So these are two women. If you don’t know what The Telepathy Tapes are, it’s a podcast about… It started out, the first season was about people who have autism and do not speak. So non-speaking people with autism who were communicating through a spelling board, who learned to communicate through spelling boards, and then began spelling things that indicated, hinted strongly, maybe one might say proved, they were telepathic. They were communicating with their parents and other people and other people with autism that they’d never even met in the flesh. It was a pretty far-out podcast.

And when I heard it, I was very excited. I mean, having had a son who still—he’s in his late 30s now and he still doesn’t really talk much. So I’d kind of gone through some of the same experiences and I had a lot of mystery, magical woo-woo around my son, as many of you well know. So I loved The Telepathy Tapes, but when I started talking to people about it, I frequently kind of got kicked in the face. Not really, not literally. But I had some people say, “Oh, that sounds interesting.” And then say later, “Oh, I heard that. It’s all been debunked. It’s been debunked. It was all a cruel joke.” Or other people who said to me, “No, those children,” though some of them were adults, “They are being exploited. They can’t really do that. The parents are faking it and they’re exploiting their children and they should be arrested.” I mean, people were really, really upset about this.

I don’t know either way. If I watch The Telepathy Tapes and they have people on there with their autistic children who are spelling and the mother and the child are staying in different rooms of the house and the mother is thinking things or writing them down and the child on the other side of the house is spelling them on a spelling board at the same time with 100% accuracy, that’s really impressive to me. But I wasn’t there.

But then there are people who go in and look at it and say, “It is debunked.” And I saw one, one of the debunkers said, “They did not control for the possibility that this was because of a subconscious connection between the mother and the child,” which to me means sounds like exactly the claim they were making in the first place. Anyway, guess what? I wasn’t there when the debunkers were there either.

If you have a set of, say, near-death experiences, people say they had them, people say that they were standing outside in the hall when a person had a near-death experience and the person who nearly died remembers hearing their conversation word for word in the hall, which was not in the room with the dying person, that’s pretty convincing to me, but I wasn’t there. But then people come along and say, “Ah, we have figured this out. It is all people deliberately deluding themselves. It is nothing more than the spasm of an oxygen-deprived brain at death doing all of this.” Okay, actually not as convincing to me, but I wasn’t there.

So all of this is just to say that we talked, Gabby and Libby and I, about how some people just refuse to believe it. And they said they would be with their children, telepathically communicating the way they had learned to communicate with their child because the child wasn’t able to speak. And they said even people who were right in the room while they were having these conversations telepathically would just say, “No, that’s not happening. Nope, not happening, not true.”

And we talked about how weird denial can be and how, say if somebody loses a loved one and then they have what Jung called a “big dream,” which is not just a dream, but an actual visitation by the person they’ve lost and the person comforts them and tells them things that are about to happen and then some things happen just as the person said. Somebody can have that experience and the people around them will say, “You’re in denial. Your loved one is dead and gone. Full stop. No come back. Dead and gone. You’re in denial about death.”

Maybe, but it’s not testable. So what if it’s the person going, “No, I don’t believe, even though you validate it six ways from Sunday for yourself, I will not believe that anyone, any consciousness survives death.” That’s not testable either. And those people are believing what they, everybody’s believing what they want to believe, but I think perhaps those people could be in denial about what death really is.

So I was thinking about how we get these little tracks of what we believe reality to be, and then we get very committed to them, and especially in modern Western culture, there’s this whole obsession with being right and like, “Boy, we have the truth and I’m not going to change my mind” and people really anchor down into it. And one of the things that it does, I think, is it makes your life more narrow.

So when I was pregnant with Adam and I started having these experiences of remote viewing where I could see what a loved one was seeing, even if they were far away and I tested and tested and asked people, “Is it real what I saw?” And yes, it always checked out. So I decided that I was just going to kick open the doors on my purview, my definition of what is real. I was going to basically take down the barriers and say what I thought was not possible may be possible. I don’t know.

And I didn’t say, “I’m going to believe every damn thing that just goes through my head.” I said, “I will test it. I will be as rigorous as I can. I will really, really put my intellect on it as well as my heart and my physical experience, but I’m going to blow the doors open. I’m going to widen my life.”

It reminded me of, I was reminded of this when I was watching American Ninja Warrior. Does anybody watch American Ninja Warrior? Can’t remember which season it was, but there’s a lovely young man on that named Christopher Harding Jones, and he dedicated his ninja obstacle course to his father, Gregory, who died of cancer at the age of 60, but decided that he was going to have a wide life, even if he had a short life. So the family motto became “Live wide,” and they just tried to really choose every day to have an experience that will add something to your fund of wisdom and joy and really, really be present and experience it and make sure you’re with the people you love, like do everything you can to widen your life. And that’s like the depth and quality of things.

But I was thinking about what happened when you widen your life by saying, and this is the change I made when I was pregnant with Adam, I said, “Instead of not believing anything until it’s proven true,” because nothing can be proven true beyond the fact that we may all be hallucinating this, “I’m going to switch to thinking I’ll entertain anything until I’m convinced it’s false.”

And given that, I started believing all kinds of things. A lot of those things turned out not to be true, and I’m okay about that. I mean, I was trained as a social scientist. I look at stuff and I say, “It has to test out.” If I have a psychic experience of a loved one doing something in a given place, it has to test out with that person’s experience, right? I can’t just sit around having willy-nilly fantasies and then telling everybody they’re real. That’s not where I go. So I’m very, very into testing things intellectually the way we test things in social science, but I’m also open to a whole bunch of things that are not part of our materialist society.

So as I was talking about this, and this was literally half an hour ago, I was sitting here in my little chair, which is right by my window, which is right by the forest. And if you’ve been here before at all, you know my obsession with animals. So one thing that happens to me when I really decide to go into a wide life is that I have encounters with animals. So I was sitting here talking to Libby and Betsy, and up to my window, galumphs a groundhog or a woodchuck. I’m not sure if they’re the same thing. Anyway, as a very large rodent, it’s the size of a beagle. It was a large creature and it came galumphing up to the window and it looked in and practically waved. It was like, “Hello.” And then it went away and then it came back and then it went.

And the whole time I was talking about the telepathy experiences that these women had had with their sons, there was the woodchuck or the groundhog or whatever it is, bouncing around with his fluffy coat and basically just paying me a visit. Coincidence? Totally, totally. I mean, that’s completely untestable.

It is interesting that every single time I go into a certain sort of very deep experience of the metaphysical, animals, wild animals tend to show up where I am. So that on top of all the other times when I’ve suddenly just found a wild animal visiting, and they are so many, I can’t even tell them here, but it made me remember to stop and kick the doors open, kick down the walls.

Every day say, “You know what? I’m going to live wide today. I’m going to deeply experience the present moment. I’m going to share it with people I love. I’m going to find the best things there are, the best songs to listen to and dance to, the best videos on the internet.” I’m not just going to mindlessly scroll. I’m going to find something that’s juicy and delicious. And in the meantime, I’m going to remember that this is not just the material world my culture has told me it is. It is a spiritual experience. I’m a spiritual being having a human experience, and the entire experience is spiritual. Even the forest outside my room, even my room itself, all of it could be, I believe is, a product of consciousness, creating something in an ongoing way in what we perceive to be the line of time.

That is where I’ve come after God knows how many years of this, but what I want us to do today, just sit wherever you are or maybe you’re walking, I don’t know, but take a couple of deep breaths and drop out of whatever you’ve been involved with. I was talking to some coaches the other day on our coach training, Wayfinder Coach Training, and we were talking about how hard it is to lose an identity. And then I said to all the coach trainees, “Right now, for the next hour, you don’t have to be anything. You don’t have to do anything. For the next hour, nothing. You don’t have to do or be anything, no definition at all.”

And this is the very thing many people are afraid will happen to them, and yet when they let it happen, suddenly I was watching all these people breathe these huge sighs of relief. We didn’t have to be or do anything during that time. This is true also of The Gathering Room. Whenever you’re listening to it, right now, stop trying to be or do anything. Just feel us.

Now, here we are all over the world. 167 is the number on my phone right now. There are 167 of us. Some people are in India, some people are in South Africa, some people are in New Zealand, some people are in Columbia. It is all over the world, and we are talking. So as these women, they were talking about how funny it was to be talking telepathically to their children in the presence of people who said it wasn’t possible. And they were like, “All right, but that’s the only way I can talk to them. So there you go.” But can you feel—I can—every time we do the Silence, Stillness, Space meditation, which we’re about to do, I swear to God, I feel every one of us plugging in.

We were talking also about how our sons do seem to be part of something that is kind of a momentous shift in the earth. And these are people, here we are, three women who just randomly had children with neurodivergence, never having talked to each other before, deciding, all of us and many, many more of us besides, that we were part of a squadron of people who are here to help facilitate a massive shift in the world.

And these are the humblest, most gentle people you’ll ever meet, no delusions of grandeur, nothing like that. And here we’re all having the same feeling that we’re part of something that is meant to make the earth more beautiful, more peaceful, more loving, more connected, more harmonious, sweeter, gentler, more fluid, more powerful, not less. And that it involves things that will call us to kick down the walls and open the doors wide. Having experiences with animals that are more than coincidence, having experiences of telepathy, feeling one another, even though we’re not physically together.

So one of the women, her son has died, Gabby’s son has died. And whenever she said something about him, she said, “Oh, he’s giving me a validation that he’s here.” She said, “I have whole-body chills.” What I didn’t mention to her was that before she said that, every time I would get full-body chills. So coincidence? Maybe.

But let’s do the Space, S,ilence and Stillness meditation. And I want you to think about the other 167 people there are in the world and the fact that we’re all in the same space, in the same silence, feeling each other. Let go of your preconceptions and feel what your body, your heart, your soul feel when we do this because the mind will be tied up with the strange questions that don’t mean anything and aren’t meant to do anything. They’re simply meant to occupy the mind so the other functions can come online.

All right, let’s do it. Let’s widen our lives again. And we do it first by getting really relaxed. You don’t have to do or be anything. Breathe out, big sigh of relief, and ask yourself the strange question: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? Can I imagine the space inside the atoms of the cells between my eyes? Because my cells are almost entirely made of space. My atoms are almost entirely made of space. Can I imagine the space inside the atoms of my whole body? Can I imagine that I’m mostly made of space? Can I imagine the continuous connection of space with space?

That is the space inside my body connecting to the space in every one of you. We are all in the same space. Can you imagine the space between us all? Can you imagine the stillness that holds us now, all of us, wherever we are and whatever is happening? There is a stillness to the space in which it all happens.

There is a silence so deep. Can you imagine the silence where we hear without hearing, see, without seeing and touch, without touching? Can we imagine ourselves as one being, one love, one compassionate consciousness here to do its best for this world and the people in it?

Can we imagine that space, silence, and stillness are conscious and filled with love and that we are all suspended in them? Can we hold that as we come back into the room and begin to function normally, normally again?

Now, if the woodchuck comes back right away, I’ll let you know. He’s not coming. It’s all debunked, y’all! So that is a way to keep one’s life wide, to keep remembering. I also call it “jumping the tracks,” going into a spiritual perspective, especially when it’s hard, when it’s difficult to do. I had a big uptick in it the other day when I got food poisoning. I was lying on the floor in the middle of the night barfing and going, “I don’t feel good.” And then I was like, “But I can imagine that there is love.” And my body got filled with love and my loved ones were taking care of me and I was crying and they said, “We’re sorry you feel bad.” And I said, “No, I’m so moved.” I was. I was so moved.

And whenever you let yourself feel the vastness of the love that is caring for you, you will be moved as well.

All right, some questions. Question: “What do you do when you’ve asked for synchronicities from the universe regarding finding your next step on the path and you haven’t received one yet?”

Almost entirely, almost absolutely. No, not entirely, absolutely. What I would bet is that you’re holding on to getting an answer. You’re attached to the idea, “I want an answer now. I want synchronicities. I’m looking.” They don’t come when you fixate like that. It narrows the purview. One of the things that I do sometimes on that meditation is I ask you to soften the focus of your eyes because soft focus is what allows the right hemisphere of the brain to bring its perceptions in. And that’s the mystical, that’s the magical side.

When you get intellectual and you say, “I’m going to ask for a synchronicity. I’ve been told that if I imagine it this way, I’m going to hold it that way, I’m going to get a synchronicity and prove it,” that energy never makes it work. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t work, but I’ve tried it all the ways, I promise you, and the tension doesn’t work.

So intention: Intend it to happen. Attention: Put your attention on it. And no tension: Relax and say to yourself, “Can I imagine the distance between my eyes?” Walk around without expectation. Bam, you’ll get all kinds of stuff. Check it. See.

Next question: “Does body, mind, heart, and soul analogy link with the four characters of the brain?”

This is from Jill Bolte Taylor, my friend, the Harvard neuroanatomist. And yes, she has these four characters in the brain and they line up roughly with body, mind, heart, and soul. I asked Jill, “The part of the brain that sees everything whole, the right side of the brain where creativity happens and connection, which character is that?” And she said it’s the right side, not the neocortex. Anyway, it’s the character four in the brain is the part of the brain that is allowing all of that goodness to occur. And it kind of brings in all the other parts of the brain, but in a space of great compassion and love. Yeah, read her book, Whole Brain Living. It’s really, really good.

Question: “How do we navigate it when others really disparage us, when we definitely are experienced in a world outside of the traditional cultural norm?”

That happens to me a lot. It still happens. And this is what I do. I go inside myself and I say, “What do I believe?” I wasn’t there when most of the things in the world happened. A lot of it I hear by some kind of report, whether it’s academic or journalistic or somebody’s eyewitness account. If somebody’s really disparaging something else that I don’t have personal knowledge of, I have to go out and see, okay, which story am I believing? Because their disparagement is just one more story. It is not bigger or stronger or better than the first story because it’s targeted and aggressive. No, it’s just another story.

Now, if they’re coming at me that way about something I experienced myself, then I go in and I say, “Is there any truth to their disparagement? They could be right about this and this, but that and that, yeah, I’m going to believe. That is more true to me.”

So it always comes back to feeling what your sense of truth is telling you. There is no absolute proof in the universe of subjective experience, right? But what we’ve experienced ourselves, do not give that up just because someone disparages it. And what you truly, deeply believe that you’ve learned from other people, don’t give the disparagement more gravity, more heft, than the story that you like, that feels right to you. Keep checking, keep looking, but allow yourself to know that it’s all just stories and go toward what feels warmer, deeper, and makes your life go wide instead of narrow. If it opens you instead of tightening you, I would always go with what opens me. And people disparage me a lot.

Question: “I’m deeply rooted in place and community and wonder what you think about how to build a wide life when so firmly planted in one place?”

Oh my God, this is the best way. I mean, that’s not true. Travel is wonderful and broad experience is fabulous. But as Ro says lately, she said, “I would never have believed that I would be a person who wants to stay more than I want to go.” But because we’re very deeply rooted in this place that we’ve just moved to, and because she’s growing a garden and we’re raising our kid and all these things are happening, it’s like life is so wide because of the quality of experience, because we’re just deep, literally with our hands in the dirt of this place, and you can have a very, very, very wide life, even if you’re bedbound.

The last time I was bedbound was a foot surgery where I had to spend eight weeks in one spot, except for going to pee. That was about the only reason I could move. And I had still wide life during those eight weeks. It was wonderful. Actually, it turned into more like several months because I didn’t bounce back particularly quickly, but oh my God, did I have a wide experience of the world. I just lay there experiencing more and more and more as I traveled in my mind and as I meditated and went deeper into my soul, as my body taught me its lessons, it was amazing. And I read, I could read, I could go everywhere. It was amazing.

Okay. Question: “How do we navigate it?” Oh nope, that’s the wrong one. “I had a rough couple of years. How do I reset my life to align with what’s right for me in this weird and crazy world?”

Stillness. What I just did—the Stillness, Space, and Silence [meditation]—that is the secret place you can always go for guidance. If you go into the silence, the stillness, and the space and you don’t have to be or do anything and you can sit there in peace, you’ll come to this sense of relaxation, of calm, of openness, and that will guide you one step at a time. Not miles and miles ahead. One step at a time. Not even one day at a time. One minute at a time. If you can find yourself rooted into that space, silence, and stillness, it will pull you like a magnet toward the things you’re supposed to do. And what you’re supposed to do will feel oddly joyful, even if it’s not, supposedly not your favorite thing. Try this and see. The more we go to space, silence, and stillness, the more guided we can be. And I hope your life gets really good really soon. Oh, I just got a notification. We’re doing a group meditation in Wilder right after The Gathering rRoom. So if you like the idea of a post-Gathering Room meditation led by me, you can join it at wildercommunity.com. Is that true, Ro? Yep. Oh, wow. Gosh. Oh, if you’re in the community, you can jump right in. Anyway, we have good times. All right.

“Why do animals show up?” someone says. “I keep getting cat visitors. I tried to telepathically call my cats home last night. They’re not the tabby who keeps visiting, so a totally different cat rocked up instead.”

I love this. I don’t know what they’re up to, these four-leggeds and the winged ones and the finned ones. They are just, they’re on the frequency. I don’t know what the non-speakers with autism are doing when they roam the planet either, but I do know there are consciousnesses that are beautiful and adorable and fascinating and so different from my own. And every time I make my life wider, I get visited by animals, by people, by heaven knows what. As Rumi says, “Angelic beings come rushing to help.” It is so much more interesting than they told us, y’all. And everything on the planet is in on it except people who refuse to believe any of it.

Wayfinders, healers, medicine people of all cultures have always had special animal friends, familiars that help them go between the worlds, that help them not be so locked in this human paradigm.

It’s like Arthur being taught by Merlin by being changed into one animal after another, learning new things from being every other animal. It’s as if they all want to help us, to help us wake up. I think they’re trying to help us wake up. That’s what I really think.

Okay. I’ve got just a couple of other questions: “Is it normal to feel anxious at first while trying to meditate regularly, especially if you’re new at this?”

Oh my God, I was so anxious for several months after I started. Well, I’d been meditating for years 20 minutes at a time, but when I really hunkered down and started doing it for at least an hour and a half a day, massive anxiety surfaced. And then you know what? It went away. And I’ve been much less anxious since, not without anxiety, but so much less. I also wrote a book called Beyond Anxiety that could really help as well. So go there.

And last question: “Can we go backwards spiritually? Can our awareness shrink?”

I don’t think we can go backwards from our spirit, but our brains, our minds can retract from what our spirits know. And I have known many people, I’ve coached many people who’ve been at a place where they felt like their lives were wide and magical and beautiful, and then somebody kicked them in the face. Somebody said, “That’s not true. I’m debunking your life.” And they retracted and said, “Oh, stupid me. I should have done what will make me acceptable to human beings.” And they narrowed their lives again. And then they were even more distressed because they’d been in a wide-open life. They’d been to living wide, and living narrow really hurts once you’ve done that.

It hurts anyway because what I think is that we’re all meant to live wide. We’re all meant to kick down the walls of what our culture tells us we should think. Look at what we have done to the planet and each other while in that governing paradigm. And think about what the world would be like if you lived wide and that you had magic and joy and connection and you could feel all of us all around this planet loving you and sharing the mission. Yeah. So live wide, people. Thank you so much for joining me here and I’ll see you next time on The Gathering Room.