So I met some of you this last weekend because I was teaching a seminar at the Omega Institute here in upstate New York, and a lot of amazing people from our Wilder community, the online community that Ro and I created, a lot of us were there together. And I met other people who maybe are not in Wilder but have come to The Gathering Room, and I got to see you and hug you and talk to you. And I didn’t actually feel like I’d had enough by the end.

The last day, there were so many people who brought so many really perfect, important questions that I tried to answer in brief, but I left a lot of loose threads, I feel. So I’m going to bring these issues in and start tidying up those loose threads because I’ve had thoughts since. And I think these are things we all wonder and worry about.

So the whole thing was about how this is a chaotic time, and how do we adjust and how do we steer our lives? And a lot of people were having issues like “I’m living on faith, but my finances are drying up and I don’t know why I can’t manifest more abundance,” or “I’m really, really trying to do everything right, but I still haven’t found the right person,” or “I still haven’t found the right place to live.” There were a lot of transitions.

Weirdly, almost everyone in the audience seemed to be either moving house or just had moved house or something like that. And I think that’s kind of symbolic of the fact that a lot of us are in basic transitions in our state of being. So moving house is kind of a symbol of moving from one state of consciousness to another.

And if you know me at all, you know that I believe we are in the middle of a transformation of human consciousness that I’ve been waiting for since I was born, and got all excited that it started happening when I still have enough life in me to enjoy it.

So here’s the deal. If you’re looking at a new way of living on the earth, a new way of seeing and knowing, if you’ve read Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth, there’s a bunch of people, it’s not just me, who’ve been saying for a long time, something’s going to shift. Well, now it’s shifting, and it’s shifting to something brand new.

And the problem is that when you shift to something brand new, nothing that you’ve learned how to do, nothing works because you’re in a new place. So in the past I’ve talked about phase transitions. If you’re on a planet where everything is made of ice, you know how to deal with solid things.

But if the temperature goes up, suddenly everything that you know how to do with your environment changes because the solid turns into a liquid. So you have to jettison all your ice spikes and axes and things and learn to use swim fins and scuba gear or whatever. You get what I mean? It’s a hypothetical.

So then you learn to live in liquid water, but then the temperature keeps rising. We’re going to say this doesn’t kill you and it all turns into steam, and suddenly you can’t swim in it. You can’t use your flippers. So you see what I mean? When something is changing, you take the same basic ingredients of a world, or of a way of being, and it undergoes a phase transition. Suddenly the very same stuff that always worked one way does not work anymore. And the kicker is we don’t know how this new world is going to work.

So over and over, I talked to people in this audience at this wonderful Omega thing, and they had courageously stepped forward from things that had not been working for them in their lives and their way of being and their way of relating to people. And they were waiting for the reward. And for many of us, it hadn’t finished coming. I really think we’re in this state of transition from ice to water or from water to steam. Something is fundamentally shifting.

And what that means is that some of the stuff we see as our survival needs—so stuff like how we get money, very, very important, how we establish a home base in the world, how we have a physical home, how we connect with other people, our families, our friendship groups. We’re all thinking, “The old ways that I was doing that, they weren’t fully functional. Now I believe there’s a new way. So I’m going to step off the old path and then expect things—like then I’ll know what to do.”

Problem is, you don’t know what to do. So I’ve always talked about how when you don’t know what to do, you do what you know. And that is not a way to make this situation get better. It’s like you wake up in a car that’s going off the road, and you just hit the gas instead of the brake. You don’t slow down what you’ve been doing, you accelerate it.

So for example, there were people in this crowd who said, “I really believe I was supposed to leave my soul-sucking job, so I took all my money and I invested it in this new small business and the new small business is losing money. I’m pumping my savings into it and I don’t see the beautiful manifestation that I was supposed to see according to all the New Age ideas.” Because I think the New Age ideas are headed in the right direction, but y’all, they are still part of the old consciousness. They’re still framed in the old ways. 

There’s also an illusion that comes, I think, to most of us from being in social systems like school. In school, if you do something fabulous, you get a reward for it and it’s pretty set up. There are certain ways, you have to keep certain rules, and some of us hate it, but some of us decided, “We’re going to do this,” and we did everything that was required. And sure enough, the rewards come. 

And that almost hides from us the reality that when you’re dealing with the world at a very basic primal level of how you’re surviving, there’s no school structure around that. There’s no authority system that’s going to reward you for doing all the New Age things right. So for example, say somebody left the bad job and lived in a, like, we had people there who’d gone and lived the van life that Roey, the Gracious Badger, my partner, she always thinks van life would be great. I disagree, but that’s a whole different subject. Anyway, we had a van life person and we had people who had jumped off and written a book and gotten it published, but it wasn’t out yet. And we had people who had started new businesses, but they weren’t thriving yet. 

And here’s the thing: If you go out into the woods and you’ve never been out there and you have to figure out how to live out there, if you just do the things that you always did when you lived in a city, like, “Gosh, I made a mailbox and I sit by it and I wait for my mail to be delivered and nobody comes by. It’s shocking.” Or if you say, “I found a stream, but after three days it wasn’t there anymore. It dried up. Who’s going to fix that?” Nobody’s going to fix that.

So here’s the bitter truth, y’all. It’s not bitter. It’s a good truth, but things are fundamentally shifting. They really are. And you don’t have to be woo-woo to believe that. Look at the socioeconomic factors, as I said at the Omega Institute. If you look at the biggest, most well-funded, most well-researched studies, most scientists estimate that we will see a collapse of human civilization starting as early as 2040 and certainly within the next 20 to 40 years. 

So what is that? It’s 2026. It’s 2066. A lot of us will still be alive. A lot of you will still be alive—I don’t know about me—that long. But when you say total collapse, it doesn’t mean everything’s going to explode. It means that the systems we rely on will have changed and they might have fallen apart. There may not be someone bringing the mail to the mailbox. There may not be someone pumping clean water to the house.

And I don’t mean to get all survivalist and scary. I’m just saying all bets are off right now. Seriously, all bets are off. And when you’re in absolutely unknown territory, you don’t just keep another set of rules and then wait for the reward. Instead, and this is what I wanted to talk about today, when you don’t know what to do, you do things you’ve never done. You start trying all kinds of things. We just adopted a dog today, a shelter dog named—Lila and Ro have chosen to name our dog “Rumi” after the poet. I think it sounds too much like a room. So I call the dog “Jelly” after Rumi Jalāl al-Dīn.

Anyway, it’s a dog and has been in a shelter for seven months. Nobody would adopt her because she’s got a cool shaman eye. She’s got this one strangely colored eye and she’s very timid, very scared, and she’s never had a family around her. We adopted—our last dog was a rescue too, but he lived with a family. He integrated so easily. This is a shelter dog that nobody wanted, and we have careful instructions not to do anything with her for a while. They say it takes her three days to settle and three weeks to start to calm down and three months before she’ll feel at home, and we have to respond to that.

So this dog is going through things she’s never been through before. She’s never been in our house. She’s never really been in many houses. She’s never been away from the shelter. And so what we have to do is observe her very closely and follow the cues that she gives us while trying various things in a very short-term, gentle way. So, see if she likes a certain kind of treat. Go toward her crate where she feels safe with the treat. She starts to shiver, you walk away. She doesn’t want the treat enough to get over her fear of us. So then, okay, what would make her feel better? If you just sit and sing to her? No, she seems to think that’s weird. Would it help to bring the other dog into the room? Nope. We thought that might help. Didn’t help. So we pull the other dog out. We’re trying. I mean, it’s only been literally a couple of hours, so we’re trying all these little things.

So that’s what I wanted to say to all the people at the Omega Institute who asked me questions and left going, “You didn’t answer me.” And all the other people out there who are like, “I know I don’t like the way the world’s been. I don’t know what the world’s going to become. I don’t know what I’m going to become, but please give me something to do to get there.” 

So this is what I would say to all of you who aren’t Wayfinder coaches, because Wayfinder coaches, all of you out there know exactly how this works. When you’re in a liminal situation and nothing is stable yet, you coaches know that you allow yourself to grieve what’s falling apart and be very, very observant and take little tiny steps and then check to see if they’re working, right?

So if you’re working with a Wayfinder coach and you’re in one of these transitional phases, that person will tell you, “First of all, we need to make sure that you have enough rest and peace to allow this transformation to happen. It won’t happen well from a state of anxiety or urgency or panic.” So the first thing is to get calm and allow things to fall apart. In Buddhism, they call this being without anxiety over imperfection. This is an imperfect moment because transition is like it’s always changing. It’s not going to be stable. So once you’ve got the stability to be without anxiety over imperfection, you take one step in a direction that you think might work.

We have one wonderful Wilder person—and I think she’s a coach too—she’s written this amazing book, and a few of you have written really amazing books and they’re going out there and I hope they really, really rock the world and sell a million copies or more. But if you’re not sure how you’re going to live as a writer, start a newsletter and it doesn’t matter if anyone reads it. If you put out a newsletter and get three comments back, that will still be some feedback and help you go out again. If you don’t like the internet and you hate the internet, don’t do that. Do something else. 

I’ve advised people who want to be—there’s one author, you might be out there right now, who said, “I hate the internet, but I want to be a public speaker.” She’s written a book. Okay, start giving public speeches. Where? I don’t know. A cafeteria in the basement of some office building. 

Every successful person I know who has, like me, lived outside the normal round of what could be called a job has put out hundreds of different kinds of feelers into the world going, “Will this work? Will this work? Do people want this service? Do they want that kind of product? How is this helping people? Is it enough to get some kind of healthy exchange going for value between something I can give them and something they can give me?”

So it’s just been tons and tons of small moves and then checking to see if it’s working. So if you put hundreds of thousands of dollars of seed money into a company and you’re not sure it’s going to go, and then you put it out there and it doesn’t go, it’s a lot harder than if you’ve put a couple of hundred dollars into something that’s a small replica of it and just see if your friends like it.

So what I wanted to say today to all of us is we’re all like this dog in our crate in a new place, and all of us are feeling nervous and timid and threatened. All of us feel a little unseated. I mean, maybe not, but if you’re feeling great, then I’m surprised you’re even here because all the people—I feel like the world’s a really weird place right now. 

So yeah, get yourself a Wayfinder coach or become a Wayfinder coach, which is the same thing only you get a full course of training and a trade and do what we all do in times of transition: Relax, come into absolute lack of anxiety about imperfection, or as close as you can get to that, and start taking very small steps.

Our thing with Jelly the dog is that Jelly is going to have to wait three days to three weeks before her nervous system can handle dealing with the unprecedented at this level. And she’s going to start trying little brave things, coming out of her crate just one step at a time. Ro has to drag her out right now to go pee, literally pick her up and take her. And it’s terrifying, but one day soon I hope she’ll put a paw out of the cage. It’s not a cage, it’s her crate. She loves it. Then she’ll try taking food from Ro’s hand and then she’ll try taking food from another person’s hand or even allowing someone to touch her on the ear. It’s going to be slow and you can’t—try convincing a six-year-old about this—you cannot speed it up by pushing it.

Slow is fast when you’re in an unknown situation, all right? Slow and small is fast and big when you’re in an unknown situation. So whether it’s in your own personal life, whether it’s in some kind of idealized version of a new world like I have, or whether it’s somewhere in between with your family or your job, just know that the small, slow, carefully observed steps are the ones that take you into something absolutely new.

And the huge good news is that the world is different around us now. We are in the phase transition, and that means that we can start getting feedback from our behavior from a world that is already changing. For the longest time I tried to figure out what this would be. No, can’t figure it out that way. You have to get feedback from what it is now, and what it is now is changing.

So that’s my big—I want to boost your morale for the trip forward because it is scary and it is very, very exciting. It is the worst of times, but it’s the best of times, and I promise we can choose best and leave the worst behind us.

All right, let’s do our Silence and Stillness and Space meditation now, and then I’ll get to the questions. So all this stuff about a new place and about everything changing, let’s go to non-anxiety about imperfection here and now.

We are going to do it now, and we’re going to do it by baffling our thinking minds and going to and observing awareness, and we’re going to use our strange meditation to do it. So get calm, breathe deeply, shake out the kinks, soft focus your eyes, begin breathing deeply and regularly, and ask yourself in your mind the question: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes?

Knowing that the matter, all matter, all physical matter is mostly made of space, overwhelmingly made of space, ask yourself, can I imagine the space inside the distance between my eyes? 

Can I imagine the space inside the atoms of my whole head? Can I imagine them continuous with all space everywhere? Can I imagine the distance between the crown of my head and the base of my skull? Can I imagine the distance between the base of my skull and my tailbone? Can I imagine the space inside all my organs and tissues? Can I feel them or imagine feeling the continuity between the space inside me and the space inside everyone else here all around the world?

Can I imagine the silence under the sounds everywhere in the universe? Can I imagine the stillness in which all action occurs everywhere in the universe? Can I feel the entire thing connecting with me now? It really is true. The space that is us is connected to the furthest reaches of the universe. That is not a metaphor. 

So I always feel like I can connect with even the folks in New Zealand or Romania, wherever you are, Sweden, Argentina, everywhere, even New York City. We are all connected in every moment. We just take a moment to notice it, and that helps us be without anxiety over imperfection.

But let’s look at the questions. The first one is “How do we quell our anxiety while trying to get used to new ways of living?”

We just sort of did it. You drop into neither past nor future, you’ve heard this before, you come into presence by refusing to let yourself think about what’s going on outside this moment.

So if you were dealing with—say you had a new dog and it was a scared dog, a pound dog, and it was wounded, let’s say it had a wound, not something you had to take care of right away, but something that had been dressed and was healing. Okay? So you’ve got a very anxious, wounded dog. That kind of a dog is very hard to take care of. So how do you quell its anxiety? 

You actually don’t give yourself permission to join the anxiety. I’ve watched Ro. Nobody else has touched the dog. Ro’s the only one who’s touched her so far, but I watch Ro refusing to become anxious when the dog clearly needs to go out and she’s trying to pull this little dog out of the crate. She’s not that little, so she’s quite an armful actually, and she’s growling and she’s pulling away and she’s fighting, and Ro is staying absolutely calm and she’s saying, “It’s okay, honey. We’re going to get you. It’s all right. It’s okay.”

You get to be both those things. There’s the part of you going, “Oh, nothing’s working. Nothing’s the way I though it was, and I don’t know what I want, and I don’t know what to do.” You are that part, but you have to be noble enough to also play the one who is in charge.

Even though Ro doesn’t know anything about this dog and is not like a specialist in dog training or anything, she’s just going on what she’s read and experienced and her best instincts, but she cannot allow herself the luxury of getting anxious and snapping at the dog or forcing the dog. She remains calm, gentle, still, and determined to gently move towards certain objectives, and she doesn’t know it’s going to work. She is also adjusting in the moment. 

So there’s an anxious part of us, and there’s a part of us that can say to the other anxious part, “Yeah, I get that you’re really anxious. I’m going to keep moving forward. I will not let myself freak out. We can’t afford to both freak out, so I’m going to stay calm. I’m going to be selfless enough to be the calm one in charge, even though I too am completely clueless about what’s going on here.”

So just taking that position puts you in this awareness that is not gripped by anxiety. And there are other ways. I mean, I wrote about them in my book, Beyond Anxiety, but basically when the chips are down and there’s an emergency, the hero is the one who refuses to let herself become anxious, and that is a conscious choice for almost all of us. Sometimes it’s not.

The next question is this, “I had a stroke last week. I survived this time. How can I not overthink it will happen again soon?”

I don’t think you can stop yourself from overthinking. As I always say, “I have never been able to control anything with my thoughts, including my thoughts.” Your thoughts are going to be what they are. The brain ticker spits them out and you’ve got a negativity bias toward fear and survival fear, so it’s going to go there. So you have to be without anxiety about the fact that you’re going to be afraid of having another stroke. 

Those of us who’ve had any kind of life accident or illness, we live—well, we’re all terminal on this bus, y’all. We all know that in the end, our bodies are going to fail and we are going to pass on or pass away. So to not overthink that is to remain calm in the face of mortality, which is one of the great jobs humans get to have in this life. We get to imagine our own death in a way that seems more vivid than most animals can, we think.

And that means that we have this incredible challenge of finding our way to peace when our bodies are designed to fear what they know for sure is coming. And the way to do that, Eckhart Tolle says, “Die before you die and learn that there is no death.” And the way you die before you die is to dissolve the consciousness that is constantly telling you death is a bad thing.

There are a lot of ways to do that. I love listening to my near-death-experience stories online because once you’ve had one of those experiences, you really don’t fear death at all anymore. But also, I’ve spent a lot of years in meditation getting really comfortable with the idea that I could just go out like a candle forever. Fine with me. I won’t be around to hurt. So yeah, I mean, there are other things to fear besides death.

There’s disability, there’s limitation, but ultimately it all comes down to sitting peacefully and looking straight at the illusion that is fear and saying, “It is true that things may happen. It is not true that I have to suffer about them.” So to be without anxiety over imperfection is to allow yourself to be afraid while the part of you that is calm says, “And you know what? We will figure it out when we get there. That’s the only thing we can do with our dog or ourselves or anything.” 

I’m sorry that happened to you, by the way. Very sorry.

Question: “Could the LGTBQ+ community be the critical mass needed to start dissolving the pyramid if we created a society?”

Could be. I don’t know. I like the way you’re thinking. Put it out there. I’m putting it out there simply by being gay and being alive. So it is true that people who are on the lower levels of the social pyramid, those people who are denigrated, oppressed, downtrodden, whatever, are more likely to give up the structures of the society that’s oppressing them than the people who are benefiting from it. 

So that means that people who, like people of color, women as opposed to men, people who have had or are considered a lower rank in society are much more likely to let go and be without anxiety over the change because it’s a change away from something that doesn’t benefit them as much as people higher up. Certainly LG—I’m completely tongue-tied here—LGBTQ+, we definitely count as a lower stratum. So, yay. 

And there may just be so many of us that when we all switch over, the rest of the people cannot resist the delightful way we’ve decided to live. We’re not coming for your marriages, straight folk. We love you. But not following all the rules is a very nice thing for some of us.

I’m going to do a quick rundown of a few more questions: “How can we broaden our thoughts and imaginations and then actions? They feel so limited. I would love it that those come from the blank and are so, so original.”

The first thing I would say is play more. Play more. Play the way you did when you were a child. Pick up hobbies you wish you could have picked up. Don’t do it for anybody else. Do it for the joy of making stuff, for the joy of discovery. Make a pact that you won’t show it to anyone and that will free your imagination. It really is the gaze of the other that frightens us out of the breadth of our imaginations, which by their nature are infinite.

Okay, question: “How do we manage people who challenge our integrity as we try moving in our new direction?”

We handle them with love and complete adherence to our own integrity. So, “Mom, I hear you don’t want me to be gay. I love you so much. I’m gay.” Pretty much boils down to, “I’m not going to fight you over it. I’m going to love you and I’m not going to shift from my integrity.” I know that makes it sound easy. It’s not, but it’s simple. It’s not easy, but it’s simple. Live your truth and love others, full stop.

Question: “Am I wasting my precious life and passion if my job is nowhere near anything I care about, even if I still make time for things I’m passionate about?”

I don’t know. Here’s what I do know. No time is ever, ever, ever wasted. The time you spend doing stuff you hate is honing you for the ability to do things that you will love. It’s teaching you the reasons you don’t love it. It’s helping you imagine an alternative that might be better. So what matters is that you approach it from a place of consciousness that says, “I will evolve. I will learn from this. This is as much the forge in which I am being crafted as anything else.” And stop judging it, be without anxiety over the imperfection of the job and be ready to jump on a moment’s notice when the opportunity comes. Yeah, so that’s how I would.

Q: “Any tips on overcoming anxiety, get back to pursuing a passion?”

Yes. Play and do it for yourself, not for anybody else.

And then: “What type of coach did you recommend?”

The coaches I train are called Wayfinder coaches because we are all about finding the way through this new environment that’s arising on the earth. And yeah, we’ve had thousands of people go through it and it’s really what I hope is a school for people who don’t want school, a place where you’ll be encouraged and loved and challenged to broaden your imagination instead of limiting it, to become more yourself instead of less yourself.

Oh, I’ve just been told to say we are enrolling for fall now, and I think there’s an early-bird discount that is going to—is it going to go away or has it already? It’s going to very soon. Okay. It will go away very soon.

Anyway, finally: “How do I know where I’m hanging onto the old paradigm?”

Nothing works anymore, and you’re miserable. Yeah, that’s how. If it works and you’re not miserable, just stay there. It’s cool. Don’t move until it moves you. But when it does move you, be happy. It’s not trying to destroy you. It’s trying to make you into something new. And that newness is going to be awesome, I have a feeling.

So thank you for being here. I love you all. Glad I met many of you, and I’ll see you later. Bye-bye.