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’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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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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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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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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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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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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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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