In that book, I talk about something called sanity quilting. And what I was going to say, I’m so tempted by all of you coming in from all everywhere, I love you. All right, what I was going to talk about is this process called sanity quilting. I was writing away in the book and I thought, “What’s a good metaphor for building a life that goes outside the cultural bounds that you can make inside the cultural bounds of wherever you are and still be sane?”

And I thought about something called crazy quilting. Anybody out there a quilter? I bet you are. There are all sorts of people who are doing all sorts of things out there. So crazy quilting, you will know if you are a quilter, is different from ordinary quilting in that ordinary quilting starts with a pattern that is carefully drawn out, and then the quilter creates these sort of panels called blocks and they sew them together and it makes this beautiful pattern and it’s an incredible art form.

However, sometimes a quilter will decide that they have enough random scraps to make a “crazy quilt.” And you do that by starting with a piece of fabric you love and just sewing another piece to it and then sewing another piece to the two of those and then sewing some more. And you go around in a spiral until you get a large enough piece of cloth that you can trim the edges and call it a quilt. 

And I was thinking that’s sort of how you make your life. You take, say the quilt block is your time, your whole life, and you take an activity you love and you put it in the very center. Most of us are going by patterns that our culture has taught us, right? It tells us: Get a job, get a relationship, get a family, get a house, whatever. And yes, we have to do it and we have to match the pattern. And for me, it’s much more interesting to say, “What do I love most?”

Now this might be something that is pushed way far away into the margins of the cultural pattern, or it may not even be in the quilt, like don’t use that. But if there’s something I really love like, I don’t know, sailing. I do not sail. I use this as a metaphor. What if I put that in the center and then I just started putting things that connect with it around the edges, and I gradually fill up my time with things that I love? Could I do that and still exist in society?

Well, I’m doing it right now. That’s exactly the way I’ve lived my life. And I was writing about this and I thought, “That’s not crazy at all.” It’s not crazy to do what you love. And then another thing you love. It is crazy to push what you love to the margins of your life or maybe not ever experience it at all. That’s insane.

So I call this sanity quilting, making a sanity quilt. Not a crazy quilt, a sane quilt. And that was the topic for today, but I set that up a long time ago. And in the interim, crazy things are happening all around us. The pattern of society that we thought we knew is being disrupted, and it feels very confronting to a lot of people. I have noticed this, in that people are freaking out here in the United States, and I keep getting messages from other people saying, “We’re there for you, America.” This America, this big wealthy adolescent of a country bumbling around and all you lovely people out there going, “We’re sorry.” Because a lot of people in America are scared right now, and a lot of people feel like everything has gone crazy. Well, you can still make a sanity quilt. In fact, when everything else goes crazy, that’s when you must make a sanity quilt. And you do that in very quiet ways.

So, today I would challenge or invite all of you to join me in thinking about something that you can use to anchor your day. Some activity, relationship, ritual, something that helps you find your rooted center and brings your heart into peace. If you can’t find peace in yourself, chaos has won, and you can’t be part of amending that at all. It’s got you. Game over. But you’ll always get another chance. It’s like a video game. You always get another chance. 

So I sat for a longer than usual time. I’ve increased my meditation time in the mornings, and it took me about 45 minutes to get completely quiet. But oh, I felt so much saner. And then I added to that going downstairs and connecting with my loved ones, with my family, making sure everybody got a snuggle and a kind exchange of words. And then I put something else. I added doing a podcast with somebody whose podcast I like. I enjoyed that. I enjoyed interacting with him. So I’m working my way around the circle, and I’m finding things I love and I’m sewing them together. Now, there may be other things I need to do that are not just all fun and games, but they are things that help me keep the quilt frame intact, right?

So for example, the podcaster that I was interviewed by just now said he’s kind of worried that the stock market will crash because a lot of his wealth is in stocks, his net worth. So he may change that. Now, that’s not something that you do because you love it, but it’s something you do because you’re sane and you see, oh, this thing might happen, I feel when I get into my peaceful space that I need to take an action to deal with reality as it’s now happening.

So whatever you put in the center of your life, like it could be first thing in the morning or it could be at lunchtime or it could be any time that you have a chunk where you’re by yourself, just a little space in time. You young mothers out there or mothers of young children, like take a bathroom break, get a sitter, do whatever it takes to find that calm and peace or sit and cuddle your kids and put on a movie they’ll like that you, that’s uplifting for you too. I liked Moana 2 recently. I cried at the end. Anyway, find a place to sink into calm, into peace, then take in the information you need to move forward in circumstances as they are and make sure that every step feels peaceful.

Now, it’s not going to feel like “A wave of peace washes over me as I reallocate the place I keep my money.” Not all of those things are going to feel like a happy day in the sun, but they will feel calm and peaceful if you pay attention to one simple variable, and that is, I call it the manic panic. So something that is really, really exciting and gets you all manic. One thing I’ve noticed is that because of the way the internet works, we are pulled into very extreme emotions because the algorithms know that we’ll watch, their commandment from their makers is just keep us engaged online. And they know that if they can get us manic, really hysterically excited, or even more so panic, we will watch longer. We will spend more time online, we will be more engaged. So the algorithms then feed us things that put us into a mania: manic. Or into anxiety: panic. This whole book is about don’t let the panic get you.

And it also, you’ll find it says, don’t let the manic get you either. Because say, for example, you stumble across a conspiracy theory that says, or something that says, “You’re going to do this new form of financial trading and you’ll be a billionaire by nighttime tomorrow,” and you get really, really manic about it. That’s an energy of push, going past the limits of peace.

If something is meant to work for you, it doesn’t feel like mania. It feels calm. And so check to see if you’re doing things from a manic place like forming a relationship, making life decisions based on a kind of “Aaahh!” Careful, now you are being trained by social media to get manic and to make your decisions based on a mania. I play a game online and it puts all these ads up that are probably fake, and I started to get kind of twirly-eyed: “Oh my gosh, I could just butter my head and I would have no more wrinkles!” or whatever. And I can feel that sort of advertising-based mania, “Ohhh!”

No, no, that doesn’t make a sanity quilt. That’s a bit of crazy. Put it off to the side. Even more, when you start to panic, when you look at what’s going on and you know a bit of history like I do, it’s very easy to panic right now. If you look at the patterns of what’s happening in our society and you know when those patterns have been present before and what happened afterward, don’t panic. Panic is a terrible place from which to make decisions.

I’ve got a zillion exercises in [Beyond Anxiety] if you do get panicky, that will pull you out of that space in your brain because it is also not sane to be in a constant panic. Sanity is calm even when it knows there’s something wrong. Fear, even—genuine fear, read Gavin de Becker’s The Gift of Fear—it is a calm, strong impulse to do something. A clear, strong impulse: Get up, get out of the car, get the kids out of the house, or whatever it is. But it doesn’t, that “Ahhh! I don’t know what to do!” That’s not actual fear, that’s anxiety built all the way up to panic. Even if you keep it in, panic is a bad way to make a decision. So always put calm in the center of your sanity quilt. Sit for as long as it takes.

Ro and I have just started a thing in the Wilder Community where we’re just going to be sitting together live twice a week to ground our peace without saying anything. People can do what they want. They don’t have to meditate, but it’s a silent connection where we just ground ourselves into calm. Because if you can find other people who are calm and ground in with them, even if you’re really panicking, that can be very, very healing. And it forms the center of your sanity quilt.

So you find the people that help you stay sane, and you start connecting with them every day or every few days. You check in, you connect. If there’s a physical presence, you get a hug. If there’s an online presence, you get a smile, you get a word saying, “This is how I feel. How do you feel?” And that connection is what gives you the next piece in your sanity quilt. And we did this, we just announced it today, and we did two minutes of silent togetherness with like a hundred people. Oh my God, we’ve both been so much more grounded all day since then. So much more at peace. My body feels better. Everything helps when you get your peeps together and stay calm just for a while. Even in the madness, we can stay sane.

And then you take an activity that you love and you create something that’s very much a part of staying out of anxiety. So I started painting and writing today out of a place of peace, never out of mania, never out of panic, and you just keep stitching in an activity here, it can be five minutes here and a half an hour there, an hour tomorrow. You keep sewing these pieces of beauty into the fabric of your time, and you’ll end up moving the other things out to the margins until your whole time frame is filled with peace, sanity, and just plain good sense. That’s how we’re going to stay sane in the days, weeks, and years to come.

All right. So I have some questions here. Bridget says, “I would love to hear your ideas on confidence and if you feel women struggle more with it.”

Yeah, confidence comes from connecting with Self, capital-S Self if you’re familiar with IFS therapy, Internal Family Systems therapy. The Self is a part of us that is very, it’s centered. And when you find your way through all your neuroses and all your anxieties, what you have is a Self that in every person, according to this theory is: clear, calm, confident, courageous, creative, compassionate, connected, and curious. So it’s got all these—they call them the C values—and men are told implicitly and sometimes directly, males, people who identify as male, are taught to act more confident, and then they’re given more positive reinforcement when they do act confident. If a woman acts confident, she’s likely to be called bad names and to not be “feminine.” 

So if you can take out of your quilt all the pieces of time that you spend feeling fear and lack of confidence, and you can start filling it with just, for example, doing something that makes you feel very confident and reflecting on the fact that you’re really confident doing it, like driving or tying your shoes or making a sandwich—it does not have to be complex—notice what you’re good at.

When I was doing my research on lying, I found a study that said that most people lie three times within 10 minutes of meeting each other. And the men told lies that made them seem more impressive, and the women told lies that made other people feel happier. And that’s not, I’m not slamming men for that. They are conditioned to do that. And women are conditioned against it, but we have just as much truth and confidence in ourselves as anyone. 

We just need to start pushing out the lie that says we don’t deserve to be confident and connecting with the Self that has always been confident and always will be. That’s what you find when you go to that peaceful space.

Oh yeah, yeah. Somebody just reminded me in the questions that the sessions that Ro and I are going to be doing in Wilder, in the community, are called Still Point Sessions. We’re going to do the Still Point Sessions, the “still point of the turning world” as T.S. Elliot put it. So if you want to join us, we would love that.

Dr. Donna says, “What if the daily chaos impacts you with deep hopelessness, and it’s hard to remember what grounds me? For example, grounds me to draw and write. Now I can’t. Instead I scroll and get sadder.”

Well, you’ve named it right there, you scroll. Okay, you may not be able to control sadder, but you can control scroll. Put down your phone. Put down your computer. Go for a walk outside. Pet a dog. Watch leaves fall from a tree. Go find another person and talk to them. Go to a coffee shop and have coffee. Read a book—I don’t know, Remembrance of Things Past or Huckleberry Finn, anything that just gets you out of the place of anxiety and panic and misery. It is not disloyal to the truth for you to enter joy sometimes during the day. 

I just started reading a fiction book. It’s called Dr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Library or something. It’s a really sweet fantasy that my hairdresser told me about, and I’m like, “Yeah, I’m actually going to spend part of my day listening to this book that has no ‘value added’ for my research or anything.” And the joy of being off in this fictional world gives me strength and rest so that when I come back to what I think is a fairly drastic situation here, I can do it with calm and I can do it with sanity. So put something into the sanity quilt besides scrolling. Get scrolling out of there.

All right, Delia says, “What’s the difference between manic chaos versus creative chaos? Especially with someone who has ADHD?” 

Since I do, I can tell you. If I am physiologically dysregulated, that is if I’m sweating and my heart is pounding and I’m jittery and shaky, and boy, this can happen a lot when I get excited about an idea, I’m very excitable. But when I’m in that “Aaaahhh!”, I can feel that if an animal were around me, especially a horse—I used to do horse work quite a bit—a horse would not come near that energy. A horse would be like, “What are you on? Get away from me.” So my ADHD brain tends to feed on things that make me manic that way, but so does everyone else’s brain. It’s just that maybe you and I are a little more distractible. So let us be distracted by things that make us sane. 

Notice, make a list in a book, get a journal and make a list of things that help you be creative and sane at the same time, as opposed to creative and manic or creative and panic: “I have to do this right!” Stay away from the manic, stay away from the panic, and you’ll make choices that belong in your life. You’ll make choices out of peace. And peace is a huge adventure with lots of ups and downs, but it never goes into hysteria. It never goes into insanity.

So Key Diaz says, “How do we get involved in supporting ourselves by political participation and also avoid too much of it?”

We had a discussion in our family this morning about it, and somebody said that one of our senators, state senators, said they weren’t taking action on an issue because no one had called their office about it. So Karen and Ro have both called their office. I haven’t had time yet today, but I’m going to do that too. If they want us to call their office, maybe they won’t take action, maybe they will. That felt like the right thing to do today. so two of us did it and one of us is still having to do it. But I will because it feels constructive and calm at the same time. And I have to choose every day what feels constructive and calm, given a certain level of social weirdness. There are times when I have gone out and stood up outside to protest something, and there are times when I’ve stayed in and written a book, and there are times when I have just gotten my friends together to consolidate. Just always put your favorite piece of fabric next on the quilt and make sure it fits with the other things that you have loved. Find ways.

They say, if you go online and look at how to make one of these crazy quilts, which I call sanity quilts, they say, “Feel free to do a lot of rearranging, try all kinds of things, put things together, cut them apart, be really loose and free.” So I’m not saying there’s one thing you do and you have to do it. Be loose and free and joyful. And what you’ll find is that when it’s time to take strong action, you will take it in a state of peace. And that’s how you know it belongs on your crazy quilt.

Selma from Wilder says, “Can you also attach things you’re very enthusiastic about to the sanity quilt?”

Oh my goodness, I am very enthusiastic about almost everything on my sanity quilt. But there’s enthusiasm, and then there’s mania when people’s heads are exploding. Now, very often mania comes from a sense of grabbiness. The left hemisphere of the brain, which is what gets caught in anxiety, also loves to grab things. So if you were in the olden days when Oprah was doing her show, she would have these giveaway shows where people would scream so loudly. The whole audience would scream so loudly. I had to be in the audience at one of those and my ears still hurt. It was not normal. I once went to a major public speaker, another one. Oprah doesn’t send people into a mania. They go into a mania. She’s a very calm person herself, very grounded. She doesn’t do things in a state of mania or panic, as far as I’ve ever seen. 

There was another motivational speaker that I went to see who was jumping around on the stage and screaming into the mic and he would make the audience scream back, “You’re right! You’re right!” And it was not nice. I agreed with everything, the words he was saying, but he wanted us to be jumping and screaming and he would say, “If the person next to you isn’t jumping or screaming, pick ’em up and make ’em jump and scream.” And people went out of there going, “I don’t know what just happened. And I was jumping and screaming, but I don’t know why.” 

Yeah, it was not just enthusiasm, it was madness. Enthusiasm feels smooth. It feels delicious. You know what you’re loving and you do it, there’s a sort of flow to it. In fact, that’s what psychologists call the state of being really, really involved in creating something, in this case, the sanity quilt of your life. To create your own sanity at a time like this will push you to the edge of your abilities, and you need enthusiasm there. But mania will just make you lose your balance. And we’ll all lose our balance. We’ll all go into panic. We’ll go into manic, and then we’re like, “Oh wait, that was manic panic. I’m climbing back into sane, and I’m going to stitch something new to my quilt.”

Lissy says, “What is your preferred method to access Self, Martha?”

Well, it’s so boring, but there is nothing better than sitting meditation. I mean, walking meditation is really good. It’s freezing cold here in Pennsylvania. So I’ve been spoiling myself and just sitting up in bed covered in my quilts and meditating there. But there has never been a culture that I have investigated where I haven’t found that the wise people of that culture sit still or walk in stillness, connecting with stillness. 

This is why we’re doing the Still Point Sessions in Wilder. It is the magic bullet. And until you feel it work, you’re like, “What is this? This is not working for me.” And then you feel it and you’re like, “Oh, I get it.” It’s kind of like, sorry to make this comparison, but it’s like people tell you about sex and then if you have sex and it’s not good sex, you’re like, “What was that all about?” And then you have good sex and you’re like, “Oh! Got it.” Stillness is actually that powerful. When you finally connect with it, it is an extraordinarily beautiful, fantastic, delicious experience that you want to have over and over, and there’s just no substitute for stillness. That’s my favorite.

Jessica from Wilder says, “Can we do the next Still Point Session tomorrow? The two minutes made me want more. Kidding, of course.”

Please don’t ask me to take care of scheduling. I have no idea. Oh, I’m getting into a panic. Oh, we are figuring out what the times will be, and we’re trying to make it so we do two in the week. One is going to be a good time for people in Australia and New Zealand and all that. And the other one is going to be good for people in Europe. And we’re going to try to make sure that everybody gets a chance to be there live. Anyway, find a live sit somewhere, guys, or women, people, everybody out there, folks. That’s the term I was going for. Now I’m in a manic panic. Find a place where you can be still with other people, online or off. I really, really do think we have to have it to be sane through these times. 

Jessica says, “When you find a new tangent, do you throttle your enthusiasm a little?”

Yeah, because if I let a new tangent get too exciting, I become manic very easily. Then I realize how far I’ve gone, and I panic and I come back. And this is my life, and for 62 years I’ve been doing this, but I’m doing a little better. Every day, a little better. Every day I find a little more sane-ness to stitch into the framework of my time.

And I hope this half-hour has been a little patch of sanity for you, and I hope—it certainly is for me. So I stitch you all into the quilt of my life, and I’m so grateful to have spent this time with folks I may not see, but I definitely love. So thank you. Thank you. I’m so happy you came here to join me in a piece that’s really near the center of my sanity quilt. Catch you next time on The Gathering Room!