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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. Hello, Instagram. It is I, Martha Beck, a person only I have ever heard of, and only recently at that. Hello, Amy. Ame Tooees. Hi, Kramer. Hi, Andrea. Oh, all these people are from Wilder. Hi, Selma. I know that's you. And it's really fun to know y'. All. And then five people at once. And how can I know that Heather's here? And happy New Year from Austria. Woo. Margit. Yes. Thanks for being here. Sorel Joseph is here. Good morning. It must be morning where Sorrel is. Good afternoon where someone else is. Julia M. Crone is here. And Kathy from New York. Guess where I am. Also New York. Andrea Faulkleberry. Hello. Kahootnix. Kahootnix from Wilder. Hello. Ximena is here. And Wisconsin is in the house. And Heather and Jeannie studios. Good name. Hello. From Austin, Texas. Hi. I love you. Shelly's in the Wayfinder Life Coach training. It's so exciting. Oh, oh. Darlingborg is praying. From Germany and from Boston. Oh, that was Denmark. And Switzerland and Connecticut and Albania. Wow. From Mexico. Oh, my gosh. From Australia, Bulgaria. This is blowing my mind. My fidget toy is necessary to keep me happy. Hi. From Oakland, Tracy. How you doing? Someone asked, doesn't your book come out tomorrow? Sagely noted. From France comes Flavia. Flavia and Gina. Clear is here. Hi. So he's here from Norway. The names disappear before the. Oh, something like my hair. Yeah, it's getting weird and curly. Somebody came in from Dubai. Someone came from Northern California. From Argentina. Okay, somebody wants to know what we're talking about today. I'm so blown away by the people coming in from the UK and from everywhere. I love the internationality of the freaking Gathering Room. I love all of you. Thank you so much for being here. I am going to get to the topic since someone did ask about it. Someone said, isn't your Book coming out tomorrow. It is. That's why I'm in New York. I'm going to be on the Today show tomorrow, and then I have to do a thing at a place called the Symphony Space. But I'm not. I'm not nervous at all. That's just a nervous tic. No, that's just a tic. I have no anxiety. The book is called Beyond Anxiety. I'm beyond anxiety. No, I have anxiety sometimes. But now I have to say I do know how to turn it off, and it works. And it's always nice when you've written a book and you're using the method in the book and it works. Very comforting. So the thing about writing a book in this day and age, it used to be I'd write one. You write for a year, then they publish it for a year. It takes a year to get all the publishing pieces in place. And then you have a launch and you tell people, I have written a book. And this is about thus and such. This was all set up before the Internet. Now I write a book for a year and I'm like, guess what? I'm writing a book, you guys. Only it was three years ago. I started the research and I started telling everybody on the gathering room about my research. And then I sold the proposal, and then I wrote the book, so it went deeper. And I told you as I went all about what I was writing, and then I recorded a bunch of podcasts with a bunch of lovely people. So it's like the publicity part that usually came after the book came out has been going on for years. I'm like, you guys already know as much as I do about this book. But. But I thought, what can I tell them today that I haven't told them already? And I had some ideas because along with the other people who run my wilder community online with me, we have been designing a deep dive into the subject matter of this book, which is called beyond anxiety, Curiosity, creativity, and finding your life's purpose. I think I have a copy of it somewhere. I'm always forgetting little things like that. And those of you who are in the Wayfinder Life Coach training, this is just gonna. This gets folded into your curriculum as well, so you'll hear it, too. But I thought as we're doing the deep dive, the thing about living with this through the whole research process, writing process, testing things on readers and on clients process, and then the interview process, you actually do get much deeper perspective on what you've written than you might if you just were sitting at home waiting for it to come out and hoping it sold well, which is the way it used to go. There it is. They did a spectacular job on the COVID It really. The book's all about spirals in the brain and ways of being creative. And they did an exquisite job of capturing that in the COVID And everybody and the publishing team has been amazing. That it's been lovely. But what I wanted to do right now is tell you about some of the deeper things because of the deep dive, as we're designing the deep dive. Oh, and if you're in the wilder community, it's free. It is scot free. And yes, it'll go on for a whole year. We're going to be really, really investigating all the stuff that I put in this book. So it's in three parts. The book, they're called the Creature, the Creative and the Creation. And what I discovered about living beyond anxiety is that first you have to acknowledge that the nervous, anxious, scared parts of you, they're like little tiny animals that are very, very alarmed and that you cannot use any fancy model of analysis or even medication to just sort of bash that little creature into a state of calm. You can't force anyone into a state of calm. So another way of looking at the creature creative creation trio is to think of the first one as calming the creature. And there are ways to calm a creature that we all know is instinctively, if you found a little starving kitten on your doorstep, you would not look at it and think, this cat needs to be analyzed and drugged so it won't be nervous anymore. You would give it kindness, you would give it gentleness. You would approach it very softly. You would put all of your emphasis on gentleness and creating a space to heal. That's the first thing you have to do to get beyond anxiety. Now, as I've talked about this and practiced it as I've really needed to, what with the anxiety of a book launch, I've realized that setting out to be kind to yourself, so anytime I feel the slightest bit of anxiety, instead of trying to outrun it or try to push it down or try to analyze it and fix it, what I do is I go immediately to kindness. And you find that if you bring kindness to yourself, every single time you feel even the slightest bit anxious, kindness starts to permeate you and it starts to. And you're only kind to yourself at first. You don't need to worry about anybody else. And the kindness starts to you, and it ends up just feeling like you're saturated with this beautiful sensation. It's not sentimental, it's not maudlin, it's not making you a victim. It is just kindness. And it reminds me of a time when I was very, very sad for several years. And I memorized the poem Kindness by Naomi Shahib Nye. And the end part of it I will quote to you because it's one of the favorite things I keep in my mind. But I have to say, as I've used kindness to respond to anxiety, I've come to understand this poem at a very felt level. I was thinking about it before. Now I feel it. She wrote before, you know kindness as the deepest thing inside. You must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow, you must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore. Only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread. Only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say, it is I you have been looking for and then goes with you everywhere, like a shadow or a friend. And I have to tell you that because I have such an anxious personality, I have had to trigger kindness over and over since I decided that this was the first step beyond anxiety. And it's like, oh, it's always with me, like a shadow or a friend. It's something. It's like being able to feel a warm hug whenever you decide to feel it and you cry that within yourself. My friend Jill Bolte Taylor talks about the part of the brain that creates that environment for the other parts and holds it with kindness. So that's the first thing is this oceanic quality of kindness that begins to open up. Now, the second thing, after you've calmed your creature, that's not the end of it because you're gonna. If you just go to calm and go to calm and go to calm, you're gonna get spun out into anxiety again. Because there are all these pressures on your brain from your social environment. We tend to be anxious. We have a negativity bias, as I keep saying. But if you start using the parts of the brain that are creative, you actually sort of rob energy from the parts of the brain that are anxious. And you start a different pattern in the brain. So when you are presented with a problem, there are two ways you can go with it. You can panic and try to solve the problem because you really, really have to. Or you can be curious, calm, confident, and creative and say, what am I Going to make. What am I going to create to change this? And immediately you get calmer, and you will find that being in a panic is not a creative state and therefore can't solve your problems, especially problems, problems you've never encountered before. For that, you've got to have creativity. So when you start using creativity, so I get kind to myself, and then I'm like, what shall I do to deal with this problem? And what happens is that everything becomes material for creativity. There's something called functional fixedness, where you see an object, you're taught an object, and you're taught how it is to be used. So. So, for example, I have a pair of glasses. I need a pair of glasses to read up close. And that is what they are for. They are for glasses. Do you know how many things I can use glasses for? One of the things I use them for most often is to, like, stir coffee is the one thing I have now that may disgust you. You may be saying, never use the temple of your glasses to stir your coffee. That is vile. Well, that's your cultural perspective on it. I happen not to agree. And I now like the objects in the world and the situations in the world that I see are not functionally fixed as much as they used to be. There are all kinds of solutions to everything, and they just pop up because the more you practice solving problems creatively, which I did just to get out of my anxiety, the more you start not just solving problems, but making stuff that's actually really fun and cool in your life. So you become creative, but you don't need to worry about being judged for not being able to draw or dance or whatever it is. It's about making anything that creatively solves a problem. So suddenly you're living in an ocean of kindness, and all around you are the solutions to all your problems. And they're just popping at you in a way they never have before because you've changed your brain into a creative state. And then the final thing, I call the creation. And that happens when you become so loose and creative in your way of engaging the world that you realize you really don't know much about the nature of eternity or about what consciousness is or what we actually are or what we're meant to be doing. And here you come into a profoundly open mind. And that is when the creation itself starts to, like, pick you up and tumble you like a mother dog playing with a puppy. Have you ever seen the golden retriever mother playing with her pups? They're the most playful Dogs. And they'll just roll and, you know, they have such soft mouths. You know, they gently hold each other with their mouths or trim each other's fur and they roll around and they bounce and they're having this beautiful time in very intense activity. That is all a celebration of love and consciousness in material form. And as you get away from fear and into the creative part of your own brain, it delivers you into this world where, as Mary Oliver said, whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination. And that's what happens. Like everything begins to come to you. So I was just in Wilder, my community, we just had a shindig. We have shindigs at the new moon. It's a little after the new moon, but we had a shindig. And I was telling the group in there about how your imagination starts to put things together, but then you start to see synchronicities. So the other day our little four year old Lila was having a meltdown. Not a real meltdown, just she was getting fussy and I said, I'm going to distract her with a cool story. Is it okay to tell this? Oh, absolutely, yeah. Okay. So I told her. We were. I was just consulting with the gracious badger, Rowan Mangan. So we were at the beach when we were doing IVF and trying to conceive Lila. And obviously we know it worked, but when you don't know if it'll work, it's really rough going. We were talking about it and then we were looking out to sea from the beach and suddenly out there a cloud formed and a water spout came down and it's like a little tornado at sea and it picks up water and it creates this big, big maelstrom coming down from the sky, coming up from the ocean. And we looked at it and thought, maybe that's our baby. Maybe that's our baby out there expressing herself or himself or their self in a way that is more sort of master of the universe. It was just a thing that we talk about. It's not like we believed it, but we filmed the water spout. And the other day I told Lila about it and we said, we talked about maybe that was you. And then I was like, I shouldn't have said that to a four year old. I don't want to make her think things that aren't really true. Then I went to physical therapy and they usually have a table with magazines on it at my physical therapy. And I sat down to get ready and all the magazines were gone and the Only thing on the table was a book by a person named Robert Beckham. And on the COVID it said it's personal. And it was an oil painting of a water spout. I've never seen a painting of a water spout, but it looked exactly like the one we saw at the beach. All right, this is just what I mean about how you get tumbled up in creation and you start to see things that just maybe they're the product of selective attention. Who cares? They're amazingly fun and affirming and joyful, and they do start to add up. I mean, that was just one synchronicity. But I've had events lately where there were like 12 coming at me all at the same time, way beyond statistical probability. So the deep dive beyond anxiety is worth going to, and it's deeper than you can go in this book that I just wrote. But I do hope that you use the book because the way to get into it is just to read it and then do the stuff and. And then keep doing it. And it really, really, really drills you down into things that are so fabulous and fantastic about human life in these bodies. And I hope you experience all of them, because they are fantastic. Oh. Oh, I just got a text. In the deep dive, by the way, we will be. There will be videos from me every month about each chapter, because there are 12 chapters. We're going to do it for a whole year. We're going to do a monthly live Q and A. We're going to have group discussions with this incredible group of people, and there are a whole bunch of other bonus resources and activities that we'll tell you about if you go there. All right, good. I did that. I said the things and now I am taking the questions. Anyone sitting? Oh, I don't see any. There's nothing here. Can I see it on your phone? I don't have any questions. They're not here. Hang on, hang on. Don't be anxious. Rowy, the gracious badger is here. Let me show it to me on.