And what I want to talk about is how in this world with all its differences, with all the time differences right now, with all the political differences, with all the seasonal differences, there is a sort of bedrock that I think we drop into when we do our Silence, Stillness, and Space meditation. But I have a new take on it.

I know people might not be watching these in order, but last week I talked about kindness to the self and I got a lot of feedback that people loved that and needed it. So I was really focusing on it this week. And I found that when I could be kind to myself, I had immediate access to that space, stillness, and silence. 

So I was talking to Roey—Rowan Mangan, the Gracious Badger, my partner—and I said, “How do you access self-kindness?” Because for me, I was going inside myself and pulling up this kindness from the well of kindness or whatever you want to call it. And she put it really differently. She said, “When I align myself with the kindness that I believe is the world or is in the world, this is how I feel.” And I was like, “Wait, wait, wait. Back up. Align yourself with the kindness? You think the world is kind?” And she was like, “Not every aspect of the world, but do I think that the universe is essentially kind? Of course I do. So when I align myself with it, I’m aligned with the entire power of the universe.”

That went right over my head for years and years because even with all my self-help and all my talk of things, I had never thought of kindness being the essential component of the universe. So I started doing meditations and thought exercises where I found the kindness that there is in the world and started to anchor myself into that. And that’s what I want to teach you today because it may seem like splitting hairs, but it made a huge, huge difference to me.

And every time I do any exercise to bring myself into an alignment with the kindness that I project as part of the universe, there’s a stability that I realize I never got from the circumstances of the world.

So we’re all trying to be happy. We’re all trying to be at peace and enjoy, and we think we have to find external circumstances that are conducive to those states. And we struggle and struggle to get the things we think will bring us calm and peace and joy and the feeling of being safe, home, and loved. Remember, in any given situation, the human brain asks three questions, and this is deep in our evolutionary brain tissue. It goes to first: “Am I safe?” If it determines that we’re safe, it says, “Am I loved? Do I belong?” And if we can say, “Oh, I’m safe and I belong,” it says, “What can I learn?” And then it starts having the adventure we’re meant to have. That’s why we’re here. We’re here as, and this is my own personal philosophy, we’re here as heroes who have taken the call to adventure, and we’re here for the adventure itself.

You don’t read, for example, the story of Odysseus, the famous—The Odyssey written by Homer about a guy who’s been stuck away from home for years and years, and he sets out to find his way home to his land, his family, his beloved wife, and he encounters all these dangers along the way. He ends up being seduced by the goddess Circe or maybe it’s Calypso. He goes to both of those. He goes past the islands of the sirens who sing so beautifully that people go mad if they can’t go be with the sirens. And he has his crew fill their ears with wax and tie him to the ship so he won’t go because he wants to hear it, but he doesn’t want to abandon the ship.

So he has all these adventures. And there are many times when his life is in danger and everything and it doesn’t sound fun. And then he gets home and there’s a little kerfuffle there while he gets settled there. But the point is it’s not called “Odysseus Gets Home.” It’s not called “Odysseus Takes an Uneventful Flight Back to His House.”

It’s about the odyssey, the journey, and we’re here for the journey. But damn, it is a rough sea out there. And there are a lot of times when we think, “Why did I?” When he does go past the island of the sirens, he screams to his men, “Please let me go. Please steer into that sound. I have to.” He really feels the anguish of not being able to go, which is what he set out to do—to feel that.

But of course, his crewmen go right past the sirens, and he has this anguish of loss that he can’t go back there and see it, but he has the experience inside himself.

So I think we’re like that. We’re on an odyssey, and we set out to have these adventures. And maybe at a certain point we even say, “Put me through something crazy and wild and difficult because I want the experience of it.” Then we’re in the middle of it going, “Whoa! Wait! Untie me from the mast! Let me go where I need, where the adventure says I can be safe.”

And very often we cry out to the heavens for help to please let us go. And whatever aspect of the universe is steering the ship just rose right through the anguished experience.

So how does this jive with a life experience that is aligned with the essential kindness of the universe? How do we justify those two things, the ups and downs of it, the yearning and sorrow and craving and fear and the idea that the universe is fundamentally kind, no matter what we feel like we’re going through?

And it reminded me of a visualization that I made up a few years ago, and I want to do it with all of us right now. Some of you may have heard it before, I don’t remember if I’ve ever done it on The Gathering Room, if so, not for a long time. And I’ve learned a lot about self-kindness ever since.

So what I want you to do for this is actually if you can, if you’re driving or something, you can’t do this, but actually put one of your hands over your heart and just put a gentle pressure on there. That is a really good trigger to your nervous system to say, “You’re okay, you’re safe.” Then take the deep breath and let out the long exhale that tells the brain, “You’re safe.”

Now notice that we’re all here together because we’re trying to be happy and we all say hi to each other and wherever we are in the world. For some of us it’s evening. For some it’s morning. For some it’s the middle of the night. Wherever we are, we have reached out together because our souls are similar and we’re sharing this odyssey. We don’t have to do it alone.

So you can keep your hand on your heart for this whole meditation, or you can just put your hands at rest if that feels a little stressful and effortful. See if you can close your eyes. Obviously if you’re driving or outside, you might not want to do this, but if you can’t close your eyes, I want you to make your gaze soft. In other words, instead of looking with pinpoint intensity at any given object, you’re looking at your whole visual field.

So everything above, everything below, everything to the sides of you while you’re looking straight ahead, just soften your gaze until you take in all of that. Or if you can, close your eyes. And with your hand on your heart, imagine this: You’re in the middle of a hurricane. It’s wildly tempestuous. There are huge waves, there are tidal surges, there is chaos. The wind is blowing every which direction. It’s frothing up the water, it’s making these immense breakers come in over everything you love. It’s a terrifying storm, terrifying. Keep breathing and imagine that instead of being a small vulnerable human, you are a point of consciousness, okay? So you may locate it as behind the center of your forehead. So I’m going to throw in our little meditation primer. Can you imagine the distance between your eyes? And as you do that, you go back about an inch from the bridge of your nose and focus on the point that is there and imagine that as your point of consciousness.

And then holding that, let your body dissolve, just evaporate into the air. So now all you are is this point of consciousness, which means that nothing can hurt you. You can’t be blown around. You’re a point of consciousness. You don’t—air pressure, wind, water, they don’t affect you temperature. No. You are pure knowing, pure curiosity, pure observation.

And now, as that point of consciousness, move as if you’re going out over the ocean and there are all these waves. And if they’re hundred-foot waves, you are at 110 feet. You’re just above them. And you can look down at this incredible turbulence. And then imagine that your point of consciousness decides it’s going to drop a thin thread of pure consciousness down into the water.

So just imagine it like a brilliant, incredibly thin line of brilliant light. So it’s like a fishing line, only it’s luminous and it’s part of you and you project it down into the water. The waves are going back and forth, but nothing moves you.

This straight pure line of consciousness keeps extending downward. And it goes through the horrific waves at the top of the water. And then it goes down into the place where there’s movement and a lot of chaotic water movement. But there’s, you’re out of the air, you’re in water. And as you go down, the push and pull starts to be more gradual, more subtle. The light turns blue as you go down, down, down.

And then it’s just as if you can feel the energy of the water just swirling a bit around you and it’s getting more and more and more still. And the blue gets deeper and deeper and you drop further and further and further down. And you’re getting to the place where this fertile darkness from which we all took our life. That’s what you can see now.

And you yourself are warm and still and bright and you go down, down, down. And now you’re into a place where there is absolute stillness. There’s a band of water in the ocean that is so still, deep, deep down there that the great whales go down to that level to call to each other and the water will carry the sound waves over hundreds of miles. It’s so still.

And you keep going down and you keep going down. And then you find the bed of the earth, the bed of the ocean, you drop right into the sand and you keep going. And then you get to the mantle of rock right next to the core of the earth, and you just anchor it.

So now, you can be in this place of absolute stillness and you can know all the things that are happening all the way up. Your consciousness is still in the air. It can see the waves, it’s in the waves, it can feel the tempest. It’s just under the waves. It feels the massive pressures. And it’s down deep, deep, deep to the place of complete stillness and nothing can harm you and you drop anchor there.

Now this deep stillness around the core of the earth, this is what Ro told me the other day, that stillness is the kindness of the universe. It’s always under the tempest. It is not separate from it. It is present with it, but it is unshaken and unshakeable. It is completely nurturing. It is absolute safety.

My dear friend Susan had the opportunity to go down, she studies the deep ocean and wrote a beautiful book about it, which will come to my mind in a moment. But she talked about going down in a deep submersible, which is a spherical plexiglass bubble, almost, because the roundness of that shape as you go deeper into the pressure of the water, it presses on the whole sphere at once and therefore makes it a stable shape. And I said to her, “Weren’t you terrified going down there?” And she said, “I’ve never felt more safe. I felt so held.”

Because for her the ocean is alive and for all of us the ocean is alive. Susan just knows it. It’s called The Underworld, her book, and it’s absolutely beautiful. But that shifted me the way Ro’s saying that when I anchor into the kindness that is in the universe, I can be still. And I thought about Susan saying that deep stillness is the mother, it is the holding. It is like the womb before birth. It is the safest place imaginable and it’s always, always accessible.

So now when things are a little rocky, I pull back behind my eyes, become that point of consciousness and go down quite quickly because I’m anchored. And I’ve noticed that as I do this meditation, if people I love are mad at me, it doesn’t bother me very much. If I get trolled online, it doesn’t bother me very much. When I read world events, there’s a lot of tempest up here, but when I’m connected to that line of absolute kindness and pure consciousness, it’s just wave action. And I can be the stillness in which the wave action is occurring.

So can you imagine the distance between your eyes? Can you imagine the space between the top of your head and the core of the earth? Can you imagine the silence that holds the storm?

It can be howling wind and crashing waves and it’s all happening in the loving silence of consciousness. Can you imagine how much space there is extending not just through this planet but through the whole universe, holding everything that happens, that apparently happens as planets come and go, as solar systems and galaxies come and go, as the Big Bang comes and the black coals go?

Can you imagine that it is all the play of love, of kindness, of consciousness, which is what we essentially are here on this odyssey, having all our adventures and knowing that the one inevitable thing is that we get to go home?

So that’s what I’ve been doing as my little visualization, the dropping down into the stillness at the bottom of the ocean and even below. So let’s go to some questions about this.

So I’m not going to read names anymore. They’re too hard. “How do you convince yourself to see good in everything, even in the toughest situations?”

Because what is seeing is the good. So when you look at a really tough situation and inside you, there’s deep pain. Last week, and I’m going to say this a lot from now on, put your hand over your heart. Go in and find the part of you that can say to the part that is looking at this tough situation and say, “I’m right here. I’ve got you. You’ll be okay. We’ll be all right.” We all evolved with the consciousness of how to calm a frightened animal. And if we do that with our own hearts, we realize that there has to be love in our universe because we are love.

So in any situation, no matter how scary, you can find the part of you that is calming you, and that part is the real—to me, the only real component of the situation. Try it, try it, imagine it. I don’t believe it, but I don’t not believe it. I’m an open mind and I just find that works really well.

Okay, Nicole says, “Hi, Martha, just love you.” Ah, thank you. “Can I please ask, how do I, in the pursuit of learning and growing and very likely failing along the way, allow myself to do this if it may negatively impact another if I fail?”

So you’re going to have to go, like when Ro said, “I align with the kindness in the universe,” I realized my hubris because I was saying, “I create kindness and I will generate it from inside and I’ll offer it to myself and the whole world, and doing that, I’ll take care of everyone else along the way.” And then I realized, no, it is the kindness in the universe that is real and my alignment with it by being kind to myself, or this visualization aligning myself, anchoring into the kindness that is in the universe, it teaches me that that same kindness holds all the other people in this situation. And you can let it go. I mean, if you’re holding tension for another person, take a deep breath and let it go. Let all your muscles relax and just think about, for example, your parents or your spouse or somebody who’s desperately wanting you to be happy. If they relaxed and just were there saying, “I’m here with you, tell me everything, I’ve got you,” would that not be the greatest gift they could give? So if you can relax even in the face of failure, you will become a place of safe harbor for other people.

If you put your anchor into that kindness, that infinite kindness, they will be held by the same kindness and you won’t need to try at all. Just be there with them and help them anchor in too by being, like resonating that, the example of the anchored heart.

All right, Avisena says, “Sometimes during meditation the fear pops up, fear of losing beloved ones or other fear. How to be friends with fear and not let fear control me?”

Such a good question and one that I have dealt with many, many, many times. Many. What you do is you bring kindness to the fear. You don’t try to stop the fear or crush it or push it away because that’s going to scare it even more. What you do is you know that the fear is not your entire mind, and you say to the fearful part of yourself, “Of course you’re scared of missing loved ones. Of course you’re afraid of all the things that could go wrong. Anyone in this world would be. I see you, I allow you, I’ve got you. Feel exactly the way you need to feel right now. I’ve got you.”

In Internal Family Systems therapy, this causes or can really help with something called “unblending.” If you’re totally believing that you are the fear, you’re blended with the fear. But when you say, “Okay, fear, come with me. I’m going to go through this visualization and become a line of consciousness that goes through every tempest and is anchored just inextricably in the deep peace, the deep kindness of the universe.” If you can do that and say to the fear, “Go ahead and be yourself,” it will want to come with you. It will curl up with you like a puppy and go to sleep. I have many years of practice doing this, and I’ve done a lot of research and read a lot of brain science to learn the very same things. So give that a whirl and see how it works.

Elle says, “What if the tempest is from trauma? It’s internal.” Well, almost all the tempest is internal. “How do I find peace in there?”

First of all, get yourself a good trauma therapist because it’s very hard to do this alone, and I really, really want you to have support. Once you have a good trauma person in your corner, what you find is the peace in the Self with a capital S that is able to extend its kindness to the parts that are lost in trauma.

So again, you unblend from them in order to love them. And you don’t even need to really know what happened. If you know that you had trauma at some point and you have PTSD symptoms, all you have to do is imagine that part of you that’s traumatized just very, very gently say to it, “I’ve got you. You can do this.You lived through that. I’m here. I’m going to find someone to help us. It’s going to be okay.”

And then in a safe place, when we know that we’re safe and we’re loved, the psyche wants to bring the trauma up to be healed and released. This is the one mental health challenge that has the very best prognosis because it’s not a mental illness, it’s a mental wound, it’s a psychological wound. And if it’s allowed to, if it’s given some air and light and love and company, even from within where you’re saying, “I am the one who is anchored down in the bedrock of the sea and I’ve got you,” you’ll find that there are these waves of negative emotion as trauma comes up. And if you understand it, you don’t even have to understand it if you are compassionate toward it, and especially if you have at least one other compassionate witness, it heals surprisingly quickly in most cases. So all the love in the world to you for that.

Jessica says, “Is enlightenment staying in this place of stillness without having to use processes to get there?”

I think so. But the wonderful thing about it is that every time we do a visualization, every time we do the Space, Stillness, and Silence meditation, we are actually rewiring our brains. What fires together, wires together. It’s not like, “I have a scared brain. I’m going to add all these first aid things to it to make it feel like the universe is kind.” Uh-uh. It’s, “I have a frightened brain. It is wired for fear, it is wired for a sense of scarcity, for anger, for all these things, and I’m going to go in there like an electrician and rewire that sucker.”

Every time you sit in meditation, every time you offer yourself compassion, every time you say, “I’ve got you Troubled? Then stay with me, for I am not.” Every time you grasp that thin thread of consciousness that cannot be shaken, you rewire your brain to go more away from the negative emotions and anchor into kindness, anchor into compassion, and it gets easier and easier and easier. Although, if you let the world frighten you again—and the world, our culture in particular is very, very interested in frightening you to get your attention—you may have to repeat the process. Because you might get, your wiring may go back and forth.

But I’ve found that if you have a practice, and just coming to The Gathering Room is a practice, you get more and more wired for peace, calm and joy. So yeah, it’s worth doing.

Someone says, “Do you think that pursuing a PhD is worth it, seeing that the process may bring a lot of anxiety and sometimes the process feels not joyful?”

It’s absolutely up to you. When I decided to get a PhD, especially in sociology, which I’d never studied, I felt such joy. And when I—I mean, I had a seven-month-old baby, when I started my graduate studies and I was getting very little sleep and I was so fired up by what I was reading, that I would actually stay up all night reading stuff that wasn’t even required, that had not even been assigned because I was so thirsty for it. If your soul and your destiny is to learn something, you’ll be thirsty for it. And yeah, it was hard. It was really hard. But the things, the adventures that make this life worthwhile are hard. So if there’s joy in this PhD program, if you feel that, go with it. If there is no joy, stay away. You do not—work on your need to have letters after your name. It’s not necessary, but it all depends on what you feel.

Someone says, “What if you just can’t deal with the situation you’re in?”

Then withdraw, put your eyes down and focus on this point behind your eyes, and then drop a line down to your heart and then keep that line dropping down and down and down so that 25% of your energy is still monitoring your situation, but 75% of you is busy going down to the part of the ocean that is so still you can hear the whale song. And you don’t have to deal with the situation you’re in in the same way.

Few more questions. We started a tiny bit late, so I’m going to just take ’em. Someone says, “I’m struggling in the job hunt after losing my job from USAID. It feels like failing everyday, it feels like failing every day, submitting applications into the void. How do you suggest I navigate this and find the energy to keep trying?”

First of all, I’m sure there’s not a single person here of all of us who is not reaching out to you with our hearts, with compassion and support. That’s horrible. One thing that is very true in this time of unprecedented things happening is that it’s easier than ever to lose a job, but it’s also easier than ever to find a way that your joy can take you to the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. So as you go into your job search, instead of thinking, “Oh my God, I have to get a job,” think about, “How can I help the world? How can I do what I love that benefits others? Where can I make something? Where can I help?” So you become not the hapless fisherman throwing a line into the water and not getting anything back. You’re more like a spear fisher. You’re swimming around under there going, “I know exactly what I want and I’m going after it.” So I know a lot of people are losing jobs these days, and it’s horrible. But you can do this. You can. We’ve got you.

Two more questions. First one: “Often when I’m meditating, my body has a physical reaction. How can I find out more about what’s happening? I want to make sure I’m doing something constructive with it and not damaging.”

One of the things that will happen is that when you are still, traumas and feelings that may be difficult tend to surface. So you don’t really need to know any technical stuff about them. Picture yourself as a mountain just sitting there, and gusts of wind fly toward you and then over you. And your body may shake, may tense and then release, may do all these subtle readjustments, and that is part of the process of healing from the trauma the world has put with all of us. The body will shift. As long as it’s not physically damaging to you, and as long as you can stay in a state of relaxation, welcome what’s going on with the body. I can’t imagine a situation in which meditation would make the body’s health less. So keep going in the meditation, notice the physical movement and say, “That’s just wind against the mountain. I’ll be fine.”

Then finally, “Can you talk about the role of forgiveness in healing?”

Yeah. As you go deeper into the kindness of the world, you realize that you are so overflowing with the gratitude at having found anchor, that you stop being so upset at the people who are tossing around in the waves. And as your attention becomes really, really wrapped like Susan in her submersible, in the place where there is no light except for the bioluminescence of the creatures down there, feeling like she’s in the womb and in a space of magic and on another planet altogether. She wasn’t thinking about the things that were at the surface. She was amazed by what she’d discovered under there. And at that point, forgiveness is moot.

You’ve let go of everything having to do with the tempest. And if somebody who was bad to you is up there screaming, they don’t even deserve any of your attention. What deserves your attention is the miracle of finding this deep, still, nurturing place where you are always safe and you can always find love, and that that’s the nature of the universe. And you just align yourself with it, click in, anchor down, and keep taking long, slow breaths because you have come home.

Thank you so much for being here with me. I love you all so very, very much, and I will see you again on The Gathering Room.