gathering
ROOM

Waves of shame. They’re icky, they’re toxic, and they’re not easy to escape. 

In this episode of The Gathering Room, Martha is talking about how we can move past this particularly intense form of anxiety and swim on to better [...]

Many of us have heard about the mind-body connection, but have you ever tried sense-memory therapy?

Martha recently lost her sense of smell to a sinus infection, and instead of worrying that she’ll never get it back, she’s trying sense-memory [...]

Did you know you were born a creative genius?

All of us are, Martha says, but we are socialized out of our genius by the structures of culture. Why? Because the culture wants everyone the same, but genius doesn’t homogenize [...]

The world can be a hard, inhospitable, downright hostile place, and people can quite often be less than kind. Yet Martha says that by practicing what she calls “kindness in motion,” we can start to change the whole complexion [...]

How do you respond when you’re in a painful situation where things are going wrong, and there seems to be no way out? 

Martha says the answer is paradoxical, and she’s talking about it in this special “Listen Again” episode [...]

You’ve heard of the fight and flight reflexes, but what about flop and fake?

Flop and fake (also known as fawn) are two of the other responses in the polyvagal system, a theory about how our nervous systems adapt to [...]