In the Wayfinder Life Coach Training, we talk about how there are three reasons for you to change. One is shock. That is something bad happens and you have to change your life to accommodate it. Number two is opportunity—where you get a chance to do something wonderful and you jump at it, or something wonderful happens like you fall in love, you have a baby, get a dog, whatever. And the third one is just growth. You just are developing new thoughts, new ideas, new life preferences, and you don’t fit back in your baby clothes anymore.

So those are the three reasons. Well, I think I’m going to add a fourth. You coaches out there, get your notebooks out. This is the fourth reason: just sheer bare-ass adventurism. Actually not so much. Let’s call it compass reading. Sorry, I’m using more coachy terms.

The way I do my sort of self-help gig and the way I teach coaching and the way I coach has to do with my belief that we are sort of endowed, endowed by our creator—to paraphrase, to quote the Declaration of Independence—with a knowledge of our own destiny and mechanisms in our bodies, our minds, and our hearts, our psyches, and our spirits to drive us, steer us, “wayfind” us to the places we’re meant to go.

Now, if you don’t learn to read your compasses, you tend to do what you’ve been told to do or what you’ve seen other people doing ahead of you. You do what your parents do. You do what your mentor does. You do what your favorite teacher did in school or whatever. But you don’t go inside and say, “What should I do next based on nothing but what I feel?”

That is the reason my family and I recently moved to upstate New York. It’s been exactly nine months since we conceived of this idea. It was at the full moon nine months ago, and last night was the full moon. I think they call it the Blood Moon because it’s really close to the earth and it looks red or something. Anyway, it was beautiful seeing from the Catskills where I am now. And during those nine months there’s been a lot of upheaval. I mean it’s a lot to do to move your whole life and sell and buy houses and everything on basically a whim. I mean, that’s the way it looks from an outside perspective.

From an inside perspective, Ro, one of my beloveds came with her mother up into the Hudson Valley nine months ago and felt something very, very deep inside her about the place to the point where she saw a ginkgo tree and they have these beautiful leaves and she was going to get one tatooed onto her arm or someplace. I actually didn’t ask where she was going to get it, but as a sort of promise to herself that she would one day move to this area.

Meanwhile, I was back at home for some reason obsessing over the brilliant abolitionist Sojourner Truth. If you don’t know that name, Sojourner Truth was an African-American woman who was very active in getting a lot of enslaved people to freedom and she was brilliant. She was the first person ever to sue the American government for the freedom of another person. She sued Alabama, I think the state of Alabama, to get her son’s freedom and she won, which was unthinkable at that point in history. This was before emancipation, obviously.

Anyway, I was obsessed with her and Ro came back from here telling me, :Oh, this area, this area, I have to live there someday.” And I’m like, “Did you know about Sojourner Truth?” And it just so happened that we found out that Sojourner Truth lived in this area and helped people reestablish themselves after they managed to get on the Underground Railroad out to freedom.

My whole obsession in life is about finding a sort of spiritual freedom. And as Toni Morrison wrote, “The function of freedom is to free someone else.” So it was weird how obsessed I was with that. Then, we got on a plane, actually Ro and I went off to do a speech or something, and we were in the airport and this woman came up and said, “Oh my God, I’ve been reading your books all the way on a flight across the country from California. Would you come and meet my wife?” So here are these nice lesbians meeting us, and I hope we are nice lesbians as well. And they had just been, they were planning to move to New York City, but guess where they had just come from? The exact area that we’d been talking about. And they had pictures and they had, of all the places Ro had told me were wonderful. It was strange. It was strange how many things lined up.

Still, to move your whole life when everything’s going fine? Ah. Yeah. And so we did. And the reason is that I do actually walk my talk, and all these coaching techniques that I’ve used on other people and that I teach in the training, I go in every single day and use them on myself. And I felt like the compasses of my life, here’s how they work. Quick, quick, Wayfinder Life Coach Training: Your whole life is like the game “You’re getting warmer, you’re getting colder,” right? If something feels warmer, you go toward it. If it feels colder, you go away from it. And you just keep doing that. You just keep adjusting your life by what feels warmer, what feels colder.

But “warmer” is a synonym in this context for more free. If something makes you feel more free, that is moving you not only toward the life you’re meant to have, but toward your own awakening as a being. And when you decide to always step into “more free,” you kind of cross a line away from the materialist culture that is around us saying, “You can only count on what you can measure, and you should, there’s a logic to everything.” You cross a line when you decide you’re going to live by reading your compasses. And it’s the line that goes from logic into magic.

It doesn’t exclude logic, it includes logic, but it prioritizes what I can only call “magic.” And the way it’s working is that you get that magical things happen to you. So I think I’ve talked in here about we bought this property and it had an art studio that I really liked. I’ve had two recurring dreams that I’ve had since childhood that I think I’ve mentioned on the podcast a couple of times. One is that I open the door to my house—I know, this was the first-ever episode of the Gathering Room, this dream that I open a door to my house that I haven’t really noticed and there’s a cathedral on the other side. That’s one of my recurring dreams. Then there was another one that I had from little, little that I would be at a river at night and I would dive into the river and go down, down and it would be very silent. I’d be at the bottom of the river. I could breathe for some reason, and there I would meet an albino beaver, this pure white beaver. And he would sit there and we would communicate telepathically and he would teach me math because beavers are engineers, right? He was obsessed with math and I was obsessed with him.

So the only time I’ve ever really gotten in trouble with the law is when I was four or five, I used to go out of my house and I knew, I’d read about, I learned to read early and I was obsessed with this book about beavers in the Rocky Mountains. And I lived on the slopes of the Rocky Mountains in Utah and I knew there was a gutter in front of our house that got water from a canal that got water from a river that got water from beaver lodges up river.

So on occasion, I would trek off from my house, four or five years old, and head up into the mountains following a watercourse because I knew up there I was going to find a beaver of some sort.

Okay, so we find this house in upstate New York. It’s an older house. It’s going to need a lot of work, a really lot of work. I think I mentioned yesterday about the mouse that was just painted over in the basement. Okay, so another wildlife encounter, not the kind I love. But I love it, and after we’d already bought the property, it had an art studio. There’s a big sort of empty non-insulated room that I thought, “Oh, that’s my art studio.” And we moved in and we started doing some heavy lifting and Ro bought me a sledgehammer, which I named Mr. Love Taps, and I smashed out a wall in the art studio and found that on the other—once the wall was smashed out, there’s a triangular window at one side high up and it’s repurposed stained glass from a chapel, and it’s the dove of peace.

And we found out that the original builder used it as a place for indigenous elders to gather and talk about how to preserve the earth, their cultures, the dignity of all beings. It was like, wow, we didn’t know any of this when we bought it. And I walked in the day after I smashed the wall and just looked at it and went, “Oh my God, I have a cathedral in my house.”

And then I got up the other day and I’ve been doing long walks, training to go on a walk in Spain, the Camino de Santiago. And I knew that four miles from our house was a river, I mean a lake. So I set out before dawn and I walked to this lake and I got to it just about as the sun was rising. And I was walking along the road parallel to the lake, really close to the lake, and it was glassy calm, dead silent. And I looked to my right, and there, swimming along, about maybe three or four yards away from me, not far away was a beaver. And he swam with me. And there was nothing, there was nothing for him to eat. There was no way to get off a lake. It was really steep and rocky there. I mean he probably could have, but I think he was just there or she was just there because it was a visit. It was a curious animal who wanted to connect, just to see what was happening.

And it walked along beside me in dead silence, like silky smooth water and everything went so quiet. And I went back to the dreams of my childhood and I thought, “This is one of my oldest dreams. I have walked out of my house and up a mountain to a place where a beaver has come to meet me. This is cool. This is cool.”

Now, there have been so many times between deciding to move here and moving here that I have said, “This makes no sense.” I was profoundly upset about it for months, really months. I mean once we made the commitment, I was like, “What am I doing?!” So I have to coach myself, and I go to my coaches and I need people trained in compass reading who can sit there with me and say, “Look, this is how you read the compass. This is how you follow the compass. This is how you keep your faith when the night is dark and everything looks insane.”

Thank God I am surrounded by freaking Wayfinder Life Coaches because it takes you into magic, and then the world comes to meet you. And it meets you in a way that is so, so deep. And so everything you’ve asked for all the way back to being four years old. And I don’t believe I would’ve had that experience, I know I couldn’t have had that experience if I hadn’t decided to stop steering by the cultural guideposts and start steering by the compasses inside me.

Wow, I am so grateful for that. So all I’m here to ask you today is would you please, I’m going to do our little Space, Silence, and Stillness meditation, but please, every day this week set an alarm or something to just take five minutes and sit down and look inside yourself and see if you can find what feels freer and what feels less free, what feels warmer and what feels colder. And then start to navigate, start to way find by your connection to those feelings. Just try it.

I mean, one of the reasons for the Wayfinder Coach training is that it gives people kind of an excuse to say, “I’ve pledged myself to this. I’m going to sit and do it every day.” But even if you don’t have that, sit down and do it anyway. Just see if you can connect with other people from the Gathering Room or something so you have a community that is supporting you when you reach inside and say, “This is what feels freer to me and it makes no sense and I’m freaking going to do it anyway.” And then watch for the magic.

I feel so I am so privileged. I know that I—“Check your privilege, Beck.” I know I’m super privileged, but walking up the mountain to that beaver, that was a magic. I wasn’t born into the chance to do that. I navigated to it. And I really believe you can too. Write down your deepest dreams from when you were 4, 5, 6, 7, any age, start Wayfinding. Go toward what feels freer and then keep a list of the magic things that show up. It is, I mean, it may not be a big deal for other people that I found a stained glass window and a beaver, but it kind of sums up my whole life as a Wayfinding Life Coach and lesbian.

All right, let’s do our Space, Silence, and Stillness meditation. And I really want you to hold in your consciousness the idea of you as a smaller person, a child with unreasonable dreams and aspirations. Because I want those to come out of the moth balls. I want to get them out and dust them off. It took me 58 years to manifest that one walk up the mountain. So let’s get yours happening now, now, now. We can’t do it too fast.

All right, let’s do the meditation and then I’ll answer some questions. Okay, so uncross your legs and arms, get yourself relaxed, deep breath in a long breath out. And then put yourself in a light trance by asking the strange question: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? And let your mind follow that. Let it follow that into freedom. The question makes no sense. Follow it. Can I imagine the empty space in the atoms of the matter between my eyes? Can I imagine in the empty space, in the atoms right here between my eyebrows? Can I imagine the empty space all the way through my skull, my skeleton down my spine to my pelvis, my arms and legs, my shoulder blades? Can I imagine that they are mostly made of space? Because that is the physical truth.

Can I imagine that the space of which I am mostly made up is continuous with the space that goes past galaxies and star clusters all the way to the ends of the universe? It is all continuous. Can I imagine the stillness beneath the action of my life? Can I imagine the silence in which all sound is held? Can I imagine that silence, stillness, and space are alive and conscious and loving, adoring and all holding their breath to watch what happens to these little physical creatures with our tiny bodies and our huge emotions? Can I imagine that everything in space, silence, and stillness loves me and is me?

Can I imagine everyone else right now who is imagining this all over this world? From Poland and the Czech Republic and Saudi Arabia and New Zealand, everywhere right now we are one thing. Does that feel freer or less free? To me, it feels freer. So that’s my story and I’m sticking to it until it stops feeling free.

All right, so thank you for joining me in our weird meditation. And now let’s go to some questions. Question, someone says, “Feeling very stuck. Single mother to a 2-year-old and struggling to find a job and rebuild my life. Any insights on where to turn or good advice?”

Well, the first thing is to remember that our culture has isolated parents. Even couples feel isolated when they’re parenting together. But a single parent is sort of at the absolute most stressful point in life alone. I know you know that. That’s the material truth, but if I look inside myself as Laozi asks us to do in the Tao Te Ching, what I feel is that that does not set me free. The idea that you are alone.

If I look at the opposite—You are not alone—that right there shifts the culture. And it may not feel true, but if you hold it, you can start to see how it might have ways of coming true. “I am not alone.” And whoever you are, I don’t have the names, the most important thing you absolutely must do is not be alone. And I know it’s incredibly hard, but right now you’re in a community of people who are connected, who are probably all loving on you right now. Around you there are people who would like to connect with you. And as much as our culture tells you it’s just about money, money, money, it’s actually about love, love, love. It’s about community. It’s about connection. It’s about villages. And I’d really urge you all to find a village of any kind you can.

I have an online community now that’s my village. Well, one village. The Wayfinder Life Coach Community is very strong as well as a group of people supporting each other. I don’t know about everything else in the world, but those are the two things that I do know about. And there are ways to access these things because of the internet in ways that you couldn’t have when I was raising my older children and I was feeling completely isolated. Even though I was married, my then husband was gone a lot of the time, and it was hard. So find community. Find community. But know right from the start that if it sets you free to think “I’m doing this alone,” go for it. If it doesn’t feel like freedom, don’t believe it. Start by disbelieving that one thought and then go to the opposite thought and begin to steer toward it by the sensations in your body, in your physical self, in your emotional self. Anything that opens you and allows you to feel free is warmer, is the way to go.

I just realized something. There are a lot of coaches out there who might, that have already been trained, who might be willing to do some pro bono work or something. I don’t know. I don’t know. But reach out. Look for options. Don’t assume you’re alone. The culture tells you are. You are not. So hang in there, honey.

All right, question: “I love hearing about your dreams.” Thank you. “So you didn’t know the meaning of these right away, did you?”

I actually developed a form of dream analysis that I use that is also part of the Coach Training. So I had analyzed them. And the cathedral dream clearly meant that there was a spiritual aspect to me that I hadn’t discovered yet or fully explored. But the animal dream, it was very sort of ancient and it felt like contact with the Divine. And I have to say that the silence of that moment… I walked past a deer who was maybe seven or eight feet away from me. She didn’t even startle, she just looked at me. So I’ve got a deer on one side. I’ve got a beaver just absolutely silent with his little wake coming out from his nose. And it was as ancient as it had been in the dream, and it was real. I mean, what we call real. Maybe dreams are more real than anything else. Anyway, I do know that when you start to live your, “wayfind” your life, these things start to happen.

So again, if there are other coaches out there who want to tell the folks who haven’t been in the coach world how you’ve seen dreams manifest. Once you hear enough stories, it’s like, “I think there’s something going on here, for reals.” And then you can get it to happen for you and you just have to suspend logic and jump into the deep end.

Next question: “How to tell the difference between my true internal compass and being narcissistically selfish?”

This is why we have to train, folks. This is why we have to learn this as a skill because narcissism will clench you up. Even if you’re getting manic and excited and thinking, “I’m king of the world!” it’s a tightness. It is not free. It may be manic, it may be giddy, but it’s not free. And freedom may come, like it did for Geneen Roth, who wrote about losing her whole fortune in the Bernie Madoff financial scheme scandal, and how she and her husband had been quite well-to-do, and then they lost absolutely everything. And she later wrote, “That was what set me free.”

So you don’t… It’s not self-evident because it doesn’t track with the culture. The compasses in your body will not track with the culture. So it may be that you narcissistically want something, but it feels less free. It may be free that your narcissistic self is horrified by something, but your inner self says, “Thank God.” That is very often true, which is why in our Wilder Community—oh, I have all these things going on online—it’s all about going against the logic of the culture if it meets the truth of the deepest sense inside you. And it will differentiate between narcissism and truth every time.

Okay: “How to differentiate between reading compass and the tricky impulsive self-sabotage pattern?”

Same thing. Again, when you train in it, you start to realize, oh, that feeling: giddy, manic, self-sabotaging, a little bit frenzied, whatever it is, whatever it feels to you, but tight and not free. I think the reason I was so obsessed with Sojourner Truth was her incredible ability to comprehend freedom, spending her whole life getting people out of bondage. And that magic is part of what brought me here and is arranging all this, all these dreams come true.

A couple more questions: “I used to remember dreams so vividly. Now I can vaguely remember snippets of dreams, even when sleep hygiene is good. Tips on getting back to solid dreaming?”

Keep a dream journal and write down any snippet you remember. Put a book by your bed and immediately get up and write down whatever or put a computer there and type in something. As you start training your brain to expect to write them down, it will retain them longer. So good luck with that.

Oh, question: “Can you tell us more information about Wayfinder Training?”

Er, no…yes! I will have people put it in the thing below this. I think I’m supposed to do this [points down]. In the thing below. I’ll have them put a link to the Wayfinder Life Coach Training. Yes, it will be there. And I can tell you it’s a nine-month program. Nine months—significant, right? Bring things to fruition. And that it is literally an assembly of the most incredible magicians on earth. Wow. It’s…between Wilder and the Wayfinder communities, I feel like I have a cherry picked from all humanity the most awesome individuals, and I’d love you to meet them.

Final question: “How do you discern between letting things be as they are and needing to insert your voice? How to know when to trust and when to step in with your will? Lots of love.”

Lots of love back to you. Same thing. Your compasses inside you, not your cogitation, not analysis, but a deep, again, ancient ability to sense the way forward.

I once read that the cognitive brain can process about 40 bits of information per second, which is very fast. But your whole body, your whole neurological system is processing about 11 million bits of information per second.

So your head will say, “Okay, I need to make a logical decision when to insert my voice and when to let things be.” And the ancient compasses inside you will say, “I will tell you when we get there.” Compasses don’t draw maps.

You have to walk forward to see where you’re going, but you will, once you tap into it, find that this sense of direction that you have of true North is actually very, very vivid. It’s very deep and very powerful. And getting back in touch with it is the most important thing you will ever do for yourself.

And it will tell you exactly when to speak out and when to stay quiet. It will tell you exactly when to trust and when to act. It won’t fail you. It is your own genius. It is your soul’s navigation. It is your higher Self. It is direction from the cosmos. It is all the good things and it is available to you.

And just doing the Space, Silence, and Stillness meditation can get you in there so that you can start to feel freer, less free, freer, less free. So practice it.

I write about it in some of my books as well. I know I have to leave, so I have to put in all the things. But yeah, there’s coach training, there’s reading, there’s all the stuff I’ve been doing my whole life. It’s all about this. And it all boils down to freer or less free.

So write down a list of your dreams from childhood and write down a list of the things you’re planning to do next week. And then feel what frees your soul. And then be a sojourner for truth and move forward as a wayfinder. It’s the best way to get through the world these days. I love you. Thanks for joining me. May every beautiful dream you’ve ever had come true. See you again on the Gathering Room.