Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things. We are starting 2026 with a gift for you. Nothing says New Year's energy like Martha Beck. So today, we're revisiting our very first conversation together. Think of this as an invitation for an hour. Feel what you feel. Know what you know. And then begin again. Martha has always helped me with that process. She has helped me restart my life several times.
Not from her advice, but from the way she constantly guides me back to myself. When I first fell in love with Abby, I was the happiest I had ever been in my life. And I was also deeply afraid. It was like I felt this incredible warmth and comfort and freedom for the first time. But my mind was telling me I could not have it. My mind was trying to control it.
My mind was saying no, no, no, no, while the rest of me was saying yes, please. My mind has always been a little stronger than the rest of me.
Chapter 2: How does Martha Beck help individuals reconnect with their inner selves?
Um, and it was winning. So one day I called my friend Martha and I told her all of the reasons why I was desperately in love and happy. And then I told her all of the reasons why that love was impossible, why it couldn't happen, why my entire life would fall apart if I did try to make it happen.
And I was spinning and spinning and spinning, making a really strong case to Martha about how none of this could happen. And she just said, Glennon, stop. I need you to remove yourself from your head, which always makes an excellent case. And I need you to get back into your body. And for one moment, I need you to think about me. What feels warmer?
When you think about going towards Abby, going towards this love, letting yourself have this love, do you feel warm or cold? And I said, warm. And she said, when you consider cutting it off, stopping it, going back to your old life, do you feel warm or cold? And I said, that feels very cold. And she said, okay, well, I'm making dinner now. I have to go. I hope that was enough information for you.
Martha is a master of returning us to ourselves. And that is why I trust her. Today, she will help you return to yourself. She will stop making dinner. She will listen to your spinning brain. And she will return you to the deepest wisdom you have, which is in your body. PodSquad, we hope you love this episode as much as we do. Let's go, Martha.
Welcome to We Can Do Hard Things and I just want to tell you that I'm super excited today because we have someone with us who has helped and changed millions of lives but mine in particular. She has personally walked me through some of the trickiest times that I've had and I'm excited.
The person that we have here today, well, first of all, I'll stop being mysterious and tell you that her name is Martha Beck. The Martha Beck is here. Hello, Martha. Hi. Hi. I am so grateful that you're here. My sister, for many years, has heard me talking about you. So, sister, this is Martha. This is the Martha I'm always talking about.
Hello, the famous and yet mysterious sister. Behind the sister word.
After all these many years, it's such a joy to meet you, Martha. Thank you. Thank you for everything you did for Glenn and Abby. The joy is all mine.
And Martha, I want to tell you some stories as we start off here that I don't think you know because you have been helping me for a lot longer than you know. So I first found your work lo so many years ago when I was pregnant with Chase. Really? Okay. So I haven't told you this story, but when I was pregnant with Chase with my first baby, kid. I was like 14 minutes sober. Okay.
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Chapter 3: What question changed Glennon's perspective on love?
I was pregnant with my second child. And about six months into the pregnancy, we had an amniocentesis and it turned out he had Down syndrome. And I had like a week to choose whether or not to terminate. I am Very outspokenly pro-choice, but I couldn't do it. I was already in love with him. So, plus I'd been having these weird experiences from the moment I got pregnant. I was, I'll just say it.
I'd have psychic experiences. Like there was something weird about the kid. And there still is today. And he's 33. I went against all my advisors advice and I kept him. They told me I was throwing my life away. And they were absolutely right. And the life I threw away was stupid and sucked. And the life I got instead is awesome. So that's that.
Oh, so good. So I had, so then I just turned my life into expecting Chase. Okay. Wow. And then, so I'm expecting Chase with Down syndrome and then Chase is born and he doesn't freaking have Down syndrome. So I had the opposite. So then I let go of that life that I thought we were going into because by that time, Martha, that's what I was expecting. That's what I was ready for. That's what he was.
That's what we were ready. Oh my God. Okay. Right. Then fast forward. I'm married to a man. Mm-hmm. He keeps accidentally cheating on me. I tripped. Yeah. I find out all the things. It was kind of a public situation. I heard about it. Right. Read about it. Right. I had this situation where... I was so confused.
I was stuck because I had always led my life by, by polling and just asking everyone what I should do.
Right.
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Chapter 4: How can we differentiate between fear-based thinking and body wisdom?
And then they would tell me and I would get a consensus and that's how I would know what I was supposed to do.
Okay.
That's how I ended up married to a man. Okay. So I've always been in this Christian mindset. feminist spot.
Strange position.
It's a hard Venn diagram, Martha. It is. And this is the moment where all of my Christian friends were like, the right thing to do is to stay.
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Chapter 5: What practical steps can we take to cultivate joy?
A good woman would stay. A brave mother would stay. And all of my feminist friends were like, the right thing to do is get your ass out of there, right? A strong mother would leave. And Martha, this is the moment where I realized, oh, I see. Good, right, wrong. These are not real things. These are just- It's completely subjective. Subject, cultural.
These are the barking sheepdogs that keep the herd in, right? These are the- Yep, yep. Like this beautiful moment where a woman realizes, oh, if I can't, I can't please everybody. Yay. Which means I guess I'll please myself. The only problem is I don't know what the frick self is. Uh-huh. But this is when I read, was it North Star?
This is when I was reading the book about academia versus spiritual world, which for me was Christian world versus feminine world. Right, right. Feminist world. Tell us about that for a minute. Tell us how you realized, because when you say it was academia versus you, didn't you also figure out
that the answers weren't in the woo-woo world completely, and it wasn't in the Harvard world completely. Yeah, yeah.
It's so funny that you use the term coming to consensus, because that actually is the way most people live. We look around at the pressures on us from other people, and we come to consensus, and we choose what makes us fit in best. I actually just started a podcast with my partner, Ron and Megan, and we talk... The theme, it's called Bewildered, and the theme is...
Don't live by coming to consensus. Live by coming to your senses. So what happens when you realize that the consensus is off. So I was raised Mormon, okay, like super duper Mormon. And that just turned me into a hardcore atheist by the time I went to Harvard. And I was like, yeah, intellect is everything. Then I get pregnant. I'm having psychic experiences. Yeah. I am so broken by the diagnosis.
I'm not as good a person as you are. So I'm like, I hate life and I want to die. When you get to the place where you hate life and you want to die and you actually let that part of you die, there's still something left and it comes to its senses. It's like, it's often a place where no social pressure can reach.
And it kind of raises its head out of the crowd of the world and says, okay, over here, come here. And it is whatever your belief system is a profoundly mystical experience and I actually did my dissertation on this at Harvard I had to be very careful about it.
But after I had Adam it was like they said you've thrown your career away and I thought well I'll just go back to finish my dissertation in Provo, Utah. where I grew up and everyone will understand why I didn't have an abortion and they'll all be proud of me, which they were. But then I went there and figured out I was a lesbian.
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Chapter 6: How does Martha Beck define the concept of living by consensus?
And we're like, we know there's more to life than this. We want to be free. We want to have joy. We want to feel like whatever the F you just said. We want to feel like that. Yeah. How do we start? Like, where does a woman who's got three kids who need her to get out of bed and get to school and, you know, a job that she doesn't feel like she's playing at?
Oh, yeah.
Where do we begin?
Yep, that was me. Three kids under four, one with a disability, trying to get... my degree and teach when I had such bad, um, autoimmune illnesses that I couldn't stand, sit or use my hands. Like I was at the bottom. So this is how you do it. You push yourself to the point where you can't do it anymore.
Then you go in your room and you say, get out a piece of paper and you say, here is what I am fucking sick of. Here is what I will. Nice.
fucking hate this i hate it i called it i call it liberation through pain and rage i fucking hate this and you write it all down yeah and then that's what consensus is making you do because the rage inside you is the natural it's the wild animal saying no and that's where you yeah that's where you have the cheetah be a cheetah and and that's the first thing it'll say is oh Good. Write it down.
Or for some people, there's not that energy. It's just like, ugh, I can't go on. Yeah. I cannot go on. I cannot move. I cannot stand this. And then that's the wild animal. Okay. So you let the soft animal of your body love what it loves, and then you express it and write it down. Write it all down, the most forbidden things, because the forbidden things you're thinking are
are the things that consensus has shoved on you and told you never to think. And the natural response is to fight that or to go completely inert and say, well, then I'll just die. That was my response. I think I'll just die. And yeah, I did. And then I was still alive. And I was like, well, now I don't really give a shit what anybody thinks of me because I'm dead. So I think I'm gay.
Yeah.
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Chapter 7: What does it mean to follow your inner compass?
Okay.
And here's what you tell them. Somebody tried to gay shame me the other day. And I looked at them and I said, I love you so much. And I don't care what you think. I just don't. I deeply do not care. You can't even imagine how little I care what you think of me. And I really love you and I wish you well in life. And I never want to see you again. Right. But yeah, the instructions are there.
They're there inside the rage. They're there inside the dejection and the limpness and the suffering. The suffering is teaching you the instructions for your life. And here's the cool thing. Nobody else has them. The only way you're going to ever find them is if you go in and get them from inside yourself. Your instructions are nowhere else but inside you.
If it's possible, sister, I feel like your revolution you're having recently, right? With just like feeling a lot of all of the daily grind so much that it's grinding you out of your life and your humanity. Would you mind just like describing what's happening with you just for a minute and just asking Martha, like, what is the 1% thing you'd do next? You know what I mean?
Like, what's the next step for someone who's in sister's life moment? Because I feel like so many people are.
I feel like I'm like a chef who has all the ingredients of a really lovely meal. So I have like all the parts of life that should be creating this like beautiful, beautiful life. But yet I have this like anger and resentment thing. And really short fuse about everything. And I feel like I, what the realization I came to recently is that I don't have the things that are coming from me. Yeah.
Like everything is like a duty on me. Like things that should be joyful are duties. And I realized that I don't have any room in my life to, for any of those things to grow, to respond to. So everything just feels like duty.
Yeah.
So that's why your kind of 1% idea of like just every little choice, being able to open something open up felt like possible to me as opposed to some radical life changing new way of living. I just don't know how to implement that to begin to give myself what I need. So I'm not resenting all the people around me that I don't have it.
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