Martha Creek Interview

Rick: Welcome to Buddha at the Gas Pump. My name is Rick Archer and my guest this week is Martha Creek. And I met Martha a couple of months ago when she came to my town of Fairfield, Iowa, and did a very lovely session on The Work by Byron Katie. Martha is a certified facilitator for The Work and most people listening probably will have heard of Byron Katie. In fact, about six months or so ago I filled out this long detailed form on Byron Katie’s website asking to do an interview and they turned me down. But maybe after I’ve done you, you’ll kind of like be a stepping stone or something in being able to interview Byron, or Katie rather. Martha is also serving Unity Churches. She’s in a ministry serving Unity Churches. And over the last week or two I’ve listened to a number of audios of Martha, both in her capacity as a Byron Katie facilitator and as a Unity Church advisor. And also I’ve just started listening to a very nice teleclass she gave on Eckhart Tolle’s book, “A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose.” And all this stuff is available on Martha’s website which I’ll be linking to from my website after this interview and anyone listening can download it all and listen themselves. So welcome Martha and thanks for this opportunity.

Martha Thank you, Rick. I’m blessed to do it and just delight at what may come to us and through us and I believe it’s a blessing for the world what you do and what you are and that’s my mission, too, to serve humanity. So here we go.

Rick: So one thing I heard in listening to you talk to various people and do some interviews is that you were born in Bugtussle, Kentucky. Is that right?

Martha That’s right. It’s on the border of Tennessee, just a rock’s throw over from Tennessee. It’s smack in the middle of the state and it’s where the Beverly Hillbillies came from. So I have a claim to fame and you are on it.

Rick: But you didn’t strike oil.

Martha We haven’t yet and I’m really open to that.

Rick: I wonder who named the town. They must have seen a couple of bugs tussling.

Martha That’s the report and we had t-shirts for a few years when I was a kid that showed the tussle bugs and they’re actually dung beetles and you can figure that out. Tussling right along. That’s the report.

Rick: Tussling means they were fighting with each other, right, the bugs?

Martha It could be. This was more like dung beetles, which was rolling dung to do whatever they do with that.

Rick: Oh, okay. Good. Because when I first heard the name, I thought, well those beetles weren’t loving what is if they had such a difference of opinion that they had a town named after it.

Martha Just like humanity, we’re not loving what is yet, most of us.

Rick: So, you know, I don’t imagine that in Bugtussle, Kentucky, there was a great wealth of opportunity for spiritual unfoldment, although there must have been local churches and all that you attended as a child. So, maybe we could sketch out the course of your spiritual trajectory.

Martha Yeah, you’re right about it. There were a lot of churches, actually churches on every corner, and my family didn’t go to church. I was just really called to go to church. I remember at three years old declaring out loud that “I’m going to be a minister.” It was very frightening, startling, and shocking to my family because, A: women are not ministers. And B: there was no indicator that you would just self-ordain. So, it’s like there was no way, no path to be seen about how that could actually be accomplished. I got the neighbors to take me to church. I was that strongly called to go to church and to find that. I had some radar about people as well and some distinct memories as a child about not wanting to be in certain churches. It wasn’t anything to do with the teaching, it was more to do with the people that were there. I had some kind of strange vibes from certain people that I found out later was really right on. There was one particular man, for example, who was actually molesting his children. Even as a child I had some awareness about that.

Rick: He was a minister of that church or a parishioner?

Martha He was a deacon in the church, so like a lead of the church. I just kept looking around. I got other neighbors that were going to other churches to come and get me. I had a very strong conviction about what was reality, which I now call God. What was God, what is God, and what is the reality of God? So, even though I was hearing certain things, teachings through the church and their beliefs, I was very strongly convicted to my own. I took the parts that seemed to work for me. I didn’t lose myself in those teachings. I stayed really true to what I believed.

Rick: This is when you were a young child, 5, 6, 7, 8 years old?

Martha Yes, even as a child.

Rick: That’s interesting. Boy, I didn’t have a clue at that age, any of this. I had to be dragged to church, kicking and screaming, each Sunday. What was your conviction of what God was at that point?

Martha God is good. God is good. We are a spark of that, so that we are inherently good. We lose track of that. We lose awareness of that. Through that lack of awareness, we do very strange things based on what we’re seeking outside of ourselves and actually believing that it’s possible to find it outside of ourselves. The reality is that it’s who we are, what we are, all of what we are. To look inward and to connect and commune with the essence of who we are really works. To look outside of ourselves and to distract ourselves outside of ourselves leads us down some very interesting paths that are mostly painful and very confusing.

Rick: So even as a young child, you had that conviction that God was to be found within?

Martha Yes, and that God was omnipotent, always present. I really enjoyed that, as a child; the elements, the earth, the wind, the smells. Whatever was here, I had some kind of notion that it was for me, that it was a gift to me, that the gift of life was precious, and that it was all for me.

Rick: You must not have read that or even been told that by anybody. This was just something that you innately knew, is that right?

Martha That’s how I would say it, like a defined idea. From a thought like that, I didn’t vary from it. I actually believed it and stayed true to believing that. The first scriptures I read were from the Bible that was given to me by a Sunday school teacher. She just gave all of her Sunday school children a Bible. I actually read the Bible a bit, and I was drawn to things like the Psalms, and certain parables and stories that seemed to support what I was believing. So I found quickly, probably at age 10 or 12, I found what I considered substantial indicators that what I was believing was true, based on how I interpreted what the Bible said.

Rick: That’s nice. I mean, there are certain spiritual teachers and authorities who have said that the purpose of scripture is not to just give you a package of beliefs that you should just accept blindly, but rather they should be a confirmation thing, to confirm and supplement what you’re actually experiencing.

Martha Yeah, and that was my experience, and it was a very solid teaching for me, too, the way that it was presented, the stories that were told, the parables were very meaningful to me. So it was easy for me, fairly easy for me to integrate that. Like, this is solid ground here. Like, this is the way to live.

Rick: Was there a fair amount of fire and brimstone being thrown at you at the same time?

Martha There was, and I found it interesting, and I didn’t have any effect of that. I don’t recall ever being afraid of that. I simply did not believe it.

Rick: That’s interesting, and you say it’s cool that, as such a young child, you had that level of discrimination that you were able to kind of separate the wheat from the chaff and take what you need and leave the rest.

Martha Yeah, it got interesting, too, because I was known as being like a fearless child, that things didn’t really frighten me. Even to the point of I didn’t believe in death. I don’t believe that death is the end of anything. So I had less identification than some, and I remember an example of that is my father was very much afraid of fire, the thoughts of fire, and then of storms and tornadoes and wind and things. He would wake us up as a child, our family, and ask us to go to the cellar, which is an underground place where fruit was stored, canned fruit and vegetables for the Second Coming. When he woke me up one time to go, I just said I’m not going to go.

Rick: Was there a storm coming?

Martha Yeah, yeah. It was a strong enough “No,” for lack of a better way of putting it, that he didn’t question me. He didn’t try to convince me. What happened instead was, from that day forward, the family never went in that cellar again.

Rick: Interesting, you kind of set the trend.

Martha I did, or it did, yeah.

Rick: A lot of times when I hear stories like this, you know, like your proclivities with such a clear conception of what God is and such a strong conviction, and then your father’s fear of fire and tornadoes and all, I can’t help but think of past lives, you know, with certain tendencies ingrained in us that we bring into this one.

Martha Yeah, and I’m open to that, too. I don’t have any explanation for it, and that seems right to me. I don’t explore. I’ve been very open to past lives. I’ve had several people to offer their insights about past lives I’ve had and all that, and I find it very interesting, and it even seems right, meaningful to me, and I don’t spend much time examining that because this life is a full-time job for me.

Rick: Yeah, I mean it’s sort of an interesting theory, but I wouldn’t dwell on it too much myself either. So as you moved into your teenage years, did you get into any of the usual teenage confusion and, you know, identity crisis?

Martha I did not.

Rick: You just cruised right through, huh?

Martha I did, and I was just an old soul, considered wise. I recall people, even my high school principal… There’s a story about us having a fire drill in our school, and we went out and we had to evacuate for the drill, and it was almost over. Our next period, our next class period, was basketball, and that was my real love of sports and activities and things. I just had an idea, let’s go on and get dressed, you know, and get ready for basketball because this is going to be over in a little bit. So when we went back in the building, we didn’t report to the class that we had left. We were now ready for the next class, and the principal came over the intercom and actually said these words, “Would Martha Creek and her little congregation please come to the office?” So that’s kind of an indicator of that, that there was a following of some sort, that there was a calm about me and something that was attractive to people that was not afraid, and that was what they would call very positive thinking, even Pollyanna-ish and things like that, that was the way I was living my life out.

Rick: I’m glad you said that because… I’m sorry, go ahead.

Martha I recall asking my mother once, I said, “You’ve never told me what time to be home.” I found that so shocking that people were told what time to come home, and I wasn’t. And she said, “I’ve never had to tell you what time to come home.”

Rick: Yeah, because you just came.

Martha I just went home, yeah.

Rick: Yeah. It’s funny that you brought up that story about your little congregation because I was going to ask you whether, you know, having such strong convictions and really being different than people in many respects, because not many people think that way, made you sort of an oddball who didn’t have many friends, but now you’re saying it actually attracted people to you.

Martha Yes, yes, it was the opposite of that. And I was friends with people that it did make sense to be friends with. So I didn’t have gender kind of issues, I didn’t have socioeconomic things, I felt as comfortable with somebody that had so-called everything as someone who didn’t have too much. I felt a very sense of, very much a sense of equality and oneness with people that really didn’t make any sense.

Rick: Did you find yourself coming to the defense of kids who were being picked on and, you know, that kind of thing that happens in high school?

Martha I did, and in a calmer way, though, it was more like a mediator, you know. And there’s evidences of that, of actually breaking up scuffles and fights and things. And it was very easy for me. There was never any question about whether to do it. It was just like walking in and going, “Stop this.” And I didn’t have any kind of setup in my mind that one was right or one was wrong, or somebody caused it, it was just like, “Stop this here.” So it was like what a teacher or somebody trained would have done, and I did it. I just did it as a child. And there’s a story about my uncle. We lived and worked on a farm, and we worked in tobacco. And going up this winding road to the tobacco field one day, my brother driving a tractor, the tractor hit a tree, jarred the wagon, my uncle fell off the wagon, under the tractor wheel, the tractor rolled back on top of his body. I jumped off the wagon and held the tractor wheel, and kind of took my foot and raked him out from under it, and then turned around. And I was 10 or 12 years old, and I looked around at everybody there and said, “You do this, you do that, you go get the car, you help me pick him up.” And then we loaded him in the car. I looked at the driver, which was my mother, and said, “Drive him directly to this hospital. Do not stop for anything. Just get him straight there.” And looking back on that, it’s like that would make no sense that you’re running like triage for something when you’re a kid, so to speak. And I just had a sense of calm and a sense of clarity of my mind that’s not fogged over or kind of whacked out in some kind of crisis situation like that. I was able to have a presence and functioning about me that I have no words to express the gratitude for.

Rick: Oh, that’s very fortunate. And you’re not saying that you had superhuman strength, like they hear of mothers lifting cars off their children, and you stop the tractor by virtue of that. You’re just saying that you just kind of had a lot of presence of mind and were able to sort of orchestrate that.

Martha Yes, so it was not superhuman, just enough that you could actually stop a tractor from rolling. Just with my strength, I’m a big and strong person.

Rick: Yeah, but a 12-year-old girl can’t stop a tractor, you know?

Martha Well, the tractor was stopped; it was just rolling.

Rick: Oh, so somehow you were able to apply enough force to keep it from rolling any further.

Martha Yes, yes, yes. I don’t consider it superhuman, though, to answer your question. It was more like a common sense, something if your mind is clear enough to actually see that and then respond in that way.

Rick: So it sounds like you never went through a 60s drug phase like many of us did.

Martha I was born in 1960.

Rick: Oh, okay. So you were much too young for this. Well, actually, the drugs phase started then and never stopped, really, but it sounds like you missed it.

Martha Well, and the truth is I’ve never taken a drug. I’ve never had a drug like I’ve had Advil or something like that, rarely, and nothing really outside of that.

Rick: That’s great. I’m saying it’s great because this is stuff that I – I mean, a lot of what you’re saying is the antithesis of who I was and what I went through when I was a kid and a teenager and everything else, so it’s refreshing to hear somebody who managed to bypass all that.

Martha Well, and it’s interesting because it didn’t really come to me to do it. Then, when I would actually consider it, it was like the answer was just a solid, “No,” inside of me. This is a “No.” I rationalized it back then by – I had a lot of energy and would often – I didn’t sleep very much, naturally. If there was a substance of some sort that would extend that, I felt like I would be highly addictive to something. If I could actually find something where I didn’t have to sleep at all, sleeping was such a drag to me. There was so much I wanted to do and be, so much life to have, and that was the thought really that stopped me from doing it a lot of times. If there was really some power in some drug that would prevent me from sleeping, I would probably be highly addicted to that. That seemed like a good enough reason not to do it. It didn’t have any real moral or ethical considerations. I never saw it as that. It was really just more practical.

Rick: Yeah. I mean, ultimately, I think it all boils down to physiological considerations with those things and it has very serious, diminishing returns. A couple of days, you might not have slept and then you’d pay for it.

Martha And I feel very blessed about that, that we’ve all got our things, you know, and what our crazy, confused thinking will take us to. I feel like that was grace in some way, that just wasn’t my thing.

Rick: So, at what point did you start actively pursuing actual spiritual practices of some kind? Because I know you’ve been through a few.

Martha Yeah, even as a child, I felt like I prayed daily, meditated, I read the Bible. I had a reference for what was how I wanted to live, who I’d come here to be. And then, as an adult, I started exploring things, Transcendental Meditation, and I went to mystery schools and I’ve done various rituals and practices and things over the years and still ongoing in that. Loving what is is actually a spiritual practice for me. Loving what is and questioning the inquiry of the mind is a meditation. And it’s the most significant spiritual practice that I’ve had because it absolutely works for me, 100% of the time, in 100% of the situations. And in my belief, it will work for 100% of people who really do want to open their mind and really do want to get to the other side to see what the truth is.

Rick: So, should we get into that now or is there anything of significance in your kind of biological, autobiographical account here that, you know, such as some of these practices and all the real highlights that are worth mentioning?

Martha Some find it interesting because, from that three-year commitment I made when I was 40 years old, I had quite a success in the world as far as corporate life and startup businesses and achievement and all that. And I was absolutely committed to end all that when I turned 40, which was in the year 2000. So, I started a bigger search for spiritual groundedness and even seminaries. I looked at seminaries and where I’m going to go get official training and credentialing to be a minister when I was 40. So I left what most people would work their whole life to achieve and to have in the way of title and position and money. I left it, just clean, a clean break from that at age 40 to go do what I felt like was my life’s calling to do. And I felt like every single thing I’d done in my life, though, was preparing me for what I was going to do when I was 40. And even though I was in a corporate environment, I always felt like I was applying spiritual principles, which I attributed to the success that I had as a result of living it out from a spiritual realm that I was approaching everything from that way.

Rick: That’s great. So, essentially, you were able to retire at about 40 and, you know, begin to dedicate yourself to your true love in life.

Martha It’s true, yeah. And then I started studying mediation skills, conflict resolution, and that really came from looking around in these ministries and these organizations, not just churches, but in organizations. And what I saw as a lack of preparedness that people had, particularly ministers and spiritual people in these organizations, that they were not prepared for what was going on in the field, including myself. I had a naïveté about that that was shocking to me, that I thought if I could have the success that I’d had in the corporate world, that by the time I got into these deeper spiritual venues and organizations, like churches, where we’re all such nice people and spiritual people, that it was going to be like, you know, just an amazing ease and flow. And it was the opposite of that. So I was really naive and shocked about what woundedness, apparent woundedness, and distress and suffering and insanity that exists even in our churches and what it was like for leaders to try to navigate that. And so that became my ministry, that I started studying these practices, taking these practices, including conflict resolution, mediation skills, communication skills, and more effective ways of being together, particularly when the heat’s turned up and when we’re in crisis situations or not getting what we want, to actually be with them with a great deal more presence and functioning than what I’ve seen people be able to do.

Rick: And at what point did you finally meet Byron Katie?

Martha I’d say around 2004. I don’t have much of a reference for time or years.

Rick: About seven years ago, maybe.

Martha Yeah, and I actually invited her to come to Louisville, Kentucky, and she was not available to teach, to do a workshop, to lead and facilitate a workshop. And I got a very clear inner message that was, “You do whatever you want Byron Katie to do.” So I started teaching workshops and seminars straight away without any training whatsoever. Other than…

Rick: On The Work.

Martha On The Work. And I say training, like I mean formal training. I was practiced in The Work. It was a spiritual practice for me. I’d read the book several times.

Rick: Had you been to see her at this point on some retreats?

Martha I had not. No, no. I had never seen her until then. And after doing the workshops and seminars myself and facilitating people, like really sitting with people and facilitating them, I eventually went to the school, the nine-day school. And then I’ve been back five or six or more times since then, and to other weekend intensives and various other ways of working with her to move The Work out in the world, and still do that, still will do that.

Rick: So you know, you’ve had quite a potpourri of different practices and things you’ve looked into and explored. What is it about The Work that makes it for you the best thing or the most effective teaching?

Martha It works 100% of the time. It doesn’t cost anything. It requires no devices. It requires no person. It doesn’t have any dependency on another person. And it is just four simple questions, even one of the four simple questions, actually taken in and answered, has the power to clear the mind.

Rick: Even the title of her first book, “Loving What Is,” if all you read was that title you can get quite a bit of benefit out of it, I think, if you understand what she means by it.

Martha Well, I think that’s right, Rick, and I think there’s also, even for me, there’s some appall at the title, also. Like, “Loving what is is too hard, Martha. Loving what is is too hard, you’re asking too much of me.” A: I’m not asking anything of anybody. And do I love what is? It’s like seldom, rarely, often I don’t. And I’m closer to loving what is than I’ve ever been in my life. So I think it’s a direction that I’m headed in. And I think it’s lofty to think that we go from living from these eons old ways of being and the suffering we’ve seen since recorded history, to loving what is. And for me it’s not a spontaneous arrival somewhere, but it’s absolutely a direction that I’m moving in. And the more I practice and the more I question what I’m thinking, then the more I love what is and at least I’m neutral to what is.

Rick: Yeah, I think people, when they first hear that title or that phrase, might think, “Oh, well, does that mean you love rape? You love Auschwitz? You love malaria?” I mean there’s all kinds of horrible things in this world that why would anyone want to love them? You know, they should be opposed, they should be fought, they should be changed, they should be cured. If Roosevelt and Churchill had just said, “Oh, we sort of love what Hitler was doing, we’ll just kind of let him do his thing,” the world would have been a very different place today. So perhaps you could respond to that objection. I’m sure it’s not a very informed one if one really understands what The Work is all about, but it’s an objection which I’m sure you’ve heard before.

Martha It is, Rick, and so it’s a question not of me of whether I love it or not, it simply is what is. So I don’t love rape or war yet and I understand that it’s what is and opposing it creates more of it, it perpetuates itself. So to the degree that I hate war, then I make war on warmongers. I make war on people that do war and that will not end the war in the world to do that. It doesn’t mean that if you are about to shoot somebody and I can actually stop you shooting somebody, I absolutely would. And it’s not because it’s right or wrong, because I’d hate to see you do that to yourself. You shooting someone, I would hate to have to live with that myself. I’d hate to be the killer. So then I believe that that would be hard on you, too. So if I can stop it, I will. And it’s not, I don’t run the world yet, so I can’t do what I cannot do. And I’ve learned from working with people that have been raped. Just this week actually, just a few nights ago, a lady said that she was raped and abused and when I ask a simple question like, “I was raped and abused,” speaking for her, “what does that mean? You were raped and abused and that means that…” And she said, “I’m worthless. I’m worthless. There’s something wrong with me.” Then the tears start because even after the pain of the rape and the abuse are over, 40 years of that, the pain is all over. And the deep pain, the pain that’s what’s really running our show, is caused by a thought that we’ve not questioned like, “I’m worthless,” or “There’s something wrong with me. I don’t deserve love.”

Rick: And she’s piling an interpretation on top of something which doesn’t need to be there.

Martha Ever. And that’s really the pain and suffering. So even a concept from what you just shared with horrible things happen in the world. It’s like we’ve made that up. We’ve looked at everything we don’t agree with and said it’s horrible. When we don’t get our way, we say that’s horrible. Now that’s us calling it that. So when we give it a meaning that is horrible, then we get the experience of horrible. And until we question what good has come out of it, what good if the universe is friendly, if God is good, then what good has come from those horrible things? And then it sends the mind in a different direction that does not deny that that was horrible or that we wouldn’t have preferred that. We certainly wouldn’t want that in anybody’s life. And the reality is, it’s here. It occurs. And it’s been happening since recorded history. And we’re still telling ourselves things like, it shouldn’t happen. It shouldn’t have happened. And to the degree that we oppose reality, we lose. Reality rules, like it or not. And we’re then disabled, paralyzed, mortified, afraid, panicked, terrorized, shut down, powerless, pitiful, victimized, fill in the blank, as a result of believing a concept like that.

Rick: But I presume this doesn’t disempower a person. If you were a doctor, for instance, it would not mean that you, it would not eliminate your motivation to say go to Africa and help people who are suffering from AIDS or malaria or something. You might throw yourself totally into that, right?

Martha Yeah, exactly. That’s exactly it, Rick. It’s the opposite of disempowerment. It’s like your mind is clear. You’ve got all the energy that we have spent arguing with what is. One hundred percent of that energy can be put toward doing something about what we can do something about. And if it’s people who are hungry, feed them. If it’s people who are distressed, give them a blanket, apply medicine to them. So we’re then freed up to be love in action, actually.

Rick: Yeah, and a few minutes ago you said, you know, with regard to war, the solution wouldn’t be to fight it because that stops more wars. But wouldn’t you acknowledge, like take my World War II example, you know, the allies basically had to step up and oppose Hitler militarily because otherwise he was just going to keep running rampant all over Europe.

Martha Well, absolutely. And that’s an insane thinking that would cause something like that. So you’re not dealing with some body or something in its right mind. So when somebody’s not coming from their right mind, then we’ve got to have a boundary of some sort and to say you’ve got to stop that, regardless of what it takes to say that must be stopped.

Rick: Yeah, there’s a saying in India, it takes a thorn to remove a thorn. Sometimes you need a thorn.

Martha Exactly, which means that’s part of our role here, too. You know, it’s not one or the other, you know, it’s not just that or just that, it’s going to be both and. And I think that’s going to free up some of our suffering, is to understand that it’s not one or the other in these situations, that is there war, yes, and is there a possibility of no war, yes. And instead of making it good and bad, it just is what is. And that in itself is a little less suffering, it just is. It’s not good or bad. And the mind has to draw the line and say this is good, this is bad, and then it has to be right. So it gathers evidence to support itself. And then we’re further and further into believing it instead of questioning it. Like what if we didn’t have a concept, you know, if something’s good or bad. And an example in my own life is I got a diagnosis of cancer a few years ago. And I absolutely did not mind when I got the call that I had cancer. I didn’t have a reference for it was bad, it just is. And I had less identification than even I knew that I didn’t believe that it was my breast, so to speak. When I would hear them say, “It’s your breast,” it’s like I didn’t have a reference for that. It’s not my breast. It’s not out of a denial or something, but it’s like the body is a temporary something or other here and when the body changes, I don’t look like I did when I was one year old. I don’t look like I did just two years ago. So the body is having its own life, you know, it’s doing what it’s come here to do. And it’s not to do with who I am. I don’t pick what happens and then there’s no war in that. And then I can just follow the directions, you know, it’s like here’s a cancer in your breast and here’s what you do about that. And if it feels right and made sense to me, that’s what I follow.

Rick: Yeah, it’s like if your car’s transmission blows out, it’s not you that’s blowing out, it’s your vehicle that’s damaged. Get the vehicle fixed.

Martha Exactly. Yes, that’s another perfect example of that, too, Rick. Even when you hear the word “my”, like if we hear somebody else’s car got scratched, this is from Eckhart Tolle’s work, you know, if you hear somebody else’s car got scratched, it’s like, oh, that’s too bad. Then it’s like my car got scratched and it’s like no way to damage here. That’s a different story. My car, my car, my body. So we have a big reaction when we think it’s my body.

Rick: You were saying that things are not so much good or bad, they just are what they are and you love them as they are. But how does that relate to the idea of having preferences? You know, like if you go into a restaurant or something, there’s one food perhaps that you know you’re going to enjoy, or even forget restaurants, I mean at home, there’s certain things you like, you cook those for yourself, and there’s certain things your dog likes, you wouldn’t eat those. We do, as human beings, have preferences.

Martha Yeah, it’s right. So a couple of things I want to clear up in this, that this notion that I don’t see things as good or bad is not really true. I’m not there yet, Rick, so I still will have an experience of not liking something and I’m quicker now to catch my mind calling something bad and I don’t believe it much anymore. So even if the mind says, “That’s bad,” I’m quicker to catch that. So with enough practice, I’m less likely to go down that path. So I’m not there yet, it’s a direction I’m headed in. I have got a real, much more solid foundation of, in your case of food, like I can think I’m going to prepare a food, for example, that I’ve liked, I may have liked most of my life, and I can prepare it believing that it’s going to turn out a certain way, and actually taste it or put it in my mouth and it wasn’t what I had in mind. For whatever reason, I may not like it. And if I’m attached to liking it, or if I’m believing that it’s what I’ve got to eat, or it’s what I’m supposed to eat, and I’m not really liking it, then there’s a big internal war there, versus just accepting what is. And that, for whatever reason, what I used to like, I don’t like anymore, and that’s been my case, that certain things I ate for a lot of years have left me, that I don’t prefer them anymore. And that if I think I know how something’s going to turn out, I’m absolutely insane. There’s no way to know a future that doesn’t exist. So I can say I can cook this egg the same way I’ve cooked it always, and I cannot know how it’s going to turn out. And if I’m attached to how it’s going to turn out, then I just won’t have much peace, because then when it doesn’t turn out the way I like or prefer, then I have a little tantrum.

Rick: Yeah, and if you burned it, you could always cook another one.

Martha Yes, well, if there is another one, so then the mind has a lot of conditions put on things. There has to be a certain kind of egg, or a certain size egg, and it’s got to turn out a certain way. And it’s got itself set up quite substantially to always get what it wants. And then when it doesn’t, and that’s the bottom line to it really, I think, Rick. What happens in us when we don’t get what we want, regardless of what it is? And if we think that something’s right or wrong, or we should have gotten A and we got B, where does it leave us? And it’s not much of a life for me to think that I know how things ought to be, because it leaves me too much gap in my peace, and I’m more interested in having peace regardless of how things turn out.

Rick: Yeah, there’s a couple of lines from the Gita that come to mind. One is, “You have control over action alone, never over its fruits.” That’s one. And another is, “Satisfied with whatever comes unasked, beyond the pairs of opposites.” So it’s like, you know, you have control over this moment, or you appear to anyway, but not over the outcome, you know, and so whatever outcome comes, you didn’t have control over that, so you’re satisfied with whatever comes unasked, beyond the pairs of opposites.

Martha Exactly, and to the degree that I can live that out, that is my interest, and that’s very, very exciting to me, to experience that and to actually believe that it’s possible. And when I don’t do it, I return as quickly as I can.

Rick: Yeah, and that kind of leads us into the work itself, the four questions and the turnaround and all that, because that’s a tool that you’ve found very valuable for inculcating this way of behavior, this way of being.

Martha And I’d love to go right into that, and you told me offline a description of humility that I’d love to hear again.

Rick: Well that’s right, you know, we just had a little glitch, Martha and I, where I forgot to resume the pause button after we had some little interruption. And the line was that, it was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi actually who defined it this way in his commentary in the Gita, he said, “Humility is the quality of not insisting that things happen any particular way.” I mean, often the word “humility” is used to connote sort of a self-deprecation, you know, “Oh, I’m just a miserable slug,” you know, “I’m nothing.” But what he was saying is it’s more of a, again, not insisting that things happen any particular way, not sort of superimposing your ego on the flow of events and trying to sort of, as I’ve heard you say many times, not trying to do God’s job.

Martha You’ve got it, and that’s what it led me, that my definition of humility had come somewhere along the way of just continuing to loosen and loosen and loosen my opinions, and it doesn’t mean that I don’t have one. I’m just less and less invested in them and less and less attached to them, so that I can say, you know, “Are you going to vote A or B?” And it’s like I vote A, and I don’t think that it means anything. It was just…

Rick: Or at least it doesn’t mean that all the people who vote B are a bunch of idiots, you know?

Martha Never, ever, exactly. Or wrong, which is “idiots” equals “wrong,” which is how the mind has drawn the line, which is usually, it’s not usually, “I’m right, you’re wrong. My way is the better way. My way is the right way.” Or if the coin turns up, like “I am a miserable worm of the earth.”

Rick: Well, you know, there are a lot of wars that have been fought in which people on both sides felt that God was on their side, you know?

Martha Of course.

Rick: And so, you know, I would say either you’re going to say God’s on no sides or God’s on all sides, but it’s not going to be one side or the other.

Martha That’s what I believe too, that God is there. Something created us, something is breathing us, something is in charge here.

Rick: Yeah, and he’s breathing the tiger as well as the gazelle, and the murderer as well as the victim, and I mean, everything is being animated by that same divine force.

Martha Absolutely. What else could be possible?

Rick: Yeah. So maybe we could… Have you ever been married?

Martha I was married to the only person I’ve dated.

Rick: Oh, that’s nice. But that again is like symptomatic of your certainty and conviction in life at a young age.

Martha Well, it’s actually the opposite of that. There’s been about twice in my life, and I’m really glad you went into this, Rick, because there’s a couple times in my life where I left myself.

Rick: What does that mean? Oh, you got blurred over?

Martha I got blurred over. I left myself. I left my conviction, and one of it was when I got married. I got married when I was 18 years old, and I never wanted to. I did not believe to do that, and I got blurred over, and I left myself. I lost myself in some kind of standard or norm or just a state of confusion, I would call it, and I actually got married. I stayed married for five years, so I was with somebody for about eight years total as a kid, as an 18-year-old, and I’ve not been married since that time.

Rick: Did you have any children?

Martha I didn’t, and that was another conviction that I had as a child that I would not have children. So I didn’t waver from that, even under a great deal of pressure from a lot of peers, family, and a husband, actually, to have children, and it was an absolute no for me.

Rick: And marriage, too, has been a no. It wasn’t that you married the wrong guy, it was that you didn’t want to get married, period, right?

Martha I didn’t want to get married, period. Yeah, I didn’t want to get married, period. And that’s an example of this belief system, because even though I didn’t want to do that, and did, I would not end it based on a belief that was very simply, if you make your bed, you’ve got to lay in it. Now, that’s been generations old and handed down, so divorce is wrong, and you kind of did this, so you’re stuck with it. And that was an example of how one belief that you don’t question will absolutely paralyze you from doing what you know is the kindest, most intelligent, caring thing you can do for yourself and for another person. I absolutely was able to get a divorce from that man because I believed that it was unkind to him not to do it. I believe for me, I could have stuck it out and just lived like that. And what kept me from doing it was it was not kind to him to be in a marriage with someone who did not want to be married.

Rick: Did you see it as a possible course of events that you would stay married and that, difficult as it was, the difficulty in itself would be evolutionary for you, or was it just so incompatible that it would not have been a viable possibility?

Martha It was viable, and it just felt dishonest. I don’t know the word for it, actually, but it was a dishonest thing to do, to stay married. It was not integral, and therefore, the war in me was too much.

Rick: Did your husband end up remarrying, and is he a happier man now?

Martha Yes. I don’t know what his life is like and his heart and his mind. I have a strong belief that it’s better than it would have been otherwise.

Rick: Yeah, good. So, 2004 or so, you met Byron Katie. You started actually teaching The Work, or facilitating little workshops with it, before you had even trained with her or met her, just on the basis of reading the book and all. But at a certain point, you went deeper and got more formal training. So I have a kind of a sense of how The Work works because I’ve read her books and everything, but a lot of people listening might not know anything about it and we keep referring to it so maybe we better talk about that a little bit so people know what we’re talking about.

Martha I’m delighted to. I want The Work out in the world so any way it can move, I like that.

Rick: Yeah. So, why don’t you lay it out for us, the basic points of it. There actually are some pithy little points that summarize it and that will give people a sense of what it is.

Martha Well, it’s a very simple technique of four questions, to question your mind. So any thought that you have, any thought that becomes a belief that you have that causes you stress, you can write down that thought or ask these questions to yourself or be facilitated in these questions to see if what you’re believing is true. An example is, if I have a thought that somebody is unkind to me, I ask me, “Can I absolutely know that that’s true, that they’re unkind to me?” And then, “Well, yes,” could be the answer.

Rick: But the word absolutely is pivotal there.

Martha It is to some of us, not always, Rick, but it could be. That’s a sign that you’ve actually questioned your mind a bit. It would be pivotal in you, that’s not always the case. So the question, the answers to questions, the first question is actually, “Is it true?” And then the answer is yes or no, and there’s no other answer to questions one or two, yes or no. And the mind will want to go off and go, yeah, but, yeah, but, and oh, but if you only knew, and it’s like, that’s not The Work. The Work is simply, here’s the question and then it’s either yes or no.

Rick: I’d have a hard time answering yes or no at that point because I would say, well, yeah, but not entirely. I mean, I can see to some extent that it’s not true, so how can I answer yes or no? And that leads to the second question.

Martha Well, it does, and it’s a just, it will also be a demonstration to yourself of the wiliness, and the slyness even, of the mind, the conditioning of the mind, to not just land on an answer. Even when you hear, Rick, the answer is yes or no, that we absolutely cannot just say yes or no. It’s very difficult to just land on yes or no as simple as it sounds because the mind’s got to be right, so it’s got to go out and rationalize it, justify it, explain it, and that’s really the internal war is all that mental gyration. It’s not what’s happening, it’s all the mental gyration that goes with it. So it’s, question one is, “Is it true she’s unkind to you?” Question two is, “Can you absolutely know that to be true, that she’s unkind to you?” And question three is, “How do you react when you think the thought, she’s unkind to you?” And then the answer is whatever the answer is. It’s often things like, well, I avoid her, I gossip about her, I teach her a lesson, I give her the look, I may cut off from her, so it’s like, wow, that’s how I react when I think and believe somebody’s unkind to me. So the short answer is, when I think and believe somebody’s unkind to me, then I’m unkind to them. So it’s not hard to see with much of a look that I’m doing exactly what it is I don’t want somebody else to do to me or out in the world. Question four then is, “Who would you be if you didn’t have the thought, she’s unkind to you? Who would you be without the thought she’s unkind?” And you know, people have their own experience of it. It could be more focused, freer, calmer, saner, more balanced, and The Work, I think, some people that haven’t taken The Work as deeply as possible would give off an answer like peaceful, calm, kinder. And it’s one thing to answer the question like that, and it’s an entirely different thing to actually experience your answer. So to say that you’re calm or calmer is one thing. To actually experience calm and calmer is a different matter. And I think that’s where we fall short with The Work, and the power of The Work is not to actually ask the question, answer the question, and experience the answer. And I think that’s another level to The Work.

Rick: Seems like to experience the answer, your perspective would have had to have shifted quite a bit by that time in order for you to really arrive at that.

Martha Yes, so it’s less made up and more experienced, and then there’s a great power in that from my experience.

Rick: Right, and people’s perspectives don’t always just turn on a dime. Sometimes there’s a lot of conditioning, it takes a while to unravel it.

Martha Very seldom turn on a dime. And if we’ve got a sense of it, because the mind is infinite, it’s very quick, so it’ll come in even if you’re saying calm and going, well yeah, but she better not do that, or she better not do that, and if she does that one more time, and there was that one time. So it’s very quick to fight back, even when you’re questioning and getting a sense of what it would be like. Heaven, how do I react when I think she’s unkind? Hell, who would I be without the thought of heaven, and we’ll still go back to hell over and over and over again. And then it’s powerful to see that as I question, she’s unkind to me. With the thought that she’s unkind to me, I suffer. Without the thought, I don’t. Now then that’s very clear that she’s not my problem. Now this freed me the day that I really got that people are not my problem. That if there’s a problem here, it’s thinking. So my thinking is what was causing all of that, not somebody, not some person. And then that applies across the board. When people stop being the matter with us, so who’s the matter with me? And how much we’ve lived that out over our whole life, who’s my problem? And when who’s my problem doesn’t exist anymore, then you got a direct shot to working with your thinking, which is the cause of all the suffering. And Eckhart Tolle’s words are along the lines of, The Work is like a razor sharp sword that cuts right through the illusion that there’s anything problematic here but the thinking. So then we have a thought, we write it down, we ask these four questions and then we turn it around and when I have a thought, “She’s unkind to me,” one of the turnarounds is, “I’m unkind to her.” And I’ve already seen that from question three, how do I react when I think she’s unkind to me? I see that I do that also. Another turnaround is, “I’m unkind to myself.” So if I want unkindness to stop in the world, then I’ve got to stop it right here where it started, which is in my own experience, in my own mind and in the way I treat me and others. So to the degree that I’m unkind to me, then I’m also going to be unkind out into the world. I also often turn it around with, what’s the opposite of unkind is kind. Now this takes a radically open mind or a willingness for your mind to open to look at how it’s the same person that we told ourselves, sometimes our whole life we’ve told ourselves she’s unkind, that we start to open the mind up a little to see is it possible that she’s also kind. Where one example in our life that she actually was kind to me and then we can start to find one little way that she was kind and then you can find two ways and three ways and four ways and to the degree that we send our mind in that direction, then it actually has a new balance to it. A recalibration if you will. So we’re not as far off, we’re not as insane, we’re not as far off the center.

Rick: It’s not a black and white universe, is it?

Martha Not that I know of.

Rick: I mean there’s always gradations and spectrums and shades of gray and good mixed in with the bad and vice versa.

Martha Well and that’s wholeness in itself. Like if we didn’t have the line drawn down the middle and saying this is good and this is bad or this is right and this is wrong and we understand it’s not one or the other, it is one and the other. This is key and then to the degree that we get that, that it’s one and the other, what would we react to?

Rick: Yeah, I mean there’s so many examples of where people try to make everything black and white. I mean you know, Democrats are good, Republicans are bad, abortion is bad, you know, or abortion is good or, you know. I mean there are so many issues that occupy so much of our news in this day and age that are just people shouting from polarized perspectives, whereas it’s really much more of an integrated mosaic of all kinds of qualities and it’s so hard to categorize anything in absolute terms.

Martha Yes, and to any degree that we do, it’s all made up. And then we’ve lost touch with the fact that we made it up and then we’re reacting to what we imagined and the meaning that we’ve given something, we’re reacting to that meaning, not what is.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. So, I kind of interrupted you, I guess, because there’s more than just those four questions. Have we done the turnaround yet? Did you mention that?

Martha The turnaround, yeah, the turnarounds were, “She’s unkind to me,” turns around to, “She’s kind to me,” turns around to, “She’s not unkind to me,” and then you find examples for how that’s also true. Another turnaround is, “I’m unkind to myself.” So I get to wake up then to the fact that we’re the same, you know, and to any degree that unkindness exists in me then naturally I’m going to see it out in the world because I have projected it there. That anything that is unresolved in my own mind is projected out into the apparent external, so that I get to see it.

Rick: I remember when I listened to “Loving What Is” as an audio book, there was one thing which I couldn’t quite digest, which was that there was some woman who had been sexually abused as a child or a very young girl by her father or uncle or somebody and, you know, Byron Katie took her through the questions and then, you know, tried to turn it around to say, “I abused him.” Correct me if I’m not remembering this right, but I couldn’t understand how an innocent child could in any way have been the culprit there to any extent, you know.

Martha Yeah, well, and that’s the exact point in that book where a lot of people reportedly, to me, have reported that’s where they abandoned The Work, so to speak. And I’d love you to listen to that again, Rick. I love to listen to that over and over again, so I believe I want you to experience what I experience naturally, so I want that for you. And what happens in that dialogue is, Katie asks her, “What was your part?” So we’re just looking at turnarounds, we don’t know what they are, so the opposite is, “I abused him,” and then Katie’s question to her is, “What was your part?” To a little nine-year-old girl, “What was your part?” And she eventually said, “After that happened, I could get anything I wanted from him.” So now, he did this.

Rick: Was she blackmailing him?

Martha Yes.

Rick: Yeah, like I’m going to tell her if you don’t give me something.

Martha Well, I didn’t get it that it was like that, Rick. It was more like that was our way, our only way to get love, approval, and appreciation. That was our only way to get the love we were seeking, and we would do it at any price. So even a little nine-year-old girl would sacrifice that kind of pain to get the love that she was seeking. So her part was, she did that, seeking something from him, and then after it happened, she could get whatever she wanted from him. So then it became strategy, a tool.

Rick: So the implication was that she was a willing participant in order to get what she wanted.

Martha At some level. Now, it also didn’t miss that he could’ve done, I don’t know if you can see my hands, but he could’ve done this much, like a thousand-fold. He did that much harm, and she did this much.

Rick: Right.

Martha 100% of her pain was in the part that she had. So did he do a thousand-fold over? Yes. She did one teeny little part of it, and that’s where 100% of her pain is, because she had not, that was not okay with her to do that.

Rick: So would you say that there really could not be any circumstance in which the victim is totally innocent, that we’re always culpable to some extent?

Martha I don’t know. I know that what I believe is whatever action and reaction we have is thought-based. So it’s not even so much for me, Rick, what happens is what was I thinking that caused that? And then I get to work at the level of the cause, and when I question what thought caused it, then I can see what hurts and what doesn’t. And then I’m enlightened to that. And then I can stop hurting me, and I can stop hurting you to the same degree.

Rick: So in other words, it’s kind of, I’m just pursuing this a bit so I totally understand what you’re saying. So you’re saying it’s kind of fruitless to try to analyze the occurrence that may have happened 40 years ago and determine what the percentages of blame and what not may be, because you really have no control over something that happened 40 years ago. What happened happened, but what you do have control over is how you’re living with that now, how you’re reacting to the impression of that now. Is that what you’re saying?

Martha Yes, and that’s the one thing we can control is our internal world. So I’m still reacting to what happened 40 years ago, just like it’s happening again today, and it’s over. And I can say it shouldn’t have happened, shouldn’t have happened, shouldn’t have happened, and I lose. So every time I tell myself and believe it that it shouldn’t have happened and it did happen, I’m stressed. So the rape is over, in this case, a rape is over, and I’m still raping me over and over and over every time I play it through my mind. And the mind’s got the picture made up in graphic detail, showing it to us, and we’re reacting to what the mind is projecting instead of to what’s in front of us, which is in this moment now, there’s no problem here, you know, woman on chair.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. No, I think it’s good that we’re dwelling on this because, you know, if you read things like that, it can seem a little heartless or cold or something, to say that the girl had some kind of responsibility for the circumstance, but I mean if, you know, well you just said it very beautifully, if we can somehow, well, woman sitting on chair, if we can somehow just be in the present and not relive a thousand times something, things that have happened throughout our lives, then we’re free, right?

Martha We are, exactly, and it doesn’t change what happened. And no amount of praying, wishing, wailing is going to change what’s over.

Rick: Did you ever hear that Zen story about the two monks, an older one and a younger one walking along, and they get to a stream and there’s a beautiful young girl who is waiting by the side of the stream and she wants to cross this muddy thing or something and she can’t get across, and so the older monk picks her up and they walk across the stream and he puts her down and they keep on walking. And a couple of hours later the young monk finally can’t handle it anymore and says, “What did you do? You know we’re not supposed to touch women and yet you picked up that beautiful young girl.” And the older monk says, “Oh, are you still carrying her? I put her down on the other side of the stream.”

Martha That’s exactly it, and I love that, I’m glad you told it again, I love hearing you tell it, and that’s from, where I read that was from “A New Earth,” Eckhart Tolle’s work.

Rick: Oh, he told it too, yeah, that’s an old story.

Martha It’s written in that book.

Rick: Yeah.

Martha And that’s what we’re doing, Rick, whatever it is, even a minute ago, you know, if you took on shame for example for not hitting the pause button.

Rick: Yeah, “Oh, what’s Martha going to think of me, I wasted ten minutes of her time.”

Martha Yeah, like that’s possible, like that’s not possible for you to do it, and the reality is the thought did not come to you, “Press the pause button,” that’s all that happened. And you cannot have a thought that you don’t have, there’s no amount of efforting, wishing, strategizing that’s going to make a thought appear to you that doesn’t appear to you. And instead of just staying in that reality, we take it on like we’re inept or incompetent, or we got shame and guilt about it, and then we worry what somebody’s going to think about us, versus just seeing our own innocence in that, and the fact is that a thought didn’t come to you to push the pause button.

Rick: Yeah, I did a whole interview with this lovely lady named Betty Ensign, and we went on for two hours, and then when I went to process the video I discovered that there was no audio, the mic hadn’t worked. So I thought, “Darn it, it was such a good interview, we’re going to do it again.” So I set it all up again the next night and we did another two-hour interview, and I went to process it and the audio worked fine for twenty minutes and then it stopped working, so we lost that one, too. I’ve got to do it again actually, because she had such a good story, but I must admit I felt a little bummed, but I kind of was like the duck in Eckhart Tolle’s story, I shook my wings a bit and thought, “Okay, move on, whatever, maybe there’s a reason why the first two ones didn’t work.”

Martha Yeah, we’ll drop the “maybe.”

Rick: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Martha Yeah, and there’s a reason, whether we ever understand it or not, and we can spend the rest of our life assessing it, evaluating it, talking about it, or being bummed about it, or we can just notice it’s what it is and then go on about our lives.

Rick: Yeah, I mean it wasn’t going to bring back the interview for me to beat myself up over it.

Martha Well, that’s really wise.

Rick: Yeah. We mentioned Eckhart Tolle a few times. I’ve heard actually that he, on some occasions, actually prescribes Byron Katie’s work as a sort of a way of, a technique for, arriving at the state that he so eloquently describes, being in the present.

Martha Yes, that’s my interpretation, too, and I didn’t mean to interrupt you, Rick. That’s my interpretation, too, and that’s how I’ve heard it said, is that Eckhart Tolle is “what to do” and Byron Katie is “how to do it.”

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Martha So it’s the “how to do it,” and we’ve read for centuries “what to do,” and now it’s time to do the work. And there’s a reason it’s called The Work.

Rick: Yeah, that’s good because a lot of teachers, even contemporary ones, are very good at describing the state they’re in, but they’re kind of offering that description as a way to be in that state, but unless you’re in that state it doesn’t work, you know? You can’t just sort of, it’s like a man on a mountaintop describing the view, it doesn’t help the people who are way down in the mountains someplace.

Martha Precisely, and my short answer for that is, it’s just more blah, blah, blah. Which is what I say in workshops, don’t try to believe what I’m saying because it’s just my blah, blah, blah, until you take this on and experience it yourself, then you’ve got another theory to talk about, instead of really taking this in and seeing what happens, what shifts in you when you really question what you’re thinking.

Rick: Yeah, now Eckhart Tolle is kind of a mystic in a way, in the sense that he’s not just describing a philosophy, he’s having an experience and he’s speaking from his experience, he’s in a certain level of awareness or awakeness or whatever. And I get the same thing with Byron Katie reading her books, especially that one, “A Thousand Names for Joy,” in which she used the “Tao Te Ching” to kind of comment on her own experience and elaborate it. It’s a very beautiful book, in fact to me it was the most readable of her books. But what we are talking about here is not just sort of, not merely a way of learning to deal more smoothly with mundane issues and concerns, we’re talking really about enlightenment, as far as I can tell, ultimately. And we’re talking about a teaching from a woman who spontaneously became enlightened or became awakened. So I guess what I’m leading to is, to what extent has that become a reality for you? Let me ask that one first.

Martha Well, there’s nothing been spontaneous for me, I can tell you that, and that’s also not my understanding of what happened with Katie. It’s also, it’s described as she had an experience of where she saw that there’s no her, and that something was seeing through her eyes. And that when she believed her thoughts, she suffered, and when she didn’t, she didn’t. And then she worked diligently on that for years after that, sitting alone and asking these questions. So she had quite a trek, from the way I understand it, including how this work was formulated and what it was like to lose orientation and identification to where people that show up and say, “I’m your family,” and you don’t have a reference for what family is or who these people are. And you just go with them because you don’t know, you don’t see a reason why not to go with them. So mine has been a practice, mine has been a systematic writing down and questioning my own mind and thought, and then facilitating other people to do that. And while I facilitate other people to do that, I’m also doing my work when I do that. And I feel like I’ve had a lot of grace in that, that there are things that I never worked on, so to speak. People I never worked on that stopped bothering me. Things stopped bothering me. I stopped being affected by things that I’ve been affected by my whole life as a result of me doing this work. And that’s what I would describe as a very high-level exponential effect of this. It’s not a 51%, 52%, 53%, it was a 51% and then a 61% and then an 85%. And the more I do it, the better it gets. And the more my mind clears, the more energy I have, and the more sanity I have, and the more joy I have. So to talk about living a life of joy is one thing, and to actually live a life of joy is something else.

Rick: Well you seem to have a lot of energy, you basically live out of a suitcase as far as I can tell. It’s traveling all over.

Martha It’s true, it’s true, and it makes no sense. Rationally it makes no sense how I physically can do what I do.

Rick: Well, but you love what you’re doing, and I think when people love what they’re doing, they have abundant energy.

Martha I think you’re right about it, and that’s my experience here, too. And I’m more excited, I remember hearing Katie say a few years ago that eventually you may go a day and not have much of a problem, you go a week and you haven’t had much of a problem, you go a month and then eventually you go years without a problem and then eventually you can’t even find a problem. And I remember thinking, oh, horse patootie! Oh, give me a break, you’ve got to be kidding me! And I can tell you now, a few years later, that I have a glimpse of what that means. I have a glimpse of not experiencing things as problems that I never would have believed that would be possible.

Rick: That’s probably more than a glimpse, I mean when was the last time you really felt like you had a problem?

Martha I have slight off… yesterday, I had an actual concern about what somebody would think of me, and that felt very strange. And I was very excited about it, I can tell you that, because I knew that there was something there for me. So years ago it would have been bummed, I would have been bummed, oh brother, something bothers me. And now it’s more like wow, what is that?

Rick: It’s like an opportunity.

Martha Like an opportunity, literally that. And it’s like there’s something there for me, and it’s like the bread crumbs back to myself, my trail back to Self, and I mean Self with a capital S, Rick. A trail back to God, back to reality of where I got lost out in the illusion again. So it was subtle, and the more subtle it’s gotten in my life, the more powerful it is. So I’m very much more open now to it. When it comes, it’s exciting in some way, that there’s something left of me, and that’s a marker, that’s a pointer to say, “Turn here, go in here and sit and see what’s happening.”

Rick: That’s great, I mean that’s a very refreshing, that’s one thing, if people only remember one thing from this interview, that might be a good one to remember, which is that anytime you feel like you have a problem, it’s an opportunity to see where you’ve got some kind of shadow work to do within yourself, you know, some kind of place where you haven’t shone the light yet.

Martha Exactly, and Rick, if we understood that all that shadow, I mean even that terminology, you know, our “shadow work,” our underworld, if we really understood that that’s all just thinking, that it’s not the essence of who we are, that it’s a thought that caused all that. You know like, I’m not good enough, something’s wrong with me, you know, I’m unlovable, life is hard, like fill in the blank, that all that caused all of that was a thought that we haven’t questioned. So it’s very doable to just have one thought at a time and then write it down and ask the questions and turn it around.

Rick: Yeah, I wanted to just revert back to something we were talking about a minute ago. It seems like, from what I read, Byron Katie did have a kind of a sudden unexpected awakening, she was sitting in a halfway house and a cockroach crawled across her foot and all of a sudden there was this awakening. And similarly Eckhart Tolle, he was like on the verge of suicide practically and he just questioned, “Wait a minute, if I can’t live with myself, are there two of me?” “Who is this ‘I’ with whom I cannot live?” And next morning woke up and it was a whole new situation. But both of them had several years at least of working through a lot of things and integrating and making sense of it all. I mean Byron Katie in her way, Eckhart sitting on a park bench feeding the pigeons, just gradually making sense of it all. I think that is the exception rather than the rule, the norm, that kind of abrupt awakening followed by years of integration. I think most of us are proceeding incrementally, you know, layer after layer working things out as you’ve been describing.

Martha And I think so, too. And it is the layer after layer now, it just seems a lot less arduous, a lot less kind of intimidating because it simply is the only layer there is, is a thought layer. Thought caused it all, thought is the cause of it all. So that’s not as ominous that we just see that oh, if thinking is the cause here, everything else is the effect of that, then we don’t have to spend too much more time in the effects. And to the degree that we understand that thinking caused it all, like what are we going to react to? That all that’s ever happening is a thought appearing. Thought appearing, thought appearing, thought appearing, then we can’t have much reaction to that.

Rick: Mm-hmm. Some people say that the more difficult stuff is the last to go, you know, the deeper, darker stuff, because if it were easier it would have gone sooner, and that, you know, we kind of… but you’re kind of saying that it’s getting easier and easier for you, or maybe it’s easier to deal with deeper stuff, you know, because you, you know, I mean one man can lift 100 pounds easily and another can hardly lift 10, but if you’re strong enough then the 100… it’s all relative.

Martha Well, it’s also meaningless.

Rick: How so? What do you mean? In what way?

Martha There’s no reality, there’s no meaning to… all the concepts are made up, so even concepts like “deep.”

Rick: Right.

Martha Like that’s deep, it’s like we made that up, we don’t know what that is.

Rick: Yeah.

Martha And then we react to a concept like, oh, that’s deep, and how do you react when you think, “That’s deep?” And it’s like, oh my goodness, oh, and it’s like, who would you be if you didn’t have a concept of deep? If we understood that it, that all the meaning that deep has is what I have applied to it. I made it all up.

Rick: Right.

Martha So it’s a blank slate, it’s a blank field, and I’m projecting on it my own meanings and then reacting to the meanings that I’ve projected as though they’re reality.

Rick: So in other words, what I just said was really sort of over-complicated speculation and what you’re doing is just, in a very simple way, just sort of questioning thoughts as they arise and seeing how substantial they are and then they kind of dissolve.

Martha Yes, as you question them, yeah, they leave you, they dissolve. And then you believe them less and less. An example I often use that’s been meaningful to people, I’m so struck about what really is meaningful to people, like if I said to you, “Your hair is green,” how does that affect you?

Rick: Not at all obviously, because I know it isn’t, unless there’s something wrong with your eyes.

Martha Yes, you spontaneously laugh, like it was just joy in you, like “Oh, she thinks my hair is green!” And so we don’t believe it, so it doesn’t affect us. And then I could say, “You’re the worst excuse for an interviewer I’ve ever seen.”

Rick: Uh-huh, and if I thought you were serious I’d probably think, “Oh my God,” you know.

Martha Yes, and you just grabbed your heart, our neck tightens.

Rick: Yeah, I’d feel like my solar plexus would tingle or something.

Martha Yes, so that’s an exact measure of how we believe a thought. So and then that’s also an indicator that I still believe that, because I had a visceral reaction to that. I had a body reaction to that. My body is a feedback mechanism that tells me I believe that. And then I get busy with, oh, write that down, ask four questions, turn it around. And then eventually that can’t affect me. You know, I could say, “You’re the worst excuse for an interviewer,” and you would just say, “I’ve had that thought, also.”

Rick: Yeah.

Martha “I think that, too, sometimes.” And then it’s like, okay, if she wants me to be a better interviewer, I want me to be a better interviewer. It’s like, “What suggestions do you have for me? Give me some feedback.”

Rick: Or read some books on it or something. Watch Larry King.

Martha Exactly, exactly. So, and to the degree then that we get that it’s all just thinking, like we couldn’t react to much. We would just see this as a thought appearing. And there’s no thought that I can have that you haven’t had. There’s no new thought in the whole world. So what would we be afraid of?

Rick: Yeah. Sometimes there’s a certain… I’m sorry, go ahead.

Martha The worst I could think about you, you already think about you. So we can live fearlessly.

Rick: Sometimes there’s a certain amount of psychic energy though, infused in, like if someone is yelling and screaming at you, it’s not just the meaning of their words that is impacting you but there’s this sort of like stressful, you know what I mean? I mean my father was very abusive. He used to drink a lot and yell at my mother all night long and eventually drove her into a mental hospital. And there was a lot of, you know, it wasn’t just the content of what he was saying, it was the sort of the atmosphere that was created, you know, with all that anger and negativity. It’s just sort of a … So how do you deal with that as opposed to just the content where, you know, let’s say you didn’t just say I was a bad interviewer, you started screaming at me and there was all this emotional, psychic energy coming through.

Martha Well it just wouldn’t have anything to do with you, Rick. My screaming is an effect of my own thinking. So if you understood that, you couldn’t react to that either. And then your mind would be clear like, I don’t like this and then you could just disconnect.

Rick: Yeah, that’s true.

Martha You could hang up on me and say, well, that didn’t turn out quite like I had in mind. She’s not suitable for my show. So you’d be empowered to do what felt right for you to do. And you’d understand that all of the effects coming out of me is a result of my own thinking. You know, just like if I somehow gave you the look, you know. I just gave you the look somehow. It’s like that look on my face is an effect of my own thought. It’s nothing to do with you. It could never be anything to do with you. And we’re so identified with this, you know, with this ourself, we think with this thing. We’re so identified that we think it’s got something to do with us. So then whatever look is on their face, we take it personally like oh, that’s me that they’re looking at. And it’s like, no, the look on their face is a result, is an effect of the thought that just occurred to them. Which could be, you know, you’re ugly, you’re fat, you’re inadequate, you’re whatever. So whatever thought hit them, that look on their face is an effect of that, and it has nothing to do with me.

Rick: It’s easy to get identified. I mean, even going to a movie, and you know it’s a movie, but if it’s a really suspenseful movie, you’re sitting there and you’re chewing your fingers, and you say, “Don’t open that door!” “Don’t go there!” “Don’t do this!” I’m sure if they hooked you up to various instruments, your heart would be beating faster. Even though you know, you can think any time, this is only a movie, but we react to things, you know, we get sucked in.

Martha That’s exactly it. And so the life is a movie, also.

Rick: Yeah, exactly.

Martha And we’ve lost ourself in it, no different. We got the same stimulation in the body that we would be just like it’s happening to us, and it’s all thought-caused. So we’ve just, we’ve forgotten that it’s a movie.

Rick: And even if we remember though, even if we know it, we still react, we still get caught in, like you said, you know, you get blurred over.

Martha Yes, and until we don’t, then our thoughts are going to run the show.

Rick: Yeah. I know people, you know, especially living here in Fairfield, who have been meditating for 40 years and stuff, and you know, very often it’s like there’s this analogy that you can move a table by pulling any of its legs and all the other legs are going to come along. And a lot of times people feel like, “Well, if I just do this, you know, going into a state of inner silence, everything else is going to work itself out.” But you very often find people who have been doing that for decades who still have a lot of baggage and a lot of stuff that, you know, maybe it would be good if they pulled two legs of the table simultaneously, keep doing their meditation if they want, but also look at this, look at that, learn how to change one’s thinking, in the way you’ve described, might move the table along a lot more easily.

Martha Well, and that was my experience, and I still, I consider The Work a meditation, and I used to sit in meditation and had mantra and that, and would consider it peaceful and it was gentle and I felt renewed by it, and the minute, even before my eyes were open, the infinite mind was recreating itself. So even in the meditation, there was little peace sometimes, because it would be a thought like, “I need a pillow,” or “Oh, somebody should be here meditating with me,” or “How long’s it been,” or “Is this really going to work?” or… And it’s like, I found something through questioning the mind that was meditative and that had a result that was mind-blowing to me, and that is effective and sustainable, and accessible. It doesn’t require anything except to ask the question and then to answer it if you really want to get to the other side.

Rick: You mentioned, you know, when you started in on this, you felt like you were moving rather quickly, 51%, 61%, 81% like that. Do you feel now, you know, to a great extent, universal awareness or pure awareness or vastness or whatever terminology we want to use, has become quite, very much part of your living reality as a result of all this?

Martha I do, I don’t know what percentage, and I don’t believe that, I don’t believe that just because I’m experiencing it right now that it’s going to last. I cannot know the future, I don’t know that somebody won’t knock on the door here in a minute, you know, and stick a gun in my ribcage. And I don’t know how I would react to that. I just know that how I react to that would be based on the thought that I was having at the time. So it’s got nothing to do with the gun or the person, it’s to do with the thought that I’m having. And that is, that’s solid ground for me.

Rick: Yeah, you know, as you speak, somehow the metaphor comes to mind of a musician tuning their instrument before playing. It’s almost like this whole process you’ve been describing is a way of kind of tuning oneself, you know, so that when we play it doesn’t sound bad, you know, it sounds like it’s supposed to sound.

Martha Yeah, that’s the way I see it too, Rick, and then when the mind takes over again, or I lose myself again, then I’m out of tune. And if I can hear myself, then I’m going to restore my tuning, I’m going to retune, attune, and atone before I perceive very much.

Rick: Yeah, I used to play in a band, I was a drummer, and very often between songs the guitar players would have to tune up a little bit again because it had gotten off slightly.

Martha Yes, and we’re going to get off with just one thought that goes unquestioned. You know, it really is that simple, it’s not as easy as it sounds sometimes, but it’s like there are really just two paths. Thought appears and then you either believe it and suffer or you question it and don’t. And I call it “peace or pain,” and I also call it “go within or go without.” So it’s which is it going to be, which is it going to be?

Rick: That’s great. So having heard all this, if a person thinks, well this sounds like an interesting approach, I could get into this, what should they do?

Martha www.thework.com, T-H-E-W-O-R-K dot com. Free resources, free audio streams, video streams, all the books, excerpts from the books, a page of certified facilitators, a helpline where people serve for free to facilitate people through The Work. And then the books, “Loving What Is,” “A Thousand Names for Joy,” “I Need Your Love, Is That True?” It’s got great exercises in it and the practices are laid out there. And if they want to work with me directly, they can contact me at MarthaCreek.net and I work on a love offering basis. That means they pay whatever they want to pay and I facilitate them based on appointments. So it’s available, 100% available to anybody who wants it, free.

Rick: That’s great. Well I always feel when I do these interviews and this one in particular, that I’m enjoying this so much I could go on all night thinking up questions and talking because it’s so nice. But I think we’ve really, we’ve covered it pretty well. Is there anything you feel like we haven’t covered that you’d like to throw in there before we conclude?

Martha I’m especially grateful for you, to you, and for whatever is motivating you to do this. I’m especially grateful for that and I’m privileged to sit with you. And I delight at the pebble in the pond here and where the waves may go, and no different than how we met in the first place. The rare chance that I would be in Fairfield, Iowa, and there I am, there you are, and here we are today. And what we’re giving here is meaningful and I appreciate it.

Rick: Thanks, Martha. What motivates me is just the joy of it. I just enjoy this so much and not only, I mean even if it were just you and me talking and no one was ever going to hear it, I really enjoy this. And I really enjoy tuning into a different person each week and there’s so many lovely people out there, but I also enjoy when other people are inspired by it and benefit from it. And each person I speak to has a slightly different way of presenting themselves. And I’ll do an interview like this and I’ll get feedback from one person saying, “You shouldn’t have interviewed that person, they were lousy.” And then ten minutes later an email will come in saying, “Oh, that was just what I needed to hear.” So I like to mix it up and I think yours has been a very beautiful contribution.

Martha Thank you for that. It was interesting to have questions about my story, about my life and my childhood. And it was fun today to tell it and to not diminish it in some way, like that’s a story, that’s a story, that’s a story, to just answer the question. But it’s also very humbling and I have a great deal of gratitude that, even as I was telling that story, that I didn’t believe for a second that it’s who I am. And that’s how we know, that’s how we can test how much of this has taken hold of us. Like if we can answer the questions and tell the story with still some investment in somebody getting it, hearing it, versus, you know, it’s so irrelevant really.

Rick: Yeah, great. Well you have an interesting story, even though it’s a story, and people like stories. And I think they’re illustrative, they’re edifying, you know, and a lot of people can relate to different facets of different people’s stories and say, “Well, you know, I can relate to that and so maybe there’s hope for me.”

Martha Yes, and I get a lot of feedback about that, so I’m dedicated to telling it for that reason, that it’s beneficial.

Rick: Yeah, that’s actually the little subtitle of this whole program, and the title of it, “Buddha at the Gas Pump,” the implication being that, you know, very awakened people in ordinary circumstances, and the subtitle is “Interviews with Ordinary Spiritually Awakening People.” And of course, I guess ultimately everyone is ordinary, but we tend to kind of put people on pedestals and feel like whatever they’ve got is unattainable, you know, and I couldn’t possibly be like Eckhart Tolle or Byron Katie or somebody, but you know, the fact is, you know, we’re all bozos on this bus.

Martha Yes, and we’re one thought away from it. One thought unquestioned.

Rick: Yeah, beautiful. Yeah, and that’s another thing, and we were carrying on a little bit, and we were about to conclude, but there’s some more good stuff here, which is that many people feel like, “Oh, you know, it’s just not going to happen to me in this lifetime, it’s so far away, you know, maybe decades from now, maybe on my deathbed or something I can have this kind of liberation or insight,” but that “one thought away” phrase is very, I think, encouraging for people.

Martha Yeah, me too.

Rick: Yeah, good. Well, thanks, Martha. So let me just make a couple of concluding statements here that I always make, which is that, depending on how you found this interview, there’s one place to go if you want to sort of find all of them, there’s www.batgap.com, which is an acronym for Buddha at the Gas Pump, so that’s batgap.com. Go there and you’ll see all the ones that I’ve been doing and will do, and you can sign up to get an email if you like, to be notified every time a new one is put up. It’s also available in podcast form. If you don’t want to sit in front of your computer any more than you already do, you can get this on your iPod or your MP3 player and listen while you’re walking the dog or whatever. And there’s a little “donate” button there, which if you feel the impulse to click it, go ahead, don’t resist. I just had to shell out a bunch of money to buy some more equipment for my dear friend Ralph Preston, whom I really should mention at the end of every single one of these interviews. We were buddies in high school and I haven’t seen him since, but we’ve been working together on this project, and he does all the post-production work and spends more time than I do probably, getting all this in usable form. So there’s a link to his website on my website, which you can check out. He had a stroke several years ago and made a remarkable recovery and is doing stuff to help other people who have had strokes. So, wonderful guy. So in any case, that’s what I want to say in conclusion. I thank you for watching and I will see you next time. Bye.