And if I just look at the last year of my life, about every six months something happens and I think, “I did not see that coming,” and it just turns my life completely around. For example, I’m now a morning person. I’ve been a night owl my whole life. Morning is like, “Where’s my coffee? Oh, please.” Well, I had a yearning to go to Costa Rica. I went to Costa Rica. I met the lovely ladies who run Sleep_works, and they said, “We will teach you to sleep.” And I said, “You are on, honeys, because I’ve had mega drugs pumped into my system and I’m like, hello! Nothing works for me. I cannot sleep.”

They not only taught me to sleep, but I sleep so deeply that I wake up—I take medication to sleep—but they said, “That’s just sedation. It’s not real sleep.” When I started doing what they said, wearing different light-blocking glasses and bright lights in the morning and stuff, my body started secreting different hormones, and I wake up at five in the morning going, “I’m going for a walk!” I did not see that coming, y’all. Now the reason I’m talking about this is because it’s my whole philosophy of life. Why did I go to Costa Rica? Because I knew I was going to meet people there who would teach me to sleep? No! I didn’t know why I wanted to go to Costa Rica, just like I didn’t know why I wanted to have a ranch in California or then move to Pennsylvania.

People are always asking me, “Why are you doing this?” And I’m like, “I don’t know.” That’s not a popular story in our culture. People don’t want to hear, “I don’t know why I’m moving across the country” or where I’m going, for that matter. I’m just, “I need to go east.” But it’s how I have lived ever since I sort of took leave of my senses way back in my twenties, and when I decided that I was going to instead of only believing things that were proven since nothing can be absolutely proven, I was just going to entertain anything until I found out that it didn’t work. But I was going to leave my mind wide open. And I began, and there were things that happened that I didn’t know how to navigate. I just did not know how to have little kids and get my doctorate and do all this stuff.

So I just sort of threw myself upon the mercy of the universe. I was like, whatever. Just if it feels a little better than—if something feels good, I go toward it in a very specific way. Something has to feel good to my soul, my spirit, and that comes upon me—we’ve talked about this many times—as a feeling of complete peace, that identification with space and silence. We’ll do the meditation in a minute, and the loss of identity that comes when you really drop down into that. In that stillness, silence, and space that I’m always going on about, sometimes nothing moves, but sometimes it moves rapidly. It says, “This way, this way.” See, I believe in manifestation, right? What you think about a lot, you probably will manifest it if you don’t get in the way of your good fortune. But I also think that our higher selves are manifesting what these meat selves can do.

So there’s a broader being that is connected to—that is just one. We’re all one. And that part of us, that eternal part of us moves us from place to place sometimes. In my first memoir, I compared it to the puppeteers in Japan who just stand on the stage moving these puppets. So in my life, I have found that the sense of being pulled by my heart and soul, it’s a kind of yearning mixed with peace and trust that I’m meant to have what I deeply desire. 

That feeling, which I don’t have a single word for, sort of pulls me forward. And it’s the reason—it’s the only way forward for me. And it was so funny, I thought, “Okay, well I’m so weird, I’m the only one who can do this.” But then I started teaching [Wayfinder] Life Coach Training, right? It’s a fine noble job and it’s a good thing to be trained in, but secretly I was just training people to find their way forward the way I do.

And the first, as I started getting cohorts of trainees, I would do a little questionnaire: “Why did you join the Life Coach Training?” And fully 85% of the people that show up say, “I have no idea. I do not know why I’m making this massive step.” And I was like, “Yes! My people! They’re out there!” Because when you learn to do things because you’re being pulled by the heart, you have no idea the riches of experience, of love, of abundance, of everything that is in store for you. So I went to Costa Rica just because I really wanted to go to Costa Rica and found people that could teach me to sleep, and it changed my life.

Another example of going toward something, being led by the heart, is when I moved to Phoenix, when I was just learning this method, I would sit and I would listen for what my heart yearned for. And one day it was like, “I need to write a screenplay. I really do.” And it hit me so hard. I was gushing tears, like geyser tears. And I went to my then-husband and I was like, “I have to write a screenplay.” And he was like, “Ooh, ah yeah, I have great faith in you. Maybe you can publish a book, but you know, screenplays— we’re talking a whole different realm of improbability.” I was like, “I don’t know why, I just have to.” And wouldn’t you know it? That day I went to a poetry reading, and they passed around a signup sheet for people who wanted to write screenplays. And I was electrified. So I write my name on it and my phone number and I take down the numbers of other people who are going.

When the day came, I drove like 45 minutes across Phoenix to a different part of the city. It ended up being four people sitting in a trailer, including me saying, “Yeah, I want to write a screenplay about armadillos.” I mean it was not great, but one of those three other people was a writer who lived less than a mile from me and became my first friend in Phoenix. And that group never met again. It just fell apart. The desire to write screenplays? Gone. But I had a friend. Sometimes I think we get yanked in ways we don’t understand, and then our minds say, “Oh, this is why I’m doing it.” And I think our higher selves are trickster-ish about it. They will tell us, they will let us think it’s for one thing when really it’s for another.

One of my favorite massive examples of this—you know I love this game preserve Londolozi, which is in South Africa and it’s beautiful. The wilderness has been rehabilitated to its natural state. It’s an incredible place to go see wildlife and to see the world as it was 70,000 years ago and to see humans working in harmony with nature and with the wildlife.

So I had been going there for 20 years, almost every year except for the pandemic. And thereon hangs the tale because in about 2014 I would go to Londolozi and everyone was talking about, “2020, 2020. We’re going to build a self-sustaining African village and we’re calling it 2020 because 20/20 vision, it’s really good, like the whole repetition—2020—it’s catchy, right? So we’re going to have our own water filtration system, we’re going to purify all our own water, we’re going to grow our own vegetables here in the vegetable gardens using the gray water that comes from purification. We are going to have solar power, everything. We are going to be totally off the grid, self-sustaining, zero carbon footprint. We’re going to show people how to marry human existence with the wilderness in this futuristic village of 2020, which combines the ancient and the modern and makes it work.”

And 2020 came, and nobody traveled anywhere. And places like Londolozi that rely almost, well rely completely, on tourism and guests coming in from around the world, the business just went boom—dead. Dead in the water. But Londolozi has about 240 people, I think, or 280, I don’t remember. It’s not a huge group, but it’s not a small group of people who live and work there and need it for their living. And those people had solar power everything, and they had their own water filtration system, and they grew their own vegetables. They very, very carefully and humanely would go out and there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these small antelope called impala. So they would hunt an impala for the village once a week and spread it out among all those people.

And they got through pretty darn well. And it was just the most astonishing example of everyone was on fire to get this ready by 2020. They thought they knew why. And yeah, the reasons why are still wonderful. They showed us how we really can partner with the earth. We really can live in harmony with nature. And by the way, there’s going to be a pandemic, so let’s make sure everybody who’s following is going by heart—they call it “heartware” instead of hardware—is going to be safe during that time and provided for.

And this, let me tell you, did not happen to just anybody. It happened to people who have a daily practice of listening. I’ve spent so much time with the people who run and operate Londolozi, mostly the Varty family, the Varty-Laburn family. And these are people who walk the talk. They are meditators, they are Wayfinders, they’ve been through the coach training that I teach. They didn’t know why, they just did it. They’ve been doing this, they’ve been seeking their path forward—in this specific way—pretty much their whole lives, and they’re just getting better and better and better at it. And that was one example of how it benefited them.

But here’s the thing. You can do this today. You can do it right now. We’re going to do the meditation in a minute before I take questions. And when we do our meditation—the space stillness, and silence meditation—I’d like you to set your intention. And your intention will be that you’ll bring your attention off the reasons you do things in the outer world, and you will focus during the meditation specifically on your heartware, on what you feel as a yearning to move forward. And it can be toward anything at all. Don’t try to define it too tightly. Don’t try to picture it vividly. Feel for the yearning that comes up in any form whatsoever. Just allow yourself to linger on it. And then even if you don’t know what it is, drop any disbelief that it can’t come true. Just let yourself trust the force.

And it doesn’t have to be specific, or it may be very specific, either way, trust the force. Just picture it, allow it to be a possibility. Okay?

All right, let’s go into the meditation now. First I’d like you to identify, just get comfortable and become aware of your neuroception of everything your nervous system is feeling, everything you’re feeling physically. And then everything you’re feeling emotionally. Allow it to be as it is. Don’t fight negative feelings or weariness. Just be with it and say to yourself, “It’s okay, it’s okay. Little anxious one, it’s going to be all right.”

Now sit in a comfortable position, close your eyes if you want, and then ponder the following questions while you allow your yearning to come fill your heart space, okay?

Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? Can I imagine the distance between me and the nearest other person who is on this broadcast right now? Can I imagine the connection of love and being that holds us both? Can I imagine all the people who are listening now, can I imagine the distance between us? Can I hear the silence that communicates between us where the pure tone of longing and love goes from each of us to each other? Can I imagine the absolute stillness of that is supporting us all? Can I imagine the space inside my body? Can I imagine the space between my heart right now and the place I am meant to go in the near future? The situation, the space, the relationships, the activities…can I imagine the space stillness and silence between me and that future moment?

Let the connection be. And as you come out of the meditation, don’t sever it. See if you can just move through that field of connection that is pulling you toward what you’re meant to do next. This is what I really coach people to do. And it will take you places and you’ll say, “I have no idea why I’m here, but oh boy, are good things happening!”

That was a very strong, intense, it still is a very buzzy feeling for me. People say they get buzzed from alcohol. I’ve never felt that, I don’t like it, but I feel buzzed right now.

All right, so SJ Kramer says, “Aren’t you scared to be not responsible if you follow your peaceful yearnings?” 

Isn’t that interesting how it sounds totally logical for us to differentiate responsibility and peacefulness? Like if you’re at peace, you can’t be responsible. That is a lot of what our culture teaches us. I would question that belief. If you’re not peaceful, how can you be responsible if you’re not bringing more peace through this body, your body into the world and sharing it with others? If you’re not doing that, how do you call that responsible? Be worried, tense, miserable? That’s not what we owe each other. What does Ani DiFranco say? “The world owes us nothing. We owe each other everything. We owe each other the world.” Yeah. So follow your peaceful yearnings. To me, that’s the most responsible thing you could do.

Jen Berlingo says, “Does Martha teach the Wayfinder training live, or other teachers?” 

Oh, interesting question. Some of it is live. Some of it is recorded videos where I teach the actual methodologies. And then you have other instructors who help you and mentor you and are very gentle. They’re not exactly teachers. They’re Wayfinders. They work this way and they teach you to work this way. And then we have our cover story, which is we’re life coaches.

Jacqueline says, “How can I tell the difference between intuition about people or ideas and my own mind? I’ve been wrong about people before and it’s made me question my intuition some.” 

I believe that if you’re in total integrity, and that doesn’t mean being really righteous, it means being whole, acknowledging and embracing every part of yourself as one united entity, not fighting yourself at all, allowing yourself to be as you are, that you drop into a space of truth—clunk—and it’s like it’s a puzzle piece fitting at that point. When people come into your energy field and they have a different energy than that, your heart will not pull toward them. It will say, “Oh, that again? No, no, no, no, no. That smells funny and I’m not going to eat it.” So before, for example, I acknowledged my history of sexual abuse, I was always misjudging people and always ending up going into emotionally dangerous situations. As soon as I acknowledged the totality of my past and sort of got to a place of integrity with it, I was a bit wonky on the intuition side, but once I became whole in that way, I haven’t been misled nearly as many times. And the closer I get to perfect integrity, the easier it is for me to read a situation or read a person by the feeling of pull or push. It’s really not up here [mind], it’s here [heart]. So this method is the only way forward for me in any situation.

Okay, Fian Foto says, “The job I yearn for is specific. There’s a pretty set study path, though, which would be out of reach financially. In this case, is it better to drop the dream? Or trust that I can find another way?” 

I would do both. So there’s a combination of trust that you’re being guided and dropping any attachment to it. If you haven’t seen American Symphony, which is a documentary about the brilliant musician Jon Batiste, it’s about a time in his life when he’s under tremendous pressure, he gets like 11 Grammy nominations, he got in all these different fields, and at the same time his beloved wife is being treated for recurrent leukemia. So it’s a guy in a really tight situation and he goes around saying, “You have to have absolute faith.” He’s writing a symphony, he’s commissioned to do this. He said, “You have to have absolute faith that it’s going to work, and you have to know that it could totally fail and that you have to somehow hold that paradox inside you.” And the way I try to do that is that I do these meditations, I drop in, I really visualize what’s coming. I do everything I can to make the thing come true. I don’t just sit in my bedroom, I do everything I can to make it come true and then I just drop it. It’s so funny because Costa Rica was a dream for me for a long time, and then I finally just booked a vacation and paid for it and everything. And then after I’d already paid for it, I got this free trip to Costa Rica. It’s like once I dropped the worry that it wouldn’t happen, it happened because I deliberately made it, but it also happened sort of magically for free. So it’s an interesting, when you come from the heart, things like that will happen to you a lot. And each time it boosts your ability to trust, even though you know it may all fall apart. It’s like the weirdest trick. You have to get out of duality and be in the field of love that has no dualities and then you can hold that paradox and it still makes sense. Yeah, but it’s all about that field of love.

Danielle says, “Hi, Martha and Ro.” Ro is over there sending me things. “After years of work, my Instagram, which is the main way I attracted clients, was accidentally deleted by Meta.” Oh my gosh. “I’m using it as a reason to start anew. Tips for starting over more successfully?” 

It just makes me think about, I paint every day watercolor and you can’t erase, and I can spend hours and hours and hours on a painting and then put in one stupid brush mark that just ruins the whole thing. And if I want the painting to turn out the way I see it in my head, I start over and I do all those hours and hours and hours again. But here’s the thing, Danielle, the second painting or the third or the fourth is informed by all the others. So the quality skyrockets. And I start with a vision, not only what I want it to look like, but exactly how I need to get there. And I’m always bummed out when I think it didn’t work. And I’m always bummed out when I’m starting all over and then I’m always like, “Okay, this is why. Because I know this painting now. I know how to do it. And each painting I know teaches me to know other paintings more easily.” So it’s horrible that your Instagram got accidentally deleted, and it’s an opportunity to come from the heart and make an Instagram account that is fully guided by I have no idea what. Just like a Wayfinder Coach, I have no idea why I am doing it, but I’m going to do it beautifully and I’m going to do it soulfully and lovingly and joyfully. And who knows what is going to happen to you as you do that?

All right, Jessica says, “I learned in class this morning, we had a little class, that I go into flop, my nervous system gives up when my stretching imagination hits max capacity. Tips to increase my faith and self-esteem to allow expansion?” 

What I would do is go into nature, go among animals, go among trees, feel your kinship with them, feel their total acceptance of you and feel your love for them. And then realize that you cannot experience an emotion like love unless a circuit is being completed. And Eckhart Tolle says, “Nature loves the way humans love it, and so it loves us back.” So as you love the natural world, you realize that as part of it, you are equal, equally deserving of love. Then you go back into the human world. It’s a little more complex. There are some variables. You can get there to where you love every person you see so much that you know that you, as a reflection of them, are also infinitely precious. But I’d start with nature first. Especially if you’re a born Wayfinder. That’s a whole different story. But if you were born to the archetype of the medicine person, this is a good way for you to go.

All right, City Lotus says, “Do you have a new morning practice, Martha, to cultivate this feeling of peaceful yearning?”

Yes, I do! I go for walks, like really long walks, like three-mile walks. That’s another thing. You guys saw me a couple of years ago when my foot was surgically reconstructed, and I did not expect to ever have strong feet again. Not at all. I put some on a vision board thinking, “That’s not going to happen.” It’s happening. The sleep thing, suddenly I’m a morning person. I’m bursting with energy in the morning, and I go out there and I walk 6, 7, 8 miles and soak in this forest, this incredible forest, and it’s just pure worship. It’s pure worship, pure joy, pure happiness. I cannot believe that at my age this is happening, that my body turned around the way it did. Yeah, but that came to me. And when I get up in the morning, it’s my heart pulling me outside. It’s not a fitness program. It’s a spiritual practice and it’s amazing. And follow your heart to your spiritual practice. Don’t make rules from your head. Follow your heart.

Okay, so, Carl Louise 12 says, “If you think you want something but that’s not your reality, does that mean you don’t really want it?” 

Sometimes. You can check it out. There are many times when I’ve seen people get what they said they wanted, and it wasn’t good. They didn’t like it. And you just have to check it out. It’s like learning how big your car is. You kind of have to bump it up against a bush or something before you know exactly how far it extends. And the whole experience of being human, I think, is about learning to differentiate between the things we truly want and the things that are socialized into us and it’s not what we really want. We are here to manifest what we really want. We’re here to feel wonderful, to learn to feel wonderful by feeling not that wonderful a lot.

Couple more questions. Your Bestie Essie says, “What are the physical cues of peaceful yearning? What does it feel like in the body?” 

I think it’s different for everyone. I mean, this is another, when we do the coach training, everybody gets really in touch with their own physical manifestation and it’s going to be different for everyone. For me it’s like a waterfall rushing. It comes down through my head and then just shoots out through my body, but especially from my chest, my solar plexus, my heart space. But yours is going to feel different. One thing I’ll tell you is it will feel good, really good. It is falling in love in a million different ways, so you’ll find it. It’s not a mystery. When you fall in love, you know it.

Finally, Emily says, “How do you learn to feel your yearnings when anxiety makes everything new feel unsafe, and you won’t be able to cope with the change?”

You learn to calm your anxiety. I just wrote a whole book about it, but it won’t be out until January. I’m pretty sure that on these recordings I’ve talked a lot about anxiety and how to just allow the party of you that’s anxious to be anxious and then start giving it kindness: “It’s okay, sweetheart. You’re going to be all right. You’ve been to this place before. It’s not the worst. Look, look, everything’s safe right now, and if you don’t get what you want, you may get something else beautiful. But I’m going to believe you’re going to get what you want. I’m totally bound with this.” You just start talking like a person who has infinite power and loves you infinitely, and then you find that you’re connected with a power that has infinite capacity and loves you infinitely. There’s just one of us. There’s just one thing that loves us all, and it is everything and it’s everywhere. 

And that’s just my story and I’m sticking to it. So happy moving forward, wherever it takes you. Have a fun, wild ride. See you soon!