Whether you’re in the US or in another country, you’re probably aware that change is accelerating and appearing quite difficult. Signs are not all pointing to “Everything’s okay.” Now, yeah, those watching in the future will not know at what point this was recorded, but suffice it to say that for months and months, for years, I’ve been saying, “Oh, I think change is coming, and I think it’s coming hard and fast and accelerating and going up, and things will become more and more chaotic, more and more difficult to navigate.”

It’s very weird to say that 30 years ago and keep saying it and saying it and then watch the things that you know are coming to watch them actually happen. I’ve talked before about how the most typical response to aging is surprise. And I could attest I was very surprised to be in my 60s. How did that happen? And yet you absolutely know it’s going to happen unless you pass to another life or whatever you believe. And it’s very much the same for me now, watching the course of world history.

I am surprised, even though I have been saying for decades, this has been bound to happen in some form. Rising chaos, apparent collapse of some of the most dominant societies, especially the US, in the world. And by that I just mean the failure of systems to maintain a sort of predictable course of human events. It’s happened so many times to so many powerful cultures before. And America showed all the signs of doing that decades ago, and now things are getting quite sporty, quite, quite sporty. So somebody said, as we came on, said that she felt gutted. I think many of us feel gutted.

And I go back in my head to a time when I was in my late 20s, because I had the experience of this once before in a way not many people get the chance to within the United States. Many of you outside of the United States have experienced similar things. But for me, it was that I was raised in a theocracy. I was raised in a place that was really—the separation of church and state doesn’t really hold true in Provo, Utah. Sorry, it doesn’t hold true in Provo, Utah, or at least it didn’t back in the 60s and 70s when I was growing up. So my only set of cultural rules was deeply intertwined with Mormonism. And almost everyone I knew was Mormon, and it was a life-world religion that influences literally everything in people’s minds and schedules and interactions and relationships and careers. It just dominated everything.

And then once I had my—I sort of left that behind, then had a spiritual sort of shock when my son was diagnosed with Down syndrome, but also proved to be somewhat psychic, very psychic actually. And I questioned the reality of everything, went back to my native culture going, “I’ve got to give this another chance.” And within a few months was like, “Oh no, this is not what I want.” And left the religion, which in that case meant leaving the society. I had lost trust in the institutions that were running the world where I lived.

And that is one of the main symptoms of cultures that are in decline or crumbling is that the people begin to lose trust in the institutions that are making their lives go forward. And event by event by event, we are seeing events in the US and affecting the rest of the world that really, truly doesn’t evoke a lot of trust from all of us people out here watching, experiencing.

So what happened during that first crisis of culture in my life was that I felt absolutely unable to navigate anything. Every rule, every institution, every relationship had been bound up with Mormonism. When I was out of it and I didn’t trust it that it was telling the truth anymore, I was upside down and sideways and had no idea what was real or what to use to go forward.

So many of us, it’s not just political. It’s also like artificial intelligence is now pouring data, pouring analysis into the world, which can be either a really great thing like this is going to make expertise outmoded. Anyone with a phone and a few good questions can become an expert on everything. Woo-hoo, the democratization of specialization, that’s an oxymoron. But also, oh my goodness, AI is going to take away a lot of the labor that people have been paid to do, and it could be used to surveil people on an unprecedented scale. Oh my gosh, it’s Big Brother.

So everything is getting tossed up in the air and mixed around at a level that is faster and scarier than anything that we’ve seen ever in human history. The Industrial Revolution didn’t cause as much change as what’s going to happen now. The European Enlightenment didn’t cause as much change. Colonization was much smaller. This is happening now and it’s happening so fast.

So there I was, like 30-some years old, three little kids, life completely off its hinges, off its tracks. And what I found is exactly what I see the wisest advisors asking us to do right now. This is a time that requires a radical turning toward the integrity of the inner self. Goethe, the German poet said, “When you trust yourself, you will know how to live.”

When I was 30-something and I began to trust myself to know how to live, I found that my body—I’ve said this before, but your thinking brain is processing about 40 bits of information per second, according to one study I read, and your whole body-mind is processing 11 million bits of information per second, per second. That means that when you’re confronted with competing stories, some of which might be made up by humans, some of which might be hallucinated by artificial intelligence, like so many narratives about your life, if you can use your embodied discernment to establish what is true for you, if you go into the body…

Now this is, you know I run this coach training, Wayfinder Life Coach Training. The “life coach training” bit of it is our cover name. The “Wayfinder” is actually what it is. It’s just what I used to teach people to do because it’s what I learned to do when I had no track at all. I was completely without a feeling of regulation, of trusting the grownups, of knowing what to do, and I began using things like deep physiological attunement. I’ve watched Ro, my beautiful, lovely partner, I have watched her be able to reliably just nail what is AI-composed and what is not. (Sorry, I’m going to silence this.) Because she loves poetry, she loves literature, and she’s incredibly sensitive and in great integrity. When she hears the voice of AI, it doesn’t register in her body the same way. AI, for example, can make meanings, but not as deeply as a human, not just mind, but body-mind. The whole neuroception that we inherited from hundreds of millions of years of evolution, that is on our side.

I named the coach training after the navigators of the great Pacific, those incredible Pacific Island cultures that could navigate 3000 miles of open water because they understood the sky and the water so well. And the “wayfinders,” something they were named by an anthropologist, internalized all that knowledge. They were like human supercomputers. They’d put one of them on a boat and off that person would navigate with very, very little in the way of instrumentation. The body-mind is so sophisticated.

So everything I’m going to tell you today is a very brief, condensed version of this method that I’ve learned and tried to teach and tried to coach. They call it coaching. Okay, whatever. I call it navigation training. And I want you to have some of that because today I got up and I felt as discombobulated and upside down looking at the news as I did when I was 30 and I no longer had a belief system at all.

Where do you go when you don’t believe in what’s around you? I’d like us all to take a deep breath right now, and I want you to turn your attention to a point right where your ribs connect in your chest, right in your solar plexus, and about three inches in front of your spine. Literally imagine there’s a point of light there and that you can turn your vision toward it and you can go into it. It’s this point of light. And as you go into it and your mind—imagine your mind going deeper and deeper and deeper and this point of light gets bigger and bigger as you go into it. And it turns out to be infinitely deep and your mind follows it in, follows it in, follows it in. And as your mind follows it in, that good left-hemisphere thinking, the light expands to fill the rest of your body. And as it fills the rest of your body, you know things. You intuit things. You sense the forward movement of your own mission in life. You sense the next step, which is probably tiny. Take it and you’ll get the next step.

When I started doing this, I remember telling myself, “It’s like I’m following a cat through a howling blizzard at the top of a mountain ridge with steep cliffs on each side. And the only thing I have to go forward with is the sound of the cat’s footsteps on the stones.” That’s how hard it was for me to pick it up. It’s a very fine layer of sort of neurological activity, this idea, this feeling of being tapped into what we call the body compass, the mental compass, the emotional compass. These are all words we use in the coach training, which is, as I said, it’s navigation. You can coach people to navigate, but it’s a navigation system and it’s meant for times like this.

So what I want you to do now, go back to where you’re going inward, inward, inward, and the light is flooding you. Now, as your mind stays with that inward velocity, that inward motion, let yourself become that light, suffused with that light. And instead of a cat walking ahead of you, what you’ve got is a warmth, a tenderness, a compassion that is soaking into you from everywhere around you and is radiating outward from your center to blend with the light around you. And in this realm of being, you are fine. We are fine. We are going to be absolutely fine.

I felt 30 years ago like I was putting my life on the line. I was. My whole everything was on the line. And instead of a cat walking ahead of me now, I’ve realized that I was listening to something, I used a metaphor that was cold and scary and alien. And the reality was that I’ve been surrounded by this loving force the entire time, and I am part of that loving force. So all I have to do is drop the illusion that I’m walking through a blizzard at night on a cliff. Instead, allow yourself to feel that you are safe, to reimagine the wild night as a calm sunrise that soaks into you and says: I am always here. Just ask. Just ask. I’m here to help you. Ask and then keep your eyes open. I will send you messages. Ask and trust your body. It will lean forward when it feels what you’re meant to do. Ask and let yourself love what you love. Ask and be in this moment, “which is where I always am,” says the light, “and where I can always tell you what to do.” Ask and it will wrap you in comfort while you grieve the things that are happening that the light also grieves, but it knows that suffering is not the end and that compassion is nothing but the evolution of consciousness in the healing of horrors such as the ones we see around us.

So drop the wild night in the mountains, drop the wild night at sea and come into this sense of being suspended, not just in a nice flowery meadow or something, but literally suspended in the air because this power is so thick that you can float in it. And as you allow it to support you entirely, it’s like learning to float on your back in the water when you’re a kid. The more you fight and thrash, the sooner you sink. And when you realize that you can let go and spread out, and the water is thick enough to hold your face out of the water, then you’re free in the water.

So the land is gone, the landmarks are gone or they’re going, but that’s okay because we can float. We can do this, but we have to figure out what we really are. We have to drop the illusion of horror that they all want us to believe, all the people who want to inflict terror on us. They are not as real as the substance in which your soul is floating. Hear me now, believe me later, give it a try. 

Let’s jump into our meditation that we do, every Gathering Room. And it will take us further into this. I talked about that thin band of energy where the truth lives, where love lives. It’s so fine and nuanced, but so gentle that often we don’t even see it. So come with me and we’ll ask our strange question, which is not meant to be answered or even accomplished, but is asked to baffle the mind.

And that question is: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes? Can I imagine the space between my eyes and the screen I’m watching or whatever I’m watching? Can I imagine the distance between my eyes and the back of my head? Can I imagine the distance between the top of my head and the base of my spine? Can I imagine the space inside the atoms of my body, which is almost all I am? Can I imagine the stillness in which activity always occurs? Can I hear, can I imagine the silence in which sounds happen? Can I be the field of complete space, stillness, and silence in which all material experiences occur?

This is not meant to fix anything. It’s meant to send you to the place where all your navigation works. And if you can come back here, and if you can use things like your body’s senses, your deep intuition, the light that comes from you and is surrounding you, you will navigate this safely in peace, not always in happiness, but always in peace.

So I have a ton of questions and I’m going to jump in. In fact, I may go over time because these are good questions.

So question: “For those of us who feel called to move elsewhere and are terrified by what’s happening in the US, any tips on manifesting moving to a new country when it looks impossible?”

Pay attention to your instincts. If you read prepper manuals on how to survive fascism, there’s all these steps you can take that are very pragmatic and solid. And then they’ll always say, “Trust your instincts. They will be sharpened.” So keep your eyes open for a location in the world that calls to you. I felt basically it was in reaction to this happening, to the last election, that my family and I moved to upstate New York, but weirdly it wasn’t. It was because we had an overwhelming feeling that upstate New York would be fabulous to live in. So don’t look for, “I’m scared, I’m scared. Where do I go?” Go to, “I’m guided. I’m guided. What feels good?” And when you think, “But nothing feels good now,” that’s the illusion. No. When the guidance comes, it always comes as love. It always comes as peace. So what feels good? And you’ll be guided step by step.

Burning question: “What do we do with irreversible decisions that lead to misalignment? I grew up LDS, that’s Mormon, and was pressured into having kids, even though it wasn’t right for me. Where do I go from here?”

The first thing is you have to get your life back into cohesive resonance—another word for integrity. And I don’t like the word integrity here because you weren’t out of integrity when you had kids. You were doing what your society said you had to do. And then you’ve got these children, right? I just put a lot of money in the therapy jar when mine were growing up. But where do I go from here? You go to the absolute truth. You sit down and you say, “Here is what I feel.” And you feel what you feel. “Here’s what I know.” You know what you know. “Here is what I want,” which they never let you talk about. You do what you want. “And here’s what I believe.” And when it is safe, you say what you believe. Inside yourself, you say exactly what you believe. That’s the space that takes you into the light. Truth will take you into the light, and I swear to God it will get you out of anything, sometimes in ways that seem frankly miraculous. And by the way, I’m very grateful that I was raised believing in miracles because it means that I was very open to them and they happen to me all the time.

Okay. Question: “With this and all of AI I do feel excitingly curious and I have a huge, constantly growing rag bag of curiosity.” You’ve read my last book, huh? “How to not get overwhelmed and organize your rag bag to help you later?”

So a rag bag is just beautiful ideas or things that you see that you put in a pile for use at some later time. You don’t need to get organized to help you later. You need to enjoy what you’re doing now. Joy will take you along the line of your destiny. Joy will tell you what to do next. In coach training, we always talk about how we’re moving, we’re following a track, and the track is different for each one of us, but for all of us, it is joy in the body that we are tracking.

And that means the body and the emotions. It’s the whole body-mind. So do it for joy, and you will end up in the place that is safe. Do it out of fear, you are very likely going to stay in scary circumstances because that’s what fear gives us. So joy and curiosity and all those things, they seem so pale in comparison with acting out of panic, but panic doesn’t solve problems. Creativity solves problems, and creativity is joyful and playful and we have to stay that way. We have to make art. We have to make beauty. We have to keep sharing the things that give us joy. That’s how we navigate, y’all.

Okay. Question: “What is one small thing we can give or teach to others that don’t know about our belief in the inner compass to help them along this crazy path?”

Well, the way I start people out in the coach training is imagine, remember a time in your life that was bad. And while you hold it in your mind, feel what goes on in your body. It will probably be some kind of clenching. Then remember a good time in your life. Hold that in memory. Feel what goes on in your body. That will probably be a loosening and an uplift. And then say, think of anything you have to do and notice if a clenching or a relaxation starts to happen.

I’ve given probably 10,000 speeches in my life and this thing, this thing I call the body compass, this is probably the thing that people want to hear the most over and over and over again. It means you’ve always got a supercomputer—and not just AI, but real I—which is not only informational, but also contextual and meaning-based. It can give authenticity that AI cannot. I put out a newsletter about that and a lot of you seemed to like it. All these things we need to bring to the forefront of our lives.

We’ve been able to relax into structures, institutions, and technologies to this point. That ain’t happening anymore. The technologies are weird. The structures are weird. The world is weird. The weather is weird. And the only place we have left to go is this humble, what Ovid called this “jar of clay with its pint of blood,” this body and this little biological thing we have. It’s freaking magic, people, if we know how to use it. So teach that to people. Learn it yourself and then teach it. If you don’t know how to learn it, find a Wayfinder coach. They can tell you. They will show you.

Question: “Martha, I’m in a Square Three.” That means creating something in the world that is hard. “And I thought I was at the very end of it, but I don’t seem to reach Square Four.” That, again, from coach training. Square Four is the time when everything’s running smoothly and you don’t have to worry much anymore. “I’m stuck at the end of Square Three, but not transitioning.”

We’ll try this technique. Okay. So if you feel like you were doing things and your life was going along and then somebody threw a spanner in the works, you are correct—things are as upended as they seem. It really is as bad as it looks. So sorry. That’s really bad news if you rely for your sanity on things being predictable, smooth, and externalized. But if you find that you still, you thought you were at the end of a journey, and it turns out we’re just beginning, that’s fine too.

Because we were designed to rethink our trajectory, to let go of the things that we’ve clutched, the ideas that we’ve hung onto, gotten attached to because they always work. When we don’t know what to do, we do what we know, and it still doesn’t work. So when you get to there, you know exactly the steps. You must be a coach because you know the phases. When things break down in your life, you go immediately to the state of death and rebirth, which we call Square One. You let go of your illusions and you grieve them. It’s horrifying what’s happening. People are losing very, very significant things. Their loved ones, their living, their hope. So there has to be a space to hold that. We compare it to the meltdown of a caterpillar in the chrysalis. And the only job we have there is to hold the cocoon around us and allow ourselves to lose what we thought we were. And it’s terrifying to the caterpillar. 

But what the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly. So just keep doing it, going around the cycle. The way I put it in my first self-help book, the way I’ve taught it to like thousands of coaches. I cannot recommend strongly enough, y’all, that you find someone who knows how to do this. I made this system for a time of social chaos when you feel like you can trust nothing. And it didn’t just save me. It’s given me this incredible life. You can have the most incredible, wonderful life. You just have to let go of what you thought was going to support you and find out what’s really under there.

Question: “Are there any good reasons not to do the Wayfinder training? Any reason why it wouldn’t be right for someone?”

One thing. If you think about it and you go look at it online and your whole body says, “Ooh, nice. Scary, but nice. Expensive, but nice.” If you feel drawn to it, do it. If you have all the money in the world and all the time in the world and you think, “That is what I want to do. I’m going to go look at it in online,” and you look at it and you’re like, “Ehh…” Don’t do it! This is not—I want you to do what your destiny calls you to do. And it may be a coach training. It may not be.

You’re the authority. You’re the master navigator of your life. You will always be the only master navigator for your life and the only navigator you will ever need. You just need to learn to read your instruments. And are there ways to do it other than Wayfinder coach training? Of course there are. I made them up, so I know I got them from other places. I just pushed them all into a pile that I think is quite accessible. But yeah, if you don’t want to, don’t do it. End of story.

Question: “I’m in a time of transition, walking into an unknowable future. So the uncertainty of the world order feels especially intense. I worry that I/we may never hit solid ground again. Is that possible?”

Wonderfully, it is. Part of my education, and again, part of what turned into my method of living is that I was educated in Asian philosophy quite young. And in Buddhism, many schools of Buddhism, there’s something called “don’t know mind.” And it’s when you’ve sat in meditation and examined your thoughts deeply until you’ve seen through the illusory nature of most of your thoughts like, “Oh my God, transition is terrifying.” Sit with that in meditation until 10, 12, 14, 80 hours. And I promise you, what will happen is if it’s frightening to you, it will dissolve, and you will see a bigger truth behind it. But that bigger truth won’t be an idea. It will be a freedom. It will be a state of liberation that is so joyful and so peaceful that there is no question in your mind this is where you want to be.

So that “don’t know mind” is the place where great masters live, not ever being sure of anything except to follow the light within them and the joy within them. My friend Stephen Mitchell, who’s married to Byron Katie and is my favorite translator of sacred texts into English, running away. And he once told me, “What you do when you don’t know what to do is you pull out the rug from under your feet, but that’s not enough. Then you have to pull out the floor from under the rug. That’s not enough. Then you pull out the ground from under the floor. Now you’re talking. Now you can get somewhere.”

That’s why I had you do the suspended-in-air visualization. That is how it feels to move forward guided in chaos, to bring coherence to chaos. And it is not a state of knowing facts. It is a state of radical letting go, radical freedom, radical truth, radical integrity and coherence.

And let me tell you something. One person who is truly coherent can pull—and I’m talking neurological entrainment—can pull thousands of people into coherence if they are in chaos and they don’t want to stay in chaos. There are a lot of forces that want us to stay in chaos, in the feeling of chaos being difficult, but one person who doesn’t need those structures, who knows to go within, who knows how to read the compasses, who knows the path of change that I’ve been talking about through this whole thing, that one person emanates a very strong frequency into the world and puts things right without even having to be there. I promise you. I know this is true. I’ve seen it. Very few things that I would claim to know, but I really, really believe that.

So question: “How might we apply this thinking to our money and finances as a broke college student who’s obsessed with what I’m studying? Thanks again.”

Again, you trust instincts, you trust…It’s not even a matter of financial versus relational versus educational versus…It’s not any modality of living. It’s an entire perspective of trust, not in anything material, but in that which underlies the material.

I talk about the space, the silence, and the stillness in which all things happen. It is real. Space is real. Silence is real. Stillness is real. What doesn’t occur to us in material form is that it’s alive. It is alive and talking to us. It is alive and in love with us. It is alive and so, so focused on what we’re going through. So no matter what the problem is, the fact that you love learning says, “Lean in, expect to learn and learn and learn.” Give yourself to that joy and ask, “Please support me. Please show me the way. Please give me the money. Please let it happen. Please hold me in this frightening, frightening time.” And I promise you, you will be held in more ways than you can even imagine, including financially.

Final question: “I feel deeply called to stay home and take care of my 10-month-old baby, but I had to go back to work to make a living. I’m so sad and angry about this situation. What can I do to follow my calling?”

First of all, you’re going to have to forgive yourself and the world for not allowing things to work the way you wanted them to work. Then you’re going to have to do some radical letting go of cultural ideas, including, for example, anything that you get from your culture about your being less than a perfect parent because you had to go and work.

I know that’s not why you left. I know that you wanted to be with your baby so much, but I also know that in my life, when things haven’t gone the way I wanted them to, and I really had plans, I’m telling you, people told me when my son was born and he had Down syndrome, “You can be an activist for Down syndrome.” And I was like, “I had other plans.” And that also included being able to be home with my kids a lot more and not being the primary breadwinner, but that’s what happened.

So you have to let go of judging yourself and judging the situation because I promise you, as my grown kids will tell you, I transferred to them the judgments I made on myself as a mother. So forgive yourself and forgive the situation for being so messed up and be, be, be in your love for your baby and keep a lookout. Ask: “I’d rather have a different way. I’d rather have a different way.” But also ask yourself, “Why would this be happening if my life was a heroic adventure and not a tragedy? Why would this circumstance have come up if my story is a hero’s story and not a victim’s story?”

Because we all feel victimized by what’s happening and we get to choose. There’s a beautiful sort of triangle of thinking that, again, we talk about it in coach training, and it talks about how when we are in a situation where things are happening to us that are bigger than us and against our will and lethal force and we are legit victims, we are legit victims of so many forms of oppression and injustice, and a lot of people are more in that situation than I am, God knows. 

But here’s the power of reversing all your illusions: When you are in the place of most victimization in your life, you are also in the point of greatest creativity. You have been pushed to your limit and your brain, which is very different from Artificial Intelligence, which runs on spirit and aesthetics and meaning and joy and play, not just information, that is going to give you a coherent picture of what—it’s going to solve the problem that makes you feel victimized by making you powerful beyond your wildest dreams. To be in the place where things aren’t going well and say, “I am a hero, damn it, and I am surrounded by forces that love me. And my story is being played out because it is meant for my consciousness to develop more creativity, power, joy than I ever thought possible. And that’s why I came here at this time. That’s why everything’s going skiwampus in the entire world because I needed circumstances that will make me create things at a level higher and more exciting than I’ve ever experienced before.”

And then you cry for two hours, you put the baby to bed, you take a bath, you try to get some sleep, you get up the next morning and you ask again, “I don’t like this. Please change it for me.” And as long as it doesn’t change, you find a way to stay not victim, but creator, hero, soul alive with amazement and curiosity at the circumstance we now find ourselves living in.

This is a time for seeing through the darkest illusions, and that’s going to call on us to reach within ourselves and find our way to something luminous, something real, something true, and then having become finders of the way to teach others to wayfind, to find the way for everyone—not just ourselves—through our joy, through our compassion, through truth.

It is really okay, everybody, but we’re going to have an interesting ride. I love you. Thank you for coming here to The Gathering Room. See you again soon. Bye.