All right, so you may have noticed if you’re a regular Gatherer here in the Room, that this is a different room than I usually broadcast from. And that’s because I am in an Airbnb bed and breakfast in the Catskill Mountains because we have just moved out of our house in Pennsylvania, but I have not yet moved into our house somewhere else in upstate New York. Now, usually I have a pretty even keel. I’m a pretty happy person. After decades of meditation and self-development and spiritual practices of various kinds, I am generally on very good terms with life and not afraid of death. And if that’s the way you feel, things are good, things are good. 

So I’ve been really happy for a long time, but I got to tell you something, this move, moving from our house in Pennsylvania to upstate New York, oof. It has kicked my ass in a very unfamiliar way. I did not realize how territorial I am. I had hunkered down in this house we lived in and in the woods in Pennsylvania. It was so beautiful. I hiked around there so much because I was training for my long walk in England last year. And every tree, every deer and squirrel felt like my best beloved. And the house itself was incredibly loving to me. And it saw me through the whole pandemic. I had surgery on my foot and had to live in my bedroom for a year. And that house was like a loved one to me.

And also I tend to have a very active sort of inner conversation going on with a loving voice. That’s all I can say. It’s a loving inner voice. Some of you follow Elizabeth Gilbert’s Letters from Love. She has people write letters to love and then she writes letters back. You’re supposed to write a letter back to yourself from love. And Liz has been doing this for decades, and love is a really strong voice in her mind. And I have been talking to this voice, which I think of as a guide of some kind for decades, and we have a really close relationship. Well, leaving this house—because we don’t really have the same kind of house to move into. Let me just put it this way. We are living in an Airbnb waiting for this house to have things done to it to make it livable. And Ro, my beloved, one of my beloveds bought me a housewarming gift today, and it’s a sledgehammer.

That kind of tells you that it’s not necessarily just ready to wear. The house is going to take some work. And I’m sure we’re going to love it and we’re going to fix it up and everything. But moving away from the house I adored to the house where I need a sledgehammer to get things going—it was hard on me. And I started talking to the voice of my guide in my head and saying, “I am not happy. This doesn’t usually happen. How could I not be? I’m always happy. Why am I not happy?”

And I got steadily unhappier until there were a few days where I just lay around, you know how you do when you’re depressed? It wasn’t real depression because it’s gone. But it was really, really sad to the point where I didn’t enjoy life, and actually death sounded really fun compared to it.

So I was very angry with the voice in my head, whatever that guide is. And I was like, “Why are these feelings bothering me? I need to stop this.” Hang on, I’ve got to get this ‘do not disturb’ to be on. Well, it’s on. I don’t know why it’s disturbing me. Maybe it’s because the voice in my head wants to get through. Anyway, I was sad. And the voice in my head, unfortunately— I’ll just call it my guide, that’s what it feels like—my guide said to me, “Yeah, you’re supposed to feel sad.” And I was like, “No! I don’t want to feel sad. What are you doing? Tell me how to get out of this.” The voice said, “No, feel it.” I said, “But I don’t like it.” The voice said, “Yeah, I know it’s really hard. It hurts.”

It said it’s like a piece of fruit on a tree. It starts out really hard and sour and bitter and almost toxic, but if you just hold it and don’t fight it, it gets bigger and then it gets softer and then it starts to get sweet and then it becomes a source of nourishment and you’re going to love it. I was like, “No. I hate this.” And my guide said, “No. This is how all pain works.”

This is why as a spiritual being, you come to a place where you are guaranteed to experience emotional and physical pain. Guaranteed. Why? Because it works to create something. Just be with it. I hate it when this happens. So I said to the voice in my head, “I am going to stay with this, but I’m angry at you.” And it said, “Yes, be angry. That’s really good. If you can sit long enough with anger, it becomes clear seeing.” And I was like, “Dammit, now I’m angry, I’m sad, and I’m scared.” And it said, “That’s awesome. Fear if you stay with it becomes courage. And sorrow if you stay with it becomes compassion. Just stay.” And I said, “How long do I have to stay?” And it said, “You don’t get to know that. That’s part of what does it.”

The uncertainty creates more fear. I was not a happy camper, y’all, and I’m usually a very happy camper. But I have also been meditating for 30 years. So I was like, all right, I am going to sit here with this. I’m going to breathe in and breathe out and notice that I feel horrible. Yes, okay, breathe in, breathe out sad, breathe in, breathe out afraid. Breathe in, breathe out angry. And I was not fun to be around. Ask Ro or Karen or anyone else in my family. I was not a fun hang for the last couple of weeks. And yesterday I was especially miserable and I was just ready to give up on everything. And so Ro, after driving us up and hauling all this stuff into an Airbnb, sat with me and helped me just stay and stay and stay. And I said, “I don’t even know if I believe the voice in my head anymore. It’s telling me things I hate.”

And Ro said, “Well, I’m not as woo as you are, but I got to tell you, it seems to me your voice is right. That inner voice is right.” And because of her confidence, I kind of settled into it and I said, “Okay. I give up. I surrender. I don’t want, I don’t want to move. I liked our house, and I’m just going to surrender to that fact.”

So this morning I woke up, and I had a headache. And I had a headache from all the moving and all the sadness and all the misery and all the holding. And I thought, “I bet I have a migraine. I bet I’m going to develop migraines now.” And this was first thing in the morning, and I heard laughter in my head like there was a party going on and the voice said, “No, that’s not a migraine. You’re not going to have migraines. Migraines are way worse than this.”

And I was like, “Who are you people?” There was so much joy in there, and it was such a clear voice. I didn’t hear it outside my head. It was in my head, but it was not me. And I said, “Why are you—there’s more than one voice? You’re having a party in my head?” And the voice of my guide said, “Well, yeah, you were very attached to that house and now that you’ve let it go, there’s all kinds of space for us.” And every time you let go of something that you’re very attached to, there is all kinds of space. It said, “This is what’s called channeling.” I told you this is going to get woo-woo. I do not consider myself a channeler. It said, “This is what channels are made of. They’re made of sorrow and fear and anger that has been held until it ripens from something hard and bitter into something soft and sweet and nourishing. And all you have to do is stay with it and let go. And this is what happens.”

And I sat up in bed and I was just bathed in these waves of love and warmth and joy and company. And I have not really even internalized it very well yet. But that’s what I wanted to tell all of you because I think—you know I talk incessantly about how I think we’re supposed to move to a different state of consciousness—I think that some people have been doing more of that state of consciousness all along. And I think that this really sense of an open channel to a metaphysical realm, I could hear friends in there that are technically deceased. I’ve had things like this before, but I can’t even express to you how clear this was.

And I think it’s not just me. I think we’re all supposed to learn to do that. And the feeling is that right now we’re between houses. I don’t have a house, but I am home. I am home in my soul with my loved ones. Many of them don’t even seem to have bodies. And it is so secure. It feels like a deeper dwelling space than the house I loved so much that I just left. And the wonderful thing is, I don’t think I ever have to leave this home.

Now, will I go away from it? Oh yeah. I will get sad and scared and angry again, and I will want to curse God and die, and I will not hear any guidance from anywhere or feel waves of love from anything. I know that because I’ve done it before and I’ve come back home and I’ve come back home and I’ve come back home. And every time I let go of more things and sit with more emotion that is hard and painful and come back again, it is like a bone that gets broken and heals, and it is stronger than before.

And I never realized until this morning that this is how the other world builds a channel from us to itself. It reaches down with love and joy and merriment, and we reach up by feeling negative emotion and releasing what we thought we couldn’t let go of. It just clears out all this space, the suffering, and then the release, boom! And there’s a very, very strong link that comes up.

So that’s what’s been going on in this neck of the woods, which I would not call my neck of the woods, which is far away from any place I know, but is also very deeply home for me right now. And I thought before we go to questions, we can do a little of our typical meditation that we do every time. And this time when we do the meditation, I want you all to realize that every pain you’ve ever suffered was useful. And that what it can be used for, I think it has many uses, but one thing it can be used for is to build a channel between you and a deep, eternal reality that never lets go of you and never lets you fall completely and that will embrace you on the day you die, and maybe every day until then if you can let it.

So let’s do the meditation, but let yourself gather all the scraps of sorrow, suffering, fear, anger that you’ve had in the past, and realize these are bits of material that are being used to build a channel between myself here on this earth and my eternal home, my infinite home. So we start with the weird question: Can I imagine the space, the distance between my eyes? So breathe and ask the question and don’t try to answer it. The point is not an answer. The point is the question itself, which causes the mind to open.

Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? Let yourself look at the distance between yourself and the screen. Look at everything that is not the look at the entire space around you with your peripheral vision. Without moving your eyes, widen your focus and ask, can I imagine the distance between this point of my forehead and the back of my skull? Can I imagine the distance between the crown of my head and the base of my spine?

Can I imagine the distance between my left shoulder and my right? Can I imagine the space inside the atoms of my heart? Can I imagine the silence and stillness that hold my heart as it beats the sound of my heart, boom, boom, boom, and the movement of it all happening in a space of absolute silence and stillness that is alive and warm and loving and communicative and present more present than even my own body. Can I imagine that presence holding all of us—New Zealand, Paris, Japan, Argentina, Canada, everywhere? Can I imagine that it holds us all as one loving family?

So let’s come back from silence, stillness, and space into matter and movement, knowing that silence, stillness, and space last eternally, while movement and sound and matter are very, very ephemeral, very brief, and that’s fine because we’re just here to build channels for the fun of it, for the joy of it.

So let’s look at some questions. First: “How do I stop vilifying anger as I think I feel angry, but I’m scared to be angry and sad?”

Anger is a hard one because it makes us want to push back against situations and other people, and that can be very dangerous. If people hold their anger too tightly and it builds up until they’re in complete agony, then they might explode and harm other people or themselves. And that makes anger very volatile. It’s like jet fuel. You can use it to go vast distances at great speed safely, but only if you know how to use it as momentum.

So my favorite phrase from Barbara Ehrenreich is, “Our task is to turn the anger that is affliction, that is pain here, to the anger that is determination to bring about change.” So if you look at the things in the world that make you angry and decide that you will act in such a way that it brings about some change, whether that means speaking out in public or taking some action or filing a lawsuit or getting a divorce or quitting your job, or when you do the frightening thing that anger wants you to do, the anger becomes jet fuel and it gets you through the fear of action. And that, I believe, is its function and it creates a channel. Yes, it does.

Next question: “How do you keep momentum while breaking away from culture day after day? I’ve been losing steam and the voices of the ‘shoulds’ are creeping back.”

Well, the previous question kind of answered that because if you let culture control you, you start to feel bad. It starts to pull you away from your true nature. It starts to make you feel miserable. You’re separated from your truth. That’s what happened to me. I was separated from the truth that says I am always home, and I thought I was losing home. That was not integrity. That was a lie. Home is here, is here, is here with you. Home is always. So suffering is our ally. Every time we suffer, it reminds us to try to figure out why we’re suffering so that we can stop suffering, and suffering will always be a motivator. If it weren’t so painful, it would not motivate us.

That’s why even in a loving universe, there is immense pain—to keep us moving forward through our illusions until we discover who we really are, until we come back to the truth of that. Every time someone’s suffering comes back to the truth of that, consciousness itself, which consists of all of us, is a little more illuminated, a little more alive, a little more in love with itself and with each other. And that, I think, is the reason for the whole game. So let yourself creep until you suffer, and then you’ll come back.

Someone said, “Why the move?”

Well, this is the thing. I walk my talk. I don’t just make this stuff up for fun to tell you. Ro went to Kingston, New York, that area, with her mother. They drove around about nine months ago, fell in love with the place itself—the whole upstate New York area—came back home, said, “I’m in love with upstate New York.” And I said, “Oh, then we should move there.” And Karen said, “Oh yes, we should move there.” And we all knew—call it the voice in the head, I don’t know, when it says move, I move. I moved to a ranch in California because of that. By the way, everybody out there, there’s a fire there. Be safe, be happy. I love you. Moved to a ranch in the middle of nowhere because the voice in the head said that would be a good thing. Then moved to Pennsylvania. Now moved to upstate New York. Always just because I follow this voice. I follow it when it says, “Sit down and meditate.” I follow it when it says, “You love that person, include them in your life.” And I follow it when it says, “Move house,” no matter how inconvenient that may be. And that, honest to God, is the reason we’re moving.

All right. Question: “What do you recommend as a start to daily channeling practice? I remember you mentioned Jack Kornfield was good. What are other good books or tools?”

Jack Kornfield is a wonderful meditation teacher. He is Buddhist, he was trained in Thailand. He doesn’t channel as far as I know, though I have heard him on recordings say that it’s completely normal that that happens when you start meditating deeply. A lot of people experience it. I don’t know. I’ve actually never studied it or anything. I didn’t have many aspirations. I just started experiencing a loving voice inside me, and now it seems to be wanting to build a channel. So if you find a book, go ahead, get Jack Kornfield’s stuff. It’s on meditation. If channeling happens, great. I would also really suggest Liz’s Letters from Love. It’s a Substack thing. And I think when you start writing back and forth to the voice of love inside you, that opens a channel as well. Especially because Liz started doing that because she was suffering—as you know, if you’ve read Eat, Pray, Love—she acts on her pain, and she does a lot of writing to and from love, and I think that she’s actually got a really strong channel.

Okay, next question: “So how do we learn to do this while staying at least somewhat functional in consensual reality? Or is that not possible?”

What I would say is you need a few confidants. If I hadn’t been able to sit down with Ro last night and say, “Look, I think not only am I really depressed, but I think that I am having really strong feelings that I need to take a sort of spiritual leap forward.” And I had to check: “Am I acting crazy?”

This is sort of part of what was so upsetting to me for the last few weeks. I felt a sort of internal pressure and a strong sense of a spiritual presence, and I was worried about leaving consensual reality. Here I am talking to you, a few of my, couple of hundred of my very best friends. So it helps to share. It makes you more conscious of how crazy you are actually going, or not. And I have people that I trust who just will tell me if I’m acting a little nuts, and that’s very helpful. That’s consensual reality. It’s up to me to figure out what’s real for me. And what’s real for me is what most strongly compels my inner sense of truth and brings me deepest peace. And I’ve always found that that always makes me kinder and more loving and clear and compassionate. So if something is making you kinder and calmer and clearer and more compassionate, I would go with it and experiment with it and see how far it takes you—always aware that there is such a thing as being completely nuts. And I may be that, but I keep checking, and so far everything is working out in consensual reality pretty well. So good luck with that.

Someone says, “How do you remain hopeful when you feel so far behind your peers and you feel demoralized?”

Yeah. Who are your peers, really? When you start to feel that you’re surrounded by loving beings who are congratulating you for having suffered because it’s brought you to a place where you can be in a world that feels magical, it’s not as hard to look at the consensus reality and say, “Oh, if they had a scorecard for this, someone would mark me down on the list.” That’s just nonsense. That’s what I call “pyramid thinking” where everything’s in hierarchies.

That doesn’t even exist in spiritual reality. That’s like part of the ocean trying to say, “I am bigger and better than another part of the ocean.” It makes no sense once you go into a place of primarily identifying as a spirit rather than as a human.

So, next question: “How do we learn to love uncertainty and hold space for that continuous cycle of change?”

I think it’s a matter, it’s like a friendship or a family relationship where if you have an argument and then it’s based on misunderstanding, and then you talk it out and you come to understand each other better. That’s called rupture and repair in relationship—in psychological parlance. And the relationship is stronger after it’s ruptured and repaired than it was before it got ruptured. So the uncertainty in the cyclical nature of change, it has that effect on me. So the older I get, the easier it is to go through these cycles of suffering, separation, and then return. And it’s like, “Oh, okay, I know this. I’ve done this before. It’s a spiral of change that goes around the same cycles but always moves forward as well.” So just practice, practice, practice.

Question: “Do you get a rebound effect when you tell us? It’s like you expand but the contraction is coming for you. Any tips for coping with this? Does it happen to you?”

It happens to me the other way. I have what I like to call the storm before the calm. I don’t announce things to people before I feel really solid. And so usually I go through all my uncertainty before I tell anyone. So I’ve gone through this long period of struggle and uncertainty, and then today I feel really, really clear. So that’s why I’m telling you about it—even though it is so woo-woo—because it’s so sure for me that I don’t actually—I love you, but if you think that I’m off my hinges, I respectfully do not care because I feel so solid. And once a storm has come and the calm comes after, the calm is very strong and it doesn’t tend to rebound at all when I do it in that order. I don’t like the storms, but the calms are amazing.

A couple more questions. “While we were doing the meditation,” someone says, “I was getting lightheaded when asking the questions, and my body was reacting by breathing faster. Is that normal?”

It’s completely normal, and it’s probably a sign that you were starting to feel something you hadn’t felt before. And the unfamiliarity of that was frightening to the animal part of your body. So when that happens, and I’m so glad you were aware of it, the remedy is always the same because it works on the brainstem and the amygdala: Take a deep breath in and a long breath out through pursed lips and tell your physical system, “You’re okay. You may be about to feel something you’ve never felt, and the unfamiliarity and the alienness of it can be frightening at first, but you are safe, and you’re here with a hundred and something of your best friends, and you’ve got this.” And then breathe deeply and let it happen. And that’s how you experience magic for the first time and then the second time, and then the 200 millionth time.

Final question: “As someone who is somewhat nomadic, I energetically react differently to each place. Is there a good way to ground in a new setting?”

I think the whole moral of today’s Gathering Room is that it’s not about the ground. Last night when I was talking to Ro and I said, “I feel so completely like everything’s weird around me physically, but everything’s weird inside me. I’m having weird spiritual feelings, I think. I don’t know what’s happening.” And she reminded me of something my Zen Buddhist friend Steven once said, which is, “When you pull the rug out from under your feet, that’s good. Then you want to pull the floor out from under the rug, that’s even better. Now, pull the earth out, pull the ground out from beneath the floor. Now you’re getting somewhere.”

And that’s how this feels to me, that because I let go—last week’s Gathering Room was about how to fly, “Throw yourself at the ground and miss,” as it says in Douglas Adams’ book. So I’m not feeling as much grounded as I am situated in space, silence, and stillness. Those will exist long after the rug is gone, the floor is gone, and even the ground is gone. And when you’re solid here in this, we’re all together here, and we’re all home.

So welcome home, everybody. Thank you for joining me here. I love you so much, and I’ll see you next time on The Gathering Room.