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Hello, the lovely peoples. This is Marty Martha, inviting you to a free masterclass that I have made called Five Paths to youo Purpose. Probably the most common question I get from people is how do I find my purpose? Why don't I feel that I'm on purpose? Well, it turns out there are certain things you have to do to find your purpose, and I broke them down into five and I made a little masterclass about it. So if you'd like to see it, just, just go to marthabeck.compurpose and you will be able to watch it without any charge at all. Welcome to the Gathering Room Podcast, the audio version of my weekly gathering Room broadcast. I'm Martha Beck. I'm so glad to see you, especially, especially since I was gone for so long with my eye surgeries and especially since I think I've only done one gathering room since big events politically happened in America. And as you may recall, I was not my friskiest self just after that. And since then I have seen a lot. I mean, some people are rejoicing and that's wonderful for them. And there's a lot also of people who are frightened and sad and scared. And I keep reading things online and so forth that would make me more sad and scared myself if I hadn't just done a few years of research on anxiety. What I'm seeing are things that say, prepare yourself for changes that are even more unpredictable and potentially more damaging than you may have ever seen before in your lifetime if you, particularly if you live in the U.S. but as we all know, when the U.S. sneezes, the rest of the world gets a cold. So it's affecting people all over the world. And I see things like articles about how to live in an autocratic society, how to live in a society where ideas are imposed by threats of violence or whatever, and where there are things like roundups of people for deportation and so on. No one knows exactly what's going to happen, but these are very frightening articles and everything they describe maybe will come to pass. We do not know. However, as so many people correctly, I think, say it's really dumb to not anticipate dangers that may be coming our way. And statistically, with some probability, maybe, you know, a fairly high degree of probability may be coming our way. Climate change and the, the weirding of the weather is not just coming our way. It's here. And it's going to get bigger and with fewer environmental protections invoked, it's going to go faster. It would be ridiculous not to look at those things and say yeah, things might get a little sporty out here. And when I'm reading these articles, I read these articles to my friends and loved ones and they are like, why did you just. I. Sometimes I'm too jolly about reading things that are genuinely, legitimately frightening, like climate change, but also things like autocracy and what it is to live in a place that has, instead of democratic rule, has autocratic rule, those things. So I am aware of the things that could happen, and I think we should all be aware that many, many things could happen that would be difficult and the appropriate response to that is fear. However, in one article I read, it said, when you are in a situation where you don't know who's telling you the truth, where things can be deep, faked and half faked, the people strongly believe certain statements that have no evidence supporting them. But the other half, the people strongly believe exactly the opposite. And both of them are highly convinced that they're right. In times like these, you have to be very aware of your intuition. There's something I used to call, that I do call the sense of truth that I wrote about in my book the Way of integrity, which is the deepest feeling of sort of concord, peace and like, calm that comes into us when we feel, when we say or believe something that feels deeply true at the very deepest levels of the self. This sense of truth, this ha. It's a trusting that whatever we're believing at that moment is actually, actually real. And it turns out that a lot of the things that we are anxious about are not real, not yet. They're potential, but they're not real, not in this moment. So there is this difference that I saw when I started studying anxiety between fear, which is a rational response to a clear and present danger, and anxiety, which is a fraying, wearing, horrific, suffering sense of being afraid of things that may not ever happen and being afraid for long periods of time. Now, bad things definitely are happening in the world and will continue to happen, and we need to deal with those things, but we don't need to be lying awake every night afraid of them. If we're lying awake, afraid every night, we will not be able to encounter conditions that are frightening and respond in a constructive way. So I was reading this article about making sure your intuition remains sharp, and I realized that what a lot of people around me are saying is, I need to stay alert. I need to stay in order to follow my intuition. I need to really be aware of the scary things. I need to read about everything. I need to anticipate Everything I need to prepare for anything and I am exhausted from is so horrible to be afraid all the time. Well, because I just wrote this book about anxiety, I thought, wait a second. Our whole culture has conflated these two ideas. One, intuition, the sense of what might happen and what to do about it. And the other, anxiety. Always being afraid because anxiety insists. 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. But in fact, exactly the opposite is true. It's people who are anxious who aren't alert. There's the famous and horrible case of a truck driver who was having an argument on a hands free headset with one of his relatives. He was driving this bus that had passengers, it was a double decker bus and it had passengers on both levels. And he drove straight at a bridge that didn't have enough clearance and went right into it at like 60 miles an hour because he did not see the bridge. His eyes were clear, his hands were free. He was just intentionally blind because he was busy having an argument with his sister. It was over the phone. And when you're in a fight or flight state, you focus on the thing you think is dangerous. In his case, it was his sister. And you actually blank out of the present moment where you are. Real intuition arrives when all our anxiety is quiet, when it goes away. Now, if there is fear, if, oh look, there's a bridge, we don't want to hit it, put on the brake. That's a fear response. It keeps us alive. It's good. When there's a tornado warning in our area of Pennsylvania where there didn't used to be tornado warnings, our family gets the alarm, goes down to the basement and sits there, you know, keeping everybody calm because there's no. It's no use staying SC once you've taken all the measures you can possibly take to stay safe. So a lot of people are walking around constantly anxious, thinking they're alert, thinking they can trust their intuition. And in fact, we're blotting out our intuition with anxiety. All right, so as usual in this episode of the Gathering Room, we are going to do our space silence and stillness meditation in just a few minutes. This meditation is designed to make us aware of our present circumstances in a very sensory way. So in a way that accounts for the whole neuroception, the nervous system sensing of the present moment and then goes even deeper into presence by looking at the sort of matrix of stillness and silence in which material activity occurs. That's really, really peaceful. If you felt it before doing that meditation. I certainly feel it every time we do it. It's like the group energy is really intense and it puts me in a state of bliss, really. That is the state where intuition can talk to you. So our jobs, if we are on a more and more dangerous planet. I don't think that's true. I think it's always been pretty damn dangerous. But yeah, it's getting spicy, as I said before. So here we are. Our best strategy for staying safe is to go into that peaceful state and learn to anchor our brains. Remember what, what fires together, wires together in the brain. If we go into that stillness, if we go into whatever calms us over and over and over and over. You're firing the brain over and over into peace so that it wires for peace. I was just reading another thing online about the studies on meditators and how the brains of meditators are more wired for peace and happiness than other people, other brains. And folks who hadn't read this research already were like, oh my gosh, this is mind blowing. But how do we know they just weren't born that way? The answer is that there's a dose response relationship with meditation and a brain wired for happiness. Which means the more these people meditate, the denser the neuron connections are in the part of the brain that seems, that is turns on to create states of peace, joy, receptiveness, sensory alertness. So it's when we are at our most peaceful that we feel things intuitively. I wrote 30 years ago in my first self help book, I wrote about how I had this weird burst of intuition one day when I was in graduate school and I was walking home and my then husband and I were going to have a party and we were going to cook this Japanese dish that needed pork cutlets. And I was trudging home from class after a day in graduate school to our apartment. And as I walked past a grocery store, clear as a bell, something inside me said, go in there, they have pork cutlets on sale. And I was like, what? All right. So I went in. This was before Adam was born. This was before I went all woo woo. I was like, all right. I went in there and I went back to the meat department and literally as I arrived, the butcher was putting out a beautiful, beautiful packages of pork cutlet on sale. And I was like, I get one strong intuitive message in my entire life and it's about pork cutlets, okay? And then, of course, then I did get pregnant with Adam and I did start having psychic experiences and I really learned a lot more about intuition. But it always came in the moments when I momentarily could let go of my fear and into the place where fear had been. This love, this kindness, this information that I needed, it all flowed into the spaces where fear was, just for that moment, absent. So what I want to do now is have us all do the space, silence and stillness meditation, and then I'll answer some questions. But just know that we are deliberately wiring ourselves as we go into this meditation every single time on the gathering room to be more open to all kinds of really helpful guidance from within and who knows, from around. All right, so we're going to start, as usual, with a couple of deep breaths in and out, especially out. The long sigh of relief is one of the best signals to the brain and the rest of the nervous system that we're safe.