Heartbreak 165, you’ll learn about the pain that occurs when you and your loved one are separated by circumstances such as geographic distance or (God forbid) death. Then there’s Advanced Conflict 206, a combat-training course you enter when you and your significant other become locked in a war of wills. Most unpleasant of all, in my opinion, is Unilateral Torture 262. This class starts when you’re deeply in love, investing full trust and openness in a relationship, and suddenly your partner calls the whole thing off or simply stops calling at all. It’s like getting hit by a truck, only way slower and more humiliating. 

Study Guide: How to Make It Through Heartbreak Academy

I was in my first semester of Unilateral Torture 262, a class I’d taken three or four times already, when I stumbled across a concept in a psychology textbook that finally allowed me to learn my lesson and move on. I don’t remember anything else about that book, but I recall one crucial sentence perfectly. “Some patients,” it said, “mistakenly believe that their loneliness is a product of another person’s absence.” I stopped and reread this maybe ten times, but it still baffled me. I could have sworn that my loneliness was a product of my ex–significant other’s absence. If not, then what on earth was it? 

Finally, slowly, over the next several days, weeks, years, the light dawned: My loneliness, and the antidote to it, did not come from the significant others I’d loved and lost. I’d been emotionally isolated before I ever fell in love. Something about certain people helped me lower the drawbridge over the moat that separated me from the world, but in the final analysis I was the one who’d actually done the trick. The power to bring me out of solitude—or to push me back into it—had never belonged to any other person. It was mine and only mine.

This realization is the most important thing you need to get through Heartbreak Academy with minimum effort and maximum positive effect. Realizing that your heartbreak is not a product of the other person’s absence brings the pain into an arena where you can work with it, instead of riveting your attention on some missing lover you may never see again and could never really control. Each time you find yourself longing for the love that was, asking yourself the following study-guide questions will help you learn the lessons of heartbreak and move on to a relationship that works. 

Study Question #1: How Old Do I Feel? 

Most often, heartbroken people are unknowingly grieving a loss or trauma rooted in childhood or adolescence. That’s because we tend to fall in love with people who remind us of those who cared for us—even badly—when we were young and totally vulnerable. We become childlike when we feel securely adored, letting go of all inhibition. The failure of adult relationships is often caused by the dysfunctions we internalized as children, and the devastation we endure when we’re rejected almost always opens ancient wounds, making us feel as bereft as an abandoned little kid.

If you ask yourself how old you feel when you’re in the worst throes of heartbreak, you’ll probably find that a surprisingly low number pops into your head. Whatever the age of your grieving inner child, it’s your job to comfort her, as you would help a toddler or a teen who had lost a parent. Do small, practical, caring things for yourself: Listen to a song that helps you grieve, schedule a play date with your best friend, wrap a soft blanket around yourself and let the tears come. Most important of all, give your childish self the chance to talk. Open your journal or visit your therapist, and let yourself express your anger and anguish in all its irrational, immature glory. 

As you do this, you will almost certainly find yourself grieving losses you suffered way back when, as well as the one you’ve just endured. This is good: It means that you are finally progressing beyond ways of thinking and acting that didn’t work for you early in your life and still aren’t working today. Acknowledging and comforting that younger self is absolutely essential to easing your pain, recovering from your wounds, and finding new sources of healthy love. 

Study Question #2: What Did My Lost Love Help Me Believe About Myself? 

Look back on the time when you were falling in love, and you’ll realize that though much (or some) of your time with your lover was fabulous, the relationship made you happy even when the two of you were physically apart. The really potent part of love is that it allows you to carry around beliefs about yourself that make you feel special, desirable, precious, innately good. To graduate from Heartbreak Academy, you have to learn that neither your ex-beloved nor the fact of being in love invested you with these qualities. Your lover couldn’t have seen them in you, even temporarily, if they weren’t part of your essential being. 

Make a list of all the things you let yourself believe when you saw yourself mirrored in loving eyes. Write them as facts: I’m fascinating. I’m beautiful. I’m funny. I’m important. Realize that you chose to believe these things in the context of your relationship, and now that the relationship is over, you have another choice: either to reject a loving view of yourself or to believe the truth. 

But, you may say, what if these positive things aren’t really true at all? What if the truth is that I’m hopelessly unlovable? Well, let me remind you that when you believe you’re an insignificant bird dropping on the sooty gray pavement of life, you feel unspeakably horrible. On the other hand, when you opt for believing what love once taught you about yourself, the core of your despair is replaced by sweetness, however bitter your subsequent loss. I say, use what works. Self-concept is a self-fulfilling prophecy: When we let ourselves believe that we’re wonderfully attractive, we act wonderfully attractive. By letting yourself believe the most loving things your ex ever said about you, you can get rid of the bathwater but keep the baby, honoring and preserving what was precious in your relationship, while letting go of the pain. 

Study Question #3: What Did My Relationship Give Me Permission To Do?

Being in love is so intoxicating, that special person so compelling, that lovers often drop some of the obligations and rules that dominated their lives before they met. When you’re in love, you may forget that you don’t usually allow yourself to splurge on perfume, or write poetry, or be wildly sexual, or say no to invitations you’d rather not accept. When your relationship is over, the bleak prospect of going back to the rules can drive you to the brink of despair, making you pine obsessively for your lost love to return and free you again. Eliminate the middleman. Free yourself. 

You can start by making another list. This time write down all the forbidden things you allowed yourself to do when you were madly in love with someone who was madly in love with you. Now give yourself permission to do all those things anyway. 

Nothing can make your trip through Heartbreak Academy easy or painless. Grieving will always hurt, but it is not mindless torture. It’s more like panning for gold. Recurrent floods of sadness and anger gradually wash away the rubble of the defunct relationship, leaving only the bits of treasure: the remembered moments of real communion, a new understanding of your own mistakes, a clear picture of the dysfunctions you will never tolerate again.

Letting these precious things emerge naturally means that you will retain the real love you’ve received, even as you let go of your former lover. And realizing that you hold the keys to your own healing will keep sadness from becoming despair and help you master the lessons a broken heart can teach. It means the relationships you create after that will be more trustworthy, the unavoidable losses less devastating. 

“The world breaks everyone,” Hemingway once wrote, “and afterward many are strong at the broken places.” A broken heart is simply a heart that has a chance to become stronger. It’s a heart that is more self-sufficient, more open to the truth, and more capable of lasting love. 

Ah, February. The month of hearts and flowers. The month in which, if you do not have a perfect relationship, all things conspire to make you suicidal. As a freshman at Harvard, I once went to the campus health service psychiatrist to explain that I was so buried in sadness and hopelessness that I was afraid I might simply might collapse and die on the cobbled streets of Cambridge.

“I think I have depression,” I told him.

“No,” he said, “this isn’t depression, this is just February.”

He was wrong, of course (I was depressed as hell) but he was also right. The month of February can be a cold harsh slog for the heart. It can make you feel very much alone.

I have had many difficult Februaries in my life, but this—I am overjoyed to say—is not one of them. In fact, I often feel as though I’m five years old and having a wonderful dream. As a child I was obsessed with nature and animals. Now I wake up in the morning to see deer daintily stepping past my bedroom window, a host of feathery angels eating at the bird feeder I put up, and a bobcat hunting in the pasture just beyond the fence.

Of one thing I am certain: I do not deserve one tiny bit more happiness than any other human being. (Except maybe Stalin; Stalin didn’t deserve much.

I believe the reason I’ve been given so much joy is very simple. Fairly early in my life, after having one of those near-death experiences everyone talks about, I set out to live in a way that would bring me home to my true self. Whatever felt like peace, truth, and spiritual freedom, I would do. Whatever felt like captivity, suffocation, or injustice, I would not do. It really is that simple, though there are times when it is not at all easy. (I’ll be describing the exact procedures in my telecourse that starts February 5th.)

Many people take umbrage when someone sets out to find his or her spiritual home. If you embark on a similar journey, you should expect some people to be shocked, to be angry, to tell you you’re breaking the rules. That has certainly been my experience. However, the rewards are inexpressibly wonderful. Heading towards that inner home will take you places—both inside yourself and in the external world—which your heart will recognize as its native environment, even though you have never been there before. I would go so far as to say that this may be the purpose for human life; that we are set free into a lonely universe like homing pigeons meant to find our way back to joy.

This may sound odd, but I have something I call a “song angel.” Very often when I’m especially desperate for answers I will hear snatches of a song or poem I barely remember. If I Google the lyrics they always turn out to be precisely the answer I needed.

When I bought the little house in the big woods that is bringing me so much bliss, my horse whisperer friend Koelle also moved to the property—a necessary condition of the move, since I know as much about running a ranch as chipmunks know about calculus. (Interesting factoid: chipmunks spend their entire life hiding food, but have a memory span of only 3 minutes. This means that they are constantly searching for things they have hidden from themselves. This is why chipmunks are my spirit animal.) Just before Koelle moved to the property, I was on the computer and I suddenly developed the conviction that I needed to know the American Sign Language gesture for “home.” The way I Googled my request brought up a short video by a young man named Colby Moses who signed a song called This Is Home by the rock group Switchfoot. It was immediately clear to me that I should play this song to Koelle when she moved to the ranch. It felt perfect because not only had Koelle roamed the world learning her craft without ever having a real home base, but she was also having trouble with her ears and I knew there were days where she could barely hear at all.

So when Koelle moved into the ranch several months before I did, I gathered all our friends who had come to help with the move and showed them Colby Moses’s video. We all wept copiously. And that, I thought, was the end of that. But six weeks later, when Karen and I moved to the ranch and turned on our television to see if it wouldwork, guess what was playing on the TV? Oh, yes it was. This is Home by Switchfoot. It was only then that I Googled the song again and learned that it came from a movie about Narnia—a magical land where the animals can talk that had obsessed me since early childhood.

Now, please remember what I said in the first part of this newsletter: we come home in the material world when we come to the truth and liberation of our real selves. Please humor me by joining me in a life coachy exercise, right now. First, remember a time when, even if only for a moment, you felt safe and loved enough to relax your defenses and let go of your fears. Remember a time when you could breathe a long sigh of relief, knowing that in that moment, nothing would harm you, nothing would shame you, and there was nothing to guard against. Hold that moment in your memory until it fills your mind and becomes your present moment. Then click on this link—This is Home—listen to my song angel and feel the truth of the message.

I don’t know what my song angel actually is; I don’t hold any religious opinions or beliefs but I do feel (and experience confirms) that there is Something guiding us toward the places we belong, in our hearts and on this planet. So here is the challenge: Once you get to you inner home, don’t go back to how it was. NEVER go back. As the song says, you were created for this place even if you have never known it. You are a miracle, and you are not alone.“ 

That doesn’t bother me, though, because I’m less competitive than Besty. If someone were to rank us on noncompetitiveness, I would definitely win.

Anyway, one January—resolution time, goal time, gotta-shed-holiday-weight time—Besty and I joined some pals at a spa, planning to refocus, get in shape, prove that when the going gets tough, the tough get going. Instead, that week taught me to honor W.C. Fields’s profound statement “If at first you don’t succeed, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.” The thing is, science supports this. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the ability to quit easily makes us healthier—and wealthier—than does leechlike tenacity.

Quitters Win and Winners Quit

After settling in at the spa, Besty and I considered the activities being offered the following day.

“Oh, look!” said Besty. “There’s a morning hike at 5 a.m.!”

“Great!” I said, trying not to show horror. If Besty could haul herself out of bed and frolic athletically in the middle of the night, then, dammit, so could I.

“We’ll be back in time for water aerobics,” said Besty. “And after that, weight training and then kickboxing. This’ll be so fun!”

“Fun!” I echoed. Then I heard my own voice, like a train with no brakes, saying, “How about Pilates and Jazzercise after that?”

“Cool!” said Besty. “I’m in!”

Dammit! 

The next day was a blur of sweaty, exhausting, recondite competition. Besty walked faster than I did on the hike, because I’m not a morning person. Then I edged her out in weight training. Kickboxing was a draw—her kicks were higher, but she’s tall, which must be considered. Besty got more praise from the Pilates coach, but I got more in Jazzercise. After seven straight hours of strenuous exercise, I felt as though my muscles had been taken apart, scoured, then badly reassembled by a team of evil student nurses. Besty still looked fresh. Pert. She looked really pert.

“Ready to call it a day?” I asked.

“Well…” Besty said. “There’s still an advanced yoga class before dinner.”

I looked at my schedule. Dammit! Dammit! Dammit!

“Shall we?” asked Besty, like a kid on Christmas morning.

“Absolutely!” I gagged. “Wouldn’t miss it!” That class lasted approximately as long as the Pleistocene epoch. I try never to think of it. Sometimes, though, despite heavy medication, the memory returns unbidden, and I hear again the yoga instructor’s comment, “The key to success is persistence. Quitting is failure.” My mind reacted to this with numb acquiescence—I’d heard it so often, after all. But my body silently screamed, “Not always!”

Turns out my body was right.

Recently, psychologists Gregory Miller and Carsten Wrosch set out to investigate the mental and physical health of people who resist quitting, and of those who throw in the towel when facing unattainable goals. The second group—the quitters—were healthier than their persistent peers on almost every variable. They suffered fewer health problems, from digestive trouble to rashes, and showed fewer signs of psychological stress.

In another study, which followed a group of teenagers for a year, subjects who quit easily had much lower levels of a protein linked to inflammation than did their more tenacious peers. This made them less likely to develop many debilitating illnesses later in life.

The mechanism that helps people quit appropriately, Miller and Wrosch discovered, was not wisdom but dejection. People who are trying in vain eventually get depressed about their ongoing failure, and those who respond to this depression by quitting when it first appears enjoy all kinds of benefits.

I didn’t think about this scientifically during that yoga class—though I experienced it subjectively when the teacher guided us into a shoulder stand. The pose caused my body to quake violently with exhaustion as my workout shorts fell back around my pelvis and my gaze was forced upward. Gentle reader, you cannot imagine a ghastlier view: The depression evoked by the gelatinous consistency of my thighs beggars description.

I should’ve quit right then. I would have, if Besty weren’t so competitive. 

The Quitting Bonus

The fact that I continued with the class exemplifies my approach to life and no doubt explains my digestive troubles, rashes, and inflammatory illnesses. But the implications don’t stop there: Not quitting may be at the root of fiscal problems as well as physical ones. That’s right—quitters prosper not only physically but financially.

Every first-year economics student learns about the “sunk-cost fallacy,” though virtually no one remembers it when making spending choices. The sunk-cost fallacy is a universal human error. It refers to our tendency to throw good money after bad, trying to justify our mistakes by devoting more resources to them. For example, a gambler who’s lost a small fortune is likely to stay and keep hemorrhaging cash precisely because he’s losing. “I’m down $10,000,” the thinking goes. “I have to keep playing until I get it back—this rotten luck can’t go on forever.” This is how human psychology works.

It is not how reality works. 

A gambler is no more likely to win on the 500th roulette spin than on any of the previous 499. But a huge amount of effort goes into attempts at redeeming things—lemon cars, money–pit houses, horrible relationships, wars—that just aren’t working. Learning to quit while you’re not ahead, when the dull ooze of depression tells you things are not going to get any better, is one of the best financial and life skills you can master.

This should have occurred to me well before Besty and I hit that yoga studio. It should have occurred to me several years earlier, when I first realized that she was simply better than I was at everything. But even after a thousand failed attempts—and even though I once actually taught at a business school—I forged on.

How to Quit

Moving from shoulder stand to triangle pose, I was hit by two things: a back spasm and the realization that though I was ready to quit, I didn’t know how. I’d never practiced quitting. I didn’t know the right path out of the room, the right facial expression, the right way to give up.

So there I stood, befuddled, trying to touch my right foot with my right hand while bending sideways, when I heard a complicated thumping from the other side of the studio. By rolling my eyes far back into my skull, I saw what had made the sound. Besty had toppled from triangle pose directly into corpse pose.

She seemed too tired to speak, but from her feeble movements, she might have been trying to signal something—perhaps that she wished to be rinsed. But I took my own message from her example. In that moment, I saw with great clarity that (to paraphrase poet Elizabeth Bishop) the art of quitting isn’t hard to master. We can always just go limp.

That’s something any toddler intuitively knows. For instance, when my daughter Katie was 3, she said she’d just met “that fat lady next door.” I told her that was wonderful, except that it was better to refer to “the fat lady” as Mrs. Ellis.

“What if I forget?” Katie asked.

“Well, honey, then I’ll remind you.”

Katie thought for a minute and asked, “What if I refuse?”

That, frankly, was a stumper. I had no real way to force my daughter—or anyone else—to continue doing something she simply refused to do.

So, how do you quit doing something when depression, inflammation, and financial disaster loom? If worst comes to worst, just stop. The formalities will take care of themselves. I’m not advocating this, but if you stop showing up at work, they’ll fire you. If you refuse to act married, your spouse will eventually drift away or file for divorce. It’s far better karma to be up-front and honorable about quitting. I’m just pointing out that you always have the power to quit something at a physical level. In other words: Corpse pose is always an option.

This applies to everything, including (stay with me here) the process of quitting itself. If you’re trying in vain to quit something you do compulsively, like overspending or smoking or macramé, try quitting the effort to quit. As therapists like to say, “What we resist, persists,” and this is especially true of bad habits. Imagine trying not to eat one sinfully delicious chocolate truffle. Got it? Okay, now imagine trying to eat 10,000 truffles at one sitting. For most of us, the thought of not-quitting in this enormous way—indulging ourselves beyond desire—actually dampens the appetite. It’s a counterintuitive method, but if the “I will abstain from…” resolutions you make each year are utter, depressing failures, you might quit quitting and see what happens. When my clients stop unsuccessful efforts to quit, they often experience such a sense of relief and empowerment that quitting becomes easier—it’s paradoxical but true. (Try it before you dismiss it.)

I didn’t know what made Besty hit the floor of the yoga studio. I assumed she’d simply misplaced her center of gravity, due to having lost so much weight in one day. But I was wrong. She’d had enough—and her giving in to the force of gravity had a liberating effect on me. I found myself shuffling toward the door, and as I did, my depression lightened. I’d stumbled across a transformative resolution I’d keep all that year: to quit when I was behind, without shame or self-recrimination. It was a watershed moment in my life and in my friendship with Besty. She was fitter and more determined than I was, and even when it came to quitting, my friend had done the job first, and best.

Dammit.