Beauty Is the Real Truth That Lies at the Heart of Everything: Q&A With Danny Martin
On the art of pausing, working with life, and navigating a challenging world
Hey friends,
In our busy, confusing world, many of us want help with the same timeless quests: How can we slow down, pay attention, and live calmer, more peaceful lives? Danny Martin, a theologian and independent consultant, has spent much of his life understanding these questions. As the principal creator of Mindfulness-Dialogue, Martin has developed a method that integrates mindfulness practices with dialogue techniques, which has been utilized globally for leadership development, team building, and cultural enhancement for groups ranging from therapists to leaders at the United Nations to mothers who have struggled with substance abuse.
I came across Martin’s work in 2018 through The Leatherman’s Loop, a trail race held annually at the Ward Pound Ridge Reservation in Cross River, N.Y. since 1987. Every year, Martin leads a brief pre-race blessing. Usually, his words remind runners to pay closer attention to their bodies and surroundings. His blessings encourage people to cultivate a deeper awareness, which aligns with his lifelong commitment to help people live more attentively. Among his guiding words:
“The Loop is kind of a falling in love…you can’t force that. Fall in love a little in this run today.”
“Beauty is not about being the best…it’s really about seeing things as they already are. It means waking up.”
“Beauty is the real truth that lies at the heart of everything. Even if it doesn’t appear that way sometimes. Beauty is this powerful encounter with the truth that lies beneath the surface of things…This deep encounter with one another and the land.”
“Breathe in beauty, breathe out gratitude.”
“This is much more than a race. It’s a fun gathering, a time for connecting with nature, even a spiritual experience…most of all, it’s a reminder how related we all are.”
In this conversation, Martin discusses the art of awakening, joy, aging and eldering, and how to work with life in these challenging times. The interview has been edited lightly for brevity and clarity.
What role does nature play in your life? Do you experience something deeper when you connect with nature?
I grew up in Ireland on the edge of Belfast, where there were fields and farms behind us. It was undeveloped. Nature is in the Irish blood. There’s a sense of meaning and even spirituality linked to the rhythms of the seasons. If humans are out of sync with the earth, then they’re in trouble.
When I was young, I’d lie in the heather near the rabbits and squirrels. I felt at home, a sense of belonging. I started going to mass every morning, and I got the same feeling in the candlelit dark church that I did when lying in the heather.
Nature is poetic, and connecting with nature is like feeding my soul.
Do you live in nature today? Have you always?
Yes, today, in Cross River, N.Y. In Ireland, too. I also lived in Kenya in the wild where the road ended and there was no utilities, no electricity, nothing. I lived there from 1973 to 1984. I had a Sony tape recorder and I’d listen to music or play guitar. I used to sit in the desert. Paul Simon, Kris Kristofferson, and Bob Dylan became brothers to me. I’d learn their songs and sing them in the desert.
What drew you to live amid nature around Westchester County’s largest park?
I suppose the simplest way to say it was I came to the area for my PhD. I’ve since done work for the United Nations, where I met Thomas Berry, who has had a big influence on how I think.
Did you get married there in the park? Something tells me you did.
We got married here right in our garden. It was like a Monet painting. It was an August day without humidity. Flowers were everywhere.
What kinds of services do you offer and to whom?
I’ve worked for the United Nations, the Centers for Disease Control, and state health departments around the country.
I've been working for Jefferson Memorial Hospital in Philadelphia for the past seven years as a consultant on a program for addicted mothers. I was just working with them this morning — they're close to my heart. These are women who were addicted and have since recovered. More so, they are healers. They are amazing because there's no bull shit in them, and they know what's important. They have such compassion and energy. I try to do work where they can really understand one another and relate more honestly, more sincerely, and more skillfully.
I'm working with teachers at Greenwich Academy to develop a program about painful conversations. There are many topics we find hard to talk about. I work with people one-on-one in what you might call spiritual guidance. It’s not religion. It's about the deeper things that we're talking about today.
This work isn’t just a hobby for me. It's about how we relate to each other so that we can help one another navigate this challenging world, where we can live with joy and peace.
How should we navigate the painful conversations we often dread or avoid?
We connect through our stories. If you know my story and I know your story, something happens and we develop a kind of connection and empathy that creates a safer space. Then you can begin to address the differences. The other thing is that with painful conversations, there are really three conversations going on.
There’s often a “who said what conversation” happening. And that's where we get stuck. We get into arguing. The next conversation level is the emotional conversation. There are a lot of emotions being triggered and we're not very good at working with them. We get fired up and reactive and so on. Learning how to work with emotions is a big challenge.
Third is where the real action is happening. That's the identity conversation because what happens is that I begin to sort of feel that I'm not good enough. Or you might think I'm no good.
For example, if you're arguing with your kid, you might think you’re a bad father. Or if you're arguing with your friend, you might think, oh, she doesn't love me anymore. You have to gently get there. But it starts with connecting through stories — that’s how people have always shared who they are.
What grounds you? What practices or routines give you peace?
I wake up early and go outside for a walk. I spend the first three hours of the day connecting. I do a meditation early, then exercises. On my walk, I use an app called Merlin, which lets me identify the birds by their song. I can identify 20 birds walking, which changes my relationship to the birds. I've always been interested in them, but hearing them helps me connect with them in a different way.
By 9 o’clock, I feel more grounded in the day. Then I can move forward. Because as I get older, I'm less interested in a career. I just do what I do to help others. I see my work as a sort of exploring. Later in the day, I might sit down and have a beer with my wife, who is a therapist. We’ll talk about the day and what we discovered. She’s a therapist listening to people with challenges, especially the challenges of today — the anxiety, the depression, and how people try to make a living in this crazy world. We have a lot to discover together.
In an age of busyness and overwhelm, how else can we just be?
I mentioned mindfulness meditation. It doesn't have to be a big deal. It doesn't have to be an hour or a half an hour. It can be three minutes. It could be a basic thing like, OK, let me just breathe deliberately. When you do, you notice your breath.
Thich Nhat Hanh writes about how even washing dishes, or cleaning, or walking to work can be mindful experiences, rather than just trying to get through one task after the next.
Yes. If you can start your day with just a little bit of practice, that can set the tone. The principle that you've just described is an ancient principle of spirituality in Latin. It’s about simply doing what you’re doing.
Where does the Leatherman’s Loop mantra of “beauty before me” come from?
The Navajo people of the southwest of this country have the notion of: I walk in beauty…beauty is around me. I wrote this thing that would reflect something simple, but at the same time be really meaningful. People have come to see it as the Leatherman’s Loop blessing. Afterward, I'll meet people in the store and they say something like, “that's the only prayer we say in our family and our kids know that we do this every time we get together.” That's very gratifying to think that it could have helped that way.
Can you explain the significance and meaning behind the Leatherman's Loop event? What is the metaphor or symbolism it represents for life? You’ve talked about it being more than a race, a reminder of how we’re all related.
People are hungry for connection and hungry to belong. Studies show that people are joining running clubs, going to book clubs, or movies, and all these things because they’re all looking for connection and belonging. What I try to do with the Loop blessing is say, OK, let’s take a deep breath so we can really connect and appreciate what's going to happen.
I got emotional there when you said people are “hungry for connection and hungry to belong.” I see it all around me — loneliness. Many of us are looking for connection and love and hope.
You put your finger on something worth highlighting. I was working with a group of therapists. We were focusing on befriending death because that's part of their work as well. My generation is getting up there. Us Baby Boomers can resist or be frightened by death, but I’m trying to encourage myself and others to talk about it. Let’s see aspects of death that are right in front of us. Every out breath is a kind of dying, and every season is a kind of dying. It’s all part of the unfolding and evolution process.
What you’re getting at is this sense of hunger and not belonging. Older cultures had that belongingness built in. Today, there’s a vacuum, where we’ve become more independent and it’s about success defined as making it on your own, while acquiring as much as you can and separating yourself not only from earth and the rest of the world, but even people around you.
I don't care about such things. I'm just interested in what I find to be very real and that's belonging and connecting with others, and that’s what we talk about in some of our sessions.
There’s the idea that aging is better than the alternative. Still, how do we process and reconcile aging? How do we accept and not resist it?
I recently told this story written by the poet Rilke about a young couple who lived in the forest. Everything was happy and then death kind of appeared and they slammed the door shut. Their lives became miserable and closed. Finally, they opened their doors. I won't go into the rest of it, but essentially, it was cultivating or addressing the reality of (death) that helped…understanding that decline is part of a living system.
The psychologist Erik Erikson had his stages of life. That speaks volumes for me. At this stage of my life, you become very much aware of your own mortality. Culture might say to be eternally young and keep aging away. But it’s unrealistic to say the least, and it’s not that healthy.
Pema Chödrön writes about “dropping the battle” of life and “lightening up.”
Yes, and Thich Nhat Hanh talks about smiling. It takes many fewer muscles to smile than to frown. He says to smile, so you can give your face a break. He also gets at this idea of being deliberate. As I age, maybe one of my favorite words is “deliberate.”
How is that related to your motto, “the art of working with life?”
They’re connected. The last time I got together with some therapists, we talked about life living through you. When you become aware of that, the more peaceful you become.
As you get older, you tend to realize that you have no control of anything that’s really important. You can't even control whether you get your next breath, never mind your next heartbeat. So, if we want to be happy, it’s incumbent to learn to let life live through you — to work with things.
The author Robert Greene says “the need for certainty is the greatest disease the mind faces.” Is all of this about learning to let go?
I would quote Paul McCartney. It's more about “letting be,” it's not just letting go. Letting go is a part of it. There’s so much wisdom in that little song, Let It Be. “Mother Mary” — these guys were tapping into a kind of collective energy and trying to break through constraints we had made. To learn to work with life and move with it is the way to be, I suppose.
You’ve talked about the “deep experience of beauty,” which is touching. Can you expand on what you mean?
I use the analogy of falling in love, which is very powerful. I fell in love with Ann and it changed my life. When you fall in love with something or someone, the world changes. The only word you can use to describe that experience is beauty. It’s an awareness, a presence — an energy that you encounter and experience and immerse yourself in when you fall in love, when you get out of your own way, when you let it be. You’re just there. I think that’s what beauty is. We’ve all tasted it.
It’s sort of living “awake” and with heightened senses.
We’ve all experienced running or a great conversation or a delicious meal or great music. The experience takes you over. You’re in it. It’s like the music is singing in you or the run is running you. That’s akin to what happens when you fall in love. That’s when beauty takes you with it.
To connect with Danny Martin, visit his website here.
Celebrate your gifts,
Matthew
What an artfully done interview and inspirational sharing from Danny Martin.