So I was talking to both of them after it happened and they were in—we were all in “What do we do now?” And I have written books about how to bring down your anxiety. One book that is entirely about how to bring down your anxiety. And I now have better anxiety control than I used to, but I still have to go through the process. I am not like totally, I’m not looking at it in the rearview mirror when something goes wrong.

So I’m talking to these two people whom I love so much and who are really smack dab in the middle of what I call Square One. And I’m so grateful that I have Square One to think about.

So for those of you who don’t know what Square One is, let me just say that this is something that everybody learns if they go to the Wayfinder Coach Training. All right, it’s to see your whole life as four different squares of change that can happen. And the first thing that happens when something goes bash, something bonks us right in the face, is it knocks us out of the way we were living and it insists that we live in a whole different way, which I used to call, “Oh, I’m back to square one.”

But now I call it, “Oh, we’re on to Square One” because what I’ve found in my long life is that every time Square One hits me in the face, I go through the same process. And if I deal with it the way I’m going to tell you all to deal with it today—you can do it or not—but when I do it this way, I have far less anxiety.

I have—actually, Square One with all its confusion and fear and loss actually becomes a place that is very, very magical. It’s a liminal place. “Limen” means threshold. And to be in a liminal state means that you’re neither in nor out. You’re neither one thing nor another. You’re facing unknowns, and nothing that you’re used to is going to work anymore.

And in many traditional tribal cultures, a threshold is considered to be a magical place because on the threshold, you are neither in nor out, so you’re not anywhere. And that “not anywhere” can kind of become everywhere. And the old rules being gone, the new rules haven’t kicked in yet. It can happen that a whole new set of rules is born in that space between one thing and another.

And I’ve noticed that people who have gone through the training, through the Wayfinder Training, if something bad happens, I know a lot of you have, and those are the people that show up at Q&A calls or seminars or whatever, and they’re already calm. They’re already like, “Okay, I know exactly how to deal with this. It’s not comfortable, but okay.” So I think this works for people, and I think it’ll work for you. So I’m going to teach it to you now.

So look at a place anywhere in your life where the way you’ve been doing things may not work for much longer, or it may have stopped working, or you’re afraid it will stop working. Or you’re just afraid right now, today, because everything is so chaotic and scary and you don’t know what’s going to happen. That is certainly enough to put me back in Square One, onto Square One.

So it’s not comfortable there, first of all. It’s a place where your old identity has to dissolve and a new thing has to be born, but you don’t know what is about to be born. So there are two steps you have to take if you’re in this space.

One is: Dissolve your connection to what has passed. Okay? The second thing is to be present in the exact moment you’re living now. I mean, it’s always helpful—you know, mindfulness, being in the present. That’s generally a really good thing to do.

But if you are in a true Square One, there’s really nothing else you can do. You don’t have your roots down in the new soil yet. You don’t know what the new life is going to look like. So you can’t do it. You can’t plan it forward.

A lot of people try to make big new plans: “Here’s how we’ll cope. Here’s what we’ll do.” And they run around. That’s good for getting some of the energy out. But more often than not, as you Wayfinder coaches can tell people, the things we do in a panic in Square One don’t end up being pertinent at all to the life we’re about to begin. We don’t know the life we’re about to begin. Or do we? Let’s talk about this.

Okay. So the dissolving—how do you dissolve? How do you dissolve your attachment to what has been? The process of grieving, basically. There is the famous process where you go through denial and then bargaining and then anger and then grief and then acceptance. But actually it’s all more like mixed up in a big mush of those things. And fear is usually a passenger along there. Although it is not necessarily there, that’s what’s interesting. It’s not necessarily part of the grieving process.

So with my loved ones the other day, I was like, “Be angry. Be sad. Things can’t go along the way they’ve been going along. Let yourself cry. You’re angry at yourself for falling and breaking your wrist. Let yourself have a temper tantrum. Let it out. Pound a pillow with your one good hand. Don’t pound anything else. That wouldn’t be good. For the hand, I mean.”

If you’re in a panic, run in tight circles or go out for a jog or just jitter. I do a lot of jittering when I’m anxious if I don’t take the right steps. So after you jitter or fuss or fume, you go through the whole grieving cycle. You go through a wave of it. So let’s say you have a bit of an outburst: “I can’t believe this happened. I’m so angry at fate or whatever. And I don’t know what I’m going to do. And gosh, I can’t believe I have to deal with this.” Let yourself cry. It’s often after you’ve gone through a big wave of those feelings that it crests and then it troughs. If you allow it to flow, it goes down. And in that downness is a space where you can become still.

Now, this is a very magical place. The stillness of Square One is very magical. This is where the woo-woo can begin. And if you want concrete steps to go there, I always say breath and kindness. Those are the two things.

It’s like the Juvenal that Caesar said about “You can rule the people with bread and games. If you have those two things, the people will be happy.” Breath and presence are the bread and games of the soul. So you start boiling your timeline down to just this breath. And I like to use the mantra, “Just this, just this.” You don’t have to deal with anything but this breath, this breath.

Give yourself an hour when you’re not going to think about the future and you can just breathe. You don’t have to be in deep meditation, just breathe.

And then offer yourself kindness. So, “May I be well. May I be happy. May I be free from suffering. May I be free from fear.” Just start offering that, and it activates the part of your brain that is compassionate. And that really helps you get into this next space, presence.

Now, presence, stillness, this moment is fascinating because the present moment is the only place—if you think of time, the line of time as one plane and the line of eternity, infinity as the other plane, the place where they intersect, the line where they intersect is the present moment. So if you’re looking ahead of time, you really can’t see infinity. If you’re obsessed with infinity, you can’t always see time. But if you’re in the present moment, you’re in the intersection, and you can see both time and eternity.

So you can start to have some interesting relationships with time. Okay. So I mean, Einstein showed us that time is not what we often think it is. We think of it as this thing that marches on in a predictable pattern forever and ever. And an hour is always the same and whatever. But we’ve known for a hundred years that an object traveling very quickly relative to another object will experience the passage of time more slowly than the person who is at rest. And time slows more and more all the way up to the speed of light. And when you’re at the speed of light, there is no time. Time stops. And you can be everywhere in the universe at the same time because there is no time.

So I saw an interesting study out of the University of Calgary this last week. A scientist friend of mine sent it. And these researchers photographed mice, looking for these very low photon emissions that we can’t see with the naked eye. And turns out the mice glow.

And at the end of the experiment, trigger alert, they made the mice cease to live. I am sorry about it. And then they thought, what if we photograph them again? And they did. And they were no longer emitting light. And I thought maybe it was just a heat effect. No, this was light. When they were alive, they were emitting light. When they weren’t alive, they didn’t emit light. So this is not scientific at all, but I thought, “That feeds my belief that there is some connection between light and life.”

And my hunch in this direction is born out in almost every culture. People talk about when someone passes away, the light goes out of their eyes. Light and life somehow are connected to us, at least in our psychology. I don’t know if that’s literal, it may be. But the part of us that is light—now I’m going purely into metaphysical speculation. If part of us is light, and I think it is, then it is everywhere all the time. And it is everywhen all the time.

So whatever part of us is light, I think, can go out into the universe and bring back messages from the future that can help resonate through the present. And they could help us kind of know what do we do now.

And I’ve experienced this many times. I’ve known many, many other people who’ve experienced it as well. At a time of crisis and fear, you go through a big gout of rage or sorrow or fear. And then you come down into the present moment, you start to breathe more deeply. You get still. And it’s like the part of you that can send messages from the future can drop little pebbles of knowing into the present moment.

But if you drop a pebble into white water, you don’t hear anything. It has to be still like a well. It has to be very still water. If you drop a pebble into a well and listen, you can hear it plink. And the same thing happens when we get still in our minds. If we ask, “What do I do now? What do I do now?” Not “What should I do?” Not “What would work out best?” You’re literally asking your future, “What is the thing I do next? Let me know. What constructive thing do I do now?” And you’re talking about now.

And what usually comes in, there’s a message and there are three ways you can identify if it’s real. And again, I can tell you a million stories, and I have in print and online, but I don’t have time to tell a million stories right now. But here’s the deal. When the message comes from our light selves, it is always calm. It is always kind. And it increases our stillness. It does not go to us into frantic action. It makes us more still, more quiet. There’s this sense almost of homecoming.

And, for example, when my son was diagnosed with Down syndrome and I didn’t sleep for weeks and I was always miserable and throwing up. When I finally cried myself out one day and finally got still and trusted the moment enough to relax, what I got was, “You’re going to have an incredible adventure. That’s what you’re going to do next. But right now, what you’re going to do is get yourself something nutritious and take time off from fear for a bit.”

And I was able to do that right in that moment. But there was also that thing of “You’re going to have an adventure. This is going to be something you don’t understand.” This isn’t a country—you may have heard if you have a child with a disability, they give you a story that says, “It’s like getting on a plane thinking you’re going to Italy, and you end up landing in Holland. And it’s like, ‘Well, this is not what I expected, but it’s still wonderful and lovely.'”

Whoever wrote that little story wrote it, I’m sure, to their past self from the future. And I wonder if, when they were going through the trauma of getting a diagnosis, they heard that story already from the future. I believe that if we get really present and we ask, “What do I do now?” we get this knowledge that is calmer and deeper than anything our minds can think up.

It is not a plan. It is a gift. It is a view through time. It is a touch of the eternal self that is never afraid. And it will always help us rest into this moment. And the more you trust it, the more you see that what it promises is always delivered. And because I’ve been focusing so hard on these things my whole life, I can tell you that now. What it promises is always delivered.

But remember those three things: It comes in calm. It comes in kindness. And it increases our ability to be quiet, to be still. It never revs us up. And then for just a moment, we can breathe a little freer. And that’s all we ever have to do is to breathe a little more freely in this moment. That’s always the next thing to do. 

And then gifts come, gifts of knowledge when the time is right to actually take some kind of action. That comes up when we say, “What do I do now?” It says, “Oh, you might want to consult with this health clinic,” or “You might want to look this up online,” or “You might want to call this friend.”

I hope that’s why my loved ones called me after one of them broke their wrist. I hope it helped them that I gave them the whole Wayfinder Coach Training, the Square One lecture.

And I just know that all of us are going to hit “What do I do now?” Maybe later today, maybe right in this moment, certainly by next week. It’s that kind of planet. So I hope that helps. And let’s do our little space and stillness meditation just for a minute to go to that very place now where the timeless light self can find us. Yeah? All right.

So take a deep breath and let it off. We’re going to long exhale. Get ready to visit the intersection between time and eternity. Do it by focusing inward. Imagine focusing your eyes about 75% inward to the inside of your chest and ask yourself the weird question: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? Can I imagine the distance between my eyes and my heart? Can I imagine the space inside the cells of my heart? Can I imagine the space inside the atoms of my body?

Can I imagine the stillness in which all my cells are moving and acting? The absolute stillness that holds them?

Can I imagine the silence under every sound holding me, connecting me to everyone and everything else in the universe?

Can I imagine the space inside each person hearing this right now? Can I imagine the connection? The sea of space and stillness and silence that is cradling us all? Can I let myself relax into that stillness?

And at that point you can say, “Huh, I wonder what I do now.” And more often than not, if you sit there with it for a while, something will come to you that you hadn’t thought of before because that’s how it works on the threshold of things.

So thank you for joining me in that. It felt very, very strong to me today, maybe because my loved ones cracked me open. So let’s do some questions.

Question: “If an hour to just breathe sounds too overwhelming, should I or could I just start with five minutes and see how I do?”

Yeah, absolutely. What I meant is just go limp for an hour. Say to yourself, “I’m going to turn on a show on TV so that my kids and I will watch a Disney movie or whatever. And I’m not going to think till the end of this thing. And somewhere in there, I’m going to notice my breath and I’m going to breathe for five or six minutes.”

Absolutely. You don’t have to make this a zen meditation. It’s just like let yourself off all the hooks for an hour. You don’t have to worry about it. You don’t have to do anything. Just sit there and somewhere in there, start to notice your breath. Yeah. Gentle, gentle, gentle.

Jesse says, “Hey Martha, I know you recently had a relocation. What specific things like steps, activities, weird practices, et cetera, et cetera, would you recommend to someone in the in-between with homes, whether that’s childhood home or current home or other?”

This is a really powerful thing. I always tell my clients and my coaches, my coach trainees, “If you move house, it’s going to take you about a year to adjust. Unless you just move to a different house on the next street. If you have any kind of significant physical move, it’s going to mess you up for like a year because we are such homebound creatures.”

And everybody says, “Oh, it’s not going to take me a year.” And then it does. So what I would recommend is a lot of this, this exact practice: Find time to let yourself off all the hooks. Let yourself feel chaotic. Let yourself not have a place for everything and everything in its place. Right now, you’re in the dissolution process, the recreation process. We Wayfinder coaches call it the “square of death and rebirth.” It’s about grieving things as they die and welcoming them as they are born, but we don’t know what’s going to be born until it’s born.

So you’re going to have to do that many, many times, maybe every day to feel comfortable doing something like a significant move or a shift in your family situation or whatever it is, relocating in a job, whatever. And just keep doing it. And I’ve actually learned to be grateful for the opportunity to be confronted with uncertainty over and over and over again every day during an experience like that because it brings me back to these practices. And in those practices, I find, I mean, it really is. There are pebbles dropped into our present mind when it’s still from our future selves and they are so comforting. And if I allow myself to contemplate that they may be true, which I basically believe now because they’ve born out, it’s wonderful to be reminded over and over and to go back to the well, literally, and listen to the thoughts coming in from the future self. It’s chaotic, it’s hard and it’s great.

Okay: “Any words of advice for staying in that intersection as best we can staying present even as reality requires planning and strategy? I’m straddling being with doing and trying to just float with it.”

Yeah, there will come a time when the next thing to do, like what do I do now? You make a plan. You sit down with your loved ones and you get a piece of paper and you start making lists and writing, sketching out ideas. But that won’t happen very, very, very soon after the catalytic event. That’s what we call it in Wayfinder Coaching: the catalytic event. It catalyzes a shift in your way of being. So there will come a time when you get this strong urge to make a plan, to create a strategy. If you’re trying to make a plan in order to soothe your anxiety, it generally doesn’t work.

But if you’re going to make a plan because it feels like you have a burst of energy for planning, that’s when you do it. And sometimes one person won’t feel up to it and another will. Whoever’s feeling like, “Woo woo!” yeah, go to that person and say, “If you feel like strategizing, strategize now, but I’m going to be present until I feel that being present means strategizing.”

Someone says: “I can see light and auras. Can you?”

Oh, I can see light. I think I have seen, I see some people shining sometimes, but I’m not like a specialist in that. So those of you who are can teach the rest of us. Thank you for the question.

Next: “Have you heard about the Sufi concept of the imaginal realm?” Yes. “Resonates with what you’re sharing. So fascinating to learn about the blueprints and clues that the mystics have left.”

Yeah. I found that in everything from ancient Native American stories to Sufi tradition, to Buddhism, to Taoism, to Shinto. Every sacred tradition prior to our society that decided nothing is true that isn’t physical. Every culture dealt with the metaphysical, mostly in a very skillful and wise way.

So those are wonderful places to go looking for much, much more of what I’m talking about. I mean, you go back a few thousand years, talk to somebody who’s kind of a mystic, they are not going to be—this is baby steps for them. And for us in our culture, it’s like, “Whoa, that’s pretty out there.” No, it really isn’t.

All right: “Best tools to cope and manage with the anxiety and stress during a divorce?”

Everything I just said goes double, especially the part about you get to have tantrums. Don’t have tantrums with the person you’re divorcing, if at all possible. I mean, you’ve already decided that’s not really working. So if you’re tempted to have a tantrum in the relationship, maybe take it to a therapist or a friend or a group who can help you deal with the difficulty, the huge difficulty of it all.

Don’t get mired in conflict. That would be what I would advise more than anything. Use these same tools, but remind yourself not to have tantrums at the other person. It’s already over with them, kind of. All right. Blessings.

Another question: “What if the answer always seems to be ‘Let go, relax’ and nothing happens? I feel like time is ticking and I’m not getting any younger. I’m getting impatient. Any ideas?”

Well, if nothing happens and you’re getting impatient, go in and ask yourself what you’re impatient for because the impatience is a message too. And it’s saying, “I want this, this, and this to happen.” Find out what you really want to have happen and start putting that in as a pebble dropping from the future. Impatience can often lead us to frustration, can often lead us to an image of what we actually want to have happen, and that helps us move forward when the Square One is over.

All right: “Any advice on how to interpret body messages like a reoccurring headache on a regularly super healthy body?”

Oh my goodness, we have no time for this, and I want to put you through the entire Coach Training right now. Find a Wayfinder coach or someone who’s graduated from the program because they know how to interpret messages from the body. The body is such a faithful messenger, and I’ve done other Gathering Rooms on this. You’ve got yourself a gold mine of information. Find a Wayfinder coach. Ask them. They will tell you.

Okay. Someone says, “Struggling a lot with fear about climate change, especially about children. Can you recommend anything or talk about how you deal with it?”

I have the same thing. Since childhood, I’ve been panicky about what’s happening to our biological ecosystems. And I have learned to calm down about it much more than I ever could. And I use exactly the strategies I’m talking about now. I find a place where I can stop. I grieve mightily about what has been lost. I am very angry sometimes about what is happening still. I do everything I can to work for peace and repair and the climate ecosystem rehabilitation and all of that. And then I sit down. I get to the end of my own personal small little energy. I start to breathe deeply and I say, “What do we do now? What do we do now?” And more and more from the future, I hear this little plink: “This can go well.”

And I’m like, “I don’t see it.” And it says, “Yeah, you never do.” But then it happens when you wait long enough. So I am optimistic and I don’t know the future, but I need to check in regularly with my future self.

Okay, we’ve got two more questions. Someone says, “I’m wondering what guidance you’d give around making a decision about staying or leaving my marriage.”

Sit down, get still. As you breathe in and breathe out, notice what. Ask for a message from the part of you that might leave and ask for a message from the part of you that might stay and see what goes plink. And here’s the thing, the right answer for today may be the wrong answer for next week or next year or 10 years from now. Never think, y’all, that you have chosen the wrong marriage because the marriage ended. It was the right marriage. It became the wrong marriage for right now. So this is very much what this is all about is getting out of, “I need to establish my future for infinity” to, “I need to ask infinity what my future wants to tell me.” It’s much more sort of a receptive moment than figuring it out. So no pros and cons lists for me. I listen for a message from infinity, and I change my mind when the mind decides to change.

All right. Last question: “What would you say if you’re in between and are waiting for a life partner, but you’re not sure if he’ll ever come, and this feels like failing because of losing hope and this increases fear itself?”

First of all, I would say I hear a lot of stories in this. Stories about what the future’s going to bring. Fears about things that could go wrong, things that feel like they’re already going wrong. The grief of being alone now, there’s a tremendous amount of mental activity just in this question, but we all ask questions like this. This is how we’re socialized to think. And thinking does not work well in Square One. Listening, presence, breath. Those are the things that work when we don’t know what to do next.

I would say come home now. Notice that there is love around you in some capacity somewhere like right now in The Gathering Room. There is abundant love around you. Drop fears of failure. Drop thoughts of failure. They’re nonsensical from the perspective of infinity. Be present, breathe, and ask your future self, “What is it I do now? What is it?” And then take your next breath and remember that the answer will be calm, it will be kind, and it will increase your stillness, your quiet.

So thank you all for joining me here from all over the world, gathering here in The Gathering Room from everywhere. And for all of us who are in some kind of Square One, because we all are, so much love from me now and from my future self. Oh yes. Thank you, thank you. See you again on The Gathering Room later.