So think of something you’ve been trying to get done….that is difficult, feels resistant. You really, really want it, but you’re struggling. You’re struggling to write your book, you’re struggling to write your symphony, you’re struggling to get your garden growing. You’re struggling to get a relationship back on track. You’re struggling to be a parent. Struggle, struggle, struggle. The whole idea again, culturally, we have this idea of “never give up, never give up the struggle.” And so I’m a good struggler, I struggle away, but today I had a weird thing happen and it made me think of a lot of other weird things. So I’m going to tell you about it. I think it’ll make you think of weird things that have happened to you, and it’ll help us all be much more relaxed and yes, ironically, productive. 

So here’s what happened. As you may know, I have been working with transparent watercolor for many months now. It is a difficult damn medium. Some people say, a woman told me recently, it’s a forgiving medium, and I’m like, “It never forgives me for anything.” And I struggle with it every morning. It’s a joyful struggle. I love it, I love it. But damn, it’s hard. Well, for a few days I haven’t been able to do any watercolor because I’ve been busy with other things. That’s why I had to reschedule today. Busy—going, I’m going to be out of the country almost all of October and I have to get my life in order. But I’ll still be showing up here whenever possible, so don’t tune out. So I got up today and it was way before dawn and I thought, “I’m just going to sneak over to my art table and I’m going to just put a watercolor, just a first wash.” And I sat down or I stood up, actually, I paint standing up.

I stood there. I looked at the piece of paper where I had the drawing, and almost by itself my hand picked up this brush. Now this is a very large, it’s a wide flat brush, and to work with it and to get things right, you can’t get details right with this thing. You have to know exactly how the paint is going to roll across the moistened page. You have to know exactly how much paint and water have to be in the brush, and it has to accord directly with how damp the paper is. It’s incredibly technical. And my hand just started picking up paint and just putting in the wash the way I’d seen really good watercolorists online doing where they just were like, yeah, here we go. And I’m like, “How is she doing that?” It just happened.

And then I started working with a different brush that I had worked with a little. I’ll show you, they’re kind of odd. This brush has a big barrel where it holds a lot of paint, but a tiny tip and you can use it to do calligraphic lines. It’s very difficult. Everything is difficult. And my hand picked up that brush and started working with it, and I felt calm. I felt joyful. I felt like something in me knew what it was doing. 

And then I started thinking, I haven’t done anything for a week, but it’s like everything I had just been experimenting with had sunk into my nervous system. And actually when the brain learns a new skill, especially if it learns playfully, it does start on the top of your brain and then it literally sinks in. The more you do it, the more it goes down toward the core of your brain and you get better and better at it, and it doesn’t feel like you doing it anymore. It feels like magic. 

So I started to think about that as my body’s painting away and I’m going, this is actually going really well. This is much better than I expected. Then I started to think about this time when I went and lived for a year in Singapore, as I just said to our wonderful people in Malaysia, Singapore is right at the tip of Malaysia across the water. And I lived there and I studied Chinese at a Chinese-speaking research center for a year. I had five Chinese classes a day, all taught in Mandarin. Very, very difficult for this one. Partly— the grammar’s not difficult at all, but the tones are hard for me to hear because Chinese is tonal, and the writing just made me want to die. Sorry if that’s a trigger for anybody, but okay, if you try to learn to write in Chinese, I think you’ll know my pain. Even if you are Chinese, it’s hard. It’s beautiful, but it’s hard. 

So on the way home from Singapore, I stopped for a day in, I had a layover in France and I had taken French in junior high school, not high school, junior high school. So when I was like 11, 12. And I turned on the TV in my hotel room, and I was used to paying such close attention in Chinese class that I just kind of went lasered in on it, and the news came on in French and they started and it was like English. It was like, I hadn’t been studying French, it’s just there. It’s in me. What’s happening? This is example number two that I’m telling you. 

Third example: I was trying to learn, which I am very bad at. I am so bad at moving my body. I cannot, oh God, don’t try to teach me how to dance. I can’t. I won’t. You’ll laugh at me, and I will be ashamed. And karate, I wanted to do it, as I’ve said before, so that if anybody tried to mess with my kids, I could take ’em out, especially my son with Down syndrome. I never did that. I just wanted to be ready. Did get jumped in a secluded alley one time by some dude who was sneaking after me, and having done eight years of karate, I turned around, I smiled at him and I did this and he ran away. So that was the only time I ever, I thought I’ll start with his knees. I had a plan. You’ve got to have a plan. Anyway, that was after eight years. The hardest thing you learn in karate is, they’d tell me, is your yellow belt kata. A kata is a set of movements that have to be memorized in exact order. And when you get up to the brown belt, black belt level, they’re incredibly complex. Yellow belt is simple. 

But my teachers and all my old compadres at the dojo told me, your yellow belt is your hardest one because your brain is not used to these movements. It’s weird to move your right leg and your right arm forward at the same time instead of counterbalancing arms and legs. It will take you forever. And it took me months to learn my first kata. And then I couldn’t do karate for a while. I went away and I was doing some other stuff. I did a book tour and everything. I was struggling so hard to learn this yellow belt kata and I could not. And then I went back to the dojo and I said, I didn’t practice. And they said, well, you have to do it anyway. So I was like, okay.

And I went and I stood there and I did my little bow and then I did the yellow belt kata… Flawlessly! What? I had not been studying. 

So that’s the third thing. This reminded me of when Lance Armstrong, the famed and infamous bicycle rider, he won a lot of things—and he was cheating, but he won a lot of things. And at one point he got cancer and he had to stop training and do chemo. Actually, he never stopped training, really. But the chemo was hard on his body. And when he went back, he actually was way faster than before he had the chemo. And I read in an article that he said the chemo had killed off all the fibers in his body that weren’t fast-twitch or something. But then it went to his trainer and his trainer said, I just don’t think anyone realized how tired Lance really was.

So here’s where it gets to you. Where you’ve been struggling, you are tired. And when you have struggled to the point of tired, the magic wants you to rest—to let rest do the rest. And it does. It does it, I mean it does it in your body, it does it in your memory, it does with language, it does with everything. But it even seems to work with things in your life situation that aren’t directly related to you. Give it a rest, but the rest has to be total. The thing about, I mean with the watercolor stuff is that I’d been working in acrylic for several days and my brain was completely off. And you may think they’re the same. They’re not the same. And that part of my brain, which is usually struggling with watercolor because it’s fun, was off doing acrylic and I really, really took time off watercolor. When I went to Singapore and focused on Chinese, I really wasn’t thinking about French. When I went on my book tour, I really wasn’t thinking about karate. 

So I wanted to offer you a little method. Wherever you are tired of the struggle, remember, it could be relationships, parenting, health, doing things right, reading or writing a great book. Whatever it is, try these things. Number one best way to let rest do the rest is to sleep. It is only during sleep that our brain can cement the connections that teach us how to do a new thing. Sleep is so, so, so important, and at the beginning of the 20th century, most people in the developed world and all over the world were getting about 10 hours a night. That’s what we evolved to get. Now we don’t get it. Sleep as much as you can. And oh, you mommies and daddies of little children, as soon as they grow up, go to sleep! I know you need it. So that’s thing one. If you’re struggling and you really want to learn something, fall asleep. 

Two, get some good company. Get people around you who are excited about something different from what you’re doing. Your social self will wake up and if you’re with people you love, it completely drops the struggle of whatever you’re trying to make because our social instincts are so strong. But it won’t work if you’re with people you don’t like. You have to actually hang out with good people. I mean people that you like. And you can do it, if you don’t have any friends around, you can watch great standup comedians who would be good friends for you.

I just did that yesterday. Or join a community, like my Wilder Community online. Join a book club, join a painting group. Join something. Join something. We still have covid around, but wear a mask, get your shots, and go. 

Laughter. I just mentioned watching standup comedy. I think one of the reasons my watercolor improved so much is that yesterday Ro was sick. And I said, look, we’ve got to fill the well, you’ve got to rest and we’ve got to distract you. So we watched this incredible new comedian named Hannah Einbinder. I forget her last name, she’s so good. I’ll put it in the notes after I do this. But her first name is Hannah and she’s a brand new standup comedian. And you should go watch her standup. It’s amazing. Hey, if anybody knows who she is, you can put it in the chat. 

Okay, next thing, puzzle cracking. Put your little curious human mind into any puzzle that it’s fun to crack. Like do a jigsaw puzzle. Do a game on your phone. Make a pattern out of leaves. Figure out how to climb the tallest tree in your yard. Or maybe the shortest tree might be better. Puzzle-crack something in a fun way. Get your mind so completely focused on solving a puzzle that it will let go of the thing you’re struggling with. 

And then finally, make something with your hands that has nothing to do with the thing you’re struggling about. This is dangerous if you’re struggling psychologically with a relationship or anything. So make sure it’s so hard to do this thing, like do something crafty that’s really difficult like learning to knit if you’ve never knitted. I can’t knit. And you will then be able to, it’s going to shift your attention into the right side of your brain where you’re doing proprio receptive and aesthetic things, and it’ll give you some rest. 

Finally, we are going to do—yes, somebody said, Very Marilyn says Hannah, the comedian I just referenced is the co-star of the show Hacks, which I’ve been watching, but her standup is incredible. Okay, final way to let rest do the rest. Favorite way, if you can handle it: meditation. Yeah, you knew I would say it. And of course my favorite meditation is the one I do with us on The Gathering Room. So I am going to do the meditation now, and we are going to get just a little bit of rest so that rest can do the work and rest can do the rest. 

So get comfortable, relax, take a deep breath, let it out. Purse your lips, blow the air so that your nervous system gets even calmer that way. And now remember that 99.9999999999999% of every atom in your body is empty space. Even the rest is just vibrating energy. Think about the space inside your atoms and ask yourself the question: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? As you breathe in and breathe out, play with the question: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? Then ask yourself: Can I imagine the empty space in the distance between my eyes? Breathe. Can I imagine the empty space inside the atoms of my head?

Can I imagine the complete emptiness that fills most of my body between the crown of my head and the base of my spine? Then can I imagine the space inside my entire body? Can I imagine the space inside the atoms of my heart? Can I imagine that empty space—what we see as empty—filled with love, consciousness, joy, connection? 

Can I imagine the distance between myself and all the other people watching or listening to this podcast? Can I imagine the empty space in the atoms of the earth between me and everyone else here? Can I imagine us all connected by the same luminous space that holds our bodies and our hearts and our brains? Can I hear the silence underneath all the sounds of the earth? All of that. There’s silence holding them. There is silence in which they can appear in the no-thing-ness where things are made manifest. Breathe. 

Can I feel the stillness that holds every action of every particle in the universe? Can I imagine the stillness between me and the planets in my own solar system? They move in their vortices through absolute stillness. Can I imagine the stillness, the silence, and the space of the universe as my own beloved soul holding me up, creating my existence, connecting me to everyone and gathering me into safety no matter how frightened I feel? Can I imagine the love that is the space, the silence, and the stillness of reality?

Okay, that was nice. I wanted to give you an especially sort of deep experience of that because it lets rest do the rest. And now I want to answer some of your questions, but here’s the deal. My beautiful gracious badger, Roey Joey, she is not here. She’s taken our child to a doctor’s appointment. 

So I would like to get your questions right here on The Gathering Room. Jessica says, “How do you do physical tasks without such exhaustion?” Because she’s really, really tired. 

It reminds me of time. Okay, now, as if you didn’t know I’m crazy and woo-woo, here we go. I went skiing once. I love to ski. I skied for three days, really hard. In case you’ve never skied, when you’re watching those Olympic skiers going zooming down the mountain, it doesn’t look that complicated. It is actually because they’re going so fast. They’re doing the equivalent of a hundred deep squats with the weight of a grand piano on their backs. That’s how strenuous skiing can get if you’re good. I am not good, but it is strenuous. So by the third day, my legs were jelly. I was just like, I can’t go out there. And part of me spoke up and it said, “No, go out.” I was like, “I can’t. I’m exhausted.” And this part me that loves skiing said, “I’ll do it. Just get to the top of the mountain.” And I was like, “Okay.” So I put on my ski gear, I had my skis and I’m hobbling up through the snow like, “I can’t so this, I can’t take another step.” I put my skis on, get on the lift, go to the top of the mountain like, “All right, take over.” 

I skied like a demon all day long. Didn’t even stop to eat, just skied and skied and skied. And the whole time I was like, “My body’s much too tired to be doing this,” and whatever inside me loves to ski, said, “But I’m not!”

And it’s in the space, the stillness, and the silence that we access those beings. I mean, if you want to be—I don’t believe this stuff, you guys, but I don’t not believe it. That’s my position. I believe that there was a part of consciousness that loves to ski as me, just like it loves to do whatever Jessica is doing as Jessica. And it didn’t want to stop. 

So if you’re doing something that’s part of your joy and you get exhausted and everything, that’s when it’s most frustrating. When you’re not loving it, you can say to the universe, “Please gather me into your arms and help me do this and let rest do the rest.” That’s really important. But when you’re doing something you love and you’re exhausted, you can say, “Gather me into joy and let rest do the rest.” 

A certain politician keeps saying, who’s had a very brief run for the presidency, the vice presidential nominee, keeps saying, “Oh, we’ll sleep when we’re dead.” I don’t like that policy because I like to sleep a lot, but I get what he means that he’s so lifted by the joy that he’s feeling. And you can see it and feel it when those two are out and about in the world. If you don’t like them, I apologize, I love you anyway. But there’s something lifting them and lifting the people who are connecting with them in joy. And it is, I’m sure they’re not sleeping much, and they should sleep, but there’s something in the joy of it that is letting rest do the rest. 

If we can relax into our integrity where we are not going against our own best interests that we know in our heart or where we’re in peace, we can exceed our wildest imagined limits. Like we can do more than we know we can do.

Okay, so Frannie says, “How do I interrupt the perfectionist mind? It’s making me irritable.” 

Then you get, what I would do if I were you, Franny, is let it out. Let it be a baby. Stomp around, throw things at the wall, soft throw pillows, pound a pillow: “I’m so frustrated!” I just read a study yesterday that showed that they subjected people to mild pain, putting their hands in ice water. And they had some of them, they first did something that got them frustrated, which is a form of anger. And then they divided ’em into three groups. One group was told to try not to feel anything. Another group was told to think about their anger, but don’t show it. And a third group was said, just show any anger that you’re in. 

So the people who were allowed to show their real experience had far less pain. The people who repressed it, they had really bad pain, and the people who thought about it but didn’t repress it, were in the middle. So the more we repress our frustration, the more exhausted we become. That spurt of angry energy is the child self, and you going, “I want to learn this!” It’s called the rage to master and it’s part of the puzzle-cracking joy. It’s different from “I gotta go punch the clock at my job.” It’s not soul murder, it’s just learning. And you need to take rests from it and let rest do the rest. And part of the rest is showing your anger, showing your frustration. 

All right, I’m going to scroll down and see if I have other questions. Jude says, “I would like to know how to motivate an entire team to practice radical honesty. Would they drop out of the exercise? What are the challenges? Would love to know.” 

Yeah, if this is a work team, good luck. One of the dumbest things I have ever done is go into a corporate setting and say, “We’re going to be radically honest.” I never saw people lie so hard in my life because they’ve got all kinds of social dynamics that they’re worried about, and work teams—we’re told to repress. And as I just said, repressing emotion is horrible. It divorces us from ourselves. It won’t let us rest because it’s not putting anything aside. It is crushing something down. 

So if you want a group to practice radical honesty, what I would do is start with love, start with kindness, start with creating a cocoon. Make it a safe place. And then have them tell little truths that aren’t too scary. I once went to Byron Katie, the spiritual teacher’s wonderful nine-day school. If you get a chance to go there, I don’t know if she’s running it every year anymore, but it’s amazing. And one of the things she had us do, and I loved this, is we all lay down on the floor like 300 people, and she turned off all the lights. And then Katie said to us, and I didn’t know many of the people there, some were acquaintances, some I didn’t know, most I didn’t know at all. 

So she said, “Just while you’re lying there, nobody can see you. Just say the thing that you don’t want anyone to know that you’re afraid to say.” And we lay there on the floor and people were like, “I really don’t like my mother.” And then somebody else would say, “I take things from the office supplies at work.” And then people started saying the truth because our systems hate to lie, and they want to tell the truth. And Katie always does these things called turnarounds. So what she always says is, “What I least want you to know is actually what I most want you to know.” And as she established so much safety: we were lying down, we were looking straight at the ceiling, it was pitch dark, nobody could see anything. 

Now in your group, people might recognize each other’s voices. So have them start very slowly. But remove all the social cues that usually cause us to read other people’s faces and get really anxious. And start with things that are small and silly, especially if you can get them to laugh, and that—love, laughter, and a deliberate attempt to make them safe—is the absolute best way you can then invite people to be honest if they feel like it. Never try to force them. That is the worst thing you can do.

I’ve gone over time already, but I’ll just take one more really logistical question: “When meditating, does it matter if you exhale through your mouth or your nose?”

There have actually been battles fought over this in Asia. A lot of people say it’s best to exhale and inhale through your nose. I’m going to go with that simply because I read a book called Breath, which was not from Asia, it’s all Western research. Turns out if you breathe through your mouth, you will not do as well as if you breathe through your nose in a general health sense. It is astonishing what happens to us when we breathe through our mouths. After reading that book—and I know a lot of other people who read it too—we all tape our mouths shut at night with surgical tape. Just a little thing right here, and then you’ll breathe through your nose through the night because it is really different.

So I side with those people in Asia who really like to focus on the sensation of the air going through the nose and—if you don’t have a cold or whatever—and then even notice is it more in one nostril than the other? Usually we’re only breathing through one nostril, which is bizarre. Anyway, the point is keep breathing any way you can. Breathe deeply. Breathe with your whole diaphragm, fill your lungs, and let it go. Rest your body. Rest your mind. Rest your heart. 

Find something that you’re struggling on today, and either sleep, get good company, laugh, puzzle-crack, make something cool, or do another meditation. Take a real rest and watch: Rest will do the rest of the work. I love you. Thanks for showing up at this weird time. I’ll be seeing you soon. Bye.