The Gathering Room Podcast

In this week’s Gathering Room, Martha talks about the times when change picks us up and throws us around. When we reach these “maelstroms” in our lives, Martha says, the key is to surrender as we might in the experience of being dumped by a wave. When the mind surrenders control, we become open to all the natural processes that our souls want to enact through us. (Originally aired: September 5, 20...

Martha shares the secret of her own “second sight”—how being a visual artist has changed the way she physically sees the world. Using her own most recent paintings, Martha explains how she sees when she uses the left hemisphere of her brain versus the right. We all have this ability to turn on second sight, Martha says, and to see the infinite light within every material form. (Originally aired: A...

In this very special, hour-long Gathering Room, Martha talks to her friend and hero Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor about a subject we all need to hear more about: HOPE. Jill talks about hope in microcosm (the neural networks of the brain), while Martha looks at how the exact same systems and processes function at the macro level of groups of people and ecosystems. (Originally aired: August 22, 2021) See om...

Martha has believed all her life that a transformation of human consciousness would take place in her lifetime. Over the decades, she’s met more and more people who share this inexplicable belief that a mass “awakening” could change humanity’s future. In this week’s episode, Martha talks about what this transformation might look like and the hope it offers us at this particularly troubling time in...

When a guitar string is plucked, the note will spontaneously resonate with another guitar nearby—provided they are tuned the same. In today’s episode, Martha uses this metaphor to explore the ways that life creates resonances for us when we tune ourselves in certain ways. Martha gives tips for tuning yourself to joy, if this is the frequency you’d like to see matched in your life. (Originally aire...

On this very special Gathering Room, Martha was joined by Anita Moorjani. Anita’s new book, Sensitive Is the New Strong, is a must-read for people who identify as empathic or highly sensitive. In their Gathering Room conversation, Martha and Anita talked about why the world needs its empaths now more than ever, and how to develop a self-love that means we are equipped to give our gifts to the worl...

We’re often told it’s pointless to beat ourselves up for making mistakes, but Martha takes it a step further and says that error isn’t just useful, it’s crucial to getting things right. Making mistakes leads to learning and can also lead to discovery and reinvention. She points out that accidents and missteps led to the discovery of penicillin, photography, even potato chips! The discussion wraps...

In his book Break Through Pain, meditation expert Shinzen Young says that pain separates us from the divine, and learning to handle it skillfully is akin to grinding it into sand. In this conversation, Martha is recovering from surgery and describes using Young’s book to map and define her pain. She explains that pain is nature calling us to return to our bodies, but it doesn’t necessarily equate...

We may conceptualize creativity as a free-flowing stream, but Martha points out that constraint is an excellent source of creative inspiration. When we have all the time and resources in the world, we feel aimless … but given an hour and a socket wrench, we can change the world! Martha shares examples from her own life, showing how every time she faced a situation full of constraints, it catalyzed...

The Gathering Pod welcomes neuroanatomist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor to talk about her new book, Whole Brain Living, which Martha describes as “brain science from a user’s perspective.” In 1996, Jill experienced a severe hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain causing her to lose the ability to walk, talk, read, write, or recall any of her life. Then she rebuilt it back to full function over the...

Most people in our community have explored meditation, centering prayer, or other forms of spiritual contemplation … and may have come face to face with THE VOID. (Dun dun dunnnn.) Martha explains that when people encounter nothingness, they often feel fear and despair. Her own first experience with finding the void through meditation felt that way, but in this discussion she explains how we can t...

As we move toward life after Covid, many of us are feeling overwhelmed and paralyzed. We’re facing a deluge of decisions demanding attention, causing bottlenecks in our brains that make it impossible to focus on anything at all. Martha explains that the Practical Wayfinding: Creativity Mindset is the answer. Instead of allowing us to freeze up, it helps us remain curious, explore our options, and...

As any artist will tell you, creativity is rarely tidy. Lately Martha has been expressing her creativity by drawing and painting, relishing the trail of brushes, rags, and sketchbooks she leaves in her wake. Then, after working intently on one canvas, she decided she’d RUINED it … before she remembered that before order, there is chaos. When we decide to build something beautiful out of our lives,...

While promoting her new book, Martha found herself tapped out and exhausted. She quickly realized she hadn’t been using the one skill that helps her manage the rollercoaster of life: non-attachment. In this conversation, Martha explains that despite its somewhat uninviting name, this skill makes our good times last longer and go deeper, and makes our bad times easier to weather. She also explains...

Ever think if you just try harder or achieve more, you’ll FINALLY feel whole and happy? Martha warns us that this is a misconception shoved at us by culture, which insists that fame, money, and accomplishment are the answers to everything. In reality, doing things that don’t feed our souls will be unfulfilling. We must go back to the first principles of what we love, back to the fundamentals of ou...

In this conversation, Martha reveals several freaky-deaky stories that she couldn’t quite squeeze into her new book, The Way of Integrity! She talks about finding and moving to her ranch in California, meeting a massive rattlesnake, a very unusual flock of turkeys, how she acquired her own personal labyrinth, and more. (Originally aired: Apr. 18, 2021) See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy infor...

Just before the release of her latest book, The Way of Integrity, Martha describes feeling pulled in many directions and drifting away from her true self! She describes the ups and downs of preparing to release a huge creative project into the world, and her realization that she must get off the roller coaster of human emotion and back into the truth of her spirit. When your mind, heart, soul, and...

Martha identifies as a codependent: someone who helps others even when helping is to her own detriment. Since many of Martha’s listeners have similar personalities, she shares a coping technique she formulated after reading Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss. People who don’t experience empathy, such as narcissists and psychopaths, are very hard for codependents to understand. Managing these...

This conversation took place right after the Spring Equinox, a time when day and night are equal in length. Martha points out that this is a time of transition and a reminder that life can be experienced cyclically if we so choose. She adds, though, that while we are experiencing spring again as part of a cycle, we are also experiencing this particular spring for the very first time. Perhaps it’s...

In an interview with Inspire Nation podcast host Michael Sandler, Martha explained that living with integrity WILL bring fear into your life. You’ll realize you’ve been betraying your authentic self to coddle people around you. We all do this because social pushback is frightening! Then Michael described the edge between destructive fear and fear we feel despite being safe. Martha offers an exerci...

After hearing Brene Brown declare that “unused creativity is not benign,” Martha and her family decided to hold a Creativity Day … but when Martha sat down to paint, she found it terrifying and overwhelming! This is because culture trains us to value activities done for money or to help others over activities that help us build meaningful and joyful lives for ourselves. Martha challenges us to pus...

We cannot force fresh starts. They come when they want to come, and they always begin inside of us. Martha describes the feeling of being “fed up” as crucial to catalyzing sweeping change, but also explains the concept of being “full fed.” A caterpillar cannot become a butterfly unless it is full fed, meaning plump enough to sustain its transformation. Fresh starts in our own lives must be similar...

Although many of our cultural stories focus on generosity, selflessness, and giving MORE, Martha uses this episode to stress the importance of reserving resources for ourselves. She points out that when we overgive we may actually prevent people from learning and growing on their own. (And, of course, WE end up drained and exhausted.) Giving should feel joyful, and when it doesn’t, we can absolute...

How do you cultivate vulnerability while maintaining healthy boundaries with others? Striking this balance is especially complicated if we keep ourselves emotionally wide-open or utterly closed-off at all times, tendencies that many sensitive people favor. When we’ve been repeatedly hurt by people or systems, it can be hard to know who and how to trust. Martha offers tactics and resources for conn...

No matter where you are in the world, when you hit February you’re likely to hit the doldrums. Martha offers some ideas for keeping our inspiration stoked and burning during tough times and explains that there are many parallels between fire-tending and motivational maintenance. Both require fuel to burn (self-care), heat (energy from other people), and oxygen (truth and integrity). Listen in to f...