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. ...
Oct 17, 2024•31 min•Season 1Ep. 180
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...
Oct 10, 2024•31 min•Season 1Ep. 179
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) CONNECT WITH US Follow Martha on Instagram The Gathering Room Show Notes Join Martha for a Live Episode of The Gathering Room via Facebook See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Oct 03, 2024•31 min•Season 1Ep. 178
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 ...
Sep 26, 2024•31 min•Season 1Ep. 177
Have you been struggling to climb pyramids of power, education, wealth, or anything else our culture teaches us to value? Are you ready to find (or return to) your true nature instead? In this episode of The Gathering Room, Martha is talking about the importance of “be-wilder-ing” ourselves and the transformative power of making authentic connections. She says that if we can get far enough from society's rules and be willing to break them in some ways—and also be willing to look deeply within ou...
Sep 19, 2024•34 min•Season 1Ep. 176
There are times when really important things are happening, and we really care about the results. At such times, it’s hard not to get stuck in that awful place between hope and fear. In this episode of The Gathering Room, Martha is talking about how hope and fear are on the same continuum. The moment you get attached to a hope, you’re also afraid it won't happen. And the moment you’re afraid of something happening, you also hope that it won’t. As it says in Martha’s favorite book, the Tao Te Chi...
Sep 12, 2024•29 min•Season 1Ep. 175
Can you remember times when you’ve experienced pure joy? Martha recalls some key moments that led her to make joy her strategy for living, and she’s talking about it in this episode of The Gathering Room. The dictionary defines a strategy as “a plan of action or policy designed to achieve a major or overall aim." We all want to experience joy, and yet we have a society that tells us joy is not a strategy—that we should be strategizing to achieve success instead. But until you have joy, Martha ar...
Aug 29, 2024•31 min•Season 1Ep. 174
There’s a saying Martha likes that goes, “A hundred years before you were born, God drew a circle around the place you're standing now." In other words, you are here because you are meant to be here—but from this place, you can literally go in any direction! So what is the best next step for you to take? That’s what Martha is talking about on this episode of The Gathering Room podcast. She shares all of the things she’s been “nerding out” over in her quest to discover her best next step: the adj...
Aug 22, 2024•32 min•Season 1Ep. 173
Did you know that joy is your birthright as a human? Finding joy is one of Martha’s favorite topics, and that’s what she’s talking about on this episode of The Gathering Room! Martha says that joy, like beauty, is its own excuse for being, and she shares ways we can look for and experience joy, even in the midst of difficulty. She quotes a Jack Gilbert poem that says, "We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.” Meaning, we must find joy wherever ...
Aug 15, 2024•31 min•Season 1Ep. 172
Do you ever try to make forward-thinking plans, but then you get hit with surprises you never saw coming? Martha says it seems to happen to her about once every six months… For example, because of a recent trip to Costa Rica, where she happened to befriend the incredible women of Sleep-Works, she’s now a sound sleeper (and a morning person!) after a lifetime of insomnia. Trying to make plans in a world of escalating change is a challenge, Martha says, because there’s just no way to plan for ever...
Aug 08, 2024•30 min•Season 1Ep. 171
Are you someone who likes making vision boards? They’re a fun way to direct your attention—and because whatever we put our attention on tends to show up in our consciousness and in our lives, vision boards can be powerful tools for healing and for helping you manifest your desires. In this episode of The Gathering Room, Martha shares how to create a vision board, starting with digging deep into your preferences to find out what you truly want (not what you’ve been socialized to think you want) a...
Aug 01, 2024•32 min•Season 1Ep. 170
Did you know that we’re energetically connected? We all have the ability to feel each other’s energy: if someone is happy and calm, we can feel it, and when someone is angry or dangerous, we can feel that as well. What’s more, we’re each projecting our own energy all the time. However, when you’re not aware of the energy you’re giving off, you inadvertently create what Martha calls “energetic dark spots”—and these make you vulnerable to people with negative energy who want to prey on you in some...
Jul 25, 2024•31 min•Season 1Ep. 169
Waves of shame. They're icky, they're toxic, and they're not easy to escape. In this episode of The Gathering Room, Martha is talking about how we can move past this particularly intense form of anxiety and swim on to better horizons. Shame attacks us at the level of basic self-identity and makes us believe that our vulnerabilities are permanent, personal, and pervasive. It also wants us to keep secrets and hide things. So, Martha says, by being open and sharing our humiliating moments—the oppos...
Jul 18, 2024•30 min•Season 1Ep. 168
Many of us have heard about the mind-body connection, but have you ever tried sense-memory therapy? Martha recently lost her sense of smell to a sinus infection, and instead of worrying that she'll never get it back, she's trying sense-memory therapy—she holds her favorite pine-scented candle close to her nose while relishing the memory of smelling that candle. Recalling positive sense memories creates connections in the brain that reinforce positive, joyful times instead of fear or anxiety, and...
Jul 11, 2024•28 min•Season 1Ep. 167
Did you know you were born a creative genius? All of us are, Martha says, but we are socialized out of our genius by the structures of culture. Why? Because the culture wants everyone the same, but genius doesn’t homogenize well. However, your genius is still calling to you, and in this episode of The Gathering Room, Martha shares how you can recognize—and follow—its call. She says your genius will have three main characteristics: It hides in plain sight—it’s the thing that for you is so easy yo...
Jun 27, 2024•30 min•Season 1Ep. 166
The world can be a hard, inhospitable, downright hostile place, and people can quite often be less than kind. Yet Martha says that by practicing what she calls “kindness in motion,” we can start to change the whole complexion of the world. Martha defines kindness in motion as “kindness while doing things” and she’s sharing how to do it in this episode of The Gathering Room. As Martha describes it, all of our perceptions come through the filter of the mind. The voice in our heads that we think is...
Jun 20, 2024•30 min•Season 1Ep. 165
How do you respond when you’re in a painful situation and there’s no way out? The answer is paradoxical. Come learn how to do it with this week’s Gathering Room! CONNECT WITH US Follow Martha on Instagram The Gathering Room Show Notes Join Martha for a Live Episode of The Gathering Room via Facebook See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information....
Jun 13, 2024•32 min•Season 1Ep. 164
You’ve heard of the fight and flight reflexes, but what about flop and fake? Flop and fake (also known as fawn) are two of the other responses in the polyvagal system, a theory about how our nervous systems adapt to stress and the environment. Fake/fawn is a people-pleasing response, and flop means you just lie there unable to drum up motivation. In this special “Listen Again” episode of The Gathering Room, Martha’s talking about polyvagal theory and how to regulate your nervous system when it g...
Jun 06, 2024•30 min•Season 1Ep. 163
For this special “Listen Again” episode of The Gathering Room, Martha is sharing her conversation with Dr. Richard Schwartz, the brilliant creator of Internal Family Systems (IFS), a wonderful therapeutic model that Martha loves using! IFS provides an optimistic, empowering framework to help us focus on the different “parts” of our personalities so that we can shift into a state characterized by curiosity, calm, confidence, and compassion. Tune in for their conversation about Richard’s latest bo...
May 30, 2024•35 min•Season 1Ep. 162
Are you in the mood to make some magic? Martha is! And in this special “Listen Again” episode of The Gathering Room, she’s sharing inspiration from Suzanne Eder’s book, What You Want Wants You , to help you reconnect with your true desires so you can follow the path to your soul’s fulfillment. While our culture teaches us to associate desire with selfishness and even depravity—a.k.a. “base desire”—Eder’s book says this is a misinterpretation. Instead, real desire is an expression of the one soul...
May 23, 2024•35 min•Season 1Ep. 161
Have you ever experienced synchronicity? As Martha defines it in this episode of The Gathering Room, a synchronicity is any event or experience that seems to confirm or indicate that the universe is not random—that there's something making all this happen. Martha has been re-reading The Awakened Brain by Dr. Lisa Miller, who writes about synchronicities and what she calls a “spiritual docking station” in the human brain. What Dr. Miller found in her research is that when people are open to the i...
May 16, 2024•33 min•Season 1Ep. 160
Has anxiety been keeping you from your life’s mission? In this episode of The Gathering Room, Martha shares that the best way out of anxiety is not simply to calm yourself, but to get creative! When you take the creativity route, Martha tells us, you get so deep in the process of creating solutions to the problems that matter to you that it becomes literally impossible for your brain to be anxious. So how do you start living from a creative place? Martha says the key is getting curious, and to a...
May 09, 2024•30 min•Season 1Ep. 159
Is there something you’re having trouble with that you’re trying to do perfectly? If so, you’re not alone… As Martha reminds us in this episode of The Gathering Room, we are all trained by the culture to strive for perfection and to look for it in others. However, you are not going to show up perfectly—because it’s impossible! If you show up not to be perfect but to connect, nobody will care that you haven’t done it perfectly. As Martha says, we are here to be connected with a world in which all...
May 02, 2024•29 min•Season 1Ep. 158
Pleasure is something that many of us may think of as an indulgence, but Martha says it’s actually the gateway to the things that really enrich our souls… And we access this pleasure by relaxing. 🍃 In this episode of The Gathering Room, Martha shares an exercise you can do to drop into relaxation mode, and it doesn’t require a trip to the spa—you can do it anywhere! Using small, pleasant feelings to anchor the whole mind can lead to revolutionary changes, Martha says, and it begins with just tw...
Apr 25, 2024•31 min•Season 1Ep. 157
Did you know that you have a superpower you might not know about? 🦸🏽♀🦸♂️ In this episode of The Gathering Room, Martha talks about how to tap into the creative impulses at the center of your psyche—a superpower we all have but may not realize it! Remember the things you did when you were a child or a teenager for no other reason than the pure joy of it? Maybe you still do these things now, but the culture dismisses them as unimportant “hobbies.” Martha says that the very things that brought...
Apr 18, 2024•32 min•Season 1Ep. 156
Have you ever tried to manifest something, but it just wouldn’t happen? In this episode of The Gathering Room, Martha shares how to use what she calls the “technology of magic” to make your deepest yearnings a reality. Martha says that having a thought or intention is a necessary but insufficient condition for manifesting the things you want. Your intention must be combined with invention—or as Martha calls it, “rolling up your sleeves and getting to work!” At the corner of your intention and yo...
Apr 04, 2024•31 min•Season 1Ep. 155
“How do we adjust to the drudgery?” Martha was asked this question by Ro when they returned home from a wonderful stay at the Imiloa Institute in the Costa Rican jungle. A lot of upkeep is required to sustain ordinary living, and much of daily life gets consumed by repetitive tasks. In this episode of The Gathering Room, Martha talks about a shift we can make to transform drudgery into beauty. In traditions where they have the concept of awakening or enlightenment, Martha says, the emphasis is n...
Mar 07, 2024•31 min•Season 1Ep. 154
Where does your life want you to go sailing? In this episode of The Gathering Room, Martha is talking about the pull for adventure that all humans have but are often too scared to follow. To build up your adventuring spirit, Martha recommends going on “little adventures” every day—things that push you out of your comfort zone and into your growth zone. How do you do this? By consulting with your deep, deep essential self to see how you truly feel about all the different things you could do in a ...
Feb 22, 2024•35 min•Season 1Ep. 153
How do you know when something is worth the trouble? That’s the question Martha’s exploring in this episode of The Gathering Room, and the short answer is: If it’s your passion, it’s always worth the trouble! Martha’s recent trip to New York with her family to see Ani DiFranco on Broadway ended up being an enormous amount of trouble—but when she finally got to see the show, she was blown away. She found that the joy it brought her was worth all the trouble it took to get there. She also realized...
Feb 15, 2024•32 min•Season 1Ep. 152
Do you feel in desperate need of a rest? Most of us are underestimating our need to rest to an almost criminal degree, and Martha is talking about why that is—and how to change it—on this episode of The Gathering Room. We live in a society that wants us to work constantly. However, nature says that we need to rest regularly—in fact, this is absolutely crucial. “You can live without intense activity,” Martha reminds us, “but you cannot live without rest.” Rest is your connection to the Divine and...
Feb 08, 2024•33 min•Season 1Ep. 151
