Welcome back!
I was delighted to interview one of the best-known life coaches in America, “O” magazine columnist Martha Beck on The Mommy-Muse Is In: Empowering Your Journey into Motherhood last week. We had a special focus on her newest book, Steering by Starlight: Find Your Right Life, No Matter What! For those of you who might be new to her amazing work, here is some Q&A on basic stargazing concepts:
Christy: For people who may not be familiar with your earlier book, can you start off by telling us what you mean by a person’s “North Star”?
Martha: I was looking for something to describe what I believe to be a kind of fill point we each have within us that tells us the direction we need to go to have the life that is best for us. I was thinking there are a lot of religious or philosophical images that are connected to that, but I wanted one that was a little bit less laden with values. I thought about the North Star. I could compare this part of us which always knows which direction is true north.
Finding your own North Star became my metaphor for tuning into yourself and figuring out what your true self is telling you about creating the life that will make you happiest.
Christy: That’s excellent. You talked before about the concept of the essential self and the social self. In this newest book, Steering by Starlight, you talk about a third self, or the “stargazer”. What is that about?
Martha: The social self and the essential self are basically parts of the brain. The essential self is your natural personality, your characteristics, your talents, and those would be the same no matter where you were raised. if you were adopted by people from China, your essential self would not change.
Your social self is very geared to communication, to mimicry, to pleasing others, and all the other things that make human life in groups possible. Those are both good things. Sometimes the social self gets trained to do things the social self doesn’t like. That’s when people get stuck in jobs they hate, relationships that aren’t working, and so on.
My first book was all about how to bring your social and essential selves into alignment. I realized; I work with a lot of families who have children with disabilities because I have a son with Down Syndrome. You watch people get older; my friends have had their share of illnesses, accidents, and sometimes even death.
I thought; the social and essential selves can both be wiped out by one brain injury, but there’s something even deeper than that which is not even dependent on the brain. It’s what the mystical traditions would call the “great Self,” self with a capital “S”, which is the connected consciousness of all beings expressed through you, as an individual.
This last book, Steering by Starlight, is where I really went over the edge and said, “You know what; I believe in a mystical reality. I’ve had too many experiences with it to deny that I’ve experienced it.” What I really believe your true self is, is deeper than either the social or essential selves. All you have to do to find that is to still the mind, completely, and there you are.
You can look forward to more excerpts from our interview over the weekend. In the meantime, nourish yourself by listening to our first interview on December 2nd here: Expecting Adam and The Joy Diet with Martha Beck! Interested in learing more? Check out my post on the Martha Beck TEAM Connect!
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Great interview! I just tweeted it to the world. Looking forward to reading more.