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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 go to marthabeck.compurposepurpose 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. Let's get to it. I have been rereading book that I really love. It's called the Awakened Brain by Lisa Miller. I'm obsessed with her. You may have heard me talking about her before. And one of the things that amazes me so much is that she is a very well regarded Columbia professor, so very Ivy League, has degrees from all the most hoity toity institutions, and yet her body of work is all about what she calls a spiritual, spiritual docking station in the human brain and what she found. And let me tell you this, when she was doing her original research, people were not pleased with her. They did not want to be reading about spiritual docking centers in the brain. When I was at Harvard, I literally never met another student who was a mother. And there were like, I think I knew one professor who was a mother and that was it. But Alice Miller writes in her book the Awakened Brain. Not only what? Lisa Miller. Sorry, not Alice Miller. She wrote a whole bunch of things called like the Drama of the. Of the Gifted Child. A beautiful, brilliant psychologist as well. But Lisa Miller is the Columbia professor who wrote about the research she did that showed that when people are open to a spiritual reality, they have access to much more physical and mental health. That being open to spiritual realities makes us resilient and more resistant to anxiety, depression, all these other things. And I wanted to talk about the personal story that Lisa Miller puts into this book, because that too, I mean, when I was, when I was in school and graduate school and being an assistant professor, you did not talk about your personal life, you didn't have a spiritual belief and you did not talk about anything in your personal life. You were just a professional and there was a spirit split down the middle between anything you did at home and anything you did emotionally and then the stuff you brought to work. But Lisa Miller writes about her struggles to have A child while she was getting her degrees and becoming a full professor and the rest of that. And it was one of the things that opened her up to the idea that she herself might have a spiritual docking station. Now, as I talk about this, what I want for all of us is that we can start to identify times in our lives when this kind of phenomenon has happened to us. One of the things she did in her class at Columbia was she asked students if they would notice and record synchronicities that they experienced in their own lives. So anything that just seemed like an improbable coincidence. The synchronicity, I'm sure you know, is when something happens that seems to confirm or indicate that there is something going on in the universe that is not just physical, that there's something making all this happening happen. If you've seen the movie the Matrix, the hero in that movie is going along, and he's in what he thinks is real life, but he knows that it's possible to create a projected world. And you never know whether you're in a projected world or the real world. And in one scene, he's just. All these things are happening. And then a cat walks by in the background. And then a few seconds later, the cat walks by in exactly the same way, and he realizes, okay, the rest of the program is running well. But there was a little glitch in the program, and I definitely saw that cat go by twice. So I know I'm in a projection. So a synchronicity is something that happens to you that feels so improbable and it fits so well that you actually can't believe it happens without some kind of method behind the madness. One time, when I was. I had published my first book. Only my first book that actually. Well, my first book sank like a stone. But the second one, Expecting Adam, went out into the world. And I was so desperate to be a writer and so invested in this book. I mean, it was my whole heart and soul. I put the deepest aspects of my heart into this book. And then I went on a book tour, and it was my first book tour. And book tours were already becoming things of the past. And it was like I would go to a bookstore, all gussied up, you know, and I'd have a chaperone, and I'd feel all special, and there would be a poster with my face on. And it was a amazing. And then I'd start talking to three bookstore employees and someone who was just looking for a coffee bar and got lost. And it was Very depressing. And at one point, I was so exhausted on the book. Well, the book tour ended and months went by, and then I was. I just decided that it had failed. And I was in a bookstore, which was a place of great pain for me at the time because I wanted so much to be. To be able to build my life around this, this writing things down and I didn't think would ever work, and I didn't have any ideas for other books. And I was walking with my head down through this Borders bookstore, and I bumped into a table. And I looked, and it was a. A table where they'd set up this display. And for whatever reason, somebody in that store really liked expecting Adam. Because when I raised my eyes, I was looking directly at my own book. And there it was. And it was up on this display stand. I don't know who put it there. I don't know why I wandered into that bookstore and I don't know why I raised my head at that precise moment. But that's an example of a synchronicity. And I've had so many others. Another thing that happened was that I was wandering along again, always wandering along. When you're a writer, there's a lot of wandering around wishing you were more successful. That's like the definition of most of your life. And nothing seemed to be going right. And on my cell phone, I got a call from a strange number. And they didn't have a lot of spam back then, so I just. I answered the phone. And the person on the other end of the phone is named Sally Quinn, and she is a very well known sort of maven of social functions in Washington, D.C. and she writes for the Washington Post. And her husband, Bill Bradley, was the editor, famous editor of the Washington Post. And she said, is this Martha Beck? I said, yes, it is. She said, listen, you wrote this book about your son with down syndrome. And I didn't want to read it. I thought, who wants to read a book about a child with down syndrome? But I'll tell you what happened. She said, I was sitting in my office in the Washington Post, and suddenly I just got up, walked out of my office, walked through the whole floor, walked into somebody else's office. It was empty. On the desk is a copy of your book. I picked it up, I read the flap. I thought, it's about a kid with down syndrome. I don't want to read that. Took it back to my office, sat down, read it cover to cover. And I'm here to tell you that I loved It. And she promoted. I mean, she was. She was a great advocate for that book. And I'd never even heard of her. And she had called me, not by accident, but the way she encountered the book, said to me, there's something going on here that's not just random. So Lisa Miller talks about her own struggle trying to have a child in the Ivy League, which, as I said, is very rare. And she actually talks about asking her students to track synchronicities and how it's incredibly difficult for them. Week after week, she said she'd teach these Columbia classes and no one would have a synchronicity to talk about. By the way, while I'm talking, I want you to be thinking about synchronicities in your own life, because that's the spiritual docking station that Lisa Miller says we all have in our own brains. Okay? So after weeks of not having any synchronicities to report her first crop of students, one of the women raised her hand and said, look, I think we've been taught to look for other things. I think we've been taught to close that aspect of our minds. We. What if we all this week just open our minds to the possibility of synchronicities and then go out and look? And so everybody set an intention that they would be open to the possibility of synchronicity. It's like they opened the door of the docking station in their brains and they went out into the world and they all started having synchronicities. I'm getting. Oh, my God. One of Lisa Miller's students is on this. This is amazing. That's a synchronicity. Holy crap. Okay, so the incident I wanted to talk to you about, I think Lisa Miller has so much grit, because to do this in the Ivy League, it's like standing up naked and saying, now I will sing the national Anthem. I mean, it's really high risk. She writes in her book about trying to have a child of her own and going through endless, horrible IVF treatments. Oh, they're horrible. They're horrible. If you've been through them. I'm so sorry. And then she was lying in her bed one night, and she was not asleep. She actually became very, very alert. She writes. And then she sat up and she felt a presence in the room. And the presence said to her, if you knew you could get pregnant, would you still think about adopting a child? And she said, no. And she said, I felt a little guilty, but the truth just popped out. All right? The presence went away or wasn't as Obvious. So then she and her husband went through more IVF treatments. And they also started to get pictures of children from around the world that they could possibly adopt. And one day they got a picture of a little boy in Russia. And the minute Lisa Miller saw this picture, she fell in love with this little boy. I mean, this was her son, no question. And her husband felt the same way. That night she went to sleep, and then she woke up again, and the presence was back. And it said, if you knew you could get pregnant, would you still consider adopting? And she was like, hell, yes. That's my child. Of course I would. He's mine. I'm in love with him. And she felt this rush of joyful feeling. And then she woke up her husband. She actually started laughing. And her husband woke up and she told him about it. And they were so excited that they celebrated by conceiving a child which turned out to be healthy and wonderful. And now they have two. The little boy that was theirs all along and the child they conceived that night. So there's another example of a synchronicity. And if you're thinking about this, if you're opening the docking station, you are in violation of the left hemisphere dominated culture that made up the Ivy League. Congratulations. I really, really want to go through the rest of my life with that docking station good and open. I want to invite every metaphysical aspect of the Matrix that wants to come play with my brain. And I believe that this can be done. As long as I remain, you know, as long as I keep doing the things that make logical sense, the way Lisa Miller continues to do really good, solid science, then I will be grounded. So that when I open myself to the Matrix, the things that happen to me will not be my mind spinning out fantasies, but my brain starting to perceive aspects of creation that are made by consciousness rather than made by meaningless chaos. Because there's something out there, folks. In Expecting Adam, I talk about it as the Bunraku puppeteers. In Japan, they have these incredible puppeteers. They work with puppets about 4ft tall. And the arms and the legs and the hands and the feet and the head, they all work separately. The puppeteers dress all in black. And then they stand on the stage and they move the puppets and the puppeteers are in full view, but they. They stay so still and move the puppet so skillfully that you forget they are there and you think that the puppets are moving by themselves. It feels to me when I open the docking station of my own brain, that these loving, gorgeous, beautiful presences, like the One that woke up Lisa Miller. Those two nights are able to access my body, move through me, give me the experience of seeming to do everything myself, but also relaxing into being moved by this force. And I think that that's one of the reasons that we decided to be human, so that we could have that experience. All right, so, Kate, former student of Lisa Miller, thank you. Welcome to the class, and thanks for being our reigning synchronicity du jour. Okay, somebody says, why did our Western culture want that docking station closed? I think it's because it was very easy for people who believed in metaphysical things and turned it into a religion to get very dogmatic and rigid, and they stopped being spiritual and started being merely religious. And that's what created things like the Spanish Inquisition or the burning of witches and heretics. I mean, religion was used to create huge amounts of suffering. And so then a few hundred years ago, a bunch of intellectuals in Europe went, forget all that. You don't get to tie me to a stake just because I say that the Earth revolves around the sun instead of vice versa. I get to observe what I want to observe, and nothing else is real. Nothing. But in doing that, they became as dogmatic as the religious dogmatists, right? And they're like, no, no, no. We will not tolerate anybody who has any kind of meaning that comes from a different state of mind than this one right here. So our culture, whether religious or intellectual, is very dogmatic and fundamentalist. By contrast, both those attitudes, religion and extreme fundamentalist science, they both have the same belief. We know how it is. You don't. And if you look, for example, at Asian spiritual traditions, they don't start with, we know all the things they start with. We understand that nobody can know anything for sure, and nobody knows everything. And so there's a basic openness. That's the docking station. And then you just start to look for, oh, my goodness, I can't be sure of anything. But there seems to be a benevolent flow of good things that is allowing me to exceed my own limitations and do things that I couldn't do as a little isolated fragment of physical reality. So, yeah, our Western culture did close the docking station, but we can open it up by just, say, saying, this week, I'm going to look for synchronicities, and I'm going to accept that maybe the boon raku puppeteers are here helping me along through life. So Jessica says, do you consider synchronicities the same as miracles or slightly different? I don't know. To me, it's all it's all a miracle, the whole. I was just reading Jerry Fodor, a great western philosopher, American philosopher, says he's talking about how we are alive and he says nobody has any idea how matter can be infused with consciousness. Nobody even has any idea what it would be like to have the slightest idea how matter can be infused with consciousness. It is a complete miracle that we're even up and walking. So I just consider it all the mystery and leave it at that. So Kate, Lisa Miller's for a former student, as she is known to us here. No, she is Kate. She says, what do you think synchronicity is? Energy from the universe. Do you think we can create positive synchronicities? Yes, in the sense that I believe all consciousness is connected. So consciousness has no barriers or boundaries. And I believe, along with Max Planck, Nobel prize winning physicist, he says I regard matter as derived from consciousness. We've talked about this and Lisa talks about it in her book about quantum theory and how when energy is observed, it becomes matter and all the other things that we know from quantum mechanics. I think that the reality behind matter is that everything is consciousness. And since consciousness is not split, everything I feel is felt throughout the entire universe. And everything felt throughout the entire universe is in me like it's inconceivable, but I still believe it's true. So I believe that when we tap into that, there's something about being willing to believe, just openness, not dogmatic belief like the Spanish Inquisition, but just openness. I'm going to say I'm going to look for a synchronicity and see if it happens. The universe, the consciousness in other things responds to that. Oh, another beautiful thing. I love this. In Lisa Miller's book the Awakened Brain, when she's trying to have a baby and she goes to all these IVF treatments, her body is scarred and tormented by all of it. And one day she goes home and there's a little squiggly something lying on the doorstep of her house. And she looks closely at it and it's the embryo, an undeveloped embryo from a duck egg. It's like this little weird haploid duckling that never is. And by this point she had lost a lot of embryos herself. And so it was like a symbol, like who sees a duck embryo lying on their doorste? And she was like this, I'm sorry, but it's just, it feels like a sign that I'll never be able to carry a child and that it's all, it's all hopeless. And it was a pretty difficult sight. The next morning, after feeling sad about this, she hears a knock on the door. Knock, knock, knock. She goes over, opens the door. There's a female duck standing on the doorstep. And the duck puts a big, fat, juicy worm down right in front of her and then waddles away. And she was like, okay, that was weird. And to her later, in retrospect, it was the universe saying, here you're worried about dying embryos. We'll give you a dying embryo here. The universe wants to help you see that it's going to be okay. We'll send a full grown duck to give you a worm just to let you know that she believes in you or whatever. I don't know. These things often happen to me with or through animals. So many. I told y' all about the last time, which is just. We went to Costa Rica and we were there for a week in the jungle and hadn't seen a single monkey. So I just went into a meditative state connected with the consciousness of everything. Found me some monkeys, not with my eyes or my body, but with my consciousness, asked them if they would mind coming to see us. They said yes. I let it go. They showed up about a half hour later and played for hours. I mean, animals respond so directly that it feels like it's not even a synchronicity, it's just a conversation, you know? Anyway. Zoe says, I've had times in my life that are just brimming with synchronicities, big and small. But right now and for a while now, nothing. What is it that changes? I think there is an ebb and flow in nature with all things. But I do believe that if you invite it, if you talk about it, and if you are at peace with asking, it happens a lot. And when you get anxious and desperate, it eludes you, because the consciousness of the universe does not respond to your desperation. It responds to joy. And Oprah was the one who told me, the universe will never reward your desperation because that would teach you to be desperate all the. And the universe wants you to be joyful, so it rewards your joy, your love, your trust. And when you don't have joy, love, or trust, it gently pulls away so that you can learn. That's not the best method for getting things to go the way you want them to go. Michelle and Magenta says, do you think we can attract or block synchronicities? Yes. Peace allows synchronicities. Anxiety blocks synchronicities.