Wisdom from Martha Beck
Myra (far right) with Martha Beck (4th from left) and fast-made friends during “Author’s Week” at Miraval in Tucson, Arizona 2008
I’ve been a fan of Martha Beck for two decades, ever since I read her book, Expecting Adam, which chronicled her wildly painful—and exceptionally magical—accidental pregnancy with a baby she decided to keep despite the fact that he was diagnosed with Down Syndrome in utero while she was getting her PhD at Harvard. Six years later, she published another incredible memoir, Leaving the Saints, which described her childhood in Utah as the seventh of eight children raised as “Mormon royalty” within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The book shares how Martha faced her history of sexual abuse by her father (one of the Church’s most prominent authorities), and her difficult decision to sever her relationship with her faith and leave the community she’d been raised in. Not long after, she came out as gay.
As a best-selling author, speaker and life coach, Martha helps countless people by unveiling the most intimate details of her life and healing journey as she shares the powerful lessons she’s gleaned with honesty, bravery, pragmatism and humor. Her work focuses on the importance of listening to our “inner teacher” so we can live our own truth and stop subjugating ourselves to societal pressures and norms: “Imagine what you’d do if it absolutely didn’t matter what people thought of you. Got it? Good. Never go back.”
Martha encourages us to stop fearing mistakes (“Studies show that people who worry about mistakes shut down, but those who are relaxed about doing badly soon learn to do well. Success is built on failure”), and that “losses aren’t cataclysmic if they teach the heart and soul their natural cycle of breaking and healing.” She explains that once we’re willing to confront our emotional suffering, “we begin making choices based on attraction instead of aversion, love instead of fear.”
So much of Martha’s philosophy is reminiscent of my father’s. She explains the importance of positive thinking (“If we’re stuck with having expectations, there’s a very good reason to embrace positive ones: It’s that we often create what we anticipate.”), showing unconditional love to our inner child (“Caring for your inner child has a powerful and surprisingly quick result: Do it and the child heals.”), and how reconnecting to our inner child can help us live our most joyful life.
Martha points out that the average adult laughs fifteen times each day, while the average child laughs more than 400 times. She wrote, “Rest until you feel like playing, then play until you feel like resting, period. Never do anything else.” How I love the spirit of that advice. Thank you, Martha!
Myra
