All right. So in the meantime, let’s talk about resiliency itself. So I have been working away on something we’re calling the Wayfinder Business Lab. And because of that, I’ve been looking at the way people make a living when they decide to sort of go off the beaten path, like don’t try to get a “job” job, but decide you’re going to do what you love and make the money follow in some sort of way.

And when you look at folks who are doing this, you find out two things: They’re much happier in their lives than folks who feel like they’ve sold their soul to the company store. That’s one thing. And number two thing is they have to be resilient as all hell. So I want to talk a little bit today about how you come back. I mean, this is what I’m going to try to do right now. I try to do something, it doesn’t work. It’s a failure. Okay. How do I salvage what is best out of the wreckage of my plans or as I like to say, out of the shambles of my preconceptions?

So I’d like you all to join me in thinking about someplace in your life where you’re living in the shambles of your preconceptions. It could be something about your personal life. It could be a relationship that is kind of going paws up. It could be that you’ve always wanted…you have a life ambition to be something and you have decided maybe you’ll never get there. Or worse, you got there and you found out there’s no there there and you’re not happy. It could be that you’re living in a world where you thought things ran a certain way and it turns out they run a very, very different way, where you thought the good guys always win, and then you find out the good guys don’t always win.

Anything where you had your expectations set and then dashed is like a wrecking ball to your chest. I mean, I wouldn’t put today’s experience in that realm. If Eric Zimmer is out there, we weren’t able to do the technicals this week. And for an author who’s promoting a book, that can feel pretty wrecking ball-ish. For me, I feel the same. I feel intense empathy for Eric and such apology. And I’m reaching inside myself for the key to resiliency. I’m asking what it is that I do when this happens because I am a solo entrepreneur and I am a book author and that is not a steady way to make a living. That is a way to have to try and fail and try and fail and try and fail and try and then succeed. Not as much as you hoped you would succeed, but you succeed. And then you try and fail and try and fail.

And for every failure there is maybe, for every success, there may be 450 failures. I mean, it really adds up. And it is one of the markers of the successful people I know that they have failed much more often than people that we think of as successes. Wait, the successful people I know, they’ve failed more often than the people who haven’t succeeded as much. So ironically, one of the ingredients to not be a failure is to fail and fail and fail and fail.

Think about something right now I asked you to, where your preconceptions are in shambles and let’s go to that still place that we talk about in our Silence, Stillness, and Space meditation. Let’s go to the part of ourselves that is not attached to the workings of the physical world. So I’m going to do the Space, Stillness, and Silence meditation right now. And we’re going to get to that place and then we’re going to talk about resiliency building from that place. Okay?

So right now, we’re going to take a deep breath, get settled in our bodies, in our chairs, on our beds, wherever we are, and breathing in and out deeply and slowly, present to your mind the question—you’re not looking for an answer, you are looking at the question: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes?

Then ask yourself: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes and whatever I’m seeing in front of me, whatever I’m focused upon? Can I imagine that space? Then can I imagine the distance, say, between the tip of my left shoulder and the tip of my right shoulder? Can I imagine the distance between them and the enormous amount of space that exists inside the atoms of my own torso? Because we are mainly empty space. Can I imagine that it is the space in me and not the matter that is conscious of itself? Can I imagine the silence underneath all the sounds as my true voice?

Can I imagine the stillness under all activity as my real home and my own nature? Can I imagine that this space which connects us all, the stillness which holds us all and the space that is always speaking to us are made completely of compassion, that I am loved infinitely by the space, the silence and stillness in this universe.

Now, I know a lot of you dropped in with me because I feel it, and that is not…there’s no way to measure it on a physical instrument for me, but it is so tangibly obvious to my nervous system that it is as plain to me as seeing or hearing or touching things with my fingers. So I know a lot of you dropped in from all over the world, and I know we’re all connected. And from there, from this still place—Eric, when he comes on the show, will talk about proactive still points, which I think is a wonderful phrase—I want you now to think of the thing you consider a failure.

I want you to let it sit in the pool of stillness, silence, and space, until you see that it is also, this supposed failure of yours is also made of silence and stillness and space. That actually what you’re seeing is just a fluctuation of matter moving through this deep silence, still resonant, no-thingness. And you’re watching everything be just an event.

So what you consider a failure is an event. This podcast is an event. But your body is also an event. It doesn’t ever stay the same. It is continuously moving. It is a river of change. In fact, everything material is a river of change. That’s what I think the Tao is. The Chinese word for way is tao. And the Taoists believe that there is this still and silent force that is somehow allowing us to flow through it. And when we don’t resist it, it flows in directions that are always benevolent for us. It always will anyway, but if we don’t resist the current, we don’t get hurt.

So if you’ve been watching from the beginning, I had a really cherished outcome for today. I really wanted to interview Eric Zimmer and have all of you find out about him and his book. And when that didn’t work out right away, my immediate go-to strategy was to drop into stillness. And this is what happens when I hear a diagnosis I don’t want to hear for one of my loved ones. It’s what happens when our house kind of fell apart this winter and then the pump failed last week. And pretty much I opened a door, it fell off. And every time this happens, I go to the silence, the stillness, and the space where I always feel safe.

Can you sense that? I know from looking at the flags coming up as you introduced your presence on this podcast, that many of you are in places that are really hard to be in, places that are under military threat, places where there are natural disasters or crop failures. A lot of you are going through things that are very difficult, and you’re facing the failure of your dreams to play out the way you want it. So maybe you’ve already learned this. I think you probably have.

Folks in those situations learn this very quickly, but if you haven’t articulated it, when something bad happens, when you think you’ve failed, there can be a lot of clamor in the mind saying, “This is terrible, this is awful.” But very often, if something is difficult enough, there’s a kind of… We think of it as shock and sometimes it is. It’s just denial because we’re not seeing what we wanted to see and we just kind of block everything out. But there’s something benevolent in there too. When something goes really wrong and nothing’s working the way we thought it would, and we go into that kind of stunned mode, I actually believe we’re being invited into the space, silence, and stillness. We’re being invited into our real presence and when we’re there, it speaks to us.

I’m thinking about when I got my son’s diagnosis of Down syndrome and how I was on the phone with the psychiatric nurse and she told me, “Yes, the fetus you’re carrying has Down syndrome.” I was six months pregnant and suddenly everything sort of went silent. And in the silence, something said to me, “Martha, are you happy?” I’ve told this story before and I said, “What?” And the nurse repeated what she said and I said, “No, not you, the other thing.” And I thought, “Happy? I don’t know.” And then I said, “I’ve heard that people with Down syndrome can be happy.” And the voice said, “That is right.” And she said, “I don’t think so.”

Now, I’ve told that story before, but that voice, I don’t know what it is. I don’t know if it was my higher self or if it was whatever you call God or a guardian angel. I really don’t, I don’t know. I don’t care. Its essence was stillness, silence, and space, but it spoke my language so lovingly in the moment when I was stunned out of all my usual habits of perception. It was like a very brief visit home, and it changed everything. The decision was horrible. The next months were horrible, no matter which way. If you’ve made that decision either way, I love you and it’s horrible.

But there was that one moment of the stillness speaking to me, and now I knew that it speaks and I’ve spent the rest of my life listening for it. And there is never a better time to listen for it than when something has failed and when I’m feeling really on the spot. Just go to the place where nothing is to meet with the beloved, to quote the Christian mystic John of the Cross.

If there are any questions, I need to get them going here. No questions, Ro? Okay. Here they come. Fabulous. All right. Question: “This person came out of a rigid evangelical community after coming out as gay and lost everything, including my financial wherewithal. Any tips?”

Well, yeah, that is one of those things where I can say, “I’ve pretty much been there, done that.” Actually, I came out as gay…yeah, it was before I left. Yeah. I kept all the commandments of the Mormon church until I had been officially removed from the records, but I had realized that I was gay. So what I would say to you is, and this will sound, if you’re in a hard place, this may sound really unfeeling, but just hold your judgment for a second. What I would say to you is, rejoice, rejoice, rejoice. Congratulations. I’m so, so, so happy for you. Yes, it’s horrible to lose all that social support. It’s horrible to lose the financial support. I lost everything too. And gosh, I got my integrity back. And one of the things they said to me in my religion was, w”What profiteth it a man or woman if they should gain the whole world and lose their own soul?” And what I found is that, yeah, I would gladly throw away the whole world if I got my soul back out of the deal.

And I lost things that had made me feel safer, more secure, but it turned out that none of it had been making me feel genuinely happy, genuinely at peace, genuinely satisfied. And as soon as I made all the changes that were in keeping with my integrity, even in the middle of hell fire and damnation raining down on me from the human crowd, I began to feel safe in a different way, so deeply at peace, so absolutely in the embrace of truth. It really is the rock on which to build our lives. And personally, I think that’s what Jesus thought too. A lot of people who say they’re talking for Jesus certainly don’t do what Jesus seemed to do, but I’m not going to go down that avenue. All I will say is if you can go to the still place within and face this failure, you are in for such a better life. I cannot even express to you how much more happiness is waiting for you than you’ve ever had in your entire life. So I love you. I’m with you. Congratulations. Well done.

Okay: “Is there anything specific we can do to access this stillness in a hard moment? Meditation?”

Yeah, but obviously you don’t want to wait to meditate until you’re in a hard situation because your mind will get ravenous and loud and it will drown everything out. So it’s always good to… You have to practice beforehand, but you don’t have to practice for hours and hours and hours. Practice dropping in. We all just did it. I asked those three questions, can you imagine the distance and all that stuff? And it took maybe 30 seconds to 45 seconds before I felt people dropping in like crazy. And I know that a lot of you got to that space within a minute.

So by just practicing once a week with us, you’re going to have that. It’s going to be accessible. And that’s why I always use that weird key phrase, “Can I imagine the distance between my eyes?” First of all, because it’s research based. It puts the brain in this synchronous alpha state, but also because it gives you something that you can say that you would never say in any other circumstance like, “Oh my God, okay, something horrible has just happened. Can I imagine the distance between my eyes?” It’s a weird thing to say, right? So it pops you into that way of seeing. And if you’ve done this multiple times just watching this podcast or listening to it, you already have the practice you need to drop in at an emergency time. Now, that said, I love to meditate every day because it’s fun to visit home. And of course it’s easier the more you practice, but do it for the joy of it.

One thing I have to be clear about is I never meditated because I had a teacher or—I mean, I had an audio instruction course when I was beginning, Jack Kornfield’s The Inner Art of Meditation, which is wonderful. But I wasn’t in a community that was doing it. I didn’t have a teacher telling me what to do. I craved meditation. I didn’t know why. I just loved it. So I want to tell you all, I want you all to feel free to do this little drop-in. And if you want to meditate, then do it as much as you want. Do everything as much as you want, that’s kind of my theory. And I think you’re going to always have this safe place to go back to, and that is everything to me. In a dangerous world, having a safe place always handy is a real blessing.

Someone says, “I don’t want to have a kid and my mother simply cannot accept it. I feel conflicted, maybe because I seek her validation secretly. How can I approach this situation?”

You’re doing it really well. You’re looking at why: “Oh, I see what I’m doing. A part of me wants my mother’s affirmation.” The best thing you can do is to stop waiting for, stop taking the child role. If you’re grown up enough to have a kid, you’re probably grown up enough to say, you know, to vote and everything, which means you can talk to your mother straight across and say to her, “I want your validation so much, and I’m not going to have a kid right now because every child deserves to be desperately wanted. And I don’t want a child the way you want one for me. I love you. I want your validation, but this is where I stand.”

There’s something about having a child, a grown child, start talking to you that way, that it might clear her sinuses for a while, but most people I know love that—their kid has finally grown up and taking a stance. They may not agree with what you choose to do, but that’s a really, really solid foundation for a relationship built on integrity. Remember, I mean, this is the whole thing about resiliency. Relationships increase in quality depending on their ability to rupture and repair. Not go without rupture, but to rupture and repair. Whether you’ve got a little baby or you’re dealing with your great-grandmother who’s 110, that’s still going to be a rule for any human being. So integrity, rupture, and repair—that’s the best way to build relationships in this world.

Question, “What if there’s a block to the stillness? What’s a strategy we can use?”

Well, one thing you can do is wait until life hits you hard over the head, and then you’ll sort of be in the stunned silence. But typically what you have to do is watch it and like, “Oh, I see there’s a block to silence.” You watch it, pretend you’re watching a parade and here goes a thought: “Oh my goodness, something went wrong. This is terrible.” And here goes another thought: “I never do anything right.” Okay. Here goes another thought: “The deck is stacked against me,” whatever. Watch it like a parade going by until you cannot join the parade. You can’t stop the parade, but you don’t have to join it. That doesn’t take very long. And get Jack Kornfield’s The Inner Art of Meditation if you want to know how I learned it. And eventually you find that the person watching is silent, is the silence, space, and stillness and you’re home.

Question: “Failure for me always used to be disappointing other people. Now I’m starting to choose myself, but lack trust and I’m in fear. Any advice is appreciated.”

Well, the first thing is to know… I wish Eric were here. When he comes on, he’ll tell you how to be your own best friend. There is something about knowing that you are in fear that allows you to be the one who helps the one who is in fear. By the way, I’m going to go a little bit past the half-hour because we started it seven minutes after the hour, so I’m going to go seven minutes beyond the half-hour. Boo ya. Okay. So if you can tell that you lack trust and that you’re in fear, the part of you watching that can say to the part that is mistrustful and in fear, “I see you, I care about you. I will try to keep you safe. And here’s what I’m going to do very first. I’m going to get in touch with the part of me that is stillness, silence, and space.”

Now, I sometimes quote Dick Schwartz who created IFS Therapy because he has a set of adjectives for the Self with a capital S, which is exactly what I’m talking about. That Self, for me, just repeating these eight adjectives will help me get into it. So if you’re in fear and lack of trust, just see if you can find a part of yourself that is clear, confident, courageous, curious, connected, compassionate, connected, did I say?

Somebody is going to have to put those in the chat because I don’t remember all of them and I’m not going to stop to sit and remember them. But just that all I have to say is clear, confident, courageous, creative, and suddenly I’m like, “Okay, can I find that inside myself?” If you look for those qualities inside yourself, you’ll find that they also exist and you can start to root into them.

And then no matter what happens, whether there’s fear, whether there’s failure, you’re not going to be rocked off your foundation. That Self is always stable because it is no material thing. You cannot move space. Everything just moves through it. It’s absolutely still.

All right: “Resilience is hard when you feel like you’re stuck underwater. What signs can we look for as we hold on?”

Well, the fact that you’re still able to talk about it means that you can paddle up to the surface for a breath. What I’ve noticed is that especially when I’m in a time of crisis, especially, those are the times when my mind will sometimes grind to a halt and then I’ll be able to find the courage and the comfort that helps me recover from whatever blow I’ve sustained.

It’s interesting. One time I had to fast for a medical procedure for like three and a half days. I only drank water during those three and a half days, didn’t have any food at all. And I noticed I got hungry, then I sort of got beyond hungry, and then I started to get sort of hm. I was not very energetic, I can say that. And somebody started yelling at me for some reason. I can’t remember. It was somebody who was upset about a business thing. And I remember looking at them and going, “Oh, I don’t think I’m going to spend my energy on you right now. Hmm. I thought I was weak just now, I thought I was like down 10 fathoms in the water and couldn’t catch my breath, I wasn’t able to do anything, but now it turns out that I find that I can move away from a negative energy and spiritually speaking, I’m in a place where I can breathe really freely.”

It was such an interesting thing. So if you feel like you’re being flooded and you’re overwhelmed, sometimes it’s best to just go down, even like decide to accept the situation and then realize, “Oh, wait, I have a choice whether to react to this by telling myself I can’t breathe or by just noticing that I’m already breathing. I’m still breathing. I can’t go on, but I’m going on. This is very interesting. I’ve got no future. I’ve only got the present. Turns out I’m breathing in the present.”

It’s a really interesting thing how a great shock can take you into the present moment and in the present moment you find the ingredients for everything you will ever need. That too will be discussed in Eric’s wonderful book.

Okay: “The still small voice is very inconsistent for me. How can I hear it more often?”

This is such a great question. I have asked it for years because it used to be very inconsistent for me too. And here’s what it tells me, for what that’s worth. When I do access, it says, “You could be more loving to yourself because I love you, much more than you love you. You could be softer because I’m much softer on you than you are. You’re very hard on yourself. You could be a lot simpler in what you’ve asked yourself to do. You could cut yourself some slack once in a while.”

It’s always about softness, kindness, and relaxation. It’s never about try hard or be more pinpointed, get the technique right. It’s just like, “Sweetheart, could you just let me hold you for a while?” It’s like this vast, radiant mother. That’s actually the phrase that comes up for me when I think about it, the vast radiant mother that is holding us like newborns and doesn’t want us to think anything bad about ourselves and wants us to be cared for completely and softly. So when we’re tense and we’re trying, we can’t feel it. And when we soften and go kind of limp as we do during the Silence, Stillness, and Space meditation, we can feel it wrapped around us. Not coming back because it never goes anywhere. The still small voice is never inconsistent. It is as consistent as gravity.

We’re inconsistent. We get inconsistent because we’re hard on ourselves and we’re mean to ourselves. And those things do not allow us to feel this vast radiant mother that always, always, always, always loves us. So that’s what it tells me. That’s what I’m trying. So maybe you can try it too.

Couple more questions: “I’ve been dropping in to try to make some hard life career decisions, but I can’t land at a direction. What do you suggest?”

Well, if you’re right up against it, take the best option you can see and realize you can always switch course later on. Very few things are written in stone in this life, and I’m just designing this Business Lab for a type of life where you’re constantly shifting directions and able to spin on a dime and do something different. So the world is not what it used to be. It’s very, very hard to make a decision that can’t be changed very quickly these days. It’s one of the wonderful things about being alive today. So make a decision. If you don’t have to make a decision and you don’t want to make a decision, don’t make it. When you do have to make it, go the best way you can and know that you can always make another decision right down the line.

Finally: “Beyond Anxiety cured my anxiety.” Yay! Thank you. I’m so glad. “After 47 years of that crap, fear isn’t working the same. How do I feel safe?”

You feel safe now. That is the only way you will ever feel safe, is to be safe now, but it is the only way you ever have to be safe. So a lot of it is about—and Eric talks about that too, he’ll be talking about it when he comes on The Gathering Room—about how when you reach genuine presence, because you look right, left, up, down, I mean, look right now and realize nothing’s actively harming me in this moment.

Then in fact, if you go inward and you find that still place inside you, there is something wonderful happening in this moment. There is continuously a spring of absolute clarity, absolute courage, confidence, creativity is always coming to you from the part of you that is no thing, from the vast radiant mother that is actually your own identity. Fear is always about the future, and peace is pretty much inextricably linked to presence.

So that was an unusual Gathering Room. I’m hoping to get Eric Zimmer back very soon to promote his wonderful book, How Little Becomes the Law: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life. We will talk to Eric very soon. Until then, I hope you’re feeling refreshed and ready to take on the world, not with the idea that you will never fail, but with the idea that whatever failure you experience, you can bounce back stronger than ever. All right, I love you guys. Thanks for playing with me on The Gathering Room. Eric, if you’re still there, we’re going to line this up. Okay, take care, you all. Have a wonderful week.