Gathering Gold

At this time of year, it can start to feel like time is speeding up.

The holidays are here already? It's almost the end of 2025? Didn't the year just begin?!

In a culture that begins celebrating Christmas before trick-or-treaters have even begun knocking on doors, this sense of rush and speed is amplified at every turn.

In today's episode, we are exploring the question: how do we slow down time? How do we shift our relationship to time, enter into deeper presence and flow, and savor all that we have--the present moment?

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In today's episode, Sheryl and Victoria unpack an idea explored in Sheryl's upcoming course Open Your Heart: A 30-Day Course to Feel More Love and Attraction for Your Partner: a pattern of criticizing and micromanaging your partner is a surefire way to close your heart and add bricks to a wall between you.

Sheryl and Victoria name the historical, cultural, and societal influences behind the word "nag" or "nagging," which cannot be uncoupled from patriarchy and capitalism, then circle back to this question: when we are with a loving partner who is doing their best and trying to meet us halfway, and we still find ourselves quick to nitpick, criticize, and attempt to control them, how can we regain intentionality and find spaciousness to chart a healthier path forward? 

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**Today, we are practicing what we preach: slowing down and giving ourselves a little break by re-airing this episode from last year. We hope you enjoy, and we are sending you well wishes for rest, rejuvenation, and tending to your own rhythms and self-care in this season of rooting!**

Meaning making. Connecting to breath. Aligning with nature. So many actions, big and small, can help us dig a little deeper into the soil of time, anchor ourselves against the buffeting winds of change and demands, especially as we shift into a new season.  

We recorded this conversation in front of a live virtual audience of Patreon community members, opening up the second half of the episode for group discussion on the topic of rooting into autumn. 

We are so grateful to the insightful, compassionate members who added their wisdom about steadying ourselves amidst the busy-ness of autumn.

How will you send some energy to your roots today?

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Rooted, by Lyanda Lynn Haupt

In today’s episode, we are slowing down and opening our hearts to the beauty and loss abundant in autumn, a season that can so poignantly reflect and hold our own grief. Sheryl shares reflections about the passage of time, her sons growing up, and the passing of her beloved soul cat Tashi. Victoria shares her recent experience of learning about the death of a friend she had lost touch with. 

How do we meet all of the limitless forms of beauty and loss, gratitude and grief? What does autumn have to teach us about what it means to be human in this heartbreaking gift of a world?

We pick up where we left off in our last episode to discuss a few myths about relationships, unpacking commonly-held beliefs and prescriptions regarding our romantic/sexual lives, our choices about whether we want to be parents, and experiences of parenthood. By pulling apart the threads of these myths, we hope to encourage a greater sense of acceptance, compassion, and celebration of ourselves and other people, and the many ways we can lead healthy, fulfilling lives full of love and purpose.

Don't forget to check out Sheryl's 9-Month Course: Break Free from Anxiety, which explores these myths and many other messages, stories, cognitions, and experiences that create and inflame anxiety. 

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Have you ever felt like you should be able to figure out and answer all of life's questions--immediately?

That if you could just find the one right lifestyle and location for you, your life would be all shimmer and shine?

That you should just find life and adulthood easier? That everyone else finds it easier?

These are myths about life that have their fingerprints all over our psyches.

They weigh on us and dredge up feelings of not-enoughness, pulling us away from the present moment and into traps of comparison and wishful thinking. These are the myths that we are unpacking and dispelling in today's episode, inspired by Sheryl's upcoming course: Break Free from Anxiety: A 9-Month Course on the Art of Living (which begins September 20, 2025). 

Stay tuned for Part 2, a discussion of three more myths!

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We used to try to keep up with the Joneses--the family behind the picket fence on that beautiful street the next town over.

Now it's not just the local Joneses that we're trying to measure up to, but the influencers on Instagram, high school acquaintances that we still follow on Facebook, our past selves and our future potential. 

Comparison has always been the thief of joy, but in the digital media landscape, its storm cloud looms larger and darker than ever.

How can we turn down the volume on this constant humming force?

How can we soften in the places we feel aren't measuring up? 

How can we turn our yardstick into a compass pointing us to our own sense of peace?

These are the questions we're dancing with in today's episode.

There are many types of friendships, and they're all necessary. We need friends to chat with at work, neighbors to share metaphorical cups of sugar with. But we also need deep friendships built on a bedrock of safety--and those can be harder to come by.

In today's episode, we are unpacking what it means to feel truly safe in a friendship. What qualities do we look for and offer to our friends in order to create a container of deep love and security? What are the values that we orient towards when we find a kindred spirit and realize we simply love them because we love them? And, perhaps most importantly, how do we repair when something shakes the foundation we have worked so hard to build?

We all want to experience joy, but sometimes it can feel out of reach. Sometimes, the more we chase joy, the faster it slips beyond our reach. And yet, as Sheryl so often teaches, what we water will grow. We can create conditions favorable to joy.

In today's episode, we discuss joy as not a luxury but a necessity; joy as an act of resistance and a fraternal twin to grief; how joy lies hidden just beneath the surface of ordinary, everyday magic; and how we can tap into that magic with subtle shifts in our choices and perspective. 

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Join us on Patreon for bonus content and virtual gatherings: patreon.com/gatheringgold

Today's very special guest, Michael Alcée, is author of the book The Upside of OCD: Flight the Script to Reclaim Your Life. In our conversation, Michael explains what he means and does not mean when he talks about the "upside" of OCD; why Michael thinks all people with OCD start out as mini-existentialists and poets; and the key missing ingredient in many of our contemporary treatments for OCD.

How can OCD be both meaningless and meaningful at the same time? What messages might OCD be trying to deliver to us, if we only know how to listen? All of this and more in today's episode.