The Gathering Room Podcast

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 misin...

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 D...

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 fro...

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.

A...

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 lea...

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 u...

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, “rolli...

“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 c...

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, 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 found that the joy i...

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 c...

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 painting, a meal you’re preparing, a...

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 been done has been do...

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 through the four Squares of the Cha...

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 when we can answer YES to two quest...

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 ourselves keep going.

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 happening…

In ...

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 a...

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 a...