These are infamously shy, intelligent birds that stay out of the way of humans. When I moved to California, they were all around my ranch and I Googled them and the Google told me there may be as many as 300 wild turkeys in California alone. And I was like, “They’re all at my house.” They were everywhere. And I had the strangest feeling of affinity for them. I always felt like they thought they worked for the CIA, they were very secretive, but also rather narcissistic. And Benjamin Franklin wanted them to be our national bird. Did you know that?

But they do weird things. Once a year they would all gather in this pasture by my house and then split into boy/girl groups and scream at each other for a whole day. I’ve never read about why turkeys do this. Anyway, but I digress. My biggest, my point was that I looked up wild turkeys in Harvard Yard. Okay, there I said the word. And I said, “What is this thing with the wild turkeys there? Have they brought them in for Thanksgiving to slaughter them?” And the internet did tell me that they just—wild turkeys, because they’re not being hunted for food in cities, are starting to rebuild their populations in parts of the world where they naturally lived but were pushed out by human habitation. They’re coming back. And they’re these huge—it’s like pigeons, only 40 pounds. It is the size of a 4-year-old—human, that is.

So it got me thinking about all the times that I’ve interacted with animals and how I actually don’t tell all the stories that there are to be told about my relationship with wild animals and how they seem to come when they are called. That’s the only way I can put it. Although it’s not called like, “Get over here.” It’s called like, “Hello, turkeys, would you mind meeting me in Harvard Yard?” 

I actually didn’t call them in the other day, but there have been many occasions when the strangest things have happened. It happens all the time in Africa at Londolozi when I go there. The people come for the retreats, and we all sit together and if somebody wants to see a cheetah, we all call out to cheetahs and try to manifest a cheetah. And same with elephants or rhinoceros or whatever. And they pretty much always show up. But on the other hand, we’re working with the best trackers in the world in a very game-rich environment, so it’s not that surprising.

But, for example, I may have told you this, once I was driving through Wyoming, which is the most empty state in the US. It’s the most sparsely populated state in the US. And I was riding across, I was driving across this high altiplano, like this—it was like the Great Plains, only high up. And I thought at the beginning of my drive, “I have never seen a wild pronghorn antelope, the fastest land animal in North America. I would like to see some.” So I sat in my car and I called in pronghorn antelope. And then I got to driving and it was a long drive. So like four hours in, I’ve forgotten all about wanting to see pronghorns. And I see on the horizon this little puff of white. And I was like, “What is that?” And I stopped my car, and the puff of white got bigger and as it came closer to me, I could see that it was the dust cloud being raised by a herd of pronghorn antelope who were running 60 miles an hour straight at me. Straight at me! Now you’ve got to imagine, this is a wilderness. There’s nothing around, there’s one human object—my car—in the vicinity, and these animals run straight to the car, they get all around it, and they stopped and just stood there puffing. And I’m crying and saying, “I called you and you came.”

One time I was meditating outside here in Pennsylvania, and it was firefly season. And if you have never seen fireflies, they’re these beautiful little bursts of yellow-green light that go boop, boop. And if you get hundreds or thousands of them over a meadow or in a woodland, it’s very magical. I mean you really do end up believing in fairies. And I was out there, I went outside to meditate in the evening, just to watch the fireflies because sometimes for me, nature watching and meditation—there’s a very thin line in between them, and I confess that I often cross it into the animal watching zone. So I was watching the fireflies and then suddenly I thought, “Why don’t I call them?” And I thought, all right. So I called them in and hundreds of these little lights came out of the forest and flew around me going, boop, boop, boop. Like, close. I was in a cone of fireflies. It was kind of amazing.

And these things happen to me not that infrequently. So today I was feeling incredibly scattered. I don’t know how you all feel, but for me, December is the busiest, most burnout kind of month. There’s all the holiday stuff, everybody’s rushing to get stuff done before the year ends. In my case, I’m just revving up a book tour, which hasn’t really begun yet because the book isn’t coming out until January 7th, but all this publicity is happening. And I’m driving to New York, or being driven, and driving back and getting gussied up, even though I’m soaking wet, to be on some interview. And then I have to proofread things and go to a studio and record things, and my family is working flat-out to try to support me. My assistant is, like everyone’s losing their minds. And I feel like—you may have heard me talk about how we have inner parts. You may have an inner child, you may have an inner somebody in yourself who is very responsible and another part of you that likes to goof off and so on. We all have parts. Well, I feel right now at this point in my life, like I have about 10,000 parts and they’re like one of those murmurations of starlings. They’re just flying around all these different—and if you’ve never seen a murmuration of starlings, Google it immediately after this Gathering Room because you need to see them, like thousands of birds all flying together. But there’s a certain amount of chaos and it never stops moving. They come by our house here sometimes, and the coolest thing is that they’ll fly in and literally darken the sky around my windows here in my room and then they’ll land on the ground to hunt for food. And then if I go and I flick the window and make a sound, they go up and it’s literally like watching leaves fall in the autumn in a windstorm, only they’re all going up instead of down.

So yeah, it can be cool to have a murmuration, to have so many aspects of yourself trying to do so many different tasks that you can’t bring them together. But I thought today, I just had it, man, I’m so busy. And I thought, “Why—I bet other people are in this situation too.” December is rough for people in my coaching experience. Pretty much all of us have difficult Decembers and they scatter us. So I thought, “Why don’t I use the technique by which I call other animals to call in my selves like a flock of birds?” And I could teach the people on the Gathering Room how I call animals, but we can use it to call in the wild animal parts of ourselves that could be in a lot of different pieces right now.

So here is the deal. Here’s how I call animals—and I’m not a professional or magical. This is how I do it, and it really, really works well for me. First, be in complete integrity. This means that if you are, for example, going to a job you don’t like and pretending you like your boss, even though you don’t—that is only, for me, that’s only a lack of integrity if you tell yourself that you like it. You have to tell yourself the truth. So if there’s suffering in your mind—I wrote a whole book about it, The Way of Integrity—you need to track the parts of yourself that are unhappy or that are angry or that are fractious in some way. And you have to tell yourself the truth about them.

I had to tell myself the truth today that a certain task I was doing, a proofreading task, was horrible and that I didn’t like having to do it. I still did it, but I was very, very clear about not wanting to. And then I wrote an email explaining why to the people who needed to know about it. And then I was back in integrity. So whatever is disturbing you, let it be true that you are disturbed. Don’t fight yourself. Be one thing, whole and undivided.

Okay, so just tell yourself the truth about how you feel right now. Right now. It doesn’t have to be an hour from now or even five minutes from now. Right now, tell yourself the truth about what’s going on now.

The second thing, it might be called—I mean in one Christian mystic tradition is called centering prayer. I think this is what it’s like. I call it centering presence. And it has to do with, I imagine that right around the area of my heart, but in the center of my chest, not to the left, the heart is a little bit to the left. I just imagine a bright point of light and it’s almost as if my eyes are looking in at that point instead of looking out around. Obviously I don’t turn my eyes backwards, but they do tend to go down. And all my attention is as if I’m looking down at a light in my own sternum.

So I’m not lying to myself about anything, and I’m focused on the light inside my own chest and I’m putting all my sensory attention on that. And then I get a certain feeling of physical warmth in my chest and I start to breathe more deeply. I think that is when I’m in connection with my true nature, and it’s very relaxing and my verbal mind slows down.

And then I start to imagine, I imagine with my eyes, with my ears, all my senses, I imagine the being that I am calling. I just imagine it coming to me. It’s that simple. Sitting on my little lawn chair among the fireflies, I simply looked inside until I found the bright spot and I relaxed into it. And then I just imagined these little beings coming toward me and flying around me.

And I completely relax and I give it lots of time to happen. And it often does. It really often does. Another time I was in, Ro and I were in Sedona, Arizona. We flew in late at night because I was going to interview someone, Anita Moorjani for fans, I’m a fan. And then I was going to interview her first thing in the morning, then leave. And as we’re driving into Sedona, I thought to myself, “Oh, we’re out here in the beautiful Arizona wilderness and I have seen some javelinas out here.” Javelinas are little pig-like creatures. “And I would sure like to see them again, but it’s midnight now. I’m interviewing Anita at eight, then I’m leaving at nine. There’s not really the chance.” Nevertheless, as we drove in, I found the point in my chest, it’s like if I press it, everything goes, relaxes. And I said to myself, and I said to the javelinas, “Come to me.” I imagined them coming to me, walking up to me. 

So then we slept the night and we went in, and I was getting on my microphone to do the interview with Anita, and she’s in her hotel room and they have lights set up and everything. And then we hear a knock on the door of her suite at the resort, and an assistant runs over to check the door and says, “It’s a pig!” Did I tell you this last week? No. Okay. So then, we all take off our microphones and run over there. And there is a javelina, big male javelina, just standing at the door. Now this is a big resort, and somehow he knocked, I don’t even know how he did that. With his snout? With his little trotter? I don’t know. Anyway, we watched him for a while, and all these other javelinas came out of the woods, a few females, a few males, and some beautiful stripy little piglets. Oh, they were sweet. And we actually opened the door and walked out and stood and they just milled around us, eating cactus and nursing their babies. And the hotel person who was with us kept saying, “They’re very aggressive. Watch out! They’re very aggressive.” I’m like, “She’s nursing her piglets. She’s not going to hurt us.”

Anyway, just to say that when you call animals, leave plenty of time for them to show up and consider nothing impossible. They will get to you. Now, if you are playing along, we’re now going to do this with the wild animal parts of yourself: the scared, the flighty, the ones who are tired, the ones who don’t want to do what you have to do. We’re going to call them all home to this point of warmth and light in your chest.

So admit the truth to yourself, whatever needs admitting. Find the point of light or warmth, turn all your attention toward that point of light and warmth. And then imagine every part of yourself that needs to feel healed and included and rested and loved as if they were a flock of birds. Maybe they’re wild turkeys that can come home to roost in the tree that’s inside you. 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.

So it’s as if they’re going into the distance, but they’re going into the nearness. And just feel them settling and talking to each other, maybe preening their feathers and preening each other’s feathers a little. And let them all be in community and let them all be at rest.

And now we’re going to do our Gathering Room meditation, the Space, Silence and Stillness meditation. So with all the parts of you gathered like birds in your heart space, ask yourself the question: iIs it possible for me to imagine the distance between my eyes? Is it possible for me to imagine the distance between the top of my forehead and the bottom of my chin? Is it possible for me to imagine the distance between the bottom of my chin and the center of my chest where a bright light holds all the beasts and birds that represent my different parts and they’re all at peace? Can I imagine the stillness inside my body where all the parts of myself can rest?

Can I imagine the stillness that fills the universe and creates the ground in which all activity occurs? Can I imagine the silence underneath every sound? Can I imagine the space inside every atom of my being the trillions and trillions of atoms that are mostly space? And can I imagine that space continuing and permeating the trillions of galaxies and planets in the universes? Can I imagine that all of this, the stillness, the space, and the silence are conscious and thrumming with life and holding all of matter in love? And then bring all that energy that comes from these questions back into that center point and let all the parts of you be saturated with the stillness, the silence, and the space that is love. So I am hoping that calling ourselves works just like calling other animals because we are animals. 

So here are some questions:

Andrea says, “Please teach us how to do this. Call the animals.” 

Yeah, just picture any animal as long as they’re in the—one time I was thinking about elephants, but I was at a party in an old-fashioned house in Savannah, Georgia, and it was the middle of winter. And I went over to the window because I hate parties and it was hot and I wanted to press my face against the cool glass of a window. So I went into the coat room and put my face against the glass. And when I opened my eyes, I swear to God, there were three circus elephants being walked in the middle of the night down the cold streets of Savannah, Georgia. Stuff happens, y’all. Magic is—it happens.

All right, Jessica says, “Have you ever asked the animals not to come?” 

I’ve asked ants to stay off my yoga mat a few times, and they just started marching around it. Yeah, I’ve done that too. I’ve done that with a snake that got inside my house once. I was like, “Oh honey.” I pictured it turning around and leaving. And it did. I’ve never tried it with mosquitoes. That would be good. It would also be good to use with people, but just imagine them not coming in. That’s wonderful, Jessica, and I am definitely going to try that and see how the little six-leggers, how they respond.

Dr. Donna says, “What can you do if you become somewhat addicted to the dopamine of the chaos in addition to having it being paralyzed and that blocks integrity?” 

Well, you will suffer. Anxiety, depression, free-floating hostility. You will suffer. You’ll get physically exhausted and mentally weary. And at some point you may say, I need to go sober. So I’m going to find me a group that talks about being addicted to dopamine. I think codependency groups would do it. And I am going to learn to love peace even more than I loved chaos, because actually there’s a lot more to love because chaos can only go on for a time, and stillness exists infinitely. As Eckhart Tolle said, you could bring a heavy metal band into a building and have them play as hard as they could for as long as they could. In the end when they left, the stillness would still be there as if they’d never been there, and the stillness would’ve existed underneath the sound the whole time. So yeah, when you’re ready to drop in, you’ll find that your integrity, which is the same as the space, the silence, and the stillness, it’s all right there. It never got harmed. You cannot hurt it. You can only avoid it, close your eyes to it, get distracted from it.

Deborah says, “Someone asked above about asking animals not to come around. Same question: How do I ask the mice not to come into my place when it gets cold this year?” 

This is what I do. I had this issue in Phoenix once because the mice were coming in, not for warmth, but for water. And once I was actually combing my hair, and I was looking in the mirror and I saw in the mirror a mouse coming into the bathroom and running along a wall going toward the shower. I had just gotten out of the shower and I thought, “Hm.” So, I saw him in the mirror. I didn’t move, but he stopped and I turned around and this little mouse is looking at me and I was like, “Well, hello.” And God bless him, he stood up on his hind legs and just went, “I am here. I just need water.” And I was like, “Okay, you can come in for water, but leave the rest of the house alone.” Because there had been mice sort of all over. And once we established that, that he could have water, I never saw them in other parts of the house or saw any evidence of them. And so when I lived in California, we always kept water for the critters. This did not completely stop the mice, I admit, but in my defense, I never asked them not to come in that house that time. It was only when I made that deal with the mouse in Phoenix that they stopped coming into the house, except to the shower for water. So yeah, give it a whirl. Let’s see how it goes. Just remember that it works when we are in integrity, and it works less or it doesn’t work at all when we are not in integrity. Because integrity is nature and reality. And if you’re fighting reality, you don’t have much power to create anything. And the animals, they’re always in reality.

 

All right, excuse me. “Wondering why it is hard to be in integrity during Christmas? It feels like this overwhelming pressure. Why does this feel untrue?” 

It feels true to me. It is a very, very high pressure time. It’s absolutely loaded with social pressure: traditions that are supposed to be observed, family patterns that are in contradistinction to the way we think families should run. Like your family is supposed to be happy and blissful and united and content. And if it’s not, you tell yourself something is deeply wrong. It’s you telling yourself something is deeply wrong that creates the problem. If you just say, “Wow, there’s tremendous social pressure to have a perfect family, and my family is completely effed up. Given that reality, what can I make from this situation?” So instead of going into the anxiety of trying to make your family perfect, you go into the creativity of dealing with what is real. 

And that is why, in the Wilder community and in all the publicity I’m doing for my book, we always talk about having to come into integrity and be at peace with the way things are. And then instead of saying, “I’ve got to do something different,” say, “What can I make from what is? Looking at what is here, what can I create?” And that shifts the brain out of anxiety and into creativity, and I think you’ll feel less pressure. So try letting yourself off the hook this Christmas for the things that you cannot make or do. And coming to terms with what actually is, just ask yourself, “What good could I make from this?” So Holiday Bingo, never forget Holiday Bingo. I don’t know if I’m the only person to make it up, but I made it up. Make a bingo card, put in the squares the things your family does that you don’t like, or the things that are going to happen to you at work or while you’re shopping or while you’re commuting or with the weather or whatever it is, make a bingo card, get your friends together, put different things in your bingo squares. When that unpleasant thing happens to you, you get a bingo square. And the first person to get bingo has a free lunch bought by the others. So there. There’s a way to make something out of the reality of what’s happening in December rather than trying to live up to some Norman Rockwell mirage of perfection.

And finally, Grunge Shaped says, “Hi, Martha. Thank you for your content. Sorry to bother, but can you suggest any tools for dealing with derealization or depersonalization?” 

Whoa, that’s a big one to tackle right at the end of the Gathering Room. I think sometimes when people do this Space, Silence, Stillness thing, they can start to feel disassociated. And if you have issues around things like derealization and depersonalization, I think I know what you mean here. If it’s a psychological symptom, I believe that a really great antidote is to be with people you love or an animal you love, and get deeper into the stillness until you find the point of space and stillness that is the Self with a capital S. It’s weird because there’s nothing there, and yet it is what we really are. There is no thing there, but it’s not like a psychotic state because we’re deeply grounded, we’re deeply peaceful, and it can be even blissful. So if what you mean is the Buddhist sense of depersonalization, of leaving the small self, the ego self, it’s the same process. Whether you are, yeah, you say “dealing with derealization and depersonalization,” that could go either way. You could see that as a good loss of self or a bad loss of self. Either way, the best I can tell you to do, especially during this fractious time when we’re all going a million different directions in a million different ways, is this three-step sequence: Get into total integrity, practice centering presence until you find the point of stillness in the center of your chest, and imagine all the parts of you coming home to roost and perching together and preening each other’s feathers and getting warm from each other’s company, and then gently falling into a very restful sleep. You’re all together with your selves.

So that is my practice for the week. That’s what I’ve been doing. It does seem to really help me. I hope it helps you. And thank you for being here. I can’t wait to see you again on another Gathering Room. Until then, go call some animals and have a fabulous week!