At long last, my book Beyond Anxiety: Curiosity, Creativity, and Finding Your Life’s Purpose has been released into the world!

In this episode of The Gathering Room—Episode #188: What Lies Beyond Anxiety?—I’m talking about the book and sharing some insights on overcoming anxiety through kindness, curiosity, and creativity.

What can I tell you about this book that I haven’t told you already? I’m glad you asked!

The book is divided into three parts: The Creature, The Creative, and The Creation. First you have to acknowledge that the anxious part of you is like a tiny scared animal, and you can’t use analysis or even medication to bash that little creature into a state of calm. You can only calm your creature by using kindness.

Once you’ve calmed your creature, you can tap into your creative brain by exploring what makes you curious. Once you start using the creative parts of your brain, you shift energy away from the anxious parts and form a different pattern in the brain.

Curiosity then leads us to creativity. Being in a panic is not a creative state and therefore can’t solve your problems—especially not problems you’ve never encountered before. For that, you’ve got to have creativity. Just remember to be gentle with yourself.

And remember that creativity isn’t limited to traditional artistic pursuits like painting, music, or dance. Cooking, conversation, birdwatching, rearranging furniture—these are all creative acts! In fact, just about everything we humans do is creative.

When we become creatively engaged with the world, we open our minds to the mysteries of existence. At this point, creation itself starts to play with us, like a mother dog with her puppies. We begin to notice synchronicities and feel a deep connection to the world around us.

In our online Wilder Community, we’re offering a year-long Deep Dive into Beyond Anxiety with monthly videos, live Q&As, and group discussions to really explore each chapter of the book.

To hear more about moving beyond anxiety through kindness, creativity, and openness to life’s mysteries, tune in for the full episode.

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On this episode of The Gathering Room, special guest Gabby Bernstein joins Martha to talk about her newest book, Self Help: This Is Your Chance to Change Your Life.

Martha and Gabby both love Internal Family Systems (IFS) Therapy—also known as “parts therapy”—and Gabby’s new book is all about making the principles of IFS Therapy accessible to everyone.

To learn more about IFS from Martha and Gabby—and for the chance to join Gabby and Martha in a transformative guided meditation—be sure to tune in!

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Culturally we tend to think of sensitivity as weakness, but Martha says that in fact, it’s a superpower!

In this episode of The Gathering Room, Episode #186: Using Your Powerful Sensitivity, she talks about how to appreciate your sensitivity and use it to create the life you’re meant to live.

By definition, sensitivity has to do with reacting strongly to very slight stimuli. As a result, our society has come to believe that it’s not a strong position to be highly sensitive, that such people are fragile.

What Martha has come to realize is that sensitivity is powerful, and sometimes it comes on powerfully. People who are highly sensitive may feel its power before other people do.

If you’re highly sensitive and you experience something wonderful, you actually have a strong uptick in your mood—and you may feel more wonderful than someone with lower sensitivities. But if an impulse comes in that you don’t understand, your brain might go into anxiety.

Martha says that the remedy for this anxiety is to check in with yourself by asking a series of questions: Is this physical? Is this mental? Is this emotional? Once you’ve checked in with body, mind, and heart, then you can realistically ground the sensation.

If your sensitivity is telling you that it’s none of those things, then you can safely assume it’s coming from a spiritual place.

Martha believes we’re in a really interesting, unprecedented landscape—politically, biologically, and ecologically—and we need to be guided. The way that guidance will come, especially to sensitive people, is through this unfamiliar stimulus that may feel weird and scary at first.

But as you start to explore what feels true, then the magic of the brain kicks in—your curiosity will bring you out of anxiety so your sensitivity can guide you exactly where you’re meant to go.

As Martha says, “We are the ones who can start to lead our lives in the direction that our higher selves are signaling to us to go and potentially help a lot of other people whose sensitivities may not be quite as strong—and in this way we serve the world.”

To learn how to appreciate, listen to, and trust your powerful sensitivity, join Martha for the full episode, where she’ll also guide you in her grounding and calming Space, Stillness, and Silence meditation.

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Martha’s recent encounter with a flock of wild turkeys made her think about her relationship with wild animals and how they always seem to come when she calls them.

In this episode of The Gathering Room, Episode #185: Calling Yourself Home, she shares several stories of her incredible interactions with animals and how her steps for calling to them can also be used on the wild parts of yourself to “call them home.”

This can be especially helpful during times when you feel overwhelmed, exhausted, or burned out. In Martha’s coaching experience, December is a particularly rough month for many people, and she herself feels scattered during this time.

Martha says the same technique she uses to call animals can be used to call in all the many parts of your Self, as if calling a flock of birds home to roost.

The first step, she says, is to be in complete integrity. This means telling yourself the truth. You have to track the parts of yourself that are unhappy or angry or fractious in some way and tell yourself the truth about them.

The second step is what Martha calls “centering presence” where you focus on a point in the center of your chest and imagine it filling with warm light. When you can feel the warmth, you’ll be able to breathe more deeply and start to relax.

Finally, she says to imagine each part of yourself—the scared parts, the flighty parts, the parts who are tired, the parts who don’t want to do things—and imagine them coming home to that point of warmth and light in your chest.

“Maybe they're wild turkeys that can come home to roost in the tree that's inside you,” Martha says. “Or maybe it's a whole murmuration of starlings that can come perch and go to sleep for the night together on an infinitely small branch in the center of your chest.”

If you have parts of yourself that need to feel healed and included and loved, be sure to join Martha for the full episode. She’ll lead you in her Space, Stillness, and Silence meditation and help you call all the scattered parts of yourself home to rest.

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Our culture generally teaches us that anxiety will keep us safe—but really it’s our intuition that does that. In this episode of The Gathering Room—Episode #184: How to Access Intuition When You Really Need It, Martha talks about how to tell the difference between anxiety and intuition and how to hear what your intuition is trying to tell you.

There’s something Martha calls the “sense of truth,” which is a feeling of concord, peace, and calm that comes into us when we believe something that feels true at the deepest levels of the self. It’s trusting that whatever we’re believing at that moment is actually real.

“It turns out that a lot of the things we are anxious about are not real—not yet,” Martha says. “They’re potential, but they’re not real in this moment.”

Unlike fear, which is a rational response to a clear and present danger, anxiety is a chronic, suffering sense of being afraid of things that may not ever happen.

Martha says that one of the lies anxiety will always tell you is that only by staying anxious can you be safe—because when you’re not anxious, you’re not alert. However, exactly the opposite is true: People who are anxious can’t stay alert.

Real intuition arrives when our anxiety is quiet. So many of us are walking around constantly anxious, thinking we’re alert, thinking we can trust our intuition, when in fact, we’re blotting out our intuition with anxiety.

To access intuition, we have to go into a state of stillness and peace and then listen for the fun—that’s the state of being where your intuition can talk to you.

“Your intuition can come in the goofiest, most wonderful ways,” Martha says, “once you realize it’s meant to be a frequency of joy and never a frequency of anxiety.”

To learn more about listening to your intuition and finding its frequency of joy—and to join Martha in her anxiety-relieving Silence, Space, and Stillness meditation—be sure to tune in for the full episode!

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The state of the world right now is unnerving. In this episode of The Gathering Room, she shares how we can start to heal the parts of us that are in pain or despair over the state of things.

Martha says that when we experience trauma, shock, fear, or loss, our psyches can split into different parts to help us cope. To heal this loss of integrity or wholeness, we need to unite all the parts of ourselves that are hurting. And we do this by loving them unconditionally.

In this episode, Martha walks us through a powerful visualization exercise to help us access our deepest capacity for love, hope, and joy, so we can welcome the suffering parts of ourselves to “be warmed by the fire of love.”

As she describes it, “We have to come together as individuals held by the intelligence of nature, by the consciousness of the universe.”

When we can love all the different parts of ourselves, including our sorrow, our fear, our anger, we can love the people around us. And when that happens, vibrant communities begin to form—like Wilder, the “sanctuary for the bewildered” that Martha created with Rowan Mangan.

As Martha shares, “Everything I’ve seen online from the people I respect most, whether they’re politically savvy people or psychologists or community organizers, everybody’s saying the same thing: ‘Join something. Connect, connect, connect.’”

Shock, overwhelm, fear, and rage are ameliorated as we connect with others who are feeling the same way. And this coming together of the shards of all of us could be what creates the calm beyond the storm.

If you’re feeling devastated or uncertain, isolated or afraid, and you want to learn how to let faith, love, and hope guide you to connection and the next right step, don’t miss this reassuring episode of The Gathering Room.

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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 talks about how we can activate our highly creative right hemispheres, so we can solve the problems in our lives—and in the world.

And the best part is, reawakening your own creative genius can actually be a lot of fun!

To learn how to use Martha’s 4 C’s (calm, curiosity, courage, and feeling cornered) to rev up your right hemisphere and start solving problems as if by magic, tune in to this fascinating episode, which also includes Martha’s Space, Stillness, and Silence meditation.

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In this Gathering Room, Martha talks about the “heart healer” within every person. When we’re heartsick, this is the only thing that heals us. Learn how to access your own heart healer in this very popular episode! (Originally aired: January 15, 2023)

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