And every time somebody comes to fix the electricity, they find out that the boiler needs replacing or whatever. It just keeps going forward and it’s quite frustrating. It seems slower than it should be.

I just came from talking—a quarter. I go in, we all have a sort of convention of the people who have done the Wayfinder Coach Training, and we just talk and I answer questions and coach people and things. I was working with this wonderful Wayfinder Coach lady who was thinking she just wasn’t making enough progress fast enough, and she had a completely different situation from mine, but that thought, “I’m not making enough progress. I need to make more progress. I need to move forward.”

As I worked with her, I thought, “This is the universal pernicious belief that dogs so many of us.” I mean, there are a few of them, but the “I need to be making more progress” is so deep in any kind of modern cultural setting. It is just, I don’t know, maybe y’all in different countries around the world can say, “No, not so much in my culture.” But everywhere I’ve been in the world, I have met people who are like, we’ve got to be making more progress. We’ve got to be making more progress.

And I have to say, people who want to save the world and heal hearts and do all these things and those of us who are looking around at the horrors of the world, we get caught and we’re not making enough progress. We’re not making enough progress. In our personal lives, it’s like “I have goals, I have dreams. I’m not making enough progress.” It’s such a tedious, exhausting belief.

And one of the things that I live by is my idea that if something’s weighing you down and making you miserable, if a belief is weighing you down and making you miserable, it’s not true. It’s not your integrity because your integrity makes things move forward, makes you feel better, makes you feel healthier. Not moral integrity, structural integrity. If you believe the truth, you’re in structural integrity.

If you have a belief in your head innocently, not because you sat down and thought up a bad thing, because you were taught something that is universally believed but is still not the truth for you at the very deepest level, that’s not in structural integrity. And our job is, well, my job is as a coach, but I think all of us as individuals, we need to find the places in our lives that are out of our structural integrity and figure out what our truth is.

And this thought, “I’m not making enough progress” is just so frequently what I find people struggling with and what I struggle with myself. And we were doing the Byron Katie work, if you haven’t discovered the Byron Katie work, Google Byron Katie, B-Y-R-O-N-K-A-T-I-E and blessings, I mean she’s brilliant. She’s a master and she will change your life.

Anyway, part of her method involves taking the thought that is causing you pain and considering the absolute opposite of it. So we got to that part of the work and this wonderful coach, her thought that she was struggling with was, “I need to be making more progress.” And the turnaround, she came to, the opposite of the thought was, “More progress needs to be making me.”

It doesn’t always have to be grammatical. In fact, those are some of the best ones. They sort of crack open the mind because they’re so unexpected. So I was sitting there thinking, “What does it mean for progress to make me?” And I realized that this is actually pretty profound. It made me wonder what is progress anyway? And I looked it up and it turns out that progress is “forward movement toward a destination.”

But what is a destination? The very word destination contains “destine.” What are you destined to move toward? Because real progress is going to be movement toward what you are destined to be.

And I thought about the times when I could not make enough progress. I wasn’t making enough progress. The 12 years that I could not crack the puzzle of my chronic pain and I was just basically bedridden and really my life was severely impaired because of the pain. And for all those 12 years, I was like, “I’m not making enough progress. I’m not making enough progress.” But maybe progress was making me.

If it was movement toward my destiny, then—follow this closely—if I had been healthy and able to finish my PhD dissertation in a flash and get a bestselling book going and become a tenured professor and all the things that I had dreamed about, if that had all happened quickly and easily, I would just be teaching sociology in a college somewhere. And I probably wouldn’t have, well I for sure would not have lived the life that I’ve lived.

And it’s the very experiences that I treasure the most, the ones I would feel I was really destined to have, those are the very things I would not be doing if I hadn’t spent those 12 years lying in bed with my three kids gamboling about on the bed because that’s the only place I raised them really. And trying to deal with the fact that I wasn’t matching any of the culture’s markers for what I was supposed to be doing, I was so incapacitated.

And I was thinking about the famous—John Bunyan’s famous book, The Pilgrim’s Progress, which was sort of this, it was a book about a guy who was trying to get to happy. He was trying to get to happy, which Bunyan saw as heaven, and he has to go along this road. And so much of our culture is taken from that story. He has to go through this Slough of Despond, which I’ve always referred to like “I’m despondent. I’m in the Slough of Despond.” I didn’t know that was John Bunyan. Vanity Fair. He has to go to the Vanity Fair and then he has to break free. He has to grapple with the Giant Despair and he has to overcome it. And he just has to go through all these really common stumbling blocks to make any progress.

So I was thinking about all of y’all out there in the world and the different definitions you’ve been given of progress and what you think you’re supposed to be doing—today, tomorrow, this week. What are you supposed to achieve? And what’s been pointed out to you as the place you’re meant to go? Usually, your cultural environment will tell you it’s a model of something you’ve already seen. So you’re supposed to be like your parents. Or if that doesn’t work, you’re supposed to be a famous celebrity, or you’re supposed to be like Mother Teresa. I guess she was a famous celebrity in an odd way. But you’re supposed to be some model of perfection that you haven’t chosen, and nobody knows if your destiny is anywhere close to that destination.

So wherever you think you’re supposed to go, just stop and check and say, “Does this feel like it’s getting me past things like vanity and despair and despondency? Does it feel like I’m becoming lighter and freer and more joyful?” Because on the way to your destiny, that’s how you feel. You get through the hard stuff and you push forward and you leave it all behind. And very often, that comes because your conscious intentions about where you want to go are frustrated.

So think of it as your higher Self. You really think you’re supposed to be like a race car driver like your father and his father before him. And then you are in an accident and you can never again drive a car and you think, “I’ve been completely stymied by the world and the universe hates me.” And then it turns out that what you’re really meant to be is a poet, and you would never have done that if you were out driving race cars.

I think every single one of us has a destination that is different from everybody else’s. And the way to it, the progress toward it, is full of these explosive little moments of freedom when you get past whatever it is, the Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair. When you get past the thinking that told you you had to make progress toward a destination that wasn’t actually yours.

We just went to see Liz Gilbert in Poughkeepsie, New York, where it was the second night of her book tour for her wonderful new book All the Way to the River, which you absolutely have to read. And it’s about Liz’s relationship with her most recent partner, Rayya Elias, who was her best friend for years and years, and then Rayya was diagnosed with terminal cancer and Liz left her marriage because she realized she was in love with Rayya and she didn’t want Rayya to die not knowing that.

So here’s this Eat, Pray, Love phenomenon, right? Like Liz has maybe one of the most famous marriages in the world because at the end of Eat, Pray, Love, she finds her wonderful husband, her wonderful Brazilian husband who is in real life an amazing, wonderful guy. But she’s confronted now with the prospect of watching Rayya die without ever having told Rayya how she feels. And that was not tolerable. And so Liz actually ended her marriage to go be with Rayya, and everyone who had read Eat, Pray, Love, probably almost everyone who had read it would’ve said her destiny was that marriage. Her destiny was fulfilled at the end of Eat, Pray, Love. Why in the world would she throw that away and go be with someone who turned out to descend into addiction and habit?

It’s a very, very intense book. And what happened was very intense. I promise you the book is very truthful. I promise you it’s very truthful. And a lot of people don’t understand why she would’ve done that. She had achieved, she was at her destination. She was at the place where the GPS says, “You have reached your destination.” And she left! And she went to a scenario that was death and addiction and despair and the deepest suffering she’d ever had. And at one point she talks about in the middle of all this, Russian hackers got into her bank accounts and stole all her money. And she’s walking on the street, just with everything, she said it was like it was raining hammers.

There are times in your life when it’s raining hammers. And she looked up in the heavens and she said the weirdest prayer anyone ever said, she said, “God, make it worse.” Which was kind of her because Liz is so focused on goals and destinations, when she decides to do something or be something, she does it 1000%. So for her to turn from her social cultural definition of her destiny toward whatever the Divine had planned for her, she wanted the instructions clear. She wanted no progress toward what she had once valued and full-on, full speed ahead toward whatever the Divine had planned.

That is a model of something that in I hope a much lesser, milder degree could be happening to all of us every day when we can’t quite make it work, when the kids are sick and we don’t get to work, when work is overwhelming and we aren’t there for our kids, when the person we love is not reacting the way we want them to react, when we do the hard thing and it turns out to be a failure in the eyes of the world.

There are all these places where we can’t make forward progress toward the things we think are our destination. But it’s progress making us. It’s the pilgrim’s progress saying, “Not that way, sweetheart, not that way.” And we say, “Then what?” And it says, “I can’t tell you yet, but it will be wonderful when you get there.”

Okay, will it be wonderful the whole time? “No, no. You’re going to find your progress stymied over and over and over again. You’re going to have to accept what looks like failure, despair, stupidity. You’re going to have to walk through a rain of hammers saying, “God, make it worse” before you come out on the other side. But if you do, it will break away every part of you that is not headed toward your destiny.

And you can use every hammer that falls from the heavens to knock off another piece of ego and to say, “Okay, there goes the giant despair. I finally got through it. There goes the Slough of Despond. I know how to handle that. I’m walking forward, I’m walking forward, I’m walking forward.”

And eventually what happens in Pilgrim’s Progress, of course, is that he gets to heaven. And he gets there free without any of the entanglements that he’s been through and without any of the burdens he’s carried. He just walks into the celestial city and he finds himself at home again. But he would not have been at home if progress had not come in to make him.

So if you’re afraid you’re not making enough progress, allow progress, real progress, progress toward your destiny to come in and make you. It might not be fun, but it’s going to be worth it, I promise you.

Okay, so here are some questions. First one, “I love the idea of moving toward freedom, but it feels a bit self-centered and logistical sometimes. Oh, egotistical sometimes. How do I overcome this duality?”

Well, Toni Morrison said the function of freedom is to free someone else. You cannot free anyone else from a position of not free. So it’s like being able to swim. Is it self-centered to learn to swim for yourself? Okay, maybe it’s a little self-centered, you don’t want to drown. But if somebody else is drowning and you haven’t learned to swim because you don’t want to be self-centered and you jump in and try to save them, you both drown.

Getting your own self into integrity, developing what is necessary for yourself for progress to make you, there will be times when you focus on mastering something that is personal. And in every case, if it moves you toward freedom, the result will be that you can set others free and you cannot do it from a place of not free. So yeah, do it for others if not for yourself.

Okay, question: “How do we know if we are progressing?”

Well, here’s how you know: You’re on earth and you’re a person and you’re alive. That’s it. Because this damn place is always making us, it is bashing us with hammers. God, have you checked the internet today? There’s enough hammers out there for all of us and then some. And even if we’re not aware of it, experience itself is making us, and suffering in particular is making us.

So if you look at your life and it’s not perfect, you’re definitely being made progress of. Progress is definitely making you. And if you look at your life and you’re not suffering at all, just wait five minutes, it’s coming. And if you’re in the middle of deep suffering and you can turn that around and say, “This is making me, it is making me.”

Liz said during her talk, “Nobody comes back from a really nice spa weekend and says, ‘Wow, I had a massage and I sat by the pool with my friends, and I really understand the limits of my endurance now. I really understand what I came to this earth for after that session on the pool deck with the chocolates.'” She said it’s always the things, it’s always the times that try our souls that teach us who we are and who we’re meant to be and enlarge our capacity for joy and for love, and of course for freedom.

Question: “What practice would you recommend when you feel lost, are struggling financially, and all signs indicate that the things you want to manifest aren’t coming?”

This describes most of my life just as it describes most of your life. There are far fewer times when we succeed than there are times when we fail. There are far fewer times when we don’t struggle. Yeah, far fewer times when we aren’t struggling than when we are. It just seems to be built in, again, to sort of the fabric of human life.

There will always be periods where things just don’t always work out. And if you read, for example, biographies of famously successful people, you will find, and I know this from coaching and I often say it, the difference between people who have really successful lives and those who consider themselves failures is that the successful people have failed more.

They fail and they fail and they fail and they fail, but they fail better every time. They fail better. Back to Liz, she was talking about how she wrote after Rayya’s death. She wrote a novella that didn’t get published. She wrote a novel that she wrote, she worked on for five years and it’s brilliant, but it didn’t get published for other reasons, which she absolutely could not control. And I think she wrote one more book. She wrote five books that didn’t make it before this book got published. Oh, and one about New York in the forties with showgirls.

She wrote all this stuff, and her success was still not assured. She still had things that weren’t published or that were stopped from publication. And that would look like being robbed of success. That would be all signs indicating you can’t manifest what you want for a lot of people. o put in that much work. Five years working on a book that is brilliant, brilliantly researched, gorgeously written, and it just doesn’t, basically it was offensive to some people in the world, and so it didn’t get published.

That would really bite for most of us. And I watched Liz go through it and she was like, “Okay, I see why. I absolutely see their point. Fine, I’ll write another one. I’m done with that one. It made of me what it needed to make of me and I thank it greatly and I’m moving on.”

So people who are wildly successful like that are always turning around failure to make it into success, and it is a pattern of thought to think progress is always making me. And if you can get that thought in you in place of “I’m not making enough progress,” your whole life will look different. And you’ll feel successful all the time because news flash, you are successful all the time when it comes to moving forward toward your destiny. Always. You are always succeeding at that, whether you’re feeling good, bad, or indifferent.

So when the things you manifest aren’t coming to be, figure out how progress is making you. And when you get to it, you’ll feel the ring of truth and you’ll say, “Okay, I can deal with this,” and you’ll move forward. This is from my own experience as well as Liz’s and a thousand other people I’ve coached.

Okay, question: “I want to devote my time to making progress on my dreams, but I’m afraid when I come up for air, I’ll find myself alone. My loved ones might feel abandoned and leave me. Advice to get over this fear?”

“Making progress on my dreams.” So I’m assuming that those are things that take you away from your family. What I would suggest is that if you have a dream that takes you away from a relationship, it is almost certainly coming from the western, modern, “WEIRD”—Western Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic—nations culture that dominates the world right now. In that culture, family, relationships, and success, the things you’re supposed to make progress toward are different, but that’s a false dichotomy.

If you can blend your dreams with your relationships, for example, you’re a writer and it’s a solitary thing. I can’t think of anything more solitary than that, but part of your writing practice is that you write with a group of friends and that you read the things you’ve written to your loved ones every day—and I’ve done this, I’m using this as an example because it’s something I’ve done. I’ve let writing pull me away from people, and I’ve let writing pull me toward people.

Same with exercise or with building a company or literally anything. Take away the false dichotomy that says “I have to put on a suit and go to an office and be away from my family.” Find a way to blend relationship with task because those two things are separated by our culture, but they are falsely separated. For hundreds of thousands of years, people got along together, getting the things they needed to survive together. And you can make it work that way if you get creative and let progress make you.

Question: “Is it all about courage? Is that what it comes down to?”

How beautifully you put that. Yes, it is all about courage. That’s what it comes down to. Truth plus courage equals radically the fastest possible progress toward your destination.

I’m going to say that again. I can’t remember what I just said. Truth plus courage. Truth plus courage. Yes. Integrity plus courage. Knowing what your truth is, knowing what you know, feeling what you feel, saying what you mean, and doing what you really feel is right. If you have the courage to act in the truth, in integrity, you shoot straight toward your destiny, your destination like a rocket.

And a lot of people will stand around you and say, “You just trashed everything that was going to get you to your destination. You stopped making progress when you, oh, I don’t know, quit your job, your marriage, your religion, your industry, all your training in one year and went off to do something very ill-defined that you didn’t understand.” This is what I did. Did it take courage? Yes, but I was in so much suffering that it would’ve taken more courage to keep suffering.

It’s like Anais Nin said, “The day came when the courage it took to blossom became greater than the courage it took to stay tight in a bud.” So if you have enough courage to move away from suffering—and suffering gives you lots of incentive—you start to go straight toward your destiny without many of the cultural fetters that stop most of us. Courage. Yeah. And courage is doing something when you’re scared spitless. So if you’re scared, that doesn’t mean you’re not courageous.

All right: “Do you believe that people or entities or some damn thing can put a spell on you to block your progress on a specific thing? Sounds crazy, but a real question.”

I think if something feels like it’s doing that, then either the person or a thing you’re around, if it has that negative spell feeling to it, it’s like Superman hits his kryptonite and he starts to become weak. Either that thing is not part of your destination in life, or your beliefs about how to fit in with that group are going counter to your destination in life.

So if you feel like something’s been putting a spell on you, either move away from the thing or the person or the people, or question the beliefs you hold about how you have to interact with them, how you have to make them, impress them, make them happy, set them free. Whatever it is, if you feel negatively entranced, leave. Either in your body or in your mind, or both.

All right, question: “How can we stay open to trust, maybe when we’re making progress in terms of our soul’s evolution, if we’re not making progress in an ego way?”

Here’s the thing. If you are raging because you can’t have what you want, and it feels dark and negative and you’re basically throwing an emotional tantrum because you’re not making enough progress, that is progress making you. It’s saying, “No, sweetheart, no, I can see you’re having a tantrum.” It’s like we’re two year olds and we want blue M&Ms, and there are no blue M&Ms, and then we just have a meltdown. The world doesn’t give us what we want and we start to scream. And the loving parent of the universe says, “Sweetheart, no, you don’t get what you want right now. It’s not the best thing for you. Come on. I’ve got so many things planned for you. Things that are wonderful things.”

And we can keep having the tantrum, which I think is good sometimes, get it all out there, or you can relax and start to wonder, not “Why is this HAPPENING to me?” but “Why IS this happening to me? Is progress making me here? Is my destination forming my psyche, my soul right now?” And as you start to wonder that, it begins to open itself to you, and that’s an exciting time.

Question: “How would you suggest or encourage that I view the trauma of being abandoned as well as the trauma of living way out of my own integrity and the feeling that I’m not healing enough?”

Here’s the paradox, sweetheart. The more broken you were, the stronger you heal at the broken places. So I used to think, “Man, I was broken beyond repair. This is pathetic.” And later I came to think that being so deeply broken meant that I could be so strong when I healed and that that was a gift that was given me. Progress was making me by giving me some pretty serious trauma and abandonment issues. If those are extreme, if it’s raining hammers, ask for more because the progress that is making you is turning you into something really strong and really joyful.

Okay, final question: “How do we know when we are on the right path of progress making us?”

I think it’s when we can surrender every day and allow it to happen. If you can get up every day and say, I do this every day. I get up, I’m like, “Oh, I feel like crap. All right.” I surrender my resistance to how I’m feeling. I surrender my resistance to like the tasks I have to do today. I don’t like them. Okay, I don’t like them. I own that, but I surrender my resistance. I don’t do the things that I don’t want to do and I don’t have to do. When I have to do something, or something affects me that I don’t like, surrender allows me to feel that progress is making me and that it is loving and that it is beneficial.

I forgot the Space, Silence, and Stillness meditation. We’re going to do that for one minute and then we’re going to go. Okay, so look at your screen. Take a deep breath, try to watch the space between your screen and your eyes, and then ask yourself the brain-changing question: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes?

Can I imagine the distance between the top of my head and the bottom of my chin? Can I imagine the distance between the top of my head and my heart? Can I imagine the space that makes up almost all the matter of my entire body? Can I imagine I am made mostly of space? Can I imagine the stillness that is always there below the sounds of life? Can I imagine the stillness that holds every action?

Can I imagine that space, silence, and stillness love me wildly and limitlessly and are making me into the happiest, most wildly adventurous, delighted, tickled, beloved creature the world has ever seen? Can I imagine that?

You’ll find that the more you imagine that, the more quickly progress will make you. Thank you, everyone. Thank you for showing up. I love you so much. See you next time on The Gathering Room. Bye.