The Gathering Room Podcast (Martha Beck)

We’re encouraged to “fight” in order to feel better, to love better, to be more successful. But what we fight fights back. Here’s another way.

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It’s The Best of the Gathering Pod, and this week we’re revisiting another listener favorite from the vault—Episode 110: How to Let the Light In.

In this episode, Martha talks about her “rage to master” and the paradox of imperfection: While we can try our hardest to produce perfect results, we must accept that we’ll always make mistakes. It’s this combination of effort and grace that allows us to let the light into our lives.

To find out more, be sure to listen to the full episode!

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Do you ever find yourself wondering if it’s foolish to keep hoping for good things to happen, especially with our world in the state it’s in?

Whenever I have this thought, I remind myself that if we stop ourselves from hoping, we cut ourselves off from the creativity that is meant to build what comes next. It’s only by refusing to use the human capacity for hope that we can be truly defeated.

On this episode of The Gathering Room, I’m talking about what I call the art of hope, which is both a creative practice and a spiritual one.

When you’re hoping but there’s no proof that what you hope for will ever come to pass, there is a temptation to do a spiritual bypass where you just say that you’re in the present moment and don’t care what comes. The problem with that is that we humans were designed to care about what comes! 

I firmly believe that there’s not a human group on earth where people don’t hope for wonderful things to happen. Hope is not just an idle longing for more—it’s part of the act of creating a different future. 

Sometimes the things we hope for don’t come to pass in the way that we’ve imagined them. But hope without proof is something different—it’s part of the creative arts. And what is coming for you will feel the way you imagine the thing you hope for would feel—but it will be better. 

The art of hope is to hope without fear. Hope without fear is faith, and that faith is not hollow because it’s walking out on the word of a consciousness that is somehow part of yourself.

There’s something very visceral and plaintive and sweet about hope, something that is uniquely human. You have to surrender to the openness to grief in order to touch that place of hope—that is the art of hope without proof.

Whether you’re hoping for green leaves on the trees, a new love, or a brighter future for us all, tune in and we’ll practice the art of hope together—starting with a guided visualization blending gratitude, imagination, and surrender to help you connect with and nurture your hope. 

Our hopes—big and small—help create the futures we live into, and the art of hope is a vital, magical part of being human. If you want to become an artist of hope, this episode is for you. Join me!

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On this episode of The Gathering Room, special guest Gabby Bernstein joins Martha to talk about her newest book, Self Help: This Is Your Chance to Change Your Life.

Martha and Gabby both love Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy—also known as “parts therapy”—and Gabby’s new book is all about making the principles of IFS Therapy accessible to everyone.

To learn more about IFS from Martha and Gabby—and for the chance to join Gabby and Martha in a transformative guided meditation—be sure to tune in!

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Have you ever tried to manifest something, but it just wouldn’t happen?

In this episode of The Gathering Room, Martha shares how to use what she calls the “technology of magic” to make your deepest yearnings a reality.

Martha says that having a thought or intention is a necessary but insufficient condition for manifesting the things you want. Your intention must be combined with invention—or as Martha calls it, “rolling up your sleeves and getting to work!”

At the corner of your intention and your invention is where the magic happens. And it only happens, Martha says, when your intention comes to you as part of your life’s true mission.

To learn more about using the technology of magic to manifest your soul’s intentions, be sure to tune in for this episode of The Gathering Room. You’ll also get to join Martha in meditation—and hear about her magical monkey manifestation in Costa Rica! 🐒🐒🐒

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Is there something you really want to do, but the thought of it absolutely terrifies you? 😱

Martha has been there many times, and that’s what she’s talking about on this episode of The Gathering Room: Doing the Thing You Think You Cannot Do.

If you’re facing something in your life that you want to do but it makes you anxious, Martha says to remember that 99% of every original thing that has ever been done has been done by someone who didn’t think they could do it.

In other words, you’re in good company! 🏆

Listen to the full episode to find out how to recognize when it's love that wants you to do something that scares you—and how to work up the courage to run at it full speed. Martha also adapts her Silence, Space, and Stillness meditation to soothe your anxiety about the things you're scared to do.

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When I was writing Beyond Anxiety, I wanted to find a good metaphor for building a life that you love within the cultural bounds of wherever you are and still stay sane. And I thought about crazy quilting!

If you are a quilter, you know that crazy quilting is not the same as ordinary quilting. Ordinary quilting starts with a pattern that is carefully drawn out, and then the quilter sews together panels that follow that pattern. With crazy quilting, you start with a scrap of fabric you love, and you sew another piece to it and then another and another, around and around in a spiral, until there’s a large enough piece of cloth that you can call a quilt.

And I was thinking: That’s sort of how you can make a life, too.

In this episode of The Gathering Room, I’m talking about what I call “sanity quilting” and offering up some practical advice for maintaining your mental well-being during turbulent times.

Like crazy quilting, sanity quilting involves building a life out of the things you love in order to stay peaceful, calm, inspired, and sane.

In the quilt that is your time—your whole life—most of us are taught to follow the patterns set by our culture: Get a job, get a relationship, have a family, buy a house, etc.

However, for me, it’s always been much more interesting to say, “What do I love most?” and put that at the center of my quilt. Then I put things that connect with it around the edges until I gradually fill up my time with things that I love. That’s the way I’ve lived my life.

The culture might view this as “crazy,” but I don’t think it’s not crazy to do what you love. What’s crazy is pushing what you love to the margins of your life—or even worse, never experiencing them at all.

Whenever the pattern of society that we thought we knew is being disrupted, it feels very confronting to a lot of people. At the times when everything around you feels like it’s going crazy, that’s when you must make a sanity quilt. And you do that in very quiet ways.

Join me for the full episode to learn more about stitching the things you love into your life, so you can cultivate peace, sanity, and calm during even the most challenging times.

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Culturally we tend to think of sensitivity as weakness, but Martha says that in fact, it’s a superpower!

In this episode of The Gathering Room, Episode #186: Using Your Powerful Sensitivity, she talks about how to appreciate your sensitivity and use it to create the life you’re meant to live.

By definition, sensitivity has to do with reacting strongly to very slight stimuli. As a result, our society has come to believe that it’s not a strong position to be highly sensitive, that such people are fragile.

What Martha has come to realize is that sensitivity is powerful, and sometimes it comes on powerfully. People who are highly sensitive may feel its power before other people do.

If you’re highly sensitive and you experience something wonderful, you actually have a strong uptick in your mood—and you may feel more wonderful than someone with lower sensitivities. But if an impulse comes in that you don’t understand, your brain might go into anxiety.

Martha says that the remedy for this anxiety is to check in with yourself by asking a series of questions: Is this physical? Is this mental? Is this emotional? Once you’ve checked in with body, mind, and heart, then you can realistically ground the sensation.

If your sensitivity is telling you that it’s none of those things, then you can safely assume it’s coming from a spiritual place.

Martha believes we’re in a really interesting, unprecedented landscape—politically, biologically, and ecologically—and we need to be guided. The way that guidance will come, especially to sensitive people, is through this unfamiliar stimulus that may feel weird and scary at first.

But as you start to explore what feels true, then the magic of the brain kicks in—your curiosity will bring you out of anxiety so your sensitivity can guide you exactly where you’re meant to go.

 As Martha says, “We are the ones who can start to lead our lives in the direction that our higher selves are signaling to us to go and potentially help a lot of other people whose sensitivities may not be quite as strong—and in this way we serve the world.”

To learn how to appreciate, listen to, and trust your powerful sensitivity, join Martha for the full episode, where she’ll also guide you in her grounding and calming Space, Stillness, and Silence meditation.

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Martha says one reason we humans are a strange species is because we love to make jigsaw puzzles—beautiful pictures that we cut up into tiny pieces and disassemble, and then put back together. And we don’t like them to be too easy!

In this episode of The Gathering Room: Solving the Puzzles of Our Lives, Martha talks about the way problems in our lives are like puzzles, and how it often can be more joyful to have a puzzle than not to have one. These puzzles are the life situations given to us by circumstance.

“If we can get into a state of relative relaxation,” Martha says, “and then look at even a very scary problem in our own lives, we can start to appreciate the kind of puzzles our brains like to solve.”

To learn how to approach the problems in your own life like a jigsaw puzzle—and solve them in a way that supports your awakening and can help transform the world—tune in for the full episode. It also includes Martha’s guided Space, Stillness, and Silence meditation.

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Can you remember times when you’ve experienced pure joy?

Martha recalls some key moments that led her to make joy her strategy for living, and she’s talking about it in this episode of The Gathering Room.

The dictionary defines a strategy as “a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim." We all want to experience joy, and yet we have a society that tells us joy is not a strategy—that we should be strategizing to achieve success instead.

But until you have joy, Martha argues, what good is a strategy of success? There is no point in having success without joy.

So, how do you make joy your strategy?

All the way to joy feels joyful, Martha says, and that feeling is letting you know you’re on your right path— because joy is what we all are in our essence. When we feel misery or flatness or bitterness, the message is that we’ve gotten off track and need to change course.

Martha urges us to turn toward joy and join with other people by sharing our joy and asking what we can do to help others experience more of it. Because as joy grows, it more than multiplies!

To find out how to connect with joy even in times of pain or sorrow, learn the difference between happiness and joy, and join Martha in a meditation to help open yourself up to joy, be sure to listen to the entire joy-filled episode. 

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Gatherers—I'm thrilled to be joined by Dr. Richard Schwartz, the brilliant creator of Internal Family Systems (IFS), a wonderful therapeutic model that you may have heard me talk about before because I love using it!

IFS provides an optimistic, empowering framework to help us focus on the different “parts” of our personalities so that we can shift into a state characterized by curiosity, calm, confidence, and compassion.

I hope you’ll tune in for our conversation about his latest book, YOU ARE THE ONE YOU’VE BEEN WAITING FOR: APPLYING INTERNAL FAMILY SYSTEMS TO INTIMATE RELATIONSHIPS, which is available at all major retailers.

You can follow Dr. Richard Schwartz on:
Twitter @ifs_model
Instagram @internalfamilysystems
Facebook at InternalFamilySystems
LinkedIn at InternalFamilySystems

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This week, Martha talks about the paradox of imperfection: trying our hardest to do our best while still accepting that we will always make mistakes. This combination of effort and grace lets the light into our lives. Listen in to learn how!

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The state of the world right now is unnerving. In this episode of The Gathering Room, she shares how we can start to heal the parts of us that are in pain or despair over the state of things.

Martha says that when we experience trauma, shock, fear, or loss, our psyches can split into different parts to help us cope. To heal this loss of integrity or wholeness, we need to unite all the parts of ourselves that are hurting. And we do this by loving them unconditionally.

In this episode, Martha walks us through a powerful visualization exercise to help us access our deepest capacity for love, hope, and joy, so we can welcome the suffering parts of ourselves to “be warmed by the fire of love.” 

As she describes it, “We have to come together as individuals held by the intelligence of nature, by the consciousness of the universe.”

When we can love all the different parts of ourselves, including our sorrow, our fear, our anger, we can love the people around us. And when that happens, vibrant communities begin to form—like Wilder, the “sanctuary for the bewildered” that Martha created with Rowan Mangan.

As Martha shares, “Everything I’ve seen online from the people I respect most, whether they’re politically savvy people or psychologists or community organizers, everybody’s saying the same thing: ‘Join something. Connect, connect, connect.’”

Shock, overwhelm, fear, and rage are ameliorated as we connect with others who are feeling the same way. And this coming together of the shards of all of us could be what creates the calm beyond the storm.

If you’re feeling devastated or uncertain, isolated or afraid, and you want to learn how to let faith, love, and hope guide you to connection and the next right step, don’t miss this reassuring episode of The Gathering Room.

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In this Gathering Room, Martha helps us reconnect with our true desires, which signal the path to the fulfillment of our destiny. (Inspired by Suzanne Eder’s new book, “What You Want Wants You.”)

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The secret about how to claim that elusive feeling of safety is hiding in plain sight. But it is disguised! Listen to this week’s Gathering Room to learn all about how to feel truly safe.

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How would it feel to know you were always loved, supported and cared for in every moment of your life? Well, maybe you are. Join Martha to learn how to find the helpers who never leave.

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I’m thrilled to be joined by my guest Chase Jarvis for this special episode of The Gathering Room podcast!

Chase is an award-winning artist, serial entrepreneur, and bestselling author, who has a new book out called NEVER PLAY IT SAFE: A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO FREEDOM, CREATIVITY, AND A LIFE YOU LOVE.

This remarkable book helped me take a few big leaps in my own life, and I hope that listening to my conversation with Chase will inspire you to do the same. Enjoy!

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Are you familiar with polyvagal theory? 

It may sound highly scientific, but Martha says polyvagal theory has a profound effect on spiritual practice as well, and she’s talking all about it in this episode of The Gathering Room: Dropping Anchor.

The polyvagal nerve is a system of nerves connecting the brain to various parts of the body, and it plays a key role in our response to stress—either revving us up or shutting us down. 

And according to the work of Deb Dana, it’s also involved with our sense of joy, compassion, love, and connection with higher consciousness through the part of the polyvagal nerve called the ventral vagal.

Martha says that even when we feel overwhelmed, the ventral vagal state allows us to anchor into a state of joyful, peaceful relaxation and hold that state of being even amid chaos.

To learn how to stay anchored in peace when others are in fight-or-flight or shutdown mode, tune in for the full episode. Martha even guides you through a ventral vagal exercise along with her Silence, Stillness, and Space meditation. Don’t miss it!

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Are you someone who makes New Year’s resolutions?

Martha enjoys making one (yes, one) each year—and she always keeps it! 

In this episode of The Gathering Room: A Year of Peace, she talks about her resolution to increase her brain’s wellbeing by dropping demands that have an overriding feeling of negativity and tend to make her brain shut down.

Research that has shown that our brains work best when we can answer YES to two questions:

• Am I safe?
• Am I loved unconditionally?

After basic survival, Martha says, love is the next imperative. When we feel safe and we feel loved, it’s amazing how fast we can learn, how much we can create and do—and how much happier our lives can be.

Tune in for the full episode to learn how to let go of the demands we place on ourselves for no good reason, hear about some of the demands Martha has dropped so far, and join her for her guided Space, Silence, and Stillness meditation.

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Did you know you were born a creative genius?

All of us are, Martha says, but we are socialized out of our genius by the structures of culture. Why? Because the culture wants everyone the same, but genius doesn’t homogenize well.

However, your genius is still calling to you, and in this episode of The Gathering Room, Martha shares how you can recognize—and follow—its call.

She says your genius will have three main characteristics:

1. It hides in plain sight—it’s the thing that for you is so easy you think surely anyone could do it. (Spoiler alert: They can’t!)
2. It makes you curious. When you see something that’s related to your genius, you perk up and go "Hmm…” If it makes you curious, your mind is already shaping itself around that activity.
3. It makes you feel something called the “rage to master” where you not only feel curiosity, you feel an ache in your heart that says, "Oh, if only I could do that!" If it’s aligned with your genius, you’ll get the “ignition message” to begin doing that thing.

Martha says that when something that's connected to your genius pulls you in and won't stop pulling you in, the worst thing you can do is decide that the time for you to do that thing has passed—because it is never too late.

Sometimes it's an inspiration, sometimes it's a state of consciousness, sometimes it's a way of healing, sometimes it can't be even seen. 

“Anything can be part of your genius,” Martha says. “Just go for it!”

To find out more about the genius that’s calling to you and how you can answer the call, be sure to tune in for the full episode!

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Has anxiety been keeping you from your life’s mission?

In this episode of The Gathering Room, Martha shares that the best way out of anxiety is not simply to calm yourself, but to get creative!

When you take the creativity route, Martha tells us, you get so deep in the process of creating solutions to the problems that matter to you that it becomes literally impossible for your brain to be anxious.

So how do you start living from a creative place?

Martha says the key is getting curious, and to access your curiosity, there are three things that the brain always asks, in this order:

1. Am I safe? 
2. Am I loved? 
3. What can I learn?

Once the brain knows you are safe and loved, it can go into curiosity and start learning new things. And when you realize that you have the capacity to create around anything that makes you curious, you begin to drive your life towards your own unique mission. 

To learn how to feel safe and loved so you can access your zone of genius and create your life’s mission, tune in for the full episode! Martha also guides you through her Silence, Stillness, and Space meditation to calm anxiety and stimulate curiosity.

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Do you ever feel like your life is a crazy quilt?

Martha says that creating your life is the ultimate creative project, and that’s what she’s talking about in this episode of The Gathering Room.

Each of us is given all the material to make a life—a human body, a set of circumstances, and a set of abilities—and the life we make from that material is ours to determine in this day and age.

Sometimes it feels like we’re just piecing things together helter-skelter without a pattern,  crazy-quilt style, but Martha says there’s nothing crazy about it. “Crazy” is trying to follow the pattern the culture gives us, using only the materials it wants us to have. 

When you stitch together the unique elements of your life to make something that brings you joy and a sense of purpose, that is actually very sane—what Martha calls a “sanity quilt.” 

Listen to the full episode to learn how to see beauty in the fabrics of your life so you can make your own warm and wonderful “sanity quilt.” You’ll also be able to participate as Martha guides you through her Space, Stillness, and Silence meditation.

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Pleasure is something that many of us may think of as an indulgence, but Martha says it’s actually the gateway to the things that really enrich our souls… And we access this pleasure by relaxing. 🍃

In this episode of The Gathering Room, Martha shares an exercise you can do to drop into relaxation mode, and it doesn’t require a trip to the spa—you can do it anywhere!

Using small, pleasant feelings to anchor the whole mind can lead to revolutionary changes, Martha says, and it begins with just two simple steps:

First, clench your jaw. 😬

Then, release it. 😌

Repeat this a few times, and start to notice the feeling of release when your jaw drops. See if you can find something pleasurable in that release of tension because even the smallest sense of pleasure can pull your attention toward it—and away from negative feelings.

You can extend this Relaxation Pleasure exercise throughout your whole body to help relieve anxiety, anger, or heartbreak. Want to learn how?

Listen to the full episode where Martha will walk you through the steps and also lead you in her guided Silence, Stillness, and Space meditation. It’s a recipe for what Martha calls “a mighty pleasant moment” so be sure to join her!

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We're not trained to think of a spiritually led life as being hilarious or silly or goofy. But as Martha reminds us, laughter is the beginning of prayer.

In this episode of The Gathering Pod: Letting the Force Steer Your Life, she talks about the difference between spiritual faith and religious faith, and how to connect with and trust spiritual energy (aka the Force) to guide you.

When you do, you’ll be in for some truly delightful surprises!

As Martha puts it, “The universe is not your butler. The universe is a continuous aspect of your consciousness that loves for you to play with it.”

Listen to the full episode to hear some incredibly fun stories about manifesting with integrity, learn more about the overlap between play and spirit, and participate in Martha’s guided Space, Stillness, and Silence meditation.

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For this special “Listen Again” episode of The Gathering Room, Martha is sharing her conversation with Dr. Richard Schwartz, the brilliant creator of Internal Family Systems (IFS), a wonderful therapeutic model that Martha loves using!

IFS provides an optimistic, empowering framework to help us focus on the different “parts” of our personalities so that we can shift into a state characterized by curiosity, calm, confidence, and compassion.

Tune in for their conversation about Richard’s latest book, YOU ARE THE ONE YOU’VE BEEN WAITING FOR: APPLYING INTERNAL FAMILY SYSTEMS TO INTIMATE RELATIONSHIPS, which is available at all major retailers. 

If you’re interested in learning more about IFS, you won’t want to miss this one!

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Content Warning: This episode includes details of a beloved pet passing. 

“Keeping your seat” refers to finding the core of peace that is always present at your center. This simple skill changes everything. Listen in to this week’s episode to learn how to do it and the heartbreaking reason Martha had to practice it this week.

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Is there something you’re having trouble with that you’re trying to do perfectly?

If so, you’re not alone… As Martha reminds us in this episode of The Gathering Room, we are all trained by the culture to strive for perfection and to look for it in others.

However, you are not going to show up perfectly—because it’s impossible! If you show up not to be perfect but to connect, nobody will care that you haven’t done it perfectly.

As Martha says, we are here to be connected with a world in which all of us are imperfect.

Martha is currently learning Spanish, and she recently stumbled her way through a conversation with a Spanish-speaking friend. Despite her less-than-perfect Spanish, the joy Martha felt connecting with her friend in that language was a “return to the sacredness of communion.” 

If you've been struggling with the desire to be perfect, and you want to learn how to drop into imperfection and connect to yourself and others, be sure to tune in. You’ll also be able to experience connection through Martha’s guided Silence, Stillness, and Space meditation.

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We’ve all had times in our life when we’ve needed help—and we’ve all had times when we’ve received the help we needed.

In this episode of The Gathering Room: How to Look for Help, Martha says that appreciating those times when you’ve been helped in the past is the key to getting help in the future.

When we focus on need, Martha says, it creates a lifetime that feels like nothing but need. But when you see yourself as someone who’s always ultimately received help, you begin to see the universe as a friendly place where help is everywhere.

To learn how to shift your perspective and start noticing how the universe responds to your appreciation for help, be sure to listen to the full episode!

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Many of us have heard about the mind-body connection, but have you ever tried sense-memory therapy?

Martha recently lost her sense of smell to a sinus infection, and instead of worrying that she'll never get it back, she's trying sense-memory therapy—she holds her favorite pine-scented candle close to her nose while relishing the memory of smelling that candle.

Recalling positive sense memories creates connections in the brain that reinforce positive, joyful times instead of fear or anxiety, and that's what Martha is talking about in this episode of The Gathering Room.

Martha believes this methodology can help with every aspect of life—from physical ailments to social anxieties to financial struggles and more—and literally bring the good times back!

We can even touch into the memory of what it was to be pure spirit, completely unafraid, and create brains that can go to the place of no suffering, deep wisdom, and the peace that passes all understanding.

Want to learn how? Tune in for the full episode, where Martha will also guide you through a powerful Space, Silence, and Stillness meditation to help you drop out of matter and connect with the deepest sense memory. Join her!

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As we head towards another holiday season, this week Martha wants us to know that the most important part of our holiday planning is the “refusal to suffer for imaginary reasons.” To learn to go about this, tune in to The Gathering Room! (Originally aired: December 11, 2022)

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Some people have a bullseye picture of their purpose in life and are headed straight toward it. However, this is extremely rare.

Why?

Martha says it’s because we live in a culture dominated by left-hemisphere thinking, which pulls us toward anxiety and socializes us to do as we’re told and acquire material wealth.

In this episode of The Gathering Room podcast, Martha talks about following your curiosity to activate the right side of the brain, which is where our passion lives. And our passion is what leads us to our life’s purpose.

If you want to start looking for things that draw your attention (rather than push yourself toward the things you think you should do), and you’re ready to prepare yourself to follow your curiosity wherever it leads, tune in to the full episode—it may contain just the spark you need!

Episode Links

Jill Bolte Taylor 

Josh Waitzkin

Daniel Coyle

Elizabeth Gilbert

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The world can be a hard, inhospitable, downright hostile place, and people can quite often be less than kind. Yet Martha says that by practicing what she calls “kindness in motion,” we can start to change the whole complexion of the world. 

Martha defines kindness in motion as “kindness while doing things” and she’s sharing how to do it in this episode of The Gathering Room.

As Martha describes it, all of our perceptions come through the filter of the mind. The voice in our heads that we think is coming from the outside actually isn’t. So, as she tells us, “we can unilaterally shift the screen inside the head so that it only brings kindness.” 

This means that if there's something that's frustrating you, as you go through it, be as kind to yourself as you would be to a very vulnerable child who has never tried it before, using what Martha calls Kind Internal Self Talk.

Tell yourself things like:

You are okay.

You’re doing so well.

You're doing things a lot of people couldn't do. 

This is amazing.

This is going to work out fine.

There’s always a place where you can be kind to yourself, Martha says, and soon you’ll start to see your self-kindness reflected back to you from others.

To hear some inspiring stories of kindness in motion (plus a couple that might crack you up), tune in for the full episode, where Martha will also lead you through her Silence, Stillness, and Space meditation. Be extra kind to yourself and join her!

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Did you know that the right hemisphere of your brain is doing supercomputer-level processing all the time, whether you’re aware of it or not?

Wild, right? Martha calls the right hemisphere “the magician” because it can come up with the most amazing, brilliant solutions to very difficult problems, seemingly out of thin air.

In this episode of The Gathering Room: Awakening Your Magician, Martha talks about how we can activate our highly creative right hemispheres, so we can solve the problems in our lives—and in the world.

And the best part is, reawakening your own creative genius can actually be a lot of fun!

To learn how to use Martha’s 4 C’s (calm, curiosity, courage, and feeling cornered) to rev up your right hemisphere and start solving problems as if by magic, tune in to this fascinating episode, which also includes Martha’s Space, Stillness, and Silence meditation.

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Martha’s recent encounter with a flock of wild turkeys made her think about her relationship with wild animals and how they always seem to come when she calls them. 

In this episode of The Gathering Room, Episode #185: Calling Yourself Home, she shares several stories of her incredible interactions with animals and how her steps for calling to them can also be used on the wild parts of yourself to “call them home.”

This can be especially helpful during times when you feel overwhelmed, exhausted, or burned out. In Martha’s coaching experience, December is a particularly rough month for many people, and she herself feels scattered during this time.

Martha says the same technique she uses to call animals can be used to call in all the many parts of your Self, as if calling a flock of birds home to roost.

The first step, she says, is to be in complete integrity. This means telling yourself the truth. You have to track the parts of yourself that are unhappy or angry or fractious in some way and tell yourself the truth about them.

The second step is what Martha calls “centering presence” where you focus on a point in the center of your chest and imagine it filling with warm light. When you can feel the warmth, you’ll be able to breathe more deeply and start to relax. 

Finally, she says to imagine each part of yourself—the scared parts, the flighty parts, the parts who are tired, the parts who don’t want to do things—and imagine them coming home to that point of warmth and light in your chest.

“Maybe they're wild turkeys that can come home to roost in the tree that's inside you,” Martha says. “Or maybe it's a whole murmuration of starlings that can come perch and go to sleep for the night together on an infinitely small branch in the center of your chest.”

If you have parts of yourself that need to feel healed and included and loved, be sure to join Martha for the full episode. She’ll lead you in her Space, Stillness, and Silence meditation and help you call all the scattered parts of yourself home to rest.

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Did you know there is a powerful connection between spirituality and mental health?

Martha recently read a book about this subject—The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life by Lisa Miller—and she’s talking about it on this episode of The Gathering Room: The Benefits of Awakening.

Martha believes in the transformative power of spiritual awakening, which she defines as being what you are in your true essence, once you’ve discarded illusion. While spiritual enlightenment in this lifetime may be an impossible goal, stories of spiritual awakening abound.

Listen to the full episode to hear more—and as Martha says, “Let’s all wake up together!”

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This episode of The Gathering Room suggests that you use your “discomfort zone” in a gentle but powerfully positive way. Curious? Come find out!

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Do you ever feel like a hamster running on a wheel?

Hamsters may love to scurry, but it tends to make us humans anxious and exhausted. Unfortunately, we live in a world that constantly pressures us to keep up with an increasingly frantic pace. And while we run faster and faster, the only place we ever reach is burnout.

It’s when we start to get to burnout and the wheel is still going so fast that we start to get frantic to keep up. In this episode of The Gathering Room, I’m talking about how you can get off the hamster wheel by taking tiny, true steps towards whatever brings you a sense of relief.

By “tiny, true step” I mean any small movement or action that feels like relief to you, like a relaxing exhale. In fact, a relaxing exhale could be the one tiny action you take. Or standing up to stretch. Or taking a bathroom break. Or doing just five minutes of any creative practice.

Whenever you’re feeling frantic or overwhelmed, taking one tiny, true step is enough to move you toward peace. And then if you do it tomorrow and the next day and whenever you feel exhausted and frantic, those tiny movements toward relief will start to change everything.

Remember: You are meant to live in peace, and nature never requires you to do more than you can do in peace.

Although embracing this mindset can be challenging in a society like ours that values constant busyness, you have to trust that small steps are enough to radically transform your life. Try it and see.

To learn more about the profound transformation that can come from taking small steps toward your true destiny, tune in for the full episode. We’ll even take a small step together by doing my guided Space, Silence, and Stillness meditation. Join me!

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There are times when really important things are happening, and we really care about the results. At such times, it’s hard not to get stuck in that awful place between hope and fear.

In this episode of The Gathering Room, Martha is talking about how hope and fear are on the same continuum. The moment you get attached to a hope, you’re also afraid it won't happen. And the moment you’re afraid of something happening, you also hope that it won’t.

As it says in Martha’s favorite book, the Tao Te Ching, “Hope is as hollow as fear. Whether you go up the ladder or down, your position is shaky. When you stand with your two feet on the ground, you will always keep your balance.”

Hope and fear are fundamentally future directed, Martha says, so to get off this shaky ladder and plant your feet on the ground, you must bring yourself to the present moment by practicing mindfulness and equanimity.

When we are mindful, we are fully present and aware of our surroundings and sensations, and with equanimity, we can maintain a calm state of mind, regardless of challenges.

To hear Martha’s insights on how to step off the shaky ladder, ground yourself in the present moment, and mother yourself during difficult times, don’t miss this encouraging episode, which includes Martha’s guided meditation to connect with peace, compassion, and joy.

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This week, Martha talks about what to do at those times when you can’t. She teaches us that even when there is literally no way forward, there is still—literally—a way. Tune in for more. (Originally aired: December 4, 2022)

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Have you ever experienced synchronicity? 

As Martha defines it in this episode of The Gathering Room, a synchronicity is any event or experience that seems to confirm or indicate that the universe is not random—that there's something making all this happen.

Martha has been re-reading The Awakened Brain by Dr. Lisa Miller, who writes about synchronicities and what she calls a “spiritual docking station” in the human brain.

What Dr. Miller found in her research is that when people are open to the idea of spiritual realities like synchronicities, they have access to much more physical and mental health, and they’re more resilient and more resistant to anxiety and depression.

Martha says that when she opens the docking station of her own brain, it feels like a loving, beautiful presence is able to move through her. It gives her the experience of seeming to do things herself but also relax into being moved by a loving, creative force.

It’s only when we relax our nervous systems, Martha says, that we can feel the consciousness of the universe because the consciousness of the universe does not respond to anxiety and desperation. It responds to joy, love, and trust.

To learn how to keep your spiritual docking station open so you can look for synchronicities in your own life, be sure to tune in for the full episode. Martha will also guide you through her Silence, Stillness, and Space meditation to allow those synchronicities to start showing up!

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Do you ever struggle to do things you know you have to do, even though you don’t really feel like it?

We’ve all been there—including Martha—and she’s talking about it in this episode of The Gathering Room: Keep Swimming.

Humans are the kind of creatures that can get so focused on a dream that even if that dream seems impossible, or the work it requires feels like a total slog, we can make ourselves keep going.

Martha watched a movie about long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad, who made several failed attempts to swim from Cuba to Florida. Despite serious setbacks, Diana kept going back and trying again—and she finally achieved her goal at the age of 64.

On her final successful attempt, Diana’s coach jumped into the water to swim alongside her, which Martha says is something we sometimes have to do for each other.

We may not be able to touch each other, but we can still swim alongside each other like a pod of dolphins, encouraging each other to keep going—because the effort will be worth it.

Tune in to the full episode, Ep 146: Keep Swimming, for more encouragement to keep going despite challenges and to participate in Martha’s guided Silence, Stillness, and Space meditation.

LINKS

• Nyad film

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Have you been feeling depleted?

So many of us are tired, so much of the time. To find out what we can do about it, join Martha for this episode of The Gathering Pod: Filling the Well.

Martha points out that there are many situations in human life that are analogous to drought— times when our energy feels like it’s drying up. The good news is that there are sources of energetic replenishment always available to us.

With enough spiritual practice you can actually get to a place where you feel the dewpoint of Spirit filling you up with the energy that never fails—what Martha calls the “water of life.”

To learn more about filling your spiritual well with renewed energy and joy, don’t miss the full episode! You’ll also be able to join Martha’s guided Silence, Stillness, and Space meditation.

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Did you know that joy is your birthright as a human?

Finding joy is one of Martha’s favorite topics, and that’s what she’s talking about on this episode of The Gathering Room!

Martha says that joy, like beauty, is its own excuse for being, and she shares ways we can look for and experience joy, even in the midst of difficulty.

She quotes a Jack Gilbert poem that says, "We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.” Meaning, we must find joy wherever we are.

Martha clarifies that joy is not the same thing as happiness. Happiness is what you feel when something you do succeeds, or you recover from an illness, or someone you love comes back from far away. Happiness is wonderful, of course, but joy goes much deeper.

Joy is something that says, "I am here on an experience-gathering mission, and my soul loves adventure and is not afraid to suffer."

Martha says that joy is what gets you through this world because it reminds you that you are not of this world. It is something more lasting, more powerful, and more loving than your physical experience could ever be.

To hear how Martha found joy during some difficult times in her own life, learn easy ways to find joy if it's been eluding you for a while, and get inspired to jump for joy wherever you see it, tune in for the full episode. You can also join Martha in meditation for a little “energy bath” of joy.

Don’t miss it!

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Sometimes we’re hit with a change so big it knocks us for a loop. We look around in a daze thinking, “NOW what?”

🦋 Welcome to what Martha calls “Square One” in The Change Cycle, a unique framework she developed to help people understand and navigate life’s transitions.

🦋 As Martha explains, life's changes aren't things we plan in our calendars. They are fundamental metamorphoses.

You will go through the four Squares of the Change Cycle over and over throughout your lifetime. And Square One is about not knowing exactly what to do or what will happen next. 

🦋 It’s about letting go and waiting to see what kind of butterfly you’re going to become.

If you’re in Square One and feeling scared or confused…and you want to learn how to get through it with grace and ease, then this episode is a must-listen. You’ll also be able to cultivate an immediate sense of calm by joining Martha in her Silence, Space, and Stillness meditation.

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Do you feel in desperate need of a rest?

Most of us are underestimating our need to rest to an almost criminal degree, and Martha is talking about why that is—and how to change it—on this episode of The Gathering Room.

We live in a society that wants us to work constantly. However, nature says that we need to rest regularly—in fact, this is absolutely crucial. “You can live without intense activity,” Martha reminds us, “but you cannot live without rest.” 

Rest is your connection to the Divine and comes in many different forms—it’s not just lying down and napping!—and connecting to the Divine is what gives you rest and nourishes your soul.

Tune in to the full episode to learn how to respect your circadian and ultradian rhythms, how to come up with what Martha calls “cultural cover stories” when you need them, and how to cultivate low-demand living to help you get the rest you need.

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There’s no question about it—we are living in chaotic times.

We’re all trying to be happy and at peace, and we often think we need to find external circumstances that are conducive to those states. But did you know that there is a bedrock of stillness and kindness that we can drop into, no matter what’s going on around us?

 In this episode of The Gathering Room, I’ll guide you to this still, calm place through a very special meditation that you can revisit any time you feel tempest-tossed.

As my partner Rowan, recently pointed out to me, self-kindness can always be accessed by recognizing that the universe is essentially kind. We can cultivate stillness in our chaotic world by aligning ourselves with this universal kindness.

I had never thought of kindness as being the essential component of the universe. So I started doing meditations and thought experiments where I focused on the kindness that there is in the world and began to anchor myself into that—and that’s what I’ll be teaching you in this episode.

I have a new take on our usual Space, Stillness, and Silence meditation, and it involves imagining yourself as a point of consciousness above a stormy ocean and dropping a thread of consciousness into the depths to reach the stillness at the center of the earth.

By learning to find and anchor into this stillness—which is the same as universal kindness—you can find peace and stability, no matter what the circumstances.

We are all on an odyssey in this life where the journey is the goal. We’re heroes who have taken the call to adventure, and we’re here for the adventure itself.

Tune in for the full episode to anchor into universal kindness and learn how it can help you see the good in difficult situations, help you navigate loss, self-doubt, and other turbulent situations, and help you become a safe harbor for others.

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We're not trained to think of a spiritually led life as being hilarious or silly or goofy. But as Martha reminds us, laughter is the beginning of prayer.

In this episode of The Gathering Pod: Letting the Force Steer Your Life, she talks about the difference between spiritual faith and religious faith, and how to connect with and trust spiritual energy (aka the Force) to guide you.

When you do, you’ll be in for some truly delightful surprises!

As Martha puts it, “The universe is not your butler. The universe is a continuous aspect of your consciousness that loves for you to play with it.” Listen to the full episode to hear some incredibly fun stories about manifesting with integrity, learn more about the overlap between play and spirit, and participate in Martha’s guided Space, Stillness, and Silence meditation.

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Have you been struggling to climb pyramids of power, education, wealth, or anything else our culture teaches us to value? Are you ready to find (or return to) your true nature instead?

In this episode of The Gathering Room, Martha is talking about the importance of “be-wilder-ing” ourselves and the transformative power of making authentic connections.

She says that if we can get far enough from society's rules and be willing to break them in some ways—and also be willing to look deeply within ourselves—we will go back to what nature wants us to be.

If we can find our true selves, there's only one task we need to save the world, and that task is three simple words: “Find the others.” With her brand-new online community, Wilder, Martha feels even closer to fulfilling that mission!

As she tells us, the technology we now have for gathering together is a tool in the hands of the Divine, and with the Wilder Community, it has evolved into a kind of wild space where we can become ourselves and find the others.

If you can go wild, you will find where you're meant to be—where there’s nowhere to go and nothing to strive for, but everything to love, enjoy, experience, and savor. 

“That's why we're here,” Martha says. “We are here to enjoy this world.”

To learn more about finding and embracing your true nature, connecting with others, and using your integrity to navigate life's challenges—and also hear about Martha’s exciting experiences in the Wilder community—be sure to tune in!

Martha also shares book recommendations, answers listener questions, and leads you in her Space, Silence, and Stillness meditation, emphasizing human imagination and its potential to create positive change in the world. Don’t miss it!

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For this very special Gathering Room, Martha is joined by extraordinary emerging thought leader Melissa Kiguwa. The two discuss why audacity is an underappreciated personal quality and an essential ingredient for an authentic life. 

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Gatherers—I'm so excited to be joined by New York Times bestselling author Katherine May!

If you don't know Katherine's work, do yourself an enormous favor and read everything you can that she's written. I hope you'll join me for our conversation about her new book, ENCHANTMENT: AWAKENING WONDER IN AN ANXIOUS AGE. 

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Do you ever try to make forward-thinking plans, but then you get hit with surprises you never saw coming?

Martha says it seems to happen to her about once every six months… For example, because of a recent trip to Costa Rica, where she happened to befriend the incredible women of Sleep-Works, she’s now a sound sleeper (and a morning person!) after a lifetime of insomnia.

Trying to make plans in a world of escalating change is a challenge, Martha says, because there’s just no way to plan for everything that’s going to happen.

In this episode of The Gathering Room, she talks about how to move forward by embracing change and uncertainty—and the delightful surprises that can come your way when you do.

Martha’s method is to keep a wide-open mind and throw herself upon the mercy of the universe. If something feels good to her soul (and by “good” she means a feeling of complete peace washing over her) then she moves toward that thing in a very specific way.

“In my life,” she says, “I have found that the sense of being pulled by my heart and soul is a kind of yearning mixed with peace—and trust that I'm meant to have what I deeply desire.”

That feeling is what has always pulled Martha forward, and it's the reason she started teaching her Wayfinder Life Coach Training program—she wanted to teach people to find their path forward the way she does.

As she started getting cohorts of new Wayfinder trainees, she’d ask why they joined the program, and fully 85% would say they had no idea, which filled her with the joy of connection: "Yes! My people! They're out there!"

To hear more about how you can work toward perfect integrity, learn to recognize the feeling of pull or push that can guide you to your true yearning, and move toward your next wild and wonderful experience, tune in for the full conversation!

This episode also includes Martha’s guided Space, Stillness, and Silence meditation to help you bring your attention off the reasons you do things in the outer world, so you can focus on the field of connection that’s pulling you toward what you're meant to do next.

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Gatherers—I'm so excited to be joined by Emma Nadler, author of the lyrical, funny, and heart-healing new memoir, THE UNLIKELY VILLAGE OF EDEN.

As a psychotherapist and the parent of a child with disabilities, Emma Nadler is a testament to the resiliency of parents, children, friendships, marriage, and every other manifestation of human love.

I hope you’ll tune in for our conversation about her deeply moving and inspiring book!

THE UNLIKELY VILLAGE OF EDEN: A MEMOIR by Emma Nadler is available at all major retailers. You can follow Emma on Instagram @emmanadlerwrites and find her on Facebook at Emma Nadler.

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We’re happy to announce that Martha’s bestselling book The Way of Integrity is out in paperback now! 

In honor of this new release, we are replaying Martha’s one-hour Oprah's Book Club Edition of The Gathering Room from March 6, 2022. 

In this episode, Martha shares how you can bring yourself back into wholeness (aka integrity) to allow more peace, freedom, belonging, and joy into your life.

She also answers questions from her friends over at Oprah's Book Club and her beloved regular Gathering Room peeps, so you won’t want to miss this very special episode.

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In this Gathering Room, Martha talks about the “heart healer” within every person. When we’re heartsick, this is the only thing that heals us. Learn how to access your own heart healer in this very popular episode! (Originally aired: January 15, 2023)

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There’s a saying Martha likes that goes, “A hundred years before you were born, God drew a circle around the place you're standing now." 

In other words, you are here because you are meant to be here—but  from this place, you can literally go in any direction! 

So what is the best next step for you to take? That’s what Martha is talking about on this episode of The Gathering Room podcast. 

She shares all of the things she’s been “nerding out” over in her quest to discover her best next step: the adjacent possible, liquid networks, and what Dylan Thomas called “the force that through the green fuse drives the flower.”

The “adjacent possible” means something that can happen but hasn’t happened yet, and we humans are in an adjacent possible right now—it’s possible to fix everything that is broken, given the technologies we have and the ideas that we come up with.

Martha says that when there's a big thing that wants to happen, the information and ideas necessary to come up with it are hidden in a kind of mosaic: We’re all equipped with different fragments that only make sense when we come together.

“Whenever I am close to a best next step,” she says, “the hair on my arms prickles a lot. I feel sort of guided to certain books. I get obsessed with songs and I look them up and the lyrics give me ideas, and I am drawn to certain other people.” 

Martha shares how to sense when something wonderful is coming—something delicious and delightful and exhilarating and new that you've been preparing for your whole life—and allow the intelligence of nature to show you your best next step toward it. 

If you’re ready to take that best next step, be sure to tune in for the full episode, where Martha also shares the best next step she’s most excited about in her own life. Don’t miss it!

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These days life can seem extremely chaotic—have you felt it, too? 

Whether it’s the noise of the world or the noise of your own thoughts, there’s so much happening and so many things to think about that it can really get your head spinning with questions like:

What am I supposed to be doing? 

Where is my attention supposed to be? 

How do I rest my heart?

The good news is this: You already have a still, magnetic center within you, and on this episode of The Gathering Room podcast, I share how you can access it. 

The world can be chaotic, confusing, and sometimes absolutely terrifying—but that’s only when we let ourselves spin. It’s not about escaping the chaos but finding your still center within it.

One effective way to connect with the point of stillness within each of us—what I call the “inner compass”—is meditation. I’ll lead you through a version of my Space, Stillness, and Silence meditation to help you let go of tension and allow your nervous system to regulate inward.

I’ve only just begun to realize how when you center yourself in that place and allow it to be enough, the answers to your questions about the most trivial things and the most immense things will come without effort into your consciousness. 

There is an intelligence and a love so great for you that hears you in your confusion and amidst the terrifying cacophony of this world.

Ro and I recently took Lila on a trip to the Central Park Zoo, and it was pure pandemonium in New York City: screaming kids, crowds of parade-goers, Hare Krishna worshipers, blaring bands, and all of it bathed in the city’s current signature scent…weed. 

As we were driving home through all this chaos, Lila declared, “There’s a lot of music in this town, girls!” before promptly falling asleep in her car seat. This reminded me that stillness is always available—even in the loudest moments of life. 

There’s no need to rush or try to fix everything. Your destination is right here in the present moment. Be here now. Your inner stillness holds the answers to your questions, even those you haven’t asked yet.

When we ground ourselves in the space, silence, and stillness and stand in the huge wide plain where there is no one but you and your compass that is pointing straight into your own being, your presence becomes the portal. It opens to the instructions for what you need to do next.

If you’d like to hear more about trusting your inner compass, how to stay creative amidst chaos, and how to find the answers you’re seeking, tune in for the full episode. We’ll take a collective deep breath and ground ourselves in “the still point of the turning world” together. Join me!

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There are three zones we can inhabit. Two will shrink our lives and one will grow them. Learn the difference and how to stay in the sweet spot with this week’s Gathering Room!

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Are you someone who likes making vision boards? 

They’re a fun way to direct your attention—and because whatever we put our attention on tends to show up in our consciousness and in our lives, vision boards can be powerful tools for healing and for helping you manifest your desires.

In this episode of The Gathering Room, Martha shares how to create a vision board, starting with digging deep into your preferences to find out what you truly want (not what you’ve been socialized to think you want) and allowing yourself the time and space to be creative. 

Then, Martha says, you’ll start “constellating an economic ecosystem.” 

Constellating means coming together by natural forces, so you sit in the center of your desire and your creativity, and the things you want—such as more income, good health, happy relationships—will start forming around you like a constellation.

Any place on earth where you have space, energy, and water, you're going to get ecosystems. And the same is true with each of us, Martha says. Our yearning is the energy, our creativity is the water, and the space is the time we give it in our lives.

Society has traditionally taught us that we should get one job, keep it until we retire, and that one job is where we’ll get all our money forever. So we’re not used to seeing our personal economy as a complex system of things. 

However, because of technology and competition, the old way of doing things is collapsing, and it’s become more feasible in our economy to have an economic ecosystem. To create one you need liberated deep desire, plus liberated creativity, plus time—and a vision board can help.

To learn Martha’s steps for making vision boards that create thriving economic ecosystems in your own life, join her for this fun and inspiring episode! She’ll also lead you in a meditation to help your deepest desires and the infinite power of your creativity do their magical work.

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It is a weird world out there right now, and if you’re like me, you’re feeling more than a little anxious. Anxiety has been called the mental illness of our time, but in fact, it’s not a mental illness. It’s an understandable reaction to an abnormal world that we never evolved to handle.

As I’ve written in my book Beyond Anxiety and talked about at length, creativity is the opposite of that anxiety. However, there’s a crucial step you must take to go from anxiety to creativity, and you cannot skip it. That step is kindness.

Kindness is the greatest creative fuel in human existence, and in this episode of The Gathering Room, I’m sharing the 5-step exercise I follow to cultivate kindness toward myself, get out of anxiety, and generate creativity and joy.

In fact, for the first time ever on The Gathering Room, I’m recommending that you bring a pencil and paper and work through this exercise with me. It’s fun—and powerfully effective.

You start by identifying and acknowledging your negative feelings, whether you’re feeling anxiety, anger, sorrow, or something else. Imagine the part of yourself that is feeling this way as a separate entity, and you are the compassionate observer.

Ask this part of yourself how it’s feeling, and then offer this three-word phrase, which is probably the most powerful thing you can do to heal yourself or another human being:

“Tell me everything.”

The vast majority of people, including our inner parts, just want someone to sit with them and witness what’s going on inside them. And this act of kindness—of listening—gives a place for the pain to flow.

Every time you make the choice to be kind to yourself, you are creating a whole new brain that is going to be a lot happier and more creative. This will lead you to the one way that you can create beauty that no one else ever could, your unique contribution to the world.

To work through the full five-step kindness exercise with me, be sure to tune in for the full episode. I’ll also guide you through my Space, Silence, and Stillness meditation as that is one kind thing I often give myself when I’m in an anxious place.

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We are naturally inclined to focus on things that frighten us.

Lies spread six times faster than true facts. In fact, there’s only one thing that spreads as quickly as lies, and that’s Martha’s one-word recipe for us this week. Tune in to find out what it is!

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Did you know that everything around you is conscious and responding to you in various ways?

It may sound woo-woo, but Martha says there's a tremendous amount of legitimate scientific research to support this idea!

When we’re willing to acknowledge that we don't know everything about the universe, and we’re willing to play with the idea that the universe is conscious, very interesting things start happening…

In this episode of The Gathering Room: How to Play with the Conscious Universe, Martha talks about the synchronicities and “God winks” that occur when we realize we're all one field of consciousness.

To learn how to start picking up what the universe is actually saying to you—and feel its deep calm as Martha guides you through her Silence, Stillness, and Space meditation—be sure to listen to this fascinating episode.

LINKS

The Conscious Universe by Dean Radin, PhD

The Elephant Whisperer: My Life with the Herd in the African Wild by Lawrence Anthony

Plant researcher Monica Gagliano

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How do you respond when you’re in a painful situation and there’s no way out? The answer is paradoxical. Come learn how to do it with this week’s Gathering Room!

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Some people have a bullseye picture of their purpose in life and are headed straight toward it. However, this is extremely rare.

Why?

Martha says it’s because we live in a culture dominated by left-hemisphere thinking, which pulls us toward anxiety and socializes us to do as we’re told and acquire material wealth.

In this episode of The Gathering Room podcast, Martha talks about following your curiosity to activate the right side of the brain, which is where our passion lives. And our passion is what leads us to our life’s purpose.

If you want to start looking for things that draw your attention (rather than push yourself toward the things you think you should do), and you’re ready to prepare yourself to follow your curiosity wherever it leads, tune in to the full episode—it may contain just the spark you need!

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In this episode of The Gathering Room, you’ll learn how little you really have to do. If you think that sounds too easy, change what you think, not what you do. Come see how! (Originally aired: January 8, 2023)

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“How do we adjust to the drudgery?”

Martha was asked this question by Ro when they returned home from a wonderful stay at the Imiloa Institute in the Costa Rican jungle.

A lot of upkeep is required to sustain ordinary living, and much of daily life gets consumed by repetitive tasks. In this episode of The Gathering Room, Martha talks about a shift we can make to transform drudgery into beauty.

In traditions where they have the concept of awakening or enlightenment, Martha says, the emphasis is not on what you do, but how you do it. It's the quality of presence in your body, mind, heart, and spirit while you carry out each task. 

As the Zen saying goes, “Before enlightenment: Chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: Chop wood, carry water.”

When you are fully present and engaging with all of your senses, any experience can become sublime, even mundane tasks like washing the dishes. You can look at even the simplest object and say, “You are so beautiful.”

To get more insights about transforming drudgery into a spiritual practice, tune in for the full episode, which also includes Martha’s guided Silence, Stillness, and Space meditation. And if a retreat with Martha sounds like just the thing to help you return to your life with fresh eyes, read about her Pure.Wild.Self Retreat in Costa Rica at the link below!

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All my life I’ve been waiting for a transformation of human consciousness. And I always thought that it would be a gentle and beautiful awakening, essentially like what the Buddha experienced. 

I suppose in some universes it might happen that way…but in the universe where I find myself now, I’m seeing massive upheaval and disruption instead.

In this episode of The Gathering Room podcast, I’m sharing my reflections on the breakdowns we’re experiencing in the world today—social, political, and personal—and how in the midst of this chaos there is actually the potential for profound breakthroughs.

As a breakdown comes down on you, a breakthrough can come up and into you, as if from the marrow of your bones, and it can shift the way you see your experiences.

There’s a one-hundred-year-old experiment from quantum physics called the Double-Slit Experiment that I use as a metaphor for how our perception shapes our reality. Because life is both matter and energy, we have the power to see disruptions as waves of potential.

In this episode, I’ll guide you through a visualization where you imagine two doors: one leading to a world of breakdowns and fear—what our culture insists is the only reality—and the other leading to a realm of pure love, connection, and infinite possibilities.

And here’s the secret: You don’t have to choose one or the other—it’s possible to walk through both doors at once! This visualization can help you go from whatever breakdown you’re experiencing to a breakthrough into something much sweeter and calmer and more reassuring.

To learn how to move from breakdowns to breakthroughs and step into a state of love, light, and fluidity, be sure to tune in for the full episode.

I’ll also share my daily practices to stay grounded, answer some questions, and lead you in my Space, Silence, and Stillness meditation to help you connect with your Self (with a capital S) and shift from identifying with matter to embodying pure energy and light. Join me!

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“Be prepared to stop.”

This is serious life advice, Martha says, because no matter what we’re doing (or how much we want to continue doing it), at some point we’re going to get interrupted by life.

Whenever we have to stop something we thought was going to continue indefinitely—like a job, for example, or a marriage—it can really hurt.

In this episode of The Gathering Pod: When Stopping Is the Way to Go, Martha talks about how we can make peace with inevitable interruptions by embracing another perspective:

“In the flow of time in this earthly existence, stopping and starting are the same thing—every time we stop doing something, we start doing something different.”

Tune in to participate in a guided meditation with Martha and learn how you loosening your attachments can ease the pain of stopping, so you can start observing the delicious flow of life.

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In this Gathering Room, Martha talks about the “heart healer” within every person. When we’re heartsick, this is the only thing that heals us. Learn how to access your own heart healer in this very popular episode! (Originally aired: January 15, 2023)

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What does it mean to “compose yourself”? 

The usual definition is to calm down and control yourself, but Martha has a very different meaning in mind, and she’s exploring it in this episode of The Gathering Room: How to Compose Yourself.

As Martha defines it, you are literally composing your life—the being that you are—through the act of creating something new.

Whether it’s a watercolor you’re painting, a meal you’re preparing, a business you’re building, or a child you’re raising, the act of creation is also creating you—and according to Martha, this is the actual point of creating. (Not, as the culture would have us believe, to make money from it.)

Tune in for the full episode to learn more of Martha’s insights about the beauty and importance of creating “for no reason” and to participate in her guided meditation on imperfection, impermanence, and the essence of creativity.

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Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about wayfinding and how it can help us create what I call “the new consciousness,” which is both a state and a place that we can access. That’s what I’m talking about on this episode of The Gathering Room podcast—episode 189: Finding the Field.

The name of my Wayfinder Life Coach Training program was inspired by the wisdom of ancient “wayfinders”—people who had their own ways of navigating through whatever terrain they lived in, which is what I do as a life coach.

There is a scientist named Rupert Sheldrake who went wayfinding into the structure of the universe and came up with his theory of “morphic fields”—the idea that nature has memory, where similar patterns influence others across time and space. 

So I was thinking, when we go wayfinding, we’re going toward a morphic field. And while I call it wayfinding, I never tell people exactly what they’re finding their way toward, only that whatever it is will lead them to their purpose.

My wayfinding techniques put you in a state where your mind becomes a sort of field of openness that can receive things that resonate with the space, silence, and stillness that’s holding us all in a matrix of love.

Going into the Self and finding your way using the “compasses” of your body, heart, mind, and spirit is how you will “wayfind” to the new consciousness—a collective shift in the way humans think, the way we process consciousness, and the way we use our consciousness. 

To hear more about the new consciousness and how to access it (plus hear about my vivid encounters with the spirit of Dante Alighieri!), tune in for the full episode. You’ll also be able to join me for a guided group meditation devoted to those who are scared, suffering, or lonely.

Come meet me in the field.

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At long last, my book Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose has been released into the world!

In this episode of The Gathering Room—Episode #188: What Lies Beyond Anxiety?—I’m talking about the book and sharing some insights on overcoming anxiety through kindness, curiosity, and creativity.

What can I tell you about this book that I haven’t told you already? I’m glad you asked!

The book is divided into three parts: The Creature, The Creative, and The Creation. First you have to acknowledge that the anxious part of you is like a tiny scared animal, and you can’t use analysis or even medication to bash that little creature into a state of calm. You can only calm your creature by using kindness.

Once you’ve calmed your creature, you can tap into your creative brain by exploring what makes you curious. Once you start using the creative parts of your brain, you shift energy away from the anxious parts and form a different pattern in the brain.

Curiosity then leads us to creativity. Being in a panic is not a creative state and therefore can’t solve your problems—especially not problems you’ve never encountered before. For that, you’ve got to have creativity. Just remember to be gentle with yourself.

And remember that creativity isn’t limited to traditional artistic pursuits like painting, music, or dance. Cooking, conversation, birdwatching, rearranging furniture—these are all creative acts! In fact, just about everything we humans do is creative.

When we become creatively engaged with the world, we open our minds to the mysteries of existence. At this point, creation itself starts to play with us, like a mother dog with her puppies. We begin to notice synchronicities and feel a deep connection to the world around us.

In our online Wilder Community, we’re offering a year-long Deep Dive into Beyond Anxiety with monthly videos, live Q&As, and group discussions to really explore each chapter of the book.

To hear more about moving beyond anxiety through kindness, creativity, and openness to life’s mysteries, tune in for the full episode.

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We’ve got another Best of the Gathering Room episode for you today, a listener favorite called Building on Bright Spots.

In this episode, Martha talks about finding and following the almost invisible “bright spots” in your life whenever things feel dark and cloudy. Because clouds are illusions, it's always possible to find little breaks in the clouds and see the clear points of truth that can guide you home. 

To find out how, tune in for the full episode—which might turn out to be a bright spot for you!

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Our culture generally teaches us that anxiety will keep us safe—but really it’s our intuition that does that. In this episode of The Gathering Room—Episode #184: How to Access Intuition When You Really Need It, Martha talks about how to tell the difference between anxiety and intuition and how to hear what your intuition is trying to tell you.

There’s something Martha calls the “sense of truth,” which is a feeling of concord, peace, and calm that comes into us when we believe something that feels true at the deepest levels of the self. It’s trusting that whatever we’re believing at that moment is actually real.

“It turns out that a lot of the things we are anxious about are not real—not yet,” Martha says. “They’re potential, but they’re not real in this moment.”

Unlike fear, which is a rational response to a clear and present danger, anxiety is a chronic, suffering sense of being afraid of things that may not ever happen.

Martha says that one of the lies anxiety will always tell you is that only by staying anxious can you be safe—because when you’re not anxious, you’re not alert. However, exactly the opposite is true: People who are anxious can’t stay alert.

Real intuition arrives when our anxiety is quiet. So many of us are walking around constantly anxious, thinking we’re alert, thinking we can trust our intuition, when in fact, we’re blotting out our intuition with anxiety. 

To access intuition, we have to go into a state of stillness and peace and then listen for the fun—that’s the state of being where your intuition can talk to you.

“Your intuition can come in the goofiest, most wonderful ways,” Martha says, “once you realize it’s meant to be a frequency of joy and never a frequency of anxiety.” 

To learn more about listening to your intuition and finding its frequency of joy—and to join Martha in her anxiety-relieving Silence, Space, and Stillness meditation—be sure to tune in for the full episode!

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There are more people on earth than ever before… yet so many people are lonely. The thing is, love and friendship aren’t a numbers game. There’s a way to attract the people who are waiting to love you. Come find out how!

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How do you know when something is worth the trouble?

That’s the question Martha’s exploring in this episode of The Gathering Room, and the short answer is: If it’s your passion, it’s always worth the trouble!

Martha’s recent trip to New York with her family to see Ani DiFranco on Broadway ended up being an enormous amount of trouble—but when she finally got to see the show, she was blown away. She found that the joy it brought her was worth all the trouble it took to get there.

She also realized that so much of the art and music and writing that inspires us—the astonishing art, the amazing music, the brilliant books—took an enormous amount of trouble to create. And the fact that these things take trouble to create means they’re worth the trouble.

Are you looking for some creative inspiration? Want to find out if your latest passion is worth the trouble it’s going to take? Then this episode is for you! You can also participate in Martha’s guided meditation to help you tap into the creative power of silence, space, and stillness.

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How do you respond when you’re in a painful situation and there’s no way out? The answer is paradoxical. Come learn how to do it with this week’s Gathering Room!

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Did you know that we’re energetically connected?

We all have the ability to feel each other’s energy: if someone is happy and calm, we can feel it, and when someone is angry or dangerous, we can feel that as well. What’s more, we’re each projecting our own energy all the time.

However, when you’re not aware of the energy you’re giving off, you inadvertently create what Martha calls “energetic dark spots”—and these make you vulnerable to people with negative energy who want to prey on you in some way.

In this episode of The Gathering Room, Martha talks about how you can mend any energetic dark spots you may have and create an integrous energy that is calm, pure, and doesn't attract negativity.

She’ll walk you through the process she uses to heal her own energy shields—using questions she learned from the work of Byron Katie—and she’ll also lead you in her Space, Silence, and Stillness meditation to help you visualize the energy that connects us all.

Plus, Rowan Mangan will join Martha at the end for a very exciting announcement, so be sure to tune in for the full episode!

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Our comfort zones are always shrinking or expanding. In this Gathering Room, we discuss how to make sure they keep expanding. You really are braver than you believe!

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Did you know that the right hemisphere of your brain is doing supercomputer-level processing all the time, whether you’re aware of it or not?

Wild, right? Martha calls the right hemisphere “the magician” because it can come up with the most amazing, brilliant solutions to very difficult problems, seemingly out of thin air.

In this episode of The Gathering Room: Awakening Your Magician, Martha talks about how we can activate our highly creative right hemispheres, so we can solve the problems in our lives—and in the world.

And the best part is, reawakening your own creative genius can actually be a lot of fun!

To learn how to use Martha’s 4 C’s (calm, curiosity, courage, and feeling cornered) to rev up your right hemisphere and start solving problems as if by magic, tune in to this fascinating episode, which also includes Martha’s Space, Stillness, and Silence meditation.

LINKS

• NASA study on creative genius
• Mann Gulch Fire of 1949

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Is there something you’re trying to get done? Something you really, really want, but you're struggling?

While our culture teaches us to “never give up the struggle,” in this episode of The Gathering Room, Martha is talking about how taking breaks and allowing for rest can lead to unexpected improvements and breakthroughs.

As many Gatherers know, Martha’s been working on watercolor painting for months now, and she finds it extremely challenging. Recently she had to take a break from it, and when she finally got back to her easel, something strange happened… Her hand just knew what to do!

As Martha describes it:

“It was like everything I’d been experimenting with had sunk into my nervous system. And actually, when the brain learns a new skill, especially if it learns playfully, it does start on the top of your brain and then it literally sinks in. The more you do it, the more it goes down toward the core of your brain, and you get better and better at it. And it doesn't feel like it’s you doing it anymore—it feels like magic.”

If you’d like to learn how to get the kind of rest that leads to magical breakthroughs—Martha’s favorite ways include sleep, laughter, puzzle-cracking, and more—be sure to listen to the full episode. You’ll also be able to take a restful break as she leads you in her favorite meditation.

Don’t miss it!

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Did you know that until you are truly compassionate to yourself, you can’t be compassionate to any other person?

In Episode #192 of The Gathering Room, I’m talking about building compassionate communities—and how a safe, loving, mutually supportive community is probably the most important thing we can ever have, especially during chaotic times.

I’ve been reading my way through all the skills that make you a good community creator, and one of my favorites is the book Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg, who talks about creating community by first becoming your own good company.

We have such an individualistic, fragmenting society where we’re always pitted against each other in competition, but we long to experience moments of beautiful company where everyone feels lifted by everyone else. This kind of community is a basic human need.

Marshall Rosenberg says that everything we do is trying to meet our basic needs, and we go off course by trying to meet our needs with things that don’t work. He describes bringing ourselves into that sense of loving community by following a few basic steps:

* Identify any “mistakes” or behaviors you’re upset with yourself about.
* Notice any shaming language you use around those behaviors (words like “should”).
* Understand the need you were trying to meet with those behaviors.
* Allow yourself to mourn the fact that what you tried didn’t work.

Then, if you can empathize with the part of yourself that was trying to get a need met in an ill-advised way, there’s a kind of embrace that happens automatically—and in that embrace is forgiveness.

That’s when, within yourself, you have all of your parts, including what I call the “compassionate witness.” There are all the parts who’ve been trying so hard, and everyone is empathizing with everyone else. There is mutual forgiveness for everything you ever thought you did wrong, and no one is being blamed. That’s the way into being your own best company.

And from there on, Marshall Rosenberg tells us, everything is play.

To find out more about forgiving yourself, becoming your own best company, and creating supportive, compassionate communities, tune in for the full episode. I’ll also guide you through my Space, Silence, and Stillness meditation with a special focus on bringing your inner collective into loving harmony. Join me!

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As I’m sure you’re keenly aware, people are extremely divided these days. From our politics, to our attitudes, to our ways of speaking about others, we are growing more and more polarized—and mutually destructive.

On this episode of The Gathering Room podcast, I’m talking about how upset many of us feel, why that upset is not always coming from a place we can trust, and what we can do about it.

Once upon a time, they invented something called the internet. And on the internet, social media began to play out. And these platforms soon figured out that we pay more attention to things that upset us, so they started feeding us more and more upsetting content.

Because we evolved to be social creatures who are super susceptible to group influence, we’re basically hardwired to want to agree with the group, even if it means pretending to see things differently than we actually do.

Add all that evolutionary and psychological background to social media, and you soon get social media algorithms that keep us online by stoking constant outrage and fear.
We’re terrified of being bullied and looking for people to back us up, so we consume more and more information that’s designed to upset us. Then we lash out in a way that feels like self-defense, but it looks to other people like we’re attacking them. It’s a vicious cycle where everyone feels attacked by everyone else.

A lot of us feel vulnerable and outraged and afraid of the future and of other people right now. It’s been so exaggerated by our media and our social media that we’ve lost our sense of truth in all of this. And when you get people off their basic sense of truth, they will do almost anything. They will attack other people and leave their own ethics in the dust. When you lose your sense of truth, suddenly everything bobs and sways and there’s nothing real to stand on.

Everything is spinning and slanting and trying to get you to feel a certain way, but the only feeling that you can really build a life on is peace.

So, how can you get to peace in an increasingly polarized world?

Find out on this episode of The Gathering Room, where I’ll share the one statement I’ve found to be most grounding and true, how to make peace your primary goal in all interactions, and how peace can give you the strength and clarity you need to navigate life’s challenges.

We’ll also do our guided Space, Silence, and Stillness meditation to recalibrate ourselves toward clear minds, quiet hearts, and peace. Join me!

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This week, Martha talks about the “genius, power and magic” of beginning (thanks, Goethe!). She proposes we look at beginning something new as an end in itself so that we can gently coax ourselves into it. Tune in for more!

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This week, we all go tracking! Your spirit is leaving footprints everywhere; join Martha to learn how to follow them!

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In this episode of The Gathering Room, you’ll learn how little you really have to do. If you think that sounds too easy, change what you think, not what you do. Come see how! (Originally aired: January 8, 2023)

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In this episode of The Gathering Pod: Calm Down, We Can Do Both!, Martha talks about how calming yourself frees the brain to come up with creative ways to get everything your heart desires—even when those desires seem to conflict with each other.

Martha recommends that when you reach an impasse in your yearning, push hard against the frustration you feel and let the yearning be bigger—and then let go. That’s when you get calm, which activates your brain’s full creative potential to find solutions you never thought of before!

(Note: Martha will be teaching you to trade anxiety for this kind of creative capacity in her upcoming course, “The Art of Calm.” Registration closes soon! Read more and sign up here: marthabeck.com/calm )

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Where does your life want you to go sailing?

In this episode of The Gathering Room, Martha is talking about the pull for adventure that all humans have but are often too scared to follow.

To build up your adventuring spirit, Martha recommends going on “little adventures” every day—things that push you out of your comfort zone and into your growth zone.

How do you do this?

By consulting with your deep, deep essential self to see how you truly feel about all the different things you could do in a day. Then you do what feels “warmer”—what makes you happier even if it’s a little scary—and you do less of what feels colder.

Because when you live your life in the growth zone, Martha says, it looks like all kinds of adventures are coming to you—because they are!

For more travel and adventure inspiration, plus the opportunity to join Martha in a guided meditation, don’t miss the full episode. And to find out if Martha’s Pure.Wild.Self Retreat in Costa Rica is the adventure for you, you can check out all the details at the link below!

https://marthabeck.com/retreat/

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Did you know that you have a superpower you might not know about? 🦸🏽‍♀🦸‍♂️

In this episode of The Gathering Room, Martha talks about how to tap into the creative impulses at the center of your psyche—a superpower we all have but may not realize it!

Remember the things you did when you were a child or a teenager for no other reason than the pure joy of it? Maybe you still do these things now, but the culture dismisses them as unimportant “hobbies.”

Martha says that the very things that brought you joy as a child, the things that just floated your boat and you had no idea why…those things have a magic to them. In fact, they’re the keys to unlocking your superpower! 🔑💥

You’ll be able to tell it’s your superpower because it will give you the feeling, the itch, the burning desire to go and play in creation. And, as Martha says, that's how we change the world.

To learn more about how to recognize and follow the pulse of creativity to unlock your superpower, don’t miss this inspiring episode, which concludes with Martha’s guided Silence, Space, and Stillness meditation.

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In this Gathering Room, Martha discusses the insights and breakthroughs that can only come when we surrender to the fact that we’ve F-ed up. Listen in and find out how!

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In this episode of The Gathering Room podcast, I’m talking about the power of inspiration and how we can actively go “hunting” for it amidst the sea of misinformation and disinformation we all have to navigate each day.

To learn more about actively hunting for inspiration and how it can help you create positive change in the world, join me for the full episode!

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Are you in the mood to make some magic? 

Martha is! And in this special “Listen Again” episode of The Gathering Room, she’s sharing inspiration from Suzanne Eder’s book, What You Want Wants You, to help you reconnect with your true desires so you can follow the path to your soul’s fulfillment.

While our culture teaches us to associate desire with selfishness and even depravity—a.k.a. “base desire”—Eder’s book says this is a misinterpretation. Instead, real desire is an expression of the one soul that is the basic ground of being for all of us.

As Martha elaborates, we’re all pure divine essence, and to be in physical form is to perceive an apparent separation between ourselves and all other things. The truth, however, is that we are all one. Tapping into that truth and being kind to the self are the ways we spark magic.

To learn how to drop the illusion of separation, get in touch with your true desires, and start creating a life that works for you like magic, don’t miss the full episode!

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Waves of shame. They're icky, they're toxic, and they're not easy to escape.

In this episode of The Gathering Room, Martha is talking about how we can move past this particularly intense form of anxiety and swim on to better horizons.

Shame attacks us at the level of basic self-identity and makes us believe that our vulnerabilities are permanent, personal, and pervasive. It also wants us to keep secrets and hide things.

So, Martha says, by being open and sharing our humiliating moments—the opposite of what shame wants us to do—we can actually reduce our feelings of shame. And often, the more embarrassing your “shameful” moment, the more it can be turned into a freeing kind of humor that helps you feel safe.

To learn how to share your vulnerabilities safely through openness, humor, and the step-check-step method, don’t miss this liberating episode. It also includes Martha’s guided Silence, Space, and Stillness meditation—with a special devotion to the parts of you that have ever felt shamed.

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• Follow Martha on Instagram
• The Gathering Room Show Notes
• Join Martha for a Live Episode of The Gathering Room via Facebook

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How good are you at taking a break? This week, Martha explains that taking a break starts with letting go of our resistance to what we’re really feeling. Then all kinds of magic can reach us! (Originally aired, December 12, 2021)

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You’ve heard of the fight and flight reflexes, but what about flop and fake?

Flop and fake (also known as fawn) are two of the other responses in the polyvagal system, a theory about how our nervous systems adapt to stress and the environment. Fake/fawn is a people-pleasing response, and flop means you just lie there unable to drum up motivation.

In this episode of The Gathering Pod: The Way Back to Happy, Martha’s talking about polyvagal theory and how to regulate your nervous system when it gets hijacked by fight, flight, freeze, flop, or fake.

One of the things polyvagal theory says is that we can never go into a calm, alert state unless our nervous systems are interacting with one of four things: self, others, nature, and spirit. The good news is that Martha has a process to help you do exactly that!

If you’re feeling frazzled, overstimulated, or overwhelmed and you need some relief, tune in and let Martha guide you back to your center of calm. With a few prompts, you can start to regulate your nervous system and become conscious of the beauty, joy, and love all around you.

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This week, Martha talks about new discoveries showing how drastically the arts can improve our health and our lives. Come learn how to microdose! (With a bonus group meditation at the end!)

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You’ve heard of the fight and flight reflexes, but what about flop and fake?

Flop and fake (also known as fawn) are two of the other responses in the polyvagal system, a theory about how our nervous systems adapt to stress and the environment. Fake/fawn is a people-pleasing response, and flop means you just lie there unable to drum up motivation. 

In this special “Listen Again” episode of The Gathering Room, Martha’s talking about polyvagal theory and how to regulate your nervous system when it gets hijacked by fight, flight, flop, fake, or freeze.

One of the things polyvagal theory says is that we can never go into a calm, alert state unless our nervous systems are interacting with one of four things: self, others, nature, and spirit. The good news is that Martha has a process to help you do exactly that!

If you’re feeling frazzled, overstimulated, or overwhelmed and you need some relief, tune in and let Martha guide you back to your center of calm. With a few prompts, you can start to regulate your nervous system and become conscious of the beauty, joy, and love all around you.

CONNECT WITH US

• Follow Martha on Instagram
• The Gathering Room Show Notes
• Join Martha for a Live Episode of The Gathering Room via Facebook

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

While Martha is out on vacation, we’re bringing you The Best of the Gathering Room—a treasury of Gatherers’ favorite episodes—starting with: How to Heal Your Heart.

Many of us believe something outside ourselves can heal us when we're heartsick, but Martha says the opposite is true. The heart can heal itself—if you know how to access the "heart healer" within you. 

To learn how to come into integrity so that your inner “heart healer” can do its valuable work, don't miss this popular episode!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.