Anyway, I’ve been reading my way through all the skills that make you a good community creator, and I’m still in the sort of self-help genre because it turns out that until you are truly compassionate to yourself, you cannot be compassionate to any other person. So until you are basically a very benevolent, gentle, kind, receiving power for your whole self, all the negativity in you toward yourself will project outward to other people, and they will feel that as negativity toward them. So one of my favorite authors that I’ve been reading—I’ve been going through all that classics—and one of them is Nonviolent Communication by a man named Marshall Rosenberg, who I’ve always loved his theories and I’ve loved his ways of working with people. And I was working through one of his programs trying to learn it for myself, and I thought, I want to tell my Gathering Room people because this is really going to be good.

So how do you become your own really good company? I hope that everyone out there has had the experience at least a few times of being in a room with a few other people where everybody had the same vibe, and there was mutual trust and love and support and laughter. There’s just nothing better. And it’s almost like we have such an individualistic and fragmenting society and we’re always pitched against each other at work, at school, we’re supposed to compete, we’re supposed to be individualistic. So those moments of beautiful company when it’s just, there’s a blend there, like a beautiful stew that’s greater than the sum of its parts and everything lifts you. Everybody is lifted by everyone else. So there’s this sweetness to it. It kind of has to happen by mistake almost.

People try to get it at parties, they go to parties, but they’ve never learned the skills of how to be kind to themselves, kind to other people. So they use alcohol or whatever to try to bring down the social barriers, and it does and that’s why they love parties. But what Marshall Rosenberg says is everything we do is trying to meet our basic needs, and we go off course by trying to meet our needs with things that don’t work. And one of the things that doesn’t work for me is mashing myself in with people I don’t really know and trying to lower my social resistance. I can’t handle any alcohol or much of, yeah, it just doesn’t work for me. 

Anyway, I realized, reading Marshall Rosenberg, that one of the reasons for this is that I am not good company for myself. If I were to use IFS theory, if I took the parts of myself and I hung out in a room with all the parts of myself, it would not be a happy community. There would be a couple of real a-holes in this group that hate the others. And I mean, not hate-hate, it’s not as bad as it used to be. I mean I’ve come a very long way, but I used to be really self-destructive in my teens, and then in my twenties I was way too self-sacrificing. In my thirties I was way too—just a lot of, as Marshall Rosenberg says, things that I would label “mistakes.” 

But the way he describes bringing ourselves into that sense of a loving community is as follows. He says, “Go to anything that you consider to be a mistake or an error in your own behavior.” So I’m going to ask you all to do this with me. I couldn’t come up with anything I deliberately do that I know isn’t in harmony with my integrity. But there are a trillion things I don’t do that I think I should. And I feel really bad about those all the time. The biggest thing is not reaching out to as many people as want to—like, people send me lots of letters and they send me things that they’ve made and they’re beautiful and they’re wonderful and I really want to reach out and hug and go to lunch with every single one of them. And I just don’t have, it just doesn’t work because I don’t have the energy, I don’t have, I’m not very social in the first place.

Anyway, I was kicking myself the other day because I couldn’t sleep. I woke up in the middle of the night, I couldn’t sleep for about half an hour and I played some computer word games on my phone and then I went to sleep. And then I was really mad at myself because I could, if some sweet wonderful person writes me a letter or something and I say I don’t have time to respond, and then I spend half an hour in the middle of the night playing a game on my phone, that could have been time that I gave to helping another person. And I feel, I always, I literally always am walking around feeling bad about that.

For you, it might be that you keep having the same relationship issue— you keep trusting an addict, for example, or you don’t like your job, but you just keep going. You don’t have the guts to quit. You’re not, you don’t feel spry enough to start your own business or get another job. It could be anything. You feel shy at meetings and then you feel like you say stupid things, whatever. Okay. So get that thing that you are upset with yourself about and notice the dialogue you have or that for me, it’s not just a dialogue, it’s several different parts talking to each other, and notice what Marshall Rosenberg calls “violence.”

Violence is anything that is accusatory like, “That was stupid,” or “You should have tried harder, you should have done more.” And he says in particular, the word “should” is a violent tool we use against ourselves, and we use it to inflict shame. “You should have done this, you shouldn’t have done that.” And he said that shame is the oppressor, and no action that stems from shame can lead to the real fulfillment of our needs. And he says, okay, so find the place where you’re shaming yourself or you’re angry at yourself. 

And he says, “Now really, really investigate to see what was the need you were trying to meet when you did the thing you say is bad.” So I thought, okay, I was playing a computer game. Why? I wanted something to use the left side of my brain, the worrying side, the side that’s verbal. I wanted it tied up in a spelling game, basically, because otherwise it runs off with me in the middle of the night and I can’t get back to sleep. It goes to very anxiogenic places sometimes. And yes, almost all the time I can make that go away by using the methods in my most recent book by being creative. But last night I just wanted, the game seemed to just give me a little sanctuary from always the doing and the doing. And then I was mad at myself because I’d taken sanctuary for doing. Then I looked deeper: “Okay, what is the part of me that needed that sanctuary?” 

All right, all of a sudden I’m at a very young—I feel very young and I feel like I’m trying so desperately hard to be perfect in my little Mormon community, feeling like I was the only one who wasn’t going to be raised up with Jesus when he came over the mountains. I’d have dreams about this all the time as a little kid: Jesus would come over the mountains and all the Saints—that’s what the Mormons would call themselves—would rise up to meet him, and I would be running around jumping into the air and Jesus wouldn’t take me. I’d go the other way.

So that little part of myself was the one thinking, “You should have used that time to do good and instead you spoiled it. You wasted it on a spelling game just because you wanted to get back to sleep.” And then I can think, “Ah, that poor kid running around thinking she was going to jump to heaven, but she couldn’t.” So Marshall Rosenberg says, “You may have to go through levels and levels and levels until you find the real need.” My real need was just to stop the demons from constantly telling me that I wasn’t doing enough. And it started when I was little, little, little.

So then, this is the interesting thing because I thought then you embrace yourself and everything’s great and you champion your inner child or your inner adult or whatever. But the interesting part for me of Rosenberg’s whole process, and the reason I wanted to tell it to you is that he says there is negative—there’s painful emotion that has to happen when you’ve done something that didn’t meet the need you set out to meet, okay? And the painful emotion that you should feel is not self-disgust or recrimination or blame or anger—but mourning. 

You have to grieve that the person who tried to meet their needs by doing what you did, it didn’t work. It didn’t work. And there’s such sorrow in that. I was doing this, just getting ready for the Gathering Room and I was going through this thing and I was like, when I realized that it just all the trying to be good couldn’t possibly work, it has never in six decades made me feel good. The things that made me feel good are completely different. But that part of me trying to make myself feel good by being perfect, it just will never work. And I got so sad for a few minutes.

And then, so you find the part that is trying to get its needs met and can’t, and then you let it grieve that it didn’t work that time. It’s not that it’s hopeless, but you tried really hard, probably many times, and it didn’t work. And then if you can empathize with the part of yourself that was trying to get the need met in this ill-advised way, there’s a kind of embrace that happens automatically, and in that embrace is forgiveness. So that’s the step you find what’s crummy, what you think is wrong with you, you find the need you were trying to meet, then you let yourself be sad to mourn the loss of thinking, “That’ll help!” and having it not work.

So much of what we use in this world doesn’t work. It’s such a hard world. And when we realize that there are just these little parts of us trying so hard and that all they want is to get a basic need met, then there is this gathering in that says, “Aw, we’ve all been there, we’ve all been there. I forgive you.”

And he says that’s the way into being your own best company. And that’s when you’re sitting in a room, or in yourself, with a little circle of people. There’s a compassionate witness. There’s the one who was trying so hard, there’s maybe dozens of those and they’re all there at the table and everyone is empathizing with everyone else. And there is mutual forgiveness for everything you ever thought you did wrong. And no one is being blamed. 

And he says, and then he takes a really unexpected turn. He says, “From there on, everything is play.” Because as the mourning is completed and the forgiveness occurs naturally, which you can’t force yourself to forgive, but when you empathize, you forgive automatically, then you start to realize that you don’t need to live under the lash of “should” and “must” and “Why didn’t I?” You get to live in a place where you’re always finding the parts of you that have their needs and working to get them met and forgiving yourself if it doesn’t work. So you’ve basically got a thriving little community inside yourself that can love you through anything, literally anything. And at that point, you choose activities that even if they’re really hard or really complicated, they’re chosen not out of “should” but out of “Shall we? Can we? Will we?”

And then he said, “Just keep going in that direction until everything in your life is play.” And this guy was writing many decades ago, and he says, “A lot of people say I’m too radical, but I truly believe that when we live in such a way as to honestly meet our needs and forgive ourselves when we don’t, everything in our life becomes joyful play.” I thought Marshall Rosenberg deserved a revival to have his work broadcast again today. And I am so excited that I got to do it here because I can feel in myself this sense of when I got into the forgiveness part, it’s like, “Ahh. Ahh.”

So now I think let’s do our little meditation that we do about the silence and space and stillness, and then I’ll go into questions. But as we go into the meditation, imagine your insides as a circular room and all the different parts of you that have been trying so hard to get your needs met your whole life, maybe they still haven’t succeeded, but they’re all in good company. They are all loving each other. The motto of that inner self, that inner collective is “All for all, always.” Because what blesses one blesses the whole.

So with that model, let’s go into the question. First, breathe in, breathe out, relax, and then just repeat in your mind the question, “Can I imagine the distance between my eyes?” I love that because it’s not emotional, it’s not intellectual, it’s just odd. Can I imagine the space, the empty space in the distance between my eyes? Can I imagine the empty space in the whole volume of my face and the tip of my nose back to the back of my ears? Can I imagine the space inside the whole volume of my skull and down my spine and across my clavicles and through my ribs and lungs and diaphragm and heart? Can I imagine the empty space inside those atoms? Can I imagine the stillness that holds them so that they can form this lattice of matter, moving through absolute stillness? Can I imagine the silence under all the vibration, under every sound?

Can I imagine even the energy that makes up the matter dissolving into a haze of vibration and all of it being filled with awareness, consciousness, all of space and all of matter filled with consciousness, made of consciousness, and consciousness and compassion are not different things? Can I imagine the compassion of space, silence, and stillness and how they shoot right through the core of the earth to bond us together in different countries, in different parts of this world and on into space forever? Can I imagine that I am the space that suffuses the universe and I am alive?

It is like taking the group of people that is you out to look at the stars, look up and say, “Whoa, that’s cool.” Okay, let’s see. Thank you for your noises, trolls. I’m going to, let’s see. Somebody says, “What’s the best advice you ever received?”

Some of these questions didn’t come through correctly. Sorry. I’m trying to make them big enough for me to read. I know what to do. Thank you. Okay, “What is Martha’s advice for working through early childhood religious trauma when I don’t consciously remember exactly what went wrong?”

Okay, you don’t have to remember exactly what went wrong. What you have to remember is that there is someone inside you who is still feeling the feeling you had at that point. And it could be at many, many, many different moments. It could be over years. I just can’t get these to work. So right now, everybody try this because we all have childhood trauma, right? Religious or otherwise. Find a part of you that feels young and vulnerable, and you don’t have to know what was happening. Sometimes you’ll repress knowledge of something traumatic. Sometimes it’s just there are so many incidents that they just all sort of munge together and it’s just a sort of wash. But there is an emotional tone. There is almost a flavor to it. And you have to be like a sommelier tasting wine. You have to say the exact feeling, the exact feeling I had last night when I woke up and remembered running around as a little kid jumping into the air trying to get to Jesus. The exact emotional tone was desperation, littleness, being little, hopelessness. So I’m now holding the actual wound, and it’s like going to a hospital and having them address a wound. 

Say you’ve got shrapnel in a wound and they take the shrapnel out. They don’t need to know exactly how it got there to heal you. You need to get it out. So if it’s shrapnel, they go in and they physically pull it out, they clean up the wound, they sew you together. If it’s emotional, you go in and try the process that I’ve been doing right now. You go in and you find the needs that aren’t being met in that child and you feel empathy for it. Now by just saying you feel empathy for the child, I’m already differentiating you as two different parts. That is, in fact, how the psyche works. And when I ask you to feel empathy, you automatically go to the part that is what I call the “compassionate witness.” Or in IFS, they call it Self with a capital S.

So you find the part of Self that can feel empathy toward this child part, and you just sit there with the two feelings: the vulnerable, desperate hopelessness and the empathy for that that comes from an adult, more a place where you feel more capable, more confident, and more secure like the me that was lying in bed last night. And you allow the empathy from the compassionate witness to saturate the sensation from childhood. And that really, really goes a long way toward healing.

Okay, thank you. Oh, now I’m getting physically handed your questions. So Betsy Holmberg says, “What if you shame yourself for not liking people more? Like you hang out with people for community, they’re perfectly nice, but you feel empty and sad afterwards and feel ashamed?”

What a great question. Oh my goodness, have I made this mistake over—I used to say to myself, “Any port in a storm.” 

Once I realized how lonely it is to be totally isolated, I would just hang with anybody and I could get my sort of emotional tone to match a variety of people. And in doing so, I left myself over and over. I would act, for example, like a very snide intellectual at Harvard, or I would hang out with a bunch of Mommy and Me people at the preschool and pretend that it felt normal for me to have children. My poor kids. But I wasn’t interested in the different equipment, for example, that you would use for your baby, like the different sippy cups and the values thereof. 

Anyway, I left myself over and over and over again, and it’s that separation from one’s integrity that is the violation of Self. And if you mask your real feelings in order to fit in with a group, it’s a little bit of soul murder. You pretended to be other than you were. So the real you was out in the cold, and the false you feels guilty because it knows it’s lying.

So what is the answer to that? Well, I’ve found that I set my entire focus when I did my integrity cleanse most recently, which was like, I don’t know, eight or nine years ago I started on it and I started with books. I went to the authors of books where when I read what they had written, it chimed something in me so strongly that I felt like I was in the presence of someone who “got it.” And I chose weird books. But over time, as I read the weird books and said things about them, other people who were interested in those books kind of noticed, and we started hanging out, and people who were fascinated by animals started to hang out with me. All it takes for me is somebody loving animals and we are off to the races. 

And I started to realize that we don’t need any port in a storm, although if you have done that, you were trying to meet a need, feel that, empathize with it. Imagine the compassionate witness gathering up that poor lonely one. And of course you’d put on a mask to try to be in company if you’re all alone. And it didn’t work, and you are forgiven. And now you can find people who think like you do. If you set out to do it as a grownup, we will help you in the Gathering Room and in Wilder, my community and Ro’s community online, it’s all about helping you find people that really vibe with you because we’ve both been through that, Ro and I. So yeah, there are different places you can go, different books you can read, but always be searching for something that resonates with your true Self.

All right, I can’t read the name here, but it says, “Hi, worried about the future. How do you best cope?”

Oh, yes, there have always been things in the future to worry about. Now we just know that there are things in the future that we specifically worry about that maybe we didn’t worry about a couple of years ago. So there’s always something scary coming in the future, and there’s never anything you can do about it, really. I mean, well, that’s not true. You can make sure your house has a generator in case a tree blows down a power line. We have a lot of that going on in rural Pennsylvania where I live. So it’s like, oh, all right, make plans for the future. But do that like a chess game. Like, okay, if this happens, we’ll need a go bag, a bag of stuff where we can get out quickly of an area that say where there’s a fire, like the fire’s in L.A. I could learn Spanish in case I end up going to my brother-in-law’s house in Spain. Or there are things that you can do to get ready for the future that are based on strategy and tactics. That’s great. Just do those. 

But in terms of worry about the future, once you’ve taken care of the things you feel strongly compelled to deal with in the physical world, and you have the best information you can have and you’ve done what you can do, come back into the circle of love. Be your own good company, and then notice that you’re starting to attract other people who are good company. And it is the good company that we really need more than anything else to prepare for the future. It’s the company of those who get us. And I hope you’re finding that right now. And I am actively looking for it and creating it right now. And I hope we’re all actively creating a community and therefore a small society and maybe a bigger society that is based on love, kindness, optimism, mutual support. Yeah, that’s my intention. Let’s all set our intentions now and it will happen.

Oh yes, and Ro is reminding me again to tell you the name of the community we have online, which—it’s called Wilder under the premise that if we’re a little bit less culture-bound and a little bit wilder, truer to our wild nature, we’ll build a better community. We’ll build a happier society. Seems to be working really well.

So Gail says, is it Gail from the community? Yes, Gail from Wilder says, “How can I be kinder about shoulding myself when that seems to be the one way I can get certain things done?”

Oh, maybe those things should not be done. Marshall Rosenberg talks about doing this, and he wrote down the things that he didn’t like to do, but he did them anyway. And the worst one was writing clinical reports. I have no idea what that is, but he said he considers it abusive to the Self to say, “I have to do this report.” But he asked himself, “Why do I do this?” And the answer came back, “You have to, you’re a clinical psychologist, you have to write clinical reports.” And then he was like, “Yeah, but what need am I really trying to meet?” And he realized way down deep that he was afraid he couldn’t make a living without writing these clinical reports. And at that point he said, “I knew for sure I was lying to myself because there are infinite ways of making money and I don’t have to torture myself to do it.” So he stopped writing. He said, “I’ve never again written a clinical report and I treasure each and every hour of the 39 years since I last wrote a clinical report.”

He gave up the one thing that his job said he had to do because when he dug down deep, he realized he didn’t have to do it. And that’s what he means by making sure that everything you choose is play. 

So yeah, when you become your own best company, you have a lot of group discussions in here about what the collective enjoys doing and what the collective enjoys doing might take you away from one activity or job into another activity or job. It might take you away from one relationship into another, one place to another one set of values to another, even. 

But if it’s always based on finding the true need that motivated our actions, and then finding a part of ourselves that can empathize with the one who not only needed but must mourn that we’ve been doing some things that didn’t work—oh, that’s such a letdown for a while, but the grieving passes quickly and the forgiveness comes in like a rush, a tidal wave of sweetness. And then your whole life starts to generate compassion and love for other people. And that brings out the best in them. And that brings people together for positive reasons. And that is a way to live in a wonderful world, no matter what else is going on around us.

I love you all. Thank you so much. I didn’t get to many questions because of technical issues, but I love the questions that got to me. So I hope you all come back next week and the week after that and that we—I love feeling connected to all of you, and it’s a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful thing to feel the connection of people who have become good company for themselves. So love you. See you next week. Have a good one. Bye.