Today’s topic is on keeping the faith because sometimes it is easier than other times to keep the faith. And I just had the experience—this will date this particular episode, but that’s all right–-I got to spend so much time at Londolozi, South Africa, one of my favorite places. And I go there every year, but this year I got to spend a big chunk of time there. And it’s such a grounding place for me, and it’s so thick with the presence of spirit, for lack of a better word. I mean the animals everywhere help generate a field, and the humans that are there are simply divine. There is just so much positive energy there. So I felt, plus you get gourmet meals and all your laundry gets done for you. So I had a break from my life and I spent it—I decided I was going to use that time to plunge into the new consciousness that I’ve been predicting all my life. So I did lots and lots and lots of practice. I did meditation, but I did all kinds of other things too.

And then I came back to the US. And the US is interesting right now. It is… It’s a place where you need faith in order to keep going without feeling daunted. And suddenly, because I was coming from a place of such support, I felt sort of dropped off a cliff, and I had a hard time. I realized that part of my ability to hold faith was a muscle that I’d been exercising.

And I’ve realized a lot of things because of this shift. One is that I have tried to give other people my sense of certainty that there is a loving force around us so that they, you, could rest a bit and wouldn’t have to generate that faith from the inside. And I realized that I’ve been resting on a lot of different people, different authors, different writers, different technologies of magic, I call them, to support my own faith. And that in the end, that’s not always an advantage.

So right now I’m in the process of moving house. So I came back from South Africa, took my son to get a cornea implant, sorry, a cornea transplant, which was a little dicey because he has been pretty close to blind for a couple of years, at least, now. And I kept wondering if his Down syndrome would affect having a cornea transplant. So it was very scary for me to take him down there. The operation took longer than they told me it would, and they didn’t tell me anything about it.

I was sitting in the waiting room and it was an eye hospital. All they do is eyes. So there were all these people who came in with patients who went into surgery and then the surgeons would come out and tell the people waiting, “It went great,” which is what you always want to hear.

Nobody came out to tell me it had gone great. Nobody came out at all. And there was a screen where it showed whether your loved one was in surgery or in recovery. And I watched everybody else drop off that board until it was just my son in the surgery. And then he was in the waiting room for a long time, and then nobody came to tell me how it went at all.

A nurse came to get me and I said, “How did it go?” And she said, “I don’t know. I wasn’t there. I wasn’t involved in the surgery.” So nobody told me anything. We stayed in a hotel that night because I was supposed to take him back in the morning to see how everything had gone. Folks, that was not an easy night for me. I was really scared that something had gone badly wrong.

And so I started reaching out to people that I love because I’ve read a lot of studies about prayer and positive intention and how they really do seem, in many cases, they definitely have a statistically significant impact, according to if you do a statistical analysis of people who are prayed for after an operation and people who are not prayed for after an operation, those who are prayed for recover better.

So I called in the troops, and the troops came. Lots of people were sending loving thoughts and energy, but it was still a tough night for me. And I remembered when I went in and got laser surgery, I was about 40, 40-something, and I had been legally blind my whole life. I started reading when I was three, and I’ve had my nose in a book ever since. And I think that contributed to being very, very nearsighted. As you know, if you are super nearsighted, your glasses are the most important thing in the world. Like, of all your possessions, take everything but don’t take your glasses. One of the most horrible things—it’s a trope in movies—is that when somebody is being stripped of everything they have and someone breaks their glasses, it’s almost like they’ve broken the person.

And I remember going in to get this eye surgery with my thick, young Coke-bottle glasses on, and the nurse saying, okay, so looking at my eyes, they’re going to put me in this machine that will do this surgery. And then she picked up my glasses that I had been wearing since I was seven, not the same pair, they kept getting worse and worse. And she threw them into a bucket that was full of other eyeglasses that were being sent to people who couldn’t afford eyecare in other parts of the world or something. And she said, “You won’t be needing those anymore.”

And I remember with my blurry vision looking at this bucket in absolute disbelief that she just chucked the thing that was allowing me to see. And then they took me into the surgery and they did—it’s very quick, laser surgery—once on each eye. It’s bizarre. You see these dots and everything goes black and then there are more dots and then they bandage your eyes. And somebody drove me home.

And I thought about that when I was waiting to take Adam back after his cornea transplant and that feeling of “Will I be able to see when the bandages come off?” I could sort of see after the surgery, but it was really, they put very thick, dark glasses on me and it hadn’t healed yet. So there are these nights when I have feared blindness, I have feared my inability to see the world clearly.

And that night with Adam, it took me back to that experience of my own. And then it delivered me into the metaphor for that which is: I can’t see what’s coming in the world, and what I do see is very frightening. And I really, really want to lean on anything I can that’ll tell me, “Everything’s going to be okay, everything’s going to be okay”. And when I do that, I become almost addicted. I become dependent on that source helping me the way I was dependent on glasses because I couldn’t see very well.

And in the time between having my vision taken and having it restored, there was a time when I had nothing to hang on to except faith. Hope, to be sure, and I did hope that everything was okay, but that hope wasn’t enough to get me through the night. I needed to tell myself it would be okay. And I had to find inside myself the part of me that I went to when they told me Adam had Down syndrome and he wasn’t born yet. And I had to find a place inside me that said, your life will still be okay.

When I’d written a controversial book and I was getting death threats and legal threats and threats against my children, I had to go to the part of me that had no evidence except internally and find that. And I’ve gone back to that, I’ve gone back to that, and I’ve gone back to that so many times in my life. And then my life got pretty easy. And at Londolozi it got really easy. I was just drifting, cruising, I was being cared for by all these other forces that had come into my life because of my faith. And I forgot that I had to generate that from inside me.

So that night, as people everywhere were reaching out with their energy to help and support me, and I sat there waiting to see if my faith could be rewarded, and as we’ve prepared to leave the house we’ve been living in, and I’ve been letting go of the life that I’ve lived for the last few years, I remember that—and you might see me, if you’re watching, you might see me keep almost closing my eyes, and it’s actually because the images that I’m turning my eyes toward my own solar plexus because when I turn my eyes there, I turn my attention there.

And what I’d like everyone to do with me right now is go to a place right inside your solar plexus in the center of your body and go into it and into it and into it. It is infinite. It is infinitely small. And you just go in and go in and go in and go in. And as you get there, we’re going to do our Stillness, Silence, and Space meditation again. It’s been forever, right?

You finally come to the place that is space, silence and stillness, but it’s also alive. And in there is the courage, is the future, is the knowledge that it’s going to be okay in the end. That is the exercise of faith: going inward until you find that place.

And I remember when I took the bandages off my eyes after the laser surgery, and I had 20/10 vision. I could see better than most people. And I just walked around the world staring. I remember staring at things like I went to the gym and looked at the ceiling and it was just this industrial steel ceiling. And I was like, “That is so beautiful. Why do they not tell us how beautiful it is?”

So I went back to the hospital after Adam’s surgery and I was really scared. And it was weird. It was like a Saturday and there was nobody there. And we were waiting in some hallway for an hour with nobody there. And finally this doctor showed up that I didn’t know was even involved in the surgery. I thought a different person was doing it. And she took us into an exam room and she examined Adam’s eyes and seemed surprised, frankly, maybe I was reading into that. But also very relieved because everything had taken really well. And now I watch my son who’s been reading things like this, holding them up to his face like this for years, now holding things out in front of him to read and saying to me, “I can see your face.”

It’s so great when we don’t need faith. Oh, what a relief. What a relief. But don’t stop there. Rest. Let yourself be held. Let yourself be supported. Let other people’s faith carry you for a while. When you’re scared and in the dark, ask other people, “Pray for me. Send me energy.” However you want to phrase it. “Help.”

And when you feel that, and when things are working, go back in and take this energy of “it turned out okay” and go into the infinite stillness with that treasure. “It worked. It’s okay. I’m okay. My eyes work again.” Or “I believe that the people I love will be safe.” Or “Something in the news turned out the way I hoped it would and not the way it seems to be going lately.” Take every little shred of evidence that your faith was validated and go in and offer it as a sacrifice, not a sacrifice. Offer it as something to share with the infinite in gratitude and appreciation.

And if you do that over and over and over and over and over again, you find that there are so many more moments of your faith being sustained than of your faith being broken. Yes, even with the horrors that are happening, there are so many moments that sustain and validate faith. And you start to discern between easy, fake hope, discern between the story that your brain wants to hear and what feels true to the infinite part of yourself. The infinite part of yourself is very, very still. And in it, you will feel so held. So let’s do it now. Let’s go to the place.

We’re going to start this out with the weird signature question. First of all, get calm, start breathing. Take some breaths where the exhale is longer than the inhale that tells your brain you’re safe.

And then ask the question: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? Can I imagine the distance between the top of my head and the bottom of my spine? Can I imagine the spot in the center of my body that goes infinitely inward, so small, in through the empty space that is the atoms of my body, virtually no matter? Can I imagine the space inside my cells? Can I imagine the silence underneath the sounds I’m hearing? Now, can I imagine the absolute stillness in which action occurs?

And can I feel that the thing my soul most longs for in that space is already present so that my faith hooks into something incredibly real, incredibly alive, incredibly loving? Can I imagine the love exploding like a big bang from a tiny, tiny singularity inside my own body? Can I imagine that space, silence, and stillness are alive? And can I imagine the distance between the space inside me and the space inside everyone else who is listening to this broadcast, or who whoever will?

Now that I can hook into.That I feel. And all of you are helping, but we’re not helping each other with false promises. We’re not helping each other by ignoring the bad in the world. We’re helping each other with presence, and it is powerful. And from this powerful presence grows the collective action of loving others, loving people. And I believe that power. I have faith that that power can overcome all the anguish, all the loss, all the fear that we’re all feeling every day.

So rest in it for a minute. Imagine that you can rest in it. It’s solid, empty of everything, and solid, more solid than stone.

All right, so now we have some questions. And we’re leaving off the names because that seems to have more of an effect. So if you have questions, pop them in.

First one is: “Sometimes it’s hard to keep the faith when you’re exhausted just surviving. Are there any signs or glimmers to keep an eye out for, to know you’re still on the right path?”

Yeah, the glimmer you want is the moment when there’s just a bit of an easing up. Just a bit. It’s almost like when I was learning to ski and I could not really hold my form through a whole turn and I kept falling down and falling down. But then on some falls, there would be a moment when I felt it working and it would just be a moment, but I could feel my balance. And when I finally got a ski instructor to help me, he kept saying, “Find the moments when you’re balanced and put all your focus on that.” And then he skied ahead of me and showed me what it was like to trust the whole action.

I love to do that with the spiritual masters whose books I read, with people I talk to. I’ve had some sweet conversations lately with my loved ones that have helped me find my balance even in the scary places. And I think we’re all doing that for each other these days because things look pretty tough. So lean on me right now because right now I’m supported by what, 215 people watching this, and I can feel their energy and I can relax. And I’ve practiced faith for 62 years, so I have quite a bit. Lean on it, use it. That’s what I’m here for. And I know you’d do the same for me. So that’s the first thing. We’re here for each other. It’s all about community these days.

Another question, “Martha mentioned that she spent a lot of time at Londolozi meditating on how her consciousness is shifting. Is she ready or able to share any insight she had?”

Oh yes, yes, yes. I got so much. Wow. Thanks for asking that question because it sort of takes me back there, and it was really being almost in a warm waterfall of understanding. And the first thing I was given to understand over and over and over is that the new consciousness is soft. Not weak. It’s incredibly powerful, but it is so soft. And I kept feeling places in my body and in my mind where I had braced myself against pain, against disappointment. In every single place I would find, and there were physical places in my body and I would feel something saying, “Take your armor off. Take the armor off.” 

Believe what you want to believe that keeps—you know, like I believed that everybody I had loved from my community of childhood, because they were all Mormon, thought that I was evil and going to hell. And there was a lot of bracing around it. And I thought, but what if I believed that in their souls they were fine and they knew that I meant well? And as I believed that, that armor would come off. And I would cry and cry and cry and cry and cry, but it was so soft underneath there. It was like falling into an infinite bed of softness. And I never ever thought the new consciousness, the first characteristic would be softness, but it is. 

And then the second thing I learned is that it’s funny. I remember when I had the experience that I had encountering this bright, brilliant light in surgery and how much it laughed with me. Not at me—with me. And how much joyous hilarity there was in it. And how could there be? Think about the time you’ve laughed hardest at a comedian or whatever, a little girl or boy or person doing something silly. Lila said to us the other day, “I would love to be naked for a million days. It would be such an honor.” And you catch the thread of that laughter and you feel the love in it. And how could that be different from what we are in our essence? How could that not be the new consciousness? It has to be that. And then I learned that yes, there’s a lot of psychicness going on. I learned that mortality becomes very, very…like maybe yes, maybe no. Like I know we’re all going to die, and death is not what I thought it was.

It is—the poet Andrea Gibson died this past week and they wrote in a poem called “Letter from the Afterlife” that the portal of light that we think is taking people away from us is actually bringing them back. I felt that. 

I felt a lot of things. I’ll be telling you about it in the weeks and months to come, but thank you for asking because it brings me back to what I felt, and it was so strong I didn’t need faith for a while. And having faith, going back to it now is strengthening that muscle inside me again. It is soft, but it is strong.

Someone says, “Can we pool our energy to shift the direction of the US?”

I believe very much that we can. And it doesn’t have to look like anything. Here’s the thing, that evil and anger and racism and sexism and all the isms, they all scream, but the power of the divine doesn’t. We’ve just done this exercise going into silence. It does not look like power to the external eye. But there is something moving. There is something shifting. There is something rising. Something beautiful, something awakening.

You are part of it, but it’s bigger than all of us. And I believe it wants human consciousness to go to a level that’s never been witnessed before. And that what we’re seeing is the breakdown of old systems that will allow for the generation of this new way of thinking and being. The moment you build your own faith is the moment you join the resistance, only it’s the non-resistance. You join the non-resistance that will ultimately dissolve, I think, the type of thinking that hurts other people, hurts anything, hurts the earth, hurts other beings. So yeah, we are right now pooling our energy, and I call it pool consciousness. It’s happening right now. Will it win? We’re still in the they’ve taken away my glasses and said, you won’t need those anymore, but I still can’t see the future. I’m on faith right now. Join me. It’s a better place than panic. So join me.

Someone says, “I’m struggling to trust that I made the right decision. My head says yes, my heart still grieves, though. Any advice?”

Go even deeper than the grief. Let yourself fully embody the grief. Let it rise up and allow it to teach you what to long for. Because every grief, if you allow it, will teach you the shape of the thing that is longed for. And another thing I really, really believe, now more than ever, is that the shape of what you long for is exactly what you’re meant to have and that you generate it by being authentic. So if you’re trying to manifest the future by staying in a happy place and just really focusing, that won’t do it. But if you are brave enough to allow your grief to rise and find the contours of it without being afraid of it, as painful as it is, it will teach you the shape of the thing you are meant to have.

So go down from the head, even beneath the heart, go into the soul of what’s telling you to expect that your decision was right. Or, that if you made a decision that wasn’t right, the opportunity to do even more right will come out of that decision because you made it for the right reasons and in the right faith. I don’t think any specific kind of faith, I mean good faith. Faith in goodness.

Someone says, “How do you keep the faith when a loved one is sick and you are the long-term carer?”

It is so freaking hard. The first thing is you must, you must, you must put yourself first, frequently. You must care for the person and then take a minute, take five minutes, take 15 minutes, take any time you have and aggressively give yourself kind wishes and reach out to other people the way I did when I was trying to take care of Adam. He was blind that night. He had one eye bandaged, the other, he couldn’t see. And I was trying to navigate this hotel he’d never been to and he’s got a cognitive disability. It was really hard. So I reached out and I asked for just energy and I got some. And I know that’s not anything like a long-term caregiving thing, but I do know long-term caring takes you deeper and deeper and deeper into your need to exercise faith and makes it very, very strong indeed.

Someone says, “Can we use the pool to help push more faith into the world?”

No pushing. That’s the thing. You go in, you find yourself, you hook into the faith that’s already there for you, and you’re done. You’re already generating a powerful, powerful energy and that is done by the force. You’ve done your part when you hook into your faith, and I believe there are beings, there are powers that are in awe of human beings who in even these circumstances, even in your life right now, can reach so far in that we can find faith and we can go forward loving each other and loving life, in spite of it all. We’re already doing it, but there’s no push. There’s no push. There is connection. That’s it.

A couple more questions. “Do you have extra tips or pointers to get to the faith part in me? I couldn’t get there fully and I’m still anxious.”

Yeah, again, lean, find a book, a podcast, a loved one who allows you to rest. It’s okay for you not to reach that faith right now. You get to be broken, then you have to hope. And you have love and love will support you, but you sometimes have to reach out. And when it supports you, you take that and you see if you can go in a little deeper to the faith part. Because it’s the continuous experience of being loved in our fear that allows us to develop faith, and it is a superpower and we can’t get it without the fear.

So: “How do you dance between faith and taking action? I feel so stuck right now and go between figuring out and fixing and trying to surrender, but it feels like a struggle.”

Well, for me, I struggle along and when I see another being in need, when I feel another person’s heart breaking, my own struggle takes—it moves over into the passenger seat and it lets my faith drive. I was having a struggle earlier and I talked to Ro about it and she said, “Yeah, but the thing is you’re going to do The Gathering Room.” And I did some interviews today, and she said, “You can’t find it for yourself, but you’re going to find it for the others.” And I was like, “Hm. You make a solid point.” And here we are. And I feel very, very strong in my faith right now because of you, because of the ones who are saying, “I can’t do this. Can you help?” We’re all here for you. So that’s when I take action—when love says, “Go.”

And finally, “How do we move when everything falls apart?”

For a long time, you just don’t do anything. You let yourself fall apart. But you remember that what’s going on inside the chrysalis to the caterpillar looks like madness and annihilation. And from the outside it just looks like nothing. It looks like you’re doing nothing. And you’re falling apart in there, and you’re meant to. And at the time when you’re fully apart and you surrender all hope, and you fall forward, that’s when love catches you. That’s when the butterfly starts to form. That’s when the miracles start to come and the little God winks and the bits of connection and the new relationships and whatever it is that’s meant to carry you in your life as a butterfly, it all begins to come together when you surrender to everything falling apart.

It’s not easy. Faith is hard. It’s something you do. It’s something you practice. It is not something someone brings you on a silver platter. I had things brought to me on silver platters, basically, for a month, and I forgot to exercise my faith. So I’m talking to you, getting it back, and hoping that I can remind all of you that we’re here to support each other in the moments when our faith is weak, so that later our faith will become very, very strong.

I love you all. I’m so grateful you’re here on The Gathering Room with me, and I will be back again before you know it. Be of good cheer, people, and have faith when you can. I love you so much. Bye.