The Gathering Room Podcast

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 Ma...

“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...

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 d...

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...

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 activit...

What does it mean to “compose yourself”?  The usual definition is to calm down and control yourself, but Martha has a very different meaning in mind, and she’s exploring it in this episode of The Gathering Room: How to Compose Yourself. As Martha defines it, you are literally composing your life—the being that you are—through the act of creating something new. Whether it’s a watercolor you’re pain...

Is there something you really want to do, but the thought of it absolutely terrifies you? 😱 Martha has been there many times, and that’s what she’s talking about on this episode of The Gathering Room: Doing the Thing You Think You Cannot Do. If you’re facing something in your life that you want to do but it makes you anxious, Martha says to remember that 99% of every original thing that has ever...

Sometimes we’re hit with a change so big it knocks us for a loop. We look around in a daze thinking, “NOW what?” 🦋 Welcome to what Martha calls “Square One” in The Change Cycle, a unique framework she developed to help people understand and navigate life’s transitions. 🦋 As Martha explains, life's changes aren't things we plan in our calendars. They are fundamental metamorphoses. You will go thr...

Are you someone who makes New Year’s resolutions? Martha enjoys making one (yes, one) each year—and she always keeps it!  In this episode of The Gathering Room: A Year of Peace, she talks about her resolution to increase her brain’s wellbeing by dropping demands that have an overriding feeling of negativity and tend to make her brain shut down. Research that has shown that our brains work best whe...

Do you ever struggle to do things you know you have to do, even though you don’t really feel like it? We’ve all been there—including Martha—and she’s talking about it in this episode of The Gathering Room: Keep Swimming. Humans are the kind of creatures that can get so focused on a dream that even if that dream seems impossible, or the work it requires feels like a total slog, we can make ourselve...

Did you know that everything around you is conscious and responding to you in various ways? It may sound woo-woo, but Martha says there's a tremendous amount of legitimate scientific research to support this idea! When we’re willing to acknowledge that we don't know everything about the universe, and we’re willing to play with the idea that the universe is conscious, very interesting things start...

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 talk...

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 cur...

Do you ever feel like your life is a crazy quilt? Martha says that creating your life is the ultimate creative project, and that’s what she’s talking about in this episode of The Gathering Room. Each of us is given all the material to make a life—a human body, a set of circumstances, and a set of abilities—and the life we make from that material is ours to determine in this day and age. Sometimes...

Martha says one reason we humans are a strange species is because we love to make jigsaw puzzles—beautiful pictures that we cut up into tiny pieces and disassemble, and then put back together. And we don’t like them to be too easy! In this episode of The Gathering Room: Solving the Puzzles of Our Lives, Martha talks about the way problems in our lives are like puzzles, and how it often can be more...

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 episode of The Gathering Pod: The Way Back...

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...

“Be prepared to stop.” This is serious life advice, Martha says, because no matter what we’re doing (or how much we want to continue doing it), at some point we’re going to get interrupted by life. Whenever we have to stop something we thought was going to continue indefinitely—like a job, for example, or a marriage—it can really hurt. In this episode of The Gathering Pod: When Stopping Is the Way...

Are you familiar with polyvagal theory?  It may sound highly scientific, but Martha says polyvagal theory has a profound effect on spiritual practice as well, and she’s talking all about it in this episode of The Gathering Room: Dropping Anchor. The polyvagal nerve is a system of nerves connecting the brain to various parts of the body, and it plays a key role in our response to stress—either revv...

It’s The Best of the Gathering Pod, and this week we’re revisiting another listener favorite from the vault—Episode 110: How to Let the Light In. In this episode, Martha talks about her “rage to master” and the paradox of imperfection: While we can try our hardest to produce perfect results, we must accept that we’ll always make mistakes. It’s this combination of effort and grace that allows us to...

We’ve got another Best of the Gathering Room episode for you today, a listener favorite called Building on Bright Spots. In this episode, Martha talks about finding and following the almost invisible “bright spots” in your life whenever things feel dark and cloudy. Because clouds are illusions, it's always possible to find little breaks in the clouds and see the clear points of truth that can guid...

While Martha is out on vacation, we’re bringing you The Best of the Gathering Room—a treasury of Gatherers’ favorite episodes—starting with: How to Heal Your Heart. Many of us believe something outside ourselves can heal us when we're heartsick, but Martha says the opposite is true. The heart can heal itself—if you know how to access the "heart healer" within you.  To learn how to come into integr...

Gatherers—I'm thrilled to be joined by Dr. Richard Schwartz, the brilliant creator of Internal Family Systems (IFS), a wonderful therapeutic model that you may have heard me talk about before because I love using it! 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, con...

Have you been feeling depleted? So many of us are tired, so much of the time. To find out what we can do about it, join Martha for this episode of The Gathering Pod: Filling the Well. Martha points out that there are many situations in human life that are analogous to drought— times when our energy feels like it’s drying up. The good news is that there are sources of energetic replenishment always...

Did you know there is a powerful connection between spirituality and mental health? Martha recently read a book about this subject—The Awakened Brain: The New Science of Spirituality and Our Quest for an Inspired Life by Lisa Miller—and she’s talking about it on this episode of The Gathering Room: The Benefits of Awakening. Martha believes in the transformative power of spiritual awakening, which...