So we just decided, yeah, okay, we know that. If you’re sitting in a bar and somebody dangerous comes in, you can feel it. If you’re talking to a friend and they suddenly become distracted, you can feel it. One of the things that I’ve experienced a lot, Ro experienced this the other day. We were driving along and she had a very strong sense of connection with someone she hasn’t seen for a long time and we were trying to figure out why it was. And then I said, I bet that person read your poem on Liz Gilbert’s Letters from Love. If you haven’t gone to Liz Gilbert’s Letters from Love or I think it’s on Roey’s Substack as well. Ro wrote this incredible poem. Anyway, we have energy, we can feel each other.

The only time I’ve ever completely, this is what convinced me, actually, that we are energetically connected. I’ve had people die, loved ones die, and they’re gone. And I am aware of that and the sense of yearning for them is strong. But I’ve never had an experience like one that happened when someone I cared about was given a date rape drug. So rohypnol, the thing about rohypnol is it doesn’t allow you to lay down memory tracks. You can go and do things and it looks like you’re completely conscious, but you’re actually not tracking memories. And when she woke up, she was in the hospital, she’d fallen in a lavatory and hit her head. So whoever gave her the date rape drug, I don’t know who they were or what happened, but she woke up in the hospital. Well, I was somewhere else doing a seminar, like hundreds of miles away and walking along a path, and suddenly this person disappeared from my internal screen and I was like, I have an internal screen?

All right, sorry about that. It was a technological snafu and it accompanied the moment I was telling you about how there was a technological snafu in my own internal energy system. This person that I cared about was given a medication that made her brain go blank and suddenly she disappeared from my internal screen. I could not feel her. And it was so bizarre because I didn’t know that I could feel people. I just felt that they were always there. And if people died, that feeling doesn’t go away for me when people die. But when she was on that medication, she was gone and I started calling her, calling and calling. She didn’t pick up, she didn’t pick up. Finally the next morning, she suddenly came back onto the screen and I was like, okay, that was weird. I called her again and she told me the whole story about the date rape drug and the hospital and all the things.

So I don’t know if anything bad happened to her while she was on that drug. I hope it didn’t. But the fact is it shut down her energy in a way that I couldn’t feel. This convinced me we have energy, we can connect. We can connect in the same room, we can also connect over distance. We’re also projecting energy. And if we project energy without knowing we’re doing it, we make ourselves vulnerable. So for example, if you are willing to do anything for anybody and you’re projecting that energy all the time, everybody will want you to do things for them. Everybody will come take advantage of that. It’s like the very people who are looking for someone else to live their lives, if your energy says, “Come to me, I will live your life for you. I will do everything and give you everything you could ever need,” there are people out there, most people are like, “Ugh, no, I don’t want you to live my life. I want to live my own life.” But there are people who are looking for that the way sharks are sniffing for blood in the water and they’ll gather around you. Most of us have pretty clear energy. What’s going on, Ro?

Would you mind just making an announcement? No one on Facebook can hear you. I’m turning Facebook off.

Okay, no one on Facebook can hear me. We’re turning Facebook off and asking people to go to Instagram. Please go to Instagram. This is so funny because it’s exactly what I’m talking about. That energy gets interrupted and if you have never affected an electronic machine, you are not having the same life I have. I learned some computer programming from a computer scientist who used to sit next to me, and stroke for stroke, we would make the same input into the code in our different computers, and his would work and mine would not. And finally he said, “Okay, I’m going to tell you something that computer scientists know. We don’t really talk about it, but everyone knows it’s true. When you’re tired and frustrated and under pressure, sometimes you just mix up the computer, you just interfere with its electronics. So what I want you to do is type in all your code. I’ll check your code, then I want you–” because he couldn’t be with me all the time. He said, “I want you to stand up, press enter on your computer and then run as far as you can, as fast as you can, to let the computer do its thing.”

So yes, I believe there’s something about electromagnetism in our energy. Now suppose you have a very clean and integrous energy. This is my whole thing that if you are in total integrity, your energy is very clear, it’s very pure and it doesn’t attract negativity. It actually makes it hard for people to be negative around it if you have a very strong calm energy. So people who don’t aren’t aware that they have an energetic field often just feel like it’s chaotic. I was in an airport recently on a day when the day after a bunch of flights had been canceled and it was packed with all these people trying to get home.

And I know you’ve been in airports or bus stations or places where people are having a rough time and the energy was like being in a storm at sea. It was really intense. And everybody could feel it. Everybody was uptight, everybody was anxious. In situations like that, I’ve spent my whole life learning to be calm anyway, to be the calmest thing in the room, and it’s actually the calmest energy that has the most power. And I learned this when I worked with horse whisperers and they would tell me how a herd of horses, could be a hundred horses, they will choose as their leader the calmest horse. The calmest horse in the herd is the one whose energy draws all the other horses. It’s so funny, the electricity is going all wonky on this broadcast.

So here’s my point. Most of you all know that there’s an energetic self and you’re interacting with other people. You know when someone has a bad energy, you know how to send a “get away from me” energy or a “come hither” energy. But here’s what you might not know, and that is when you see a negative pattern, like a certain type of person keeps accosting you or a certain type of event, social event keeps happening around you. People argue a lot. People get angry, people seem needy, and it just happens over and over and over again. Think of yourself as a lighthouse and you’re broadcasting your energy and it goes in a full 360-degree circle all the way out. But say in your psyche, there is one thought, let’s just say it’s one thought that is not true to your deepest self. So it’s out of your integrity.

And that thought may be something like “I need to help others, I need to make other people’s lives work.” I just chose that one because as a life coach, I really have it badly. So what happens is actually I can’t make other people’s lives work. But for a long time I had a belief that I could. So think if you have a belief and it’s not true for you, as your light goes out from the lighthouse, it’s like a piece of schmutz. It’s like a piece of dirt on the lens of the lighthouse. And as the light goes out, it goes out a long way, this little piece of schmutz creates a slice of darkness. And in that darkness people can come—energetic aggressors—it’s sort of defense against the dark arts. People can sneak up on you, as it were. So if you believe “I’m supposed to make everyone else’s life work,” most people will just think, “Oh, she’s kind of codependent.” But then there are others who are like, “Someone’s got to make my life work. Someone’s got to make my life work.” And they are going, and they find that belief in you, and they swim straight toward you.

And because it’s in your dark spot, they can get to you. And suddenly you’re in another one of those awful situations or relationships that you hate so much, but they keep happening. Where is it going on? What you have to do is get those similar situations, line them all up and say, what do they have in common? Needy people keep coming at me and wanting things. All right, why are they doing that? There’s a belief in my belief system that’s bringing them in because it’s not true for me. Here they come. And they’re giving you the message you need to know. So they’re saying, “You need to make my life work.”

That intense insistence, that echoes your belief that you need to make their life work. So that is the place you have to clean that up and mend the energy, mend your shields. And you do it by whenever someone comes at you with something unpleasant, energetically unpleasant, notice what they want, and see if you believe you’re supposed to give it to them. You’re supposed to work really hard for other people. You are supposed to deny yourself. You are supposed to… I mean, some people have narcissistic beliefs, but I think everybody listening to The Gathering Room is more likely to have the opposite. To have beliefs about serving the world: “I have to be in pain to make people happy. I have to work myself harder than I can possibly work every day of my life.” These things are spots on the lighthouse lens, and they send out beams of darkness and they make us vulnerable to situations that are really broken.

And sometimes we can get very entangled in them and it’s extraordinarily painful and frustrating. But once it adds up to the point where you can see the pattern, it’s giving you the location of the schmutz on your shield. “All these people are here thinking that I should drive them to work. Okay, where’s the belief that says I should drive people to work?” Get rid of it, question it. Notice how negative it is, talk to other people about it. Dissuade yourself.

And as that belief goes away, the light will shine clear, and nobody’s able to sneak up on you in that slice of darkness. I know I’m mixing a metaphor. That’s part of my problem. All right, so let’s look at your questions.

No questions? Goodness. All right, so usually we have questions at this point, but let’s just do a lesson.

Oh, Tess says, “How do you get rid of a belief?” All right, super great, all right. What you want to do is go to the people that are annoying you the most or making you feel most desperate or depressed and write down exactly how miserable you are about them. “I’m so overwhelmed by people who need me to do things for them and I’m so exhausted.” So you write that down and then you say, “Why am I doing this?” The reason you will have created this over and over and over, I mean we all get tired from time to time, but the reason we do it over and over and over is that we have a belief that is causing it to trigger other people.

So you say, “I should overwork myself.” Okay, that’s the belief, and you really believe it. Do the work of Byron Katie on that belief. Write it down and ask yourself, “Is that true? Can I absolutely know that I should overwork myself?” And you wait until that question goes down to your heart. “Can I absolutely know that I should overwork myself?” If the statement is not true for you, a peace will come into your heart and then a quiet assurance. “No, I’m not supposed to overwork myself,” even if you still believe it.

So the first question of the Byron Katie work is, “Is that true?” The second one is, “Can I absolutely know that thought is true?” And you really ask your heart, not just your head. The third question is, “How do I react and what happens when I believe that thought?” And you can start to look at, “Oh, I get exhausted.People come in on me, I get blindsided. I don’t know what’s happening. They sneak up on me in the dark, it seems, and suddenly they’re everywhere and I feel miserable and depleted and I get sick,” and all this stuff. You write it down. That’s what happens in how you react when you believe that thought. That is not the way truth makes us feel, and it’s not the way truth causes us to interact with our environment. Okay, so then the final question is, “Who would I be without that story?” So I always say, imagine you’re just, you have   a tiny, tiny little neurological event and it just takes away your capacity to think the thought “I should overwork myself.” It’s gone. You can’t think it. You can’t imagine it, you can’t remember it. Who are you?

In the moment that you are not believing that, your lighthouse shines clear and you may feel freer, you may feel more relaxed. When somebody comes and says, “Do this for me,” you might say, “I’m sorry, I can’t,” you’ll just behave differently.

And then the last step of the Byron Katie work is to consider the opposite thought to see if it’s as true, as truer, than your original thought. So “I should overwork myself” becomes “I should not overwork myself.” Can you find any evidence for that? So it’s more detailed than that, but that’s the basic Byron Katie work. And I have used it like a mental scalpel to dislodge beliefs from my head when they were creating these negative patterns by putting schmutz on my energy shields.

Okay. All right, so Emily says, “Does this work the same way with whether or not you seem to attract financial ease or specific to between people?” It works between people and it also works very strongly with money. Money is just an idea. It’s a human-made, imaginative value source. It’s not even something you can touch. And even if it were gold, what good is that? You can’t eat it. So Emily, not Emily. “Money is energy.” I almost said, “Money is Emily.” So Emily, you better look for a windfall. So yeah, I had all these beliefs, and you may too, that you have to work very hard for money. “Only bad people have tons of money. You shouldn’t have much money. You don’t deserve it.” I had all kinds of beliefs about money that I had to get out of to just pay the mortgage. And I can say that as you clean it up, as you clean up your belief system, the world starts to react much more sanely to you.mAnd my financial fortunes increased hugely as a result of my mending my shields, my energy shields about money.

Eloquent Sonia says, “How do we clean up the schmutz?” I just did the Byron Katie work. That’s my go-to thing. I really, really use that a lot. Can’t recommend it more highly. Go to the work of byron katie.com or just Google “Byron Katie.” You’ll find it all laid out for free.

Okay, Penguin—and then a long number—says, “What do you do when you set a boundary and it hurts someone and it sends you into a shame spiral? It keeps happening.” Okay? So if you set a boundary like “I can’t stay up late with you, I’m not getting enough sleep, I’m sorry, I’m going to bed an hour earlier than you want me to,” and they say, “Oh, I was so alone for that hour, I can’t believe how bad…” and you go into the shame spiral. You believe you’re not supposed to do anything that upsets anyone. You have a belief that it’s possible to be someone who never upsets anyone. You would have to believe that it’s possible for you to live with less than you’re able to live with. Like if I said, “Look, I need a thousand calories just to get through the day, and if I don’t get it, I will eventually starve to death. So I need to have that.” Somebody might decide that I was trying to take from them or that I should survive on less or whatever. It’s not negotiable. Boundaries are things we set to keep ourselves whole.

And Brené Brown did some amazing research. I was telling Andrew Huberman about this. He is an amazing person. Watch his podcast. Listen to it. Not just the one with me. He’s awesome. Anyway, I was telling him about the Brené Brown study that showed that people who have massive amounts of compassion also have one other thing in common, and that is sky-high, rock-solid boundaries. They have shields with no schmutz on ’em. They take exactly as much space as they need in the world, and therefore they are whole and able to give, give, give, give, give. They are deeply compassionate because they are highly boundaried. If every time you set a boundary, someone says “myeh” you go into a shame spiral, the belief is: “I should be ashamed when someone says ‘myeh.'” Is that true? Please study up. I think you’ll find it’s not.

Okay. Delia Lincourt says, “How do you know when your energy is creating an impact you want versus not? The world goes as you wish it would or not. And how do you handle times when you feel like the wrong people are getting attached to the good energy?” Well, you find the belief that says, “I should tolerate these people that don’t feel good to me.” I’ve done that a lot in my life, had the belief I should tolerate the presence of people because they want to be near me, even though it’s not comfortable for me. I will tell you this for free. You need to do the work on that, or you will have some very negative relationship endings and it will be because you were trying to be loving. It’s how it works. So if somebody’s attached to you, and it doesn’t feel good to you, detach your own energy. You don’t owe them anything that does not feel energetically healthy to you.

Sidney Lotus says, “Can we energetically fix some of these beliefs, not from convincing ourselves cognitively by changing our thoughts?” Yeah, it’s usually a thought that causes the belief to stay stuck. But sometimes, especially if we were socialized to something when we were very small, it’s just a twist in the gut. It’s like, “Oh, I’m hurting someone. I can’t, when I’m sad other people are sad, I may never show sadness. It’s wrong.” These things can get in at a very deep emotional level, very helpful to have therapy at that point. I love Internal Family Systems therapy. There’ll be a little baby in there that will hold this pattern and you’ll need to comfort and love the baby. Don’t have enough time to go into that. But yeah, I think if you energetically fix it, you need to use either, if you’re not using language, which is the most difficult way, but also very powerful, you can use visualizations. You can use IFS. You can use things from Acceptance and Commitment therapy that are images. So they’re not from the verbal left hemisphere, they’re from the visual and proprio receptive parts of the brain. And you can do visualizations that fix that. We’re going to do our Space, Silence, and Stillness meditation in a minute, and we’re going to see how we can mend shields by going to that place.

All right, BonnieBond34 says, “How do I not feel guilty about moving on with life after the death of my daughter?” Well, first of all, I am so, so sorry for your loss, and there is no need for you to move on. But there’s also no need for you not to move on. If you think about what she would’ve wanted for you, if she’d said, “My life will be shorter than any of us want, but at least I want you to be miserable for the rest of your life.” Nah. She’s pure love now and love says to those of us who are left here grieving, “You are meant to experience joy again.”

Those who have passed on, as I said, I never feel their energy leave, and I always feel that they want their loved ones to be joyful, to be peaceful, to have wonderful adventures. I think they come with us. I think they’re with us in that. So explore things that are not part. Our culture says, “No, if you lose a child, that’s it. You’re miserable forever.” I remember after my son was diagnosed with Down syndrome, they said, “You will never reach acceptance in the grieving process. You will grieve your whole life because of his disability.” I just found that not to be true. Believing it would’ve been a huge schmutz on the lens of my life and it would’ve been awful. So that’s what it is. You disbelieve your way out of it.

And now we’re going to do the meditation and then stay tuned for just a minute because the great Rowan Mangan is coming on with me, and we have an announcement to make about which we are very excited.

So I’ll try to get less excited to do the meditation that I always do in these situations. The first thing I want us to do is get comfortable and then ask the question that Les Fehmi found caused the brain to go into alpha, and that is: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? Can I imagine the space in the atoms, the emptiness that is almost all of the matter between my eyes? Can I imagine that emptiness filtering through my whole body? Every one of my trillions of atoms is mostly empty space. Can I imagine the empty space inside my body? Can I feel the stillness that holds the activity? My beating heart, my breathing lungs, they all function in a stillness that loves them and holds them. Can I hear the silence underneath every sound, every wave of sound, of sight, of feeling? All these waves happen within a still field of presence. Can I imagine that field? Can I feel the field connecting me with everyone else around this world, this little planet, our beautiful blue planet? Can I imagine this space connecting us all and filling us all and loving us all? I feel, yeah, I pretty much think that we are connected.

And Rowan Mangan is now going to come on and we get to make our announcement about which I am very excited. That meditation always leaves me kind of almost dizzy and very limp. Come on on, come on, Ro. Hello. Look, it’s the Gracious Badger herself.

Hi. Hi, everybody.

Do you want to make the announcement?

Well, look, here’s what I want to say. Many of you know that I’m the one behind the scenes looking at all the technical snafus and all the trying to restart Facebook and do all the things, but I’m also seeing something that Martha does not really see because she’s doing The Gathering Room. And that is you all greeting each other, supporting each other, asking each other questions, answering each other’s questions. And it’s really my favorite part of this. And it has always struck me as such a shame that when The Gathering Room ends, the conversation ends. Thanks, Kathy. What if the conversation didn’t have to end? We have a little passion project on the go, and what it is is an online community that we’re having built— its own app—it’s called Wilder: Sanctuary for the Bewildered.

Yes, Tracy. Yep, yep, yep, yep. And you all are invited, but we haven’t done it yet. We’re so excited we’re getting ahead of ourselves, but we’re, it’s happening fast. It’s happening fairly fast. If you go to Marty’s bio, which means after we get off here, go to her profile, click on the link, and what we’ve done is we’ve put a form so that when we do launch it, you’ll be the first to know. And we’re just telling our peeps that we love because we want you in there and we hope you’ll come and because you all deserve each other all the time. Yeah.

We don’t want to ever stop gathering. It feels hard. It interrupts our energy. It is schmutz on the lens of our lives.

Yes. Yes, Tracy. Yes, that’s right. We will be protected from trolls. In fact, it’s going to be a completely troll-free zone. Our intention is to make it, it’s a sanctuary, right? It’s Wilder. And Penguin, that meditation is going to be available in the community. It’s so good how it all works out. So yeah, drop your email address in that form that’s on Martha’s Instagram bio link. It’s the second link down. It says “Wilder Online Community. Be the first to know.” It’s also in the link in my bio, should you be over there. We’re so excited and we really hope that you’ll all be joining us there in the Wilder community.

We love you. Yay. Let’s never stop meeting. Talk to you again soon. All over the place.

All over the place. Bye.