So today we’re going to talk about, a little bit more about what I’ve harped on endlessly for years, that anxiety is the mental illness of our time. In fact, it’s not a mental illness, it’s more of a normal reaction to an abnormal world that we never evolved to handle. And that creativity is actually the opposite of that anxiety. So I wrote this book and talked to you endlessly about it. And today after seeing a couple of clients, I was really taken aback by the fact that they went very easily from “I am anxious” to, “I need to be creative,” but they skipped the in-between part, the part where you are kind to yourself and where you create oases of kindness in the world around you and you fractal kindness. I almost think I should go back and make the whole book focus just on kindness because if you’re anxious and you try to be creative, I’ll tell you right now, it won’t work very well.

If you’re not anxious at all, great. You don’t need to be here, have a great life. But if you’re anxious and you want to create, but nothing’s coming, it’s because of the lack of the greatest creative fuel in human existence, which is compassion, which is kindness.

So I want to do a little exercise with us all today. I’d love you to actually grab a pencil and paper. I’ve never asked you to do this before on The Gathering Room, but I want to teach you a little script that I go through to get myself into the driver’s seat of life every day instead of just curling up into a ball and being worried. So I’m just going to assume that everybody has a pencil and you’re writing on your arm or wherever you write. You don’t need to write very much, just a couple of keywords.

So the first thing I’d like you to do is get settled and look inside you for any trace of unhappiness. So it could be anxiety, it could be anger, it could be sorrow, it could be all of the above. It could be overwhelm, it could be any feeling state.

So I’m going to write mine down. Okay. I have a little anxiety and a little sorrow today because of things that have happened. So you write down the negative feeling state, and then I want you to imagine that feeling state is being expressed by a version of you that is not inside your head. Put it out in front of you as if it’s sitting across from you. It can look like anything. I often encourage people to make this sad little part look like an animal because it’s easy to be kind to animals for many people who are not kind to themselves.

So imagine that what you’ve written down, whatever the feeling state is, is being felt by a part of you that you can see. It is separate from you. And then, now here comes the script, and you can just replay this if you want to get it, you don’t have to write it down. The first thing is you lean over to the part of you that’s not feeling 100% okay, and you say, “How are you?” And it says, “I’m a little worried. I’m a little sorrowful.”

“Tell me everything.” Okay, those three words, I’m going to put ’em into my coach training program because they are probably the most powerful thing you can do to heal yourself or another human being. “Tell me everything.”

And then if you had your pencil and paper and a lot of time, which we don’t here, but you can use it after The Gathering Room, let that anxious worried part of you or the sorrowful or the angry or whatever it is, let it tell you everything and write it out on a page if you want to. “This is why I’m upset. This is what’s gone wrong in the world. Oh my God, this is happening and I’m afraid that’s going to happen. Holy smokes. It is a tempest out there.”

So let the part of you that’s reactive to the tempest tell you everything because that’s what it really wants. It wants to be fully heard. And almost every person in that crazy world out there, many of whom are shouting and screaming very angry things at each other, what they really want most, not all of ’em, not the people at the very top, I think they’ve got their own thing going, but the vast majority of people just want someone to sit with them and witness what’s going on inside them. We are spiritual beings having a human experience, and a human experience is very, very rough on a spirit, a spiritual being, which is very, very soft.

So there’s a lot to be communicated, a lot to be heard. Let the softness in you that feels wounded or scared tell you everything it’s feeling and write it out on a page. There’s good research that shows that just doing this once could improve your mental health and your outlook and your mood and even certain health indicators for weeks or even months to come. If you sat down for 15 minutes and did this, you would have a discernible, measurable, lasting change in your mood.

So “Tell me everything” is the first keyword and then the next thing in the script, okay, there’s tell me everything, then there’s the next one: “Of course you feel that way. Of course you’re feeling awful. Oh my God, considering what’s going on around you. You’re a spiritual being in a human body having this very difficult experience. Oh my God, of course you’re feeling this way. Tell me more.”

And you just keep validating whatever you’re feeling. You don’t act on it. If you’re super angry, you say it: “Oh man!” You don’t go attack a man or whatever kind of person you’re upset with, but you let yourself thoroughly express the fear, the anger, the whatever it is. And so you just keep saying, “Tell me more, tell me more.”

And after a while, the part of you that’s feeling the negative emotion will feel satisfied that it has spoken its truth and that it has been heard because you keep saying to it—and I ask you in your mind right now, say to the anxious part, the angry part, the sad part, “Of course you feel that way. I want to hear all about it, like everything.” And just feel how that act of kindness, of listening, gives a place for the pain to flow.

And sometimes the pain flows so hard, it overwhelms us, and that’s okay. If you can just hang onto this part that keeps saying, “I’m listening, tell me everything.” And in fact, the harder things get, the more you will experience that part of you as what you would call your Higher Self or your spirit or your guidance or whatever, whatever it is, it’s very, very wise. And we can access it by listening to our own negative experiences.

Then after you’ve gotten to “Tell me everything. Well, of course you’d feel that way, of course,” then you ask yourself this, “What’s one thing I could do right now to help you feel better?” One concrete thing. Could you listen to a favorite song that comforts you? Could I play that for you? Could I get you a cup of tea or a cup of soup? It’s always cups of things. Could I give you a warm place to lie down for five minutes? Could I put on softer clothing? Anything that grounds you in the present moment in a sense of being cared for and held—wrapping yourself in a blanket is one of the most powerful things you can do—and you just do that kind thing.

And I always refer to this, so I know I’ve said this before, but I’m going to say it again. This is how Eat, Pray, Love started where there’s someone, Liz Gilbert sobbing on the floor of her bathroom that she no longer wants to be married and pouring out her whole heart to the universe and actually hearing a response. And the response was, “Go back to bed, Liz.” And she says that’s why she knew it was a divine source because it didn’t go into any of her ego’s ranting or pontificating or telling her a plan for life. It just did one kind thing.

And you see what she created out of that. Everything that I’ve been able to make in my life has come from doing one kind thing for myself. I remember once trying to write my monthly column for Oprah Magazine, month in, month out for 17 years and through all kinds of crazy travails, it was 1500 words a month. And I wanted them to be good because I had heard that when they toss the cells in women’s prisons, they find a lot of my columns under the mattress. So I better show up for those folks. Plus there are plenty of people that I met at Harvard who probably could use a little help too. So put those two people in the same room and write a column to them.

And I would be exhausted. I would be often, maybe my life was in upheaval and I would have to say, okay, write down all the things that are wrong right now. Okay, what is one kind thing I could say? And I would end up writing down something like, “It’s okay to feel self-pity. We all feel it. We love the way it squishes between our toes. Does that mean we want to live in it? Probably not.” And I would end up, I always had topics given to me, but there was always a way that the act of kindness toward myself flowed into the writing of the column. 

And then when I was into the creative flow, sure enough, all the negativity would disappear. And I would be in the space without time and without language—paradoxically because I was working in language—but it felt more like molding clay and sitting with those two people, the Harvard professor and the inmate in prison, and trying desperately to help them both with one article.

So that’s the third thing or fourth thing you do, you say, “How do you feel? Tell me everything. Of course you feel that way. What can I do for you?” I guess it’s five things. “What can I do for you?” And then you watch what wants to emerge. You watch what wants to be created because kindness is always creative.

I didn’t know that when I sat down to write my last book, but I know it now in many, many, from many different angles, from many different types of research. And it’s really sad to me how our culture jumps straight from “You are miserable” to “You have made something wonderful.” No. Everything is the kindness in between.

And if you are willing to be kind to yourself, and I’ve given you a little script to help you, if you’re willing to be kind to yourself, you will find the one way that you can create beauty that no one else ever could. That is your unique contribution to the world. And that is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet. You’ll be feeding the needs of the people.

So I’m going to take some questions, but first I thought we’d do our Space, Silence, and Stillness meditation because that is something I can often give to myself that is kind when I’m in a stressed-out place. So let’s just do it.

Get really relaxed. I hope you’ve told some of your woes to the part of you that’s listening. And then just ask yourself the very odd question: What—can I imagine the distance between my eyes? Can I imagine the distance between the top of my head and my ankles? Can I imagine the distance between my ankle bones and my knee bones? Can I imagine the space inside the atoms that extend from my knee bones to my hip bones? Can I imagine the whole volume of my torso, which is almost entirely space? Can I imagine that the medium in which I am created and recreated and recreated in every moment, that that field of stillness, silence, and space—the three S words—can I imagine that all of them are permeated with consciousness, with intention, with compassion, and specifically with kindness toward me, whoever you are? Can you imagine that all of space is permeated with kindness meant just for you and you and you and me and each of us? Can you imagine the spaces between our physical bodies alive with consciousness that it is being known?

And then finally, imagine inviting that consciousness to give you the kindest things that it can think of or the kindest things that you can ask it for. And if you have your pencil and paper as we come out of the meditation, write down one thing that you would ask the kindness to give you, and then go back into the stillness, the space, and the kindness and let it go.

My experience is the New Agers are right, it comes running right for you. And I don’t know how, and I don’t know why, but it actually works. So thank you for being in that space with me. We’re all in the same space, whether we acknowledge it or not.

And now I’ll go to some questions. So Nicole says, “Hi Martha. How do I forgive myself for messing up if my mistakes could harm another person, junior in healthcare? Thank you.”

What a sweet, generous. First of all, you’re acknowledging that you messed up, that you made a mistake, which is further than most people ever go toward integrity. And then it shows such compassion to this other person that you might’ve harmed. The fact that you’re so attentive to their pain, to the junior person you might’ve harmed, that shows how much love is in you. So let the part of you that loves that other person also love the one who made the mistake. And surely, if the other person had made the mistake, if the junior person had made the mistake and came to you and said, “I am so sorry I messed up, please forgive me,” you probably wouldn’t have much difficulty forgiving because people who acknowledge their own errors are rare and special and precious, and we try to get things done in the world. That’s how we learn. That’s called learning. Messing up, hurting ourselves and potentially others, and then saying, as one of our children’s songs says, “Oh my goodness, look at this mess. I’m the one who made it. I must confess, I guess I better clean it up.” That right there is as close to perfection as a human being can get. So, lovely.

Avi Senna 2500 says, “Quick question, can we apply this when children get upset or angry or encounter bad feelings?”

Oh, please, please, please use this. If only I had known to use this from the moment I became a mother. And it took me so many years to learn it, to sit down with someone who’s a little child who doesn’t know how to contain all the suffering, all the fear, all the chaos around us and say, “Yeah, you’re two years old and you have no control over this. I get it. Man, I feel you. I am right here and I know how it feels to be trying to crawl out of my own skin because I don’t know how to make the world safe for myself. And I see you, and it is fine to feel the way you’re feeling.” 

When I was growing up, what we used to hear most often was, “I’ll give you something to cry about.” So if you got sad about Bambi’s mother dying, I was like, “You can’t cry about it. Or you’re going to get punched in the face.” Maybe not in the face, but that was the thing: “I’ll give you something to cry about unless you stop crying.” Go the other way. Sit down and let yourself be with them in their pain and say, “Tell me everything. Tell me more.” You’d be amazed. You don’t have to come up with the solution, you just have to hear them out. And then you say, “Boy, of course you’re feeling that way. What’s one thing you would like? Would you like to go for ice cream? Would you like to watch a video with me online?” I love showing kids animal videos. You do the same thing for them, only you do it earlier before all the damage gets done. And guess what? It heals us all, whether we’re two or 20 or 120. If anybody out there’s 120, please give a shout. I’d love to know about that. Okay, so yeah, good instincts using this as apparent.

Coco Donda says, “What do you do when your soul seems to be bringing you somewhere unknown that is outside of your comfort zone, and you feel a lot of anxiety about the uncertainty and potential change in identity?”

Oh, I get this one. Yes, this has happened to me over and over again because my comfort zone is not very huge as it turns out. So I am often, if I’m going to make any positive changes in my life, I’m going to be at the edge of anxiety and uncertainty. And even when I think about it, if nothing changes, I’m still in the middle of anxiety and uncertainty because that’s the kind of planet it is. So same plan. I can’t control anything. I don’t know what’s happening, and I do not like this. It’s out beyond my comfort zone. “All right, tell me what it’s like to be outside your comfort zone. Tell me everything.” Well…. “Say more…” “Well, of course you’d feel that way.” 

Go find a friend and have them tell you that of course you feel that way. And then give yourself one kind thing and then another kind thing, and then another kind thing. And wait until the kindness says,”We could make something.” And at the moment you start making a new thing that is outside your comfort zone, the anxiety has to quiet down. It has to. It can’t be present in the moment you are fully mentally engaged in creativity. So don’t think you can jump from panic attack to finger painting and everything’s fine. I mean kindness will carry you to the point where you create and when you begin to create. 

I was feeling this way right before The Gathering Room, and I’m sitting here at the place where I often paint and oh, I was just itching to paint. Itching, I tell you. I’ll probably do it after this because it’s like taking a sedative. Oh, once you’ve calmed yourself to the point where the creativity wants to come up, going into the creativity is like going into a warm bath on a cold day. It just opens up your brain and makes it more wired for calm and creativity than to uncertainty and sorrow, more every time you make that choice. Every time you make the choice to be kind to yourself, you are creating a whole new brain that is going to be a lot happier.

All right, Sandra Lily Poem says, “When we speak to our inside, is it the inner child we speak to?”

Well, actually, yes. Yes. I would rather say it’s inner children and maybe some inner adults. I used to do this a lot when I was coaching. I’d say, you know, somebody would be stressed out and I’d say, “How old does this part of you feel?” Because often that would be related to a trauma, small or large, that they’d taken on at a certain time. And usually they said something like, “I feel 15,” or “I feel six, and that was the year my father left,” or whatever it was. And there would be a link, a historical link that was connecting their anxiety now to whatever they’d experienced in the past.

But then some people would say, “I feel 3000 years old.” Or they’d say, “I feel no age at all.” And I didn’t know how to deal with that at first, but then I encountered Internal Family Systems Therapy. And it talks about letting each and every aspect of ourselves that feels a strong feeling, let it be its own identity and just say to it, like I asked you to jot down how you feel, you could jot down the question, “What are you?” 

And if I did that today, it would probably, what came up in my mind is, “I am Wilson the sloth who came and hung out in one tree for two days when Ro and Marty”—this is not Marty talking, this is Wilson the sloth—”when Ro and Marty were running their retreat, and I just curled up in the tree.” And one day Wilson went on a big adventure. He crawled up one branch. Actually, I’m going much faster than he went. I took a film of it that last two minutes. And if you run it at 50 times normal speed, it just looks like this. 

Right now, my comfort zone is being exceeded by a part of me that feels like a sloth that can’t move that fast. I’m like, “Oh, tell me everything.” “I have to get all my closets cleaned by tomorrow. I don’t want to do that,” says Wilson the sloth. And I say, “Of course. Of course you don’t. No one would. Oh my God, Wilson, what can I do for you?” 

And Wilson the sloth says, “I just want to sit in a tree.” So I’ll go sit in a tree. So yes, you could have an inner child, you could have an inner sloth, you could have an inner 3000-year-old, you could have a ghost that comes and haunts you, whatever. It will take, the moment you start to give your sorrow or your anger or your fear of voice and start talking to it, it can present to you as any number of different forms. But each of them will be someone to whom you can extend kindness.

I don’t know if anybody here has read The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle, an old book now; when it came out, it changed me forever. And what he talks about is an experience when he was 29, he was a PhD candidate, I think in England. And he was very, very, very unhappy. And he didn’t want to live anymore, but he didn’t want to end his life and he didn’t know what to do. And one night he said to himself, “I just can’t live with myself anymore.” And he said, then his logical mind said, “Wait, wait, wait. Who’s talking? Because if I can’t live with myself, there are two people in this.” 

And at that point, he felt like he was being pulled into a sort of vortex of energy. And something inside him, he said, from his chest, said, “Resist nothing.” When he woke up the next morning, he was basically enlightened. Everything was new and fresh and beautiful, and he was intensely present. He was living almost entirely in the right side of his brain, I would say, not knowing these things well professionally, but I would guess. 

Any time you talk to another aspect of Self and give space for kindness, it’s in the space of the kindness that spirit lives, and that is the life of everything. So yeah, let the person or the animal who’s holding the suffering, let that person tell you who they are. Write it down, write it with your non-dominant hand. You’d be amazed what comes up.

All right, Joah, I can’t read this word, but I love you. And they say, “I love psychology, anthropology, and philosophy and can’t really choose a field to do a master’s. Would love to teach social sciences and coach like you. Any advice?”

Well, don’t live in Florida because they’re canceling sociology in Florida because it’s not politically okay in Florida. So what I would say, first don’t go to a state in the US where they’re outlawing social science. 

But the next thing I’d say is look for programs that connect all these things and look for individual people like Lisa Miller, the brilliant physician and neuroscientist who works, does incredible research on the psychology of spirituality. I can’t remember if she’s at Columbia right now or Stanford. Anyway, she’s very, very well credentialed. Look for someone like that to study with and let them be the sorcerer and you be the apprentice. There are more and more and more. 

If anybody’s interested in scientists who don’t mind being a little woo woo, watch a talk called “Is the Sun Conscious?” by Rupert Sheldrake. Ro just sent that to me. And he’s just willing to apply science to all kinds of questions that are taboo in science these days. So if you’re going into academic fields, find a person who can be your mentor and who doesn’t mind this kind of stuff because this kind of stuff probably wouldn’t go down well at Harvard.

Okay, Flor de Soul says, “How do I begin to lean into my purpose at creativity or kindness for myself while in the middle of postpartum? I’m so exhausted but also anxious because I know there’s so much more for me.”

The way you can do this when you are totally overwhelmed as all young parents are—if there’s any young parent out there who’s not completely exhausted, I suggest you write a book on how to do this because the rest of us were exhausted. So the important thing is when you’ve had a massive change like the birth of a child, you don’t want to make long-term plans because you are in the process of being transformed into somebody different, the parent of this new person who’s in the world. 

And you don’t even know who this person really is. Pardon me, but I just call them plasma pets till they’re about six months old and start showing different personalities. They’re adorable. I love them. But you can’t plan long term. You can’t even really plan the afternoon. You have to get so intensely present to be with a baby and caring for a baby and not lose your mind. Also, though, find any moments you can in the day to say to yourself, “Of course you’re exhausted. Oh my God, you haven’t slept in two weeks. You can’t even take a shower. This little person is your responsibility and you don’t have enough strength to care for yourself, let alone another human. Of course, you’re terrified and overwhelmed. What’s one kind thing you could do for yourself now?”

For me, it was starting to read fiction again after years of not reading it, which was ultimately what led to my choosing writing as a career. That one thing, I wanted to do one kind thing. Couldn’t watch a TV show, not time for that when you’ve got kids. But I could read a few paragraphs of a book and then put it down and then let it simmer in my mind. And that one act of kindness toward myself became much of my career. All us parents out here are like, “We get you. You’ll get through this.”

Gail! Hi, Gail from our Pure Wild Self re retreat in Costa Rica. Gail knew Wilson the sloth. Gail says, “What if the act of creativity sparks anxiety? I can calm myself down, but then when I return to my writing project, it flares up again.”

That’s because you’re no longer writing to the kindness, you’re writing to the culture. You’re writing to whoever’s leaning over your shoulder, your English teacher from high school, your ex-husband, whoever. I don’t even know if Gail has an ex-husband, so I’m using this hypothetically, but it’s very, very hard to keep the culture out of your brain when you start to create. 

And what I suggest you do is write to one loved one who will probably never see what you write. Put all the love in your heart onto the page and think of only that person. To me, it was the person in the prison whom I never met and some Harvard professor who was in so much emotional pain they would be willing to listen to me. And sometimes it was other people. Sometimes it was my biological children. Sometimes it was the people I left behind when I left Mormonism. I’ve always, and when I draw or paint or anything I do, it’s always to link two souls together, minimum, and sometimes many more than that. But it just takes one because that’s what kindness needs. It needs two people so that one can be kind to the other.

Do that for yourself today. Please, please, please. And then do more kindness and more kindness and see that you don’t have to force creativity, that kindness alone generates creation and you were born to learn to use that.

So I love you very, very much. Thank you for being here and have a wonderful time until we meet again, all of us all around the world in the Gathering Room. Thank you, babies.