Finding Your Way in a Wild New World Quotes

“No matter where you are, no matter how small or pathetic you may feel, freeing your wayfinder’s Imagination by embarking on an adventure turns you into some kind of crazy-strong electromagnet. Take out all the stops, drop into Wordless Oneness, laugh and play and love and dream beyond all reason, and miraculous things begin happening. Doors open. Paths appear. Team members you’ve never met find their way through time, space, and every other barrier to help you. You simply wait, Imagining, as the islands rise out of the sea to greet you. It’s not necessary that you believe this. Imagining it is enough. HOW NOT TO IMAGINE”
― Martha N. Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want

“Another common feature of many cultures is the use of what I call the “four D’s” to put people in contact with the wild wisdom of their true nature. The four D’s are drumming, dancing, drinking (or drugging), and dreaming. When the time comes for a sacred ceremony in a traditional society, the tribe’s mystics dress in formal outfits, then spend hours singing, chanting, telling stories, performing ancient dances, using psychoactive chemical compounds, and reporting on whatever visions come to them, awake or asleep.”
― Martha N. Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want

“When a troubled member of a traditional society went to the tribe’s healer, the healer didn’t open the discussion with questions like “How long have you been experiencing spleen discomfort?” or “What, exactly, is your deductible?” Instead he or she asked when the person stopped feeling spontaneous joy, stopped singing, stopped dreaming. In other words, wayfinders need to know when the sick, stuck, depressed, or failing patient stopped playing. Any confident traditional healer with access to modern medicine will gladly recommend a splint or antibiotics for someone with a broken leg or an infection, but for the soul sickness and stress-related illnesses that so bedevil many of us, wayfinders know that playing to the point of enchantment is necessary medicine.”
― Martha N. Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want

“Real play is actually a wildly creative application of deep practice. It means picking something hard and doing it at a level that’s almost too difficult.”
― Martha N. Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want

“So despite our pathetically infantile teeth, claws, skeletons, and musculature, we dominate other species the way Peter Pan dominated Captain Hook: simply by refusing to grow up. We’ve proliferated and thrived because we never stop playing, and the way to cope with the increasing complexity of the wild new world is to play more.”
― Martha N. Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want

“And here we encounter perhaps the coolest thing about being human: we never outgrow our neoteny. However long we live, our true nature retains the features that wilder apes have only as babies: relatively flat faces, small nose, small teeth. The anthropologist Lee Berger, who discovered the richest deposit of “missing link” hominid bones in scientific history, told me that the egalitarianism of a human-like species can be judged by fang size. Baboons, who are brutally hierarchical, have huge canine teeth, while our canines aren’t any bigger than our molars. Like humans and unlike any other apes, small-toothed, peace-loving bonobos bare their teeth in friendship rather than aggression, peeling back their lips in a bright smile that says, “Look! I still have baby teeth! I couldn’t rip out your throat with my jaws even if I wanted to! But I don’t even want to! Hah-hah!”
― Martha N. Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want

“Play doesn’t have a script, it broadens the kinds of things we consider doing. We become willing to fool around, to explore or invent new activities . . . building resources and skills.”
― Martha N. Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want

“As you learn to gain access to this energy, your own true nature, and nature itself, will conspire to calm and assist you. As the thirteenth-century wayfinder and poet Rumi wrote, you will “close the language door and open the love window.” From there, you can see your way to anything.”
― Martha N. Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want

“But these concrete plans are byproducts of a deeper solution: the reclamation of each person’s calm, present, vastly resourceful true nature. As the poet David Whyte wrote, “What you can plan is too small for you to live. What you can live wholeheartedly will make enough plans.”
― Martha N. Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want

“I’ve learned that my clients can’t think their way out of problems caused by thinking. If I can get them to experience Wordlessness for even a few minutes, their anxiety drops, their creativity increases, and they become natural wayfinders, even in the most challenging life circumstances.”
― Martha N. Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want

“Choosing to flood your attention into the pleasurable aspects of a situation—with sensation, not Pollyanna stories—can turn an ordinary day exquisite. This method borrows from “open focus” brain research, opening the aperture of your nonverbal mind to more and more aspects of enjoyment.”
― Martha N. Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want

“Path of Torment: Hunger One thing I’ve noticed about clients who have weight problems is that their addiction to overeating is mental, not physical. It’s fueled by high anxiety, which is caused by attachment to mental stories. If you run into occasional life circumstances where you don’t get a chance to eat until you’re very hungry, don’t tell yourself it shouldn’t be happening: surrender to what you’re feeling. Study your own low energy, your stomach cramps, your fantasies of pancakes as if you’re an observer from Mars. You’ll find that you become less frantic to get food and less compulsive about eating it.”
― Martha N. Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want

“Being able to feel Wordless fatigue makes you more capable of resting deeply in whatever time you’ve got, allowing you to stay more rested physically and much calmer emotionally.”
― Martha N. Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want

“The key to making painful experiences paths to Wordlessness is to surrender all resistance to physical suffering you can’t avoid. This means allowing yourself to pay full attention to your own physical or emotional pain, without trying to avoid the feeling, or thinking that things must or should be different. That nonresistance is what allows the suffering to pass quickly; even as it’s occurring, it’s less torturous without verbal thought.”
― Martha N. Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want

“These days, when Jill Bolte Taylor finds herself feeling any sort of unpleasant emotional reaction to a situation, she says she simply checks her watch and waits ninety seconds. That’s how long it takes for her body—and yours—to process the hormonal reactions associated with fear, anger, or grief. If you experience them without resistance, the emotions then disappear, though they may return again, but only in ninety-second waves.”
― Martha N. Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want

“One universal teaching from wayfinders is that we suffer more from our thoughts about events than from the events themselves. Detaching from our verbal thoughts eliminates almost all our psychological suffering.”
― Martha N. Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want

“Can I imagine the space inside the distance between my eyes?” Fehmi found that this question pulls the brain straight into a “synchronous alpha” wave pattern, a deeply relaxed, Wordless state.”
― Martha N. Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want

“These feelings might take you off the smooth, paved roads of behavior you find normal and appropriate, but they are also your guides through life, the signals that tell you where to find what your soul is seeking.”
― Martha N. Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want

“must heal inwardly by responding to this inner knowing before moving on to guide the healing of other things.”
― Martha N. Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want

“Menders of all times and places have taught that silencing the thoughts in our heads and opening to the experience of the body and emotions is the basis of all healing.”
― Martha N. Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want

“To navigate the wild world, you need to move your basic perceptual and analytical thinking out of your head and into the whole inner space of the body.”
― Martha N. Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want

“the verbal region processes about forty bits of information per second. The nonverbal processes about eleven million bits per second. You do the math.”
― Martha N. Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want

“Our Team of wayfinders are people who feel an internal call to heal any authentic part of the world, beginning with their own true nature. If you’re a born “mender,” you’ll pursue this healing almost in spite of yourself. And as you find it, you’ll automatically become the change you wish to see in the world, healing the true nature of the people and things around you.”
― Martha N. Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want

“The means you’ll use to realize your “right life” may not be as obvious. I believe they must come from ancient traditions created and used by wise healers in many different cultures and places. These ways of mending were developed to fix any precious, complex, broken thing. Our culture, while zooming far past previous societies in its ability to manipulate the physical world, has lost or deliberately discarded these ways of repairing what is broken in people and in the world. Teaching you to use them is the central purpose of this book.”
― Martha N. Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want

“Nature can heal.”
― Martha N. Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want

“Maximum positive attention (the most valuable resource in this wild new world) comes from being absolutely yourself, operating from your true nature, to connect with the true nature of people, animals, plants, events, and situations.”
― Martha N. Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want

“The qualities that capture positive attention these days aren’t slickness, blandness, and mass consensus (boring), but authenticity, inventiveness, humor, beauty, uniqueness, playfulness, empathy, and meaning (interesting).”
― Martha N. Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want

“Knowledge is no longer power, because knowledge is no longer scarce. What is scarce is human attention. Directing human attention is the way people trade goods and services—thus how they survive financially—in the wild new world.”
― Martha N. Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want

“Breathe. Just one long exhale will transform my whole body: change my brain, my hormone balance, my intuitive abilities, and my effect on other creatures.”
― Martha N. Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want

“Menders of all times and places have taught that silencing the thoughts in our heads and opening to the experience of the body and emotions is the basis of all healing. It’s the only means by which we can reclaim our true nature or feel the subtle cues telling us how to find our way through life.”
― Martha N. Beck, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want