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’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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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