HowDoYouLive? Podcast with Mark Matousek

In this episode of HowDoYouLive? we feature Mark Matousek. Mark explores the big question - 'How do you live?'

Mark Matousek is a bestselling author, teacher, and speaker whose work focuses on personal awakening and creative excellence through transformational writing and self-inquiry. He brings over three decades of experience as a memoirist, editor, interviewer, survivor, activist, and spiritual seeker to his penetrating and thought provoking work with students.

He worked for Reuters International, Newsweek Magazine, Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine, Common Boundary Magazine and published essays in Harper’s Bazaar, Details, Tricycle, The Utne Reader, Yoga Journal, The Chicago Tribune, The New Yorker, O: The Oprah Magazine, Modern Maturity, Good Housekeeping, The Saturday Evening Post and Huffington Post.

His workshops, classes, and mentoring have inspired thousands of people around the world to reach their artistic and personal goals.

Transcript

How do you live?

Podcast.

When I was 21 years old,

My older sister came to visit me one day.

She was 30 and she had always been my role model when I was growing up.

She's the person who really took care of us.

My mother wasn't the mothering type and Marsha was a very sweet,

Big hearted person,

But she suffered from depression.

And a few days before her coming to see me,

Her husband had left her and she was suicidally depressed.

She had been hospitalized,

But the hospital let her out early because the insurance wouldn't cover it.

And we were all very,

Very worried about her.

And one day she showed up at my house just looking terrible.

And I said,

What is it,

Marsha?

What is it?

She wouldn't talk to me at first.

She kept avoiding the question.

And finally she said,

How do you do it?

And I said,

Do what?

And she said,

How do you live?

I really didn't know what to say to her.

And I thought about it and I came up with some platitudes.

You have to put one foot in front of the other.

You just have to,

What's the choice?

What's the alternative?

And all kinds of things like that.

And nothing got through.

And she just sort of gave me a kiss and left my house.

And that was the last time that I saw her alive.

Two weeks after that she killed herself.

So for me that became an emblematic experience.

It became a life changing experience because I didn't know what to tell her.

And of course I couldn't have saved her life.

But there's always the thought that had I had some word of inspiration for her,

Had I been able to give her some guidance,

Maybe that day she wouldn't have done what she did.

So the question,

How do you live,

Really became my mantra.

Really became my north star in my life.

The thing that guided me in my writing as well as in my personal life.

Because when I was in my late 20s I received what was believed to be a fatal diagnosis.

So the question,

How do you live became very urgent for me.

And all of a sudden I couldn't think about anything else.

I left my job.

I went to India.

I started meditating.

I started seeking a spiritual path.

Because I realized that until I answered that question,

How do you live,

For myself,

I wasn't going to be able to get through this very,

Very scary time.

For ten years I was waiting to die.

And as anyone who's been through a crisis,

Once the initial shock passes,

You have to figure out how to get through the next day.

You have to figure out how you're going to make it until there's some resolution or some light.

Because even crisis,

Even terror has a shelf life.

And I had to figure out when that passed,

How I was going to find my way through.

And so for me it was about spiritual seeking.

It was about looking for meaning in life.

But the key insight that came out of all of that seeking wasn't finding God,

I'm an agnostic.

It wasn't about having any permanent lasting enlightenment or illumination.

The major insight that came to me through all of my study and all of my practice was that suffering has a purpose.

That in fact the adversity and challenges that come to us in our lives are exactly what we need to wake up from the story of ourselves.

Until we have this story,

This fiction of self,

This safe life myth cracked open by some kind of crisis or some kind of catastrophe,

Something that turns us around,

We move through our lives believing that the story is us,

That this fiction is real and that we are trapped inside it as this little eye,

This small personality that needs all of these things exactly to be as they are in order to survive.

When in fact what happens when your story cracks is you realize that you're not the story,

That what you are and who you are is much,

Much bigger than this myth that you've carried around of yourself and that there's actually,

That it's the crack in everything that Leonard Cohen talks about that lets the light in.

So whatever it takes to crack your life open is exactly where grace enters your life.

It's exactly the open door into a new way of living.

And what I discovered is that when you realize that suffering has a purpose,

It turns around the depressive view of life as just being this thing that we have to bear and we realize that the darkness is there to wake us up.

Otherwise we go through our lives in a trance of complacency or a trance of self ignorance.

But when this life cracks open and you begin to see the path of freedom out of this small self your life takes on a whole different meaning.

And what I would have said to Marsha that day,

How do you live?

How do you live is by stopping looking backward and moving forward into the future.

That the way we live is by not trying to replicate some idea of well-being from the past but discovering an entirely new self in one's brokenness and one's vulnerability.

Meaning that that's actually where creativity comes from.

It comes from extreme vulnerability.

It comes from not knowing what's going on,

What's coming in the future.

That's where creativity comes from.

And when you learn to live on that edge of not knowing in what Zen Buddhist called beginner's mind it changes the quality of your life completely because you're meeting each moment fresh.

You're not trapped by some old story of who you believe you are and you're not deluded into thinking that you can control the future.

And that's the other big thing is getting that there is no creativity when we're trying to control where our lives are going.

We have to surrender to where we're being moved by desire and the creative force,

The erotic force of our lives toward our own freedom and toward our own fruition.

That only comes from releasing the past and being willing to move into the future.

One thing I did to explore this question of how do you live is I started to interview survivors who had been through all kinds of traumas from the Holocaust to losing a child to cancer to being homeless to having AIDS.

And the one thing that they all had in common was the willingness to change,

The willingness to evolve,

The willingness for things to be different in the future.

As one guy said to me,

He said,

You're going to come through this fire and either you're going to go all the way through the fire and come out gold on the other side or you're not going to come out at all.

So what I learned is that by moving toward darkness,

By understanding that suffering has a purpose,

That it actually strengthens us and shows us the part of us that can't be destroyed by circumstance,

Until we get that,

We can't live with any sense of well-being that isn't dependent on things staying exactly the way they are.

The kind of well-being that I discovered through spiritual practice was a sense of self that wasn't bound by what was happening to me.

It wasn't bound by my circumstances.

Because once your story has fallen apart enough times and you've walked through it,

You realize that you have no idea who you are until you're challenged to become that person.

You have no idea.

And that there is an essence of self.

There's an awareness of self that is much,

Much bigger than what is happening to us in the moment.

Another great thing that one of the survivors said to me is that regardless of what's happening to you,

No matter how difficult it is,

Something else is also true.

And what that means is that no matter what we're going through at any given moment,

Not all of the information is in.

And if we can keep a chink open in our mind to what has yet to be revealed and curious about what has yet to be revealed and not believe the depressive mind,

Which says this is forever,

This suffering has no purpose,

If we can allow that there may be some benefit from this terrible thing that's happening to us,

It gives us the strength to get through the darkest times.

Tagore,

The Indian poet,

Said,

Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.

And that's the essence of what this is about,

Is that the kind of faith that you learn when you go through a prolonged period of darkness is the faith that feels the light even though the dawn is still dark.

It's holding open in the mind the possibility that something else is also true,

That there will be life after this,

That this difficulty,

This pain,

This suffering isn't for nothing,

That in fact it will deepen you as a human being and it will widen and enlarge what you believe you're capable of.

That's really the main thing.

You get far more self-respect and self-confidence when you lose everything and you're broken,

Paradoxically,

Than you do when you're tootling through a charmed life and you're never really tested.

It's the tested strength that is the true strength.

And what you learn in that experience is that true strength is very,

Very fragile.

It's very,

Very vulnerable.

It's like blades of grass growing up through concrete.

That's what true strength looks like.

It finds a way through whatever the hardness is,

Whatever the difficulty is,

Through extreme flexibility and extreme fragility.

So when you come to understand strength as fragile and you come to understand suffering and pain as grist for the mill and when you come to understand being cracked open as the doorway to freedom as opposed to the end of everything,

It completely turns around your way of looking at your life and the way you look at the world.

And that's really the key to a spiritual understanding of how to live and how to move through adversity.

Understanding the nature of impermanence.

When you get that,

You realize how extremely fragile this all is,

How this moment will never,

Ever come in all of eternity again,

This very moment.

And when you look at your life with that kind of freshness,

With that kind of willingness to be surprised,

With that kind of openness,

It is very vitalizing.

It really transforms the day.

And then really every day is a good day because if great things happen,

You get what you want,

That's terrific,

Of course everyone likes to be satisfied.

But if you don't get what you want,

You realize that spiritually speaking,

That's even more beneficial because it forces you to look at where you're caught,

What you're holding on to,

What you're craving,

Where you're identified that you believe that your happiness depends on a particular thing.

Just have that thing taken away and that is the good news,

Spiritually speaking.

And when you've been doing this long enough,

You come to welcome the discomfort that comes with disappointment,

That comes with not getting what you want because you know that that's where freedom comes from.

The freedom doesn't come from getting what we want and being satisfied all the time.

So this whole thing is about learning that the crack in everything,

The suffering that comes with loss is the first step toward a creative life,

Toward a spiritually awakened life.

Because we recognize the fragility of all creation that gives us compassion and it connects us to other suffering beings in the world.

And that's the beauty of it.

Until you've suffered,

Until you've lost,

Until you've been broken,

Until who you thought you are has been taken away from you.

You can't relate to people who are suffering,

To people in need,

To people who are homeless,

To people who have lost everything,

To the refugees coming from Syria.

Until you've been homeless yourself,

Existentially speaking,

Psychologically speaking,

It's very hard to relate to people who have lost everything.

But once you have,

Once you've gotten the diagnosis or you've lost the kid or whatever has happened,

Then the world becomes your family in a profound and immediate way.

It's not just a platitude,

It's not just words.

The world really does become your family.

You get that we really are in the same boat together.

And that deepens empathy,

It deepens your connection to other people.

And it gives you a profound appreciation for every moment of life.

This is something that's hard to explain to people who haven't lost everything.

I was having a conversation the other night with a friend who's just turned 60 and he's upset about his love handles and losing his hair.

And he said,

Didn't it bother you when you lost your hair?

I said,

No,

I was happy to be old enough to lose my hair.

He said,

And he was dwelling on everything that he was losing and for,

To me,

Missing the most important thing,

Which is that he's alive.

He's alive.

And if you have that fundamental gratitude,

That transforms your experience.

It opens your mind and it opens you to new experience.

You're not going to be so afraid of trying new things,

Risking new things.

And that's another paradox.

People think,

Well,

If I'm aware of impermanence,

Then nothing matters when exactly the opposite is true.

Everything matters far more when you get that it's transitory and when you get that you're transitory.

So that's what I would have said to my sister if I had that information at the time.

I would have encouraged her to embrace this enormous loss because it could be the beginning of a whole new life.

If she was allowed,

If she allowed herself to be stripped down by the experience.

But all she could see was the suffering.

All she could see was the pain.

She was too caught in the pain and didn't sit it out long enough to come out the other side.

So that's what I say to people who come to me as writing students or as friends is sit,

Wait for the miracle.

Don't leave before the miracle.

Don't throw it away or give up on yourself or other people before what has yet to be revealed shows up.

Because that can be the difference between a life that feels like a defeat and a life that feels like it's full of potential.

Reviews

A crack is an opportunity for a new life. Thank you, this resonates with me. 🌼🌼

Deep and motivating.
Thank you.

🤯🤯

My heartfelt gratitude. May these words stay with my and help carry me through. I pray this for all who listen. 🤍

GREAT talk. Inspiring and illuminating. Can’t wait to share with others…!

”Don’t Give Up Before The Miracle”
Such a great podcast. Thank You💙

Excellent take on suffering. How do you live? is the question to ask ourselves every day. Thank you for your wisdom Matt. 🙏🏼

Beautiful and Insightful .... thank you thank you thank you... 🙏🏻

Very powerful message. Thank you 🙏

Inspirational. Thank you for sharing! 🙏♥️☮️

Wise reflected words and story about the purpose of life or when you are in a crises.

Absolutely brilliant. Here’s what I loved the most:
1. You have to meet the moment fresh
2. Release the past to be able to move forward
3. Sense of self is not bound by what is happening to you
4. Last but not least—my favorite: don’t leave before the miracle.

Profound! Thank you!

This message came at exactly the right time. ❤️❤️❤️

Absolutely wonderful!

Incredible, very thought provoking, thank you so much 💜💚💙🙏

Thank you for sharing. Found this very helpful.

Thank you! Just what I needed to hear this morning!

Wise words indeed x

Very interesting perspective on working through the suffering I'm dealing with. Gives me a strong sense of hope