Now, I also know that a lot of you out there are maybe rejoicing at the outcome of that election. And I’m not one of you. This is not a political podcast, but I do respond to current events, and I live in a house with someone who has a master’s in political science, someone who has a PhD in social work, and I myself have a PhD in sociology. So the talk around our house is often about society and social change, and I really hope I’m wrong, but I do think that this election marks not just another swing of the political pendulum, but a really qualitatively different version of American politics. And the pattern it’s following, if you’re a fan of history, could be very, very challenging for a lot of people in the United States and a lot of people around the world.

The worst-case scenario is truly nightmarish. The best-case scenario, I hope to heck I’m wrong and that everything just turns out swimmingly right from the get-go and on to eternity. However, because of my particular perspective, this election hit me like a wrecking ball. And I know that many, many of the people that I interact with feel the same way. This morning in the online community that Ro and I have organized, it’s called Wilder, and it’s just a place for people to join and share each other’s experience and connect. We did, I ran a little guided meditation, which I’m going to do in a minute. I know we have our usual meditation—silence, stillness, and space—but I’m going to add another one, a visualization. So get ready for that.

And I just want to say also that to take a spiritual perspective on this, several weeks ago, Ro and I got together and said, “We need to create an online community.” Not because it made much sense, but we did. It was right after there was an assassination attempt on Donald Trump, and we thought, “Okay, well he’s going to win the election, and we need to create a community of support for people who need it after the election.” The election itself, the ensuing weeks revealed a darker and darker side to the political rhetoric coming from that camp, that side of the net. And so after the actual election, what happened to me is I— oops, I am, excuse me, I’m connected to Joey’s wee beast here and it’s not working. Ro? Ro? Disconnect from you? Okay, great. Oh, there I am with my eyes closed.

All right, so I found myself in the last few days, I wake up really, really scared and sad, really sad, scared and sad for so many people other than myself. Myself, yes, but so many other people as well. So many people who are justifiably afraid. And I do some future-tripping, can’t help myself, and start to get scared about what’s coming. But then, I open my computer and fall into the net that is my community. I’ve had a weird personal history.

I split—when I was 30-ish—I split away from my community of origin, the Mormon community that I grew up in in Utah, my family of origin and all the friends I’d made growing up. So I have really lived in this very individualistic way of, and it’s very isolating to say, “Okay, I am going to provide for my family and I’m going to make sure everything’s okay for everyone around me. And I can depend on no one.” That was a deep, deep, deep internal belief that I’ve carried for decades and it’s why I write self help. If you look at all my work, it’s about assuming that you are sitting alone in a room scared to death somewhere or saddened or angry, and you gotta find the resources inside yourself to heal. And to a great extent that can be done if, for me, there was one caveat, even if I was the only physical human in the room, I have felt the presence of the consciousness of the universe, the intelligence of the universe as a loving force around and within me.

And for that reason and only by that, was I able to keep myself together psychologically. I mean that literally. I’m a big fan of parts, psychology, Internal Family Systems therapy, in particular, and big shocking events that happen, either to us personally or to our whole society, they literally can cause a splitting inside the self. I wrote The Way of Integrity, this book, to say—and integrity just means to be whole and undivided—because when we’ve experienced trauma, shock, fear, loss, sometimes our psyches split into different parts: “I can’t handle the enormity of this. I’m going to just hunker over in the corner. I’m going to send out parts of myself that are angry or that are grieving. I’m going to split into parts of me that are raging at other people because I’m so scared inside.” I’ve watched a lot of people around me splitting into shards since the election. It’s been a few days. And I’ve watched it in real time.

We have to come together as individuals held by the intelligence of nature, by the consciousness of the universe. That’s minimal. That is minimal. But what I’ve realized also is that when we bring ourselves together, that we become a fractal form of unification and that as we heal individually, communities begin to form. This is in the next book I wrote, it’s called Beyond Anxiety. And it talks about how when we have strong positive experiences and ideals within us, we actually can’t help creating forms of that unity with the people around us. So I want to do this little guided visualization right now. We did it this way. If you’re in Wilder, you already got this this morning when we had our vision boarding party that turned out to be a kind of vision board slash grieving party. There’s a lot of, there are many feelings going on out there.

So let’s do this little meditation. That’s what I did this morning when I was freaking out a little bit right after waking up. Short version: I want you to imagine that we’re on the African savannah and it’s nighttime and you can hear lions roaring, you can hear elephants trumpeting, you can hear hippos honking in the night. It’s quite spooky. But around you is a big circle of thorn brush. This is what people in those regions of the world can create when they’re out camping to keep the wild predators away. If you make a sort of wall of thorns around you, even the lions will respect it. So you’re inside one of these thorn brush circles and you’re safe and there’s a campfire in the center. And I want you to find the part of you that is most centered and grounded. And I want you to go sit in your mind’s eye at the campfire. So you can close your eyes and imagine this. Sit at the campfire and access your deepest capacity for love, for hope, for joy. And let your fears go for now because your role at the campfire is to be a leader. And you have to take on the mantle of the leader and be willing to put your own pain aside because your job is to heal the assembly, and the assembly is made up of the parts of you that are in pain.

So whatever your greatest pain is, if you are feeling any kind of sorrow, for example, let’s say it’s sorrow. Sadness, despair, hopelessness, all of those feelings. Picture sadness as a whole person that comes inside the circle of thorns, and instead of trying to get away from it, look at it and say, “You are welcome here. Come sit by the fire with me.” And let your sadness, your hopelessness, your despair come and sit. And say, “Warm yourself. I’m here. We’re together.”

Then take any angry feelings from incredible rage to frustration with people who you don’t feel are understanding things—from mild frustration all the way into intense anger and even blinding rage. Instead of running from those feelings, let that be a whole person standing inside the thorn center, the thorn circle and say to rage or frustration or anger, “You’re welcome here. You don’t have to change the way you’re feeling. Come and sit by the fire. You belong. I’m here. I’ve got this.”

Again, and everybody gets to feel exactly the way they’re feeling. Bring in shame. Whatever your feelings of shame are, let that be a whole person. Let your shame come sit by the fire and say, “You’re welcome here. And you don’t have to feel different.” I’m trying to remember all the things in Wilder said this morning. Bring regret, bring shock. Let shock be a whole person. Let that person sit by the fire and be numbed and be unbelieving and belong in the circle of the fire. And just keep bringing in all the parts of yourself. Now see if you can find a part that is resolute and bring that person in. Find a person that is exhausted, bring them in: “Exhaustion, come sit by the fire with me.”

Now we’re making a real circle and we’re all warmed by the fire and we all belong. And there is no need for anyone to change anything except to bring each other into the company of our others and to be warmed by the fire of love. And just keep bringing in everybody. Anytime you notice a part of yourself feeling anything, bring them by the fire, sit down with them. And then find deep, deep inside you the part that is not any of those negative feelings. You might not be able to access this perfectly, but find the part of you that wishes to express gratitude, love, and appreciation for anyone in your life who’s ever done anything positive for you. Find gratitude, find compassion, find abundance, and say to the people that are all you around that fire, “We’re going to be fine. We are going to be absolutely fine.”

And now imagine that the thorns disappear. And all around you on the African plain are circles of people sitting calmly, feeling intense feelings, but knowing that we need each other and that dark forces in the world depend on us being alone to win. We cannot heal from something this big without bringing every part of ourselves together and without bringing together all the people around us who are like us. And boy oh boy, there are so many people. This is what I’ve been finding out, doing The Gathering Room, doing Bewildered, the podcast, everything I’ve ever done, the responses to my books and all of you here on The Gathering Room. We are not different. We’re here together and we’re reaching all the way around the world. I talk about it every single time because it blows my mind. We are here together being warmed by the light of the fire and we’re going to get up in the morning and we’re going to be safe and we’re going to go about making a world of love and compassion and justice the way we always have.

And when we’re too tired or exhausted or raging to do it alone, we’re going to reach out to the right, reach out to the left, and find other hands to hold ours. And that’s what’s happening right now, right now.

So how do you make this more real? Silence, stillness, and space. So let’s do our Gathering Room meditation now, but I would love you to imagine that circle going out beyond the circle on the African plain where we evolved and all around the world connecting all the parts of us that are hurt and all the parts of us that are already beginning to heal.

So first ask the question: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? Can I imagine the distance between the front of my forehead and the back of my skull? Can I imagine the distance between the top of my head and the base of my spine?

Can I imagine the emptiness inside the trillions of atoms that make up my body? Can I imagine the space that is most of my body filled with love and consciousness and warmth and intelligence? Can I imagine this space extending all around me, around the world and through the world, everywhere, in and around and through all things? Can I hear the silence beneath every sound that will ever occur or ever has? Can I perceive, can I imagine the stillness under everything that moves? Can I imagine the stillness under all the motion, the e-motion of my heart, all its sadness, all its rage, all its fear? Can I imagine the stillness and peace holding all those motions?

Can I imagine that the stillness and the silence and the space are filled with hope and rejoicing and the presence of us all? Everyone listening to this right now and everyone listening to it later, there is no time. We are always together. And there is no space that is not combined with all of the rest of space.

Can I imagine that I am coming together inside myself to heal and that as I do, I am pulling toward me the healed selves of all the other beings of love on this planet?

So I believe that we start with our insides and then we fractal it, we fractal it to the outside and there is a power to compassion, to love, to brightness, to justice that is unperceived by forces like hate and darkness. And it rises, that power rises and the darkness can’t see it or feel it.

And when we’re in it, we can see the darkness and the hatred, and we can extend compassion. We can see the pain under the rage and we can say, “Absolutely, you do not get to do that in my circle of influence, and I understand you. Come sit by the fire. You’re not allowed to hurt anyone, but you are allowed in by the fire.”

So thanks for doing all of that with me and listening to my goings-on. I’m going to take the, oh, the questions keep disappearing. Okay, there we go.

All right, see how my cataracts go with this. So Pam says, “How do you even begin to communicate with loved ones who see this election as a good thing? I don’t even know how to start.”

You know what? I really wouldn’t try. Not yet. One thing that I do with people who are in that state, and it’s really nice to get older because I’ve learned that this is always useful. I look at them and I say, “Okay, watch.” And I become the compassionate observer. And I’ve done this with so many things in my life where people said, “Oh, you’re going to fall apart. This isn’t going to work.” And I said, “Okay, watch.” And then there are things that people said: “This is such a good thing, this is what we need.” And I just really felt like it wasn’t. And I said, “Okay, watch. I hope I’m wrong.” If you can hold the observer’s position, you go to a neutral space in your brain where you can tolerate more of that cognitive dissonance of being with people who seem to be on a different planet, a different wavelength. But then you also need to reach out to other people who think the way you do. And that’s why in Wilder, we’re going to be doing holiday bingo for people who have to go interact with friends and family that may not be on their wavelength.

And you play a bingo game where you’re actually waiting for them to say the things you don’t want to hear. And when you get bingo, you sneak off and you call the friends who are playing bingo with you and you say, “My family did all my bingo squares,” and you get a free lunch or something like that.

So you make yourself the observer and it moves the brain. That’s why so much of meditation is about watching the breath, watching the mind, watching the emotions, because the watcher is the person who can get out of that stuff. And you stay in the watcher, and if you fall out and you go into a rage or you have a meltdown at dinner or whatever, cool, we’re here for you. We will pick you up. You have us. Even if you’re in a different circle, you’re always around this campfire and you can come back to us.

Laura says, “How to connect even when we’re feeling shame, overwhelm, et cetera?”

Well, Laura, you’re here. You’re here. And everything I’ve seen online from the people I respect most, whether they’re political, like politically savvy people or psychologists or community organizers, everybody’s saying the same thing: “Join something. Connect, connect, connect.” Join a book group, join a mommy and me group, join whatever you can join. That’s why I was like, “Oh, that’s why we had to make Wilder. It was all for me.” As Nisargadatta says, “Don’t you get this? God is doing all of this for me.” I thought I was going to give other people a place to have community, and instead I’m basically emotionally surviving because I have that community. And I got the impulse to make it a few weeks ago, and it didn’t really make sense. Listen for those counterintuitive instructions. You know, go to the library today. Why? Just go. See who you encounter. When all the masks have been stripped off, it’s amazing how quickly you can connect. I went and got my haircut a couple of days ago. A person who’s only cut my hair once before. I walked in, sat down and said, “How are you?” And he said, “Oh, we’ll be fine. Maybe not in these bodies, but we’ll be fine.” And I was like, “Ah. You also have lived your life on the woo-woo fringes pretending to be normal when actually you have magical powers.” And he was like, “Why bother pretending it’s not true anymore?” We recognized that in each other, and there’s something about these shock experiences that allows us to be true, allows us to have integrity out loud and say, “This is who I am. I know you and you don’t like that, but you over there we’re similar and we both believe in love and in loving all the others, so let’s hang out together.”

And the shame and the overwhelm, they are ameliorated as we connect. I hope, Laura, that you’re feeling that even now.

All right, Michelle in Magenta said because of Covid and life happenings, I am very alone. I feel the same political divide where I live. I know community is super important, but I’m more scared of others than ever. What to do?”

Find online a group feels safe. I’ve seen a few of them. I belong to a few of them, and Ro and I created one of them. You’re always welcome there. You’re always like, go online looking, Google “I need communities who can help support me. I feel very alone and isolated and I’m frightened by or appalled by the outcome of this election. What should I join? What can I join?” Ask AI. It knows things. Ask it to tell you what you can join, but do come together. The coming together of the shards of self is so important now and the coming together of the shards of all of us, it has an inciting incident now more than it’s had in my lifetime, and I think more than perhaps since a long, long time ago. Yeah, this could be what creates the calm beyond the storm. I just hope the storm isn’t too bad.

Anyway, there are ways to find out what places can be safe for you and then go in and do this method called step-check-step where you share a little bit and you check to see if somebody comes back at you and if it feels safe. And if it does feel safe and people respond to you and they don’t scare you more, you reveal just a little bit more about yourself. Not a lot more. You don’t vomit it all out to strangers. Share a little more, see what the reaction is, step check, step check, step check. You can get to genuine connection and intimacy rather quickly if you do that.

Janice says, “Where do we go from here?”

I was talking to, I was texting with my friend Maria Shriver, and I asked her that question and she said, “I felt spiritually that we would be, I felt incredible comfort and that everything would be okay in this. I thought it meant one thing, clearly it means another, and I’m just going to have to keep checking with God.” And that, again, is something I’ve heard from the people I value most, that you put your foot forward where the light shows you a footstep and you just stay in that space. Mary Walker, a brilliant writer I know from New Zealand wrote this poem called “Choice.” Could you find that and text it to me really fast? I know we’re over time, but I don’t care.

We are not going to see the distant picture for a while, but that goes with everything I’ve always felt about the big change that I would help with in my life. Remember I used to ask, “I’m here to help with a massive change. What is it? What is it? What is it?” And I would always hear the lines from T.S. Eliot, “Wait without thought for you are not ready for thought. I said to my soul, be still…and wait without thought. For you are not ready for thought.” And I take that to mean that there is a new consciousness arising in us and that because it is a new consciousness, we cannot understand it from within the consciousness we have now. I believe that our ego selves, the part, not ego like arrogance, but just the way we understand ourselves to be and the way we understand our society to be, that’s being crushed. Like all the ego structures are being crushed, whether they’re inside us or around us. What arises out of that is something altogether new. The caterpillar cannot imagine the butterfly’s perspective. So the caterpillar allows itself to melt and it keeps itself safe. Put yourself in a cocoon of people who will love you and get through this, and you can trade times when you’re falling apart. We are falling apart. That’s good. Lean into it. Allow the feelings, all those emotions, that’s what they’re doing. They’re melting down the identity that you had before. And the place you go from there is one step at a time.

I’m going to read this poem by Mary Walker that she just posted today. She’s a kiwi. She lives in New Zealand, and she wrote this poem called “Choice.” It goes like this: “Each day splits into two again and again, hope or despair, faith or fear, love or judgment. Nothing is inevitable except at each fork in the road, the chance to choose and then the need to set your foot upon it. What would hope do? What faith? What love?”

We ask that question and we take the next step. Nothing is inevitable except the choice of the next thing. So we shrink down, shrink time down. Don’t try to deal with 10 years from now or even 10 minutes from now. Take it a breath at a time and come into: What would faith do? What would love do? What would hope do? And that is where you put your foot.

And then the next space is shown to you. And over time, it takes us into a completely new way of being.

Amanda says, “This is exactly what we need. Hello from Australia.” Hello, my beloved Australian friends, my beloved international friends who are so great and compassionate to us Americans. We’re such adolescents as a country, but I love how you’ve been reaching out. Amanda says, “How long do you feel this would need to take? Can it be done on the run?”

That’s such an Aussie question. I’m getting, what would you say? Getting the laureate. I’m going to rug up and go out there and change my consciousness. I can’t even do the Aussie accent. But how long will it take? It will take this moment and this moment and this moment, and we don’t need to look at the long picture. If we do, we will fall because we can’t imagine the path we need to take. So we have to be disciplined about letting ourselves bring attention into the present. That is what meditation’s about. That is how the brain moves toward enlightenment by being in this moment because nothing else is ever real. So stay, come back, come back. I’ve doubled my meditation practice, and I’m not asking myself how long. Because in the state of absolute presence, “How long?” is a meaningless question. I would say, how wide? Let’s connect with each other. In this moment, how wide should it be? It should be worldwide. It should be an incentive for us all to find each other and connect and join hands and drop our masks and drop our egos and walk forward together into the new thing. Whatever it is we’re meant to be. Let the forces of darkness crush what they crush. They’re crushing only the carapace, the free winged to creature is what will emerge from this.

SJ Remer says, “How can you heal continuous tension that I feel in my body during the day when I’m not doing creative things?”

Great question. One of the things I do is I listen to authors and not just self-help authors or authors about spirituality, but funny, silly stories as long as they’re really well-written. Music, whatever it is. And I have a practice of lying down at night and systematically seeing if I can relax every muscle in my body and then going through again and seeing if I can relax more and going through again. And it’s just waves of attention going through my body, relaxing more and more and more. Yoga practice is great for this. Shaking is good. Movement is good. Being in water and then getting out of the water is good. So yes, find a way to love your body through this and to let it do what it wants to do. Its instincts might say fight or flight. Do it. Punch a pillow, run in circles. Start taking very long walks, which is what I do. Work out and then rest, rest, rest, rest. Heal, heal, heal. The repetition of effort and rest will heal your body and that will bring that together. And that’s a huge part of healing you.

Okay, last of all, Buddhafied says, “How do you stay true? To course in my life when good people think I am the one brainwashed?” They may be right. That’s part of Don’t Know Mind. You go, “Oh wow, that may be true. Watch.” Watch. It might take a while. It might take years before that specific person you want to understand you actually goes, “Oh, I get it.” In the meantime, join the other people who are watching. Here we are loving each other, joining hands, feeling each other through space and stillness and silence and sitting at the campfire together, healing. I love you. I’ll see you soon. Bye for now.