And sometimes you get, I had an interview with the wonderful Dr. Lisa Miller from Columbia a few weeks ago, and she is this brilliant doctor and psychologist who also happens to give some credit to what we might call spiritual experiences, the non-material. And she was talking about how when you start to pay attention to that, which is what medicine people do, synchronicities start to happen. So it just makes me think because I see all these places and I think, “The wayfinders are coming, the wayfinders are coming now.” That’s a word that I got from one anthropologist Wade—I’ll have to find out. It’ll come to me in a minute. Anyway, he was working with the Polynesian magical people who navigate across the Pacific with no instruments of any kind except for their own brains and their own neurology and their whole nervous system. He called them the “wayfinders” because that’s sort of a compound word that you can, you know what it means even though it’s not—Wade Davis was his name.

1. So I started calling everybody who has this medicine profile, “wayfinder.” And then I have also told you, or maybe you’ve never tuned in before, I go everywhere by this sort of inner compass that is very comparable analogously to the way that people navigate the sea or navigate life, the ocean, the desert, in the way of the medicine person, in the way of the wayfinder. So that’s what I called my coaching system when I started to teach it. And I just got done doing a quarterly call with a bunch of coaches because we always stay connected if they want to. And I talked about how “wayfinder” was not the perfect word, but it’s the word I have for us. 

And then when my family and I started getting the feeling a few months ago that we were just, it would be a good thing for us to move. Like a really good thing. Like no, you have to move. And it’s very specific where you have to move. You have to move to a certain part of upstate New York. And we were like, “Okay, but there are no houses.” We found the property we finally bought through this weird thing, which I can’t really talk about here because it involves people that I have sworn to protect. Yeah, just chew on that for a while. But anyway, we kept getting these synchronicities saying, “You need to go to this part.” The Kingston area, basically. There are all these little villages around Kingston. And we got so many synchronicities, I can’t even begin to describe them. And they were not subtle.

Like Ro, my partner, she was on some website and at the end of the website there was a photo array, a slideshow entitled, “Why You Should Move to Kingston, New York.” There were no subtleties about this. Anyway, my oldest child, I told them, “Okay, we’re going to be moving there.” And they said, “Okay, well…” For some reason they went and Googled a wonderful online gamer who also has an in-person gaming community, and my kid has followed these people for 10 years, never thought to look them up geographically, went to look them up. Sure enough, Kingston, New York.

So Rowan, I went to lunch the other day with a woman named Elizabeth Lesser who is brilliant. She’s an incredible author, an incredible person. And she also started something called the Omega Institute in New York, upstate New York. And I used to teach there a lot. And it’s just a place of wisdom and peace and goodness and trying to change the world for the right. I mean, she’s a wayfinder. So she asked us, “Why did you move here?”

And we said, “Because we got all these signs.” And she said, “Tell me about it.” And I said, “Are you that woo woo?” And she’s like, “I’m totally woo woo.” So I told her about all of this, the zillion, Ro and I were telling her, and when I told her about my kid looking up this gaming community and finding them here, she said, “Oh yeah, that got started at the Omega Institute.”

So she was in charge of this place when a dude who was going to create this wonderful community made it up, called it “Wayfinder,” and then started playing a game 10 years ago that my kid has been following the entire time. So all these things kept rolling in. And as I talk to my community of Wayfinders, which is what I call our coaches, it’s so beautiful to find that when they start steering by this sort of internal, I call them the technologies of magic, the things that medicine people use that are real, that our culture doesn’t really believe in, they start to find their way to the same places.

And then I get on The Gathering Room and so many people are navigating here from so many places. Places that maybe have cultures that are hostile to each other, religions that don’t accept each other. And yet here we are, right? Here we are. So this season of the year can be particularly stressful, a time when you particularly need to find your way. And with my coaches, I’m like, “Look, you have the tools. You can use this. You can do this.” Tools to make it easier to get through the holidays, tools to make it easier not to celebrate holidays if that’s not your deal. Tools to help you navigate the new year ahead of you, whatever it is.

But stress is always high at this time of the year because many holidays do play out at this time, especially in European-based cultures. And even if that’s not your gig, there’s the new year to think about. So all the taxation systems, all the work-related stuff, everything rejiggers for the new year. And there’s this sense of something ending and something being born. That’s actually the name of January. Janus, I think, was the two-headed, the two-faced god. It was a baby on one side and an old man on the other and was watching the old year die and the new year being born.

And we have all these traditions around it, and I think that’s beautiful, but I was reminded yesterday of how difficult it can be to wayfind through these rituals and experiences because I decided to make cookies with our five-year-old, Lila. And her attention span is getting pretty good now, and she’s a smart little thing and fun and sweet and fabulous, but sugar is not a food she should have often because it affects her like, I don’t know, some kind of street drug. It’s amazing what it does to her.

So we got all ready. We spent the whole day. Of course everything went wrong. We didn’t have the hand mixer because we moved. We had to try to find a hand mixer in the middle of winter and there was none in our area. We had to send Karen out on a huge expedition after we’d already done—I mean, it took all day to get to the actual making of the cookies. I’ve asked my older kids, “Don’t you love those cookies?” And they’re like, “Uhh…” “Don’t you have fond memories?” “…Sure?” I’m like, what could possibly be wrong with that?

Well, yesterday I remembered. Because I can get quite focused on the kind of cookie I want to make. I have my own thing that I like to do. And it’s better to be working with adults when you’re very attached to a recipe. So I gave Lila her marching orders: “Okay, you’re going to stand on your step stool and you can touch things when I tell you you can touch them. And when I don’t say that you can touch them, you can’t. And you can’t eat anything until it’s cooked.”

And she was like, “Absolutely.” And she was being so good and we got started and then she started sneaking little bits of dough. And I was like, “Not till it’s cooked, not till it’s cooked.” But then we had to roll it out and we stamped the cookie cutters and then she started eating a little more of the dough. And then it was just like her head exploded. If you’ve ever seen the TikTok series called “Cooking with Beagles,” that’s what it’s like. Beagles are obsessed with food and cannot keep themselves from going at it. Lila was doing exactly the opposite of what she was told to do. So I would say, “Okay, that’s the dough. Don’t eat or touch the dough. This is the cooked cookie, this is the glaze and this is the food coloring. This is what we’re going to do. Don’t let them touch each other.”

She’s like, “I will not.” And then like a shot, she reached out, grabbed a ball of dough, put all the blue food coloring in it and stuffed it into her face. And she was going, “I don’t even know why I’m doing this!” I know why she was doing it. It’s something called the “ironic monitoring process” in the brain. It’s ironic because if you start telling yourself exactly what you have to do and what you must not do, the only thing the brain can think about is the thing you’re telling it not to do. And it often compulsively reacts to being held back and does exactly what you’re not supposed to do.

So I was watching this in real time with my poor child. But I was thinking about it all the time as people come to me for coaching and they’re like, “I’m fine with my family the rest of the year, but I find myself blurting things at Christmas.” I mean, it’s a cliche, right? You know that everybody does it. But here’s the thing: You think it’s because you’re doing something wrong, but actually it’s because you’re trying not to do something natural. Because there are rules around family gatherings at holiday times. There are rules around what you do in the office as the year ends. There are these rules that are very well established and that can’t be broken.

And all of us, I don’t know if you’ve ever had that experience of standing on a cliff and looking down and thinking, “I must not jump” and then thinking you might just jump. It’s this weird feeling of the ironic monitoring process in the brain, like pushing toward the very thing you’re trying not to do. And here’s what you need: You do not need more willpower, you do not need more resistance. And this is what I learned because with Lila, I tried to go the willpower route. I tried to the extent of “You are banned from the kitchen.” Didn’t work. She was completely unfazed by it. By the way, my older kids are like, “Okay, yeah, I’ve had several years of therapy, and now I can remember the cookies.” Lila is just like full speed ahead. But she did do things she didn’t understand, and what she needed was permission.

So when she finally came in, and I said, “I give you permission to touch all these things, to do this and that, you have my full permission,” all the juice went out of it for her. She was like, “All right.” Then she started thinking, “What do I actually want?” Decorating it the usual way was more fun for her than taking huge balls of dough, shoving them into glaze, and then eating them with incredible speed and rapacity. It was frightening, I tell you. But once she had permission to do what she wanted, she did what she wanted and what she wanted wasn’t bad at all.

So here’s what I want to do for you. I had a therapist friend who had a permission-giving buddy, and they would just call each other and say, “I want permission not to go to the PTA meeting.” And the other one would say, “I give you my full permission. You have absolute permission.” Or they’d call and say, “I don’t want to work out today.” “I give you my permission to not move at all today.” So here’s what I want you to hear: You have my permission. And I also want you to find a friend and get their permission. 

You have my permission to not go to things you don’t want to go to. You have my permission to choose to go to them even though you don’t want to and you feel like it’s out of your integrity. I choose you to wear a happy face even when you’re seething inside. I give you permission to bitch and moan about it afterward. Friends who are going, “Why did you go in the first place if you hated that much?” I give you permission to be a hypocrite and to live in paradox this holiday. I give you permission to be the two-faced god, to just do what you feel you have to do to get through the holiday, and then absolutely know what you’d rather do and do whatever helps you get by.

Now, obviously I’m talking about things your soul actually wants to do. So like homicide, those things—no, no, you don’t really want to do that. You don’t want to end up in prison. No. But the other things, the kids’ Christmas pageant? Fake it. Say you went when you didn’t. See? I feel naughty, but I give you my permission if that’s going to make you into a crazy control freak like I used to be at Christmas with my older kids, and I was yesterday also, I give you permission to feel okay about it and have that rupture a relationship and go back to repair it. Because rupture and repair, that’s the way a functional system actually works. It’s not that people are perfect, it’s that they have permission to be themselves and they communicate about it lovingly.

And if you do that, then you’re going to end up with the people you want to be with, doing the things you want to do, even at the holidays. And the other people will gradually drift away or maybe violently rupture. I don’t know. I’ve been through both, and I’m here to say everything is fine as long as you know your truth and respect it and give your true, deep Essential Self permission to be known.

Okay, so I am now open for questions. Oh, meditation. I’m going to do the meditation, okay, we’re going to do our Silence, Stillness, and Space meditation. First thing I want you to do is start breathing deeply and regularly. Feel the way your chest empties when you breathe out and feel how spacious it is when you breathe in again and your ribs expand. Breathing in and out, noticing the spaciousness that comes in when you breathe in and the emptiness when you breathe out and how they’re one and the same thing, watching the breath flow between the inner and the outer. And then asking the strange question that is a brain trigger: Can I imagine the distance between my eyes?

Can I imagine the space inside the atoms of the tissue between my eyes? Can I imagine the distance between the tip of my nose and the back of my skull? Can I imagine the distance between my eyes and the screen where I’m watching this or whatever I’m looking at? Can I imagine the distance between us? Can I imagine the distance between the top of my head and the top of my thighs? Can I imagine the distance between the soles of my feet and the top of my head? Can I imagine the distance in the atoms between the tissues inside my chest?

Can I imagine the volume inside my heart? Can I imagine it continuous with the volume inside the hearts of all the humans and other beings in every place on earth? Can I hear the silence beneath the sounds? Can I feel the stillness beneath all action? Can I remember that stillness, silence, and space are what I am? One thing united in all the universe and all of it is love. All of it, all of it.

All right, thank you for that. Sorry, we’ve had interesting tech things going on here the whole time. So the first question I got, and I quote, from Ro is, “Tissue in your crotch looks weird. Move it?” I had this in my lap. [Holds up tissue] But I thought one of you, maybe in Bulgaria, in New Zealand, wherever, just thought to say, “The tissue in your crotch looks weird, can you move it?” And I’m like, “You want me to move my crotch during The Gathering Room?” It’s wonderful. Everything’s perfect.

All right, this is an actual question: “Having a vision board party for the end of the year.” Oh my god, that sounds amazing. “Any tips for creating a vision board and your a hundred-person list for a partner? You know everything.”

Just remember that when you—here’s the thing, I used to go through magazines and find pictures back in the olden days, and it was like a picture had to really grab my attention. Nowadays I usually think of a thought and then I Google it, right? And I look at stock images or random images online and print them out and put ’em on my vision board. Be careful you don’t let your mind steer. Get a general topic and then go in and let your eyes just sort of look at what comes up online. That’s probably the way you’ll be doing it. And just always go toward what grabs you physically, what feels like, “Ooh!”

Don’t try to make it make sense. Same with the list of qualities you want in your perfect person or your perfect job or your perfect neighborhood or whatever it is. Write a hundred, a list of a hundred things you want to see in this thing that you want to have happen, and be completely, you have my permission to be wild and crazy and to ask for things that are not possible because you may find out they are possible, but not if you never imagine them. So yeah, let your imagination go beyond where your brain thinks it should and only gravitate to images and ideas that make you feel a physical move forward. Like leaning slightly forward. If this happens [leaning backward], don’t go for it. If you lean in, that’s gold. Perfect. Oh, I love that. I want to have a party too.

All right, question: “I’ve taken myself off the hook from these obligations, but feel challenged by deciding what I do want to do. How did you design your new traditions?”

You have to be very, very subtle at first. It’s like if you had a dog that had been a service dog and had been trained to always stand at attention and only play when it was allowed, and you’re trying to get it to relax and just be a dog. At first, you’d have to notice what it liked, and maybe it would just not—like a really well-trained dog will just sit there, but they’ll be like, “Oh, oh, that looks—squirrel! Squirrel!”

Like if you notice what your inner animal wants to do, just take little steps, little steps and let the traditions build over the years. It’s so fun to build traditions on what you actually like. And make sure that everyone in your family and friendship circle knows that they have permission not to participate, not to do it your way. Like, “I’m doing this, I’m doing a vision board party. This is how I want to do it. You want to come?” “Yes, but I don’t want to use pictures.” “Fine. Use whatever finger paint, whatever turns you on.”

So give yourself permission to create traditions based on what you really love. Odds are other people are going to love it too, because we’re really all one. So as we get closer and closer to our real desires, everybody starts liking the same things. This is what coming from the Wayfinder group and the coaches that I’ve trained, it’s like they show up different people with different from all over the world, different levels of education, different ideologies, but all with this same desire to heal. And as we—basically the whole coach training is just how I figured out what I wanted to do with my life, but it’s not about making people do what I did. It’s about the tools to figure out what you want to do.

And when you do that, and you’re absolutely true to yourself, what you get is uniqueness combined with volume. It’s like a choir where everybody is singing with their own voice that is distinctly theirs and could not be anyone else’s, but it harmonizes perfectly with everyone else. And when you get a thousand people all singing and blending harmonies, oh my Lord, it’s so good. So yeah, start doing what you want. Invite other people. Don’t force anybody. You come if you want. Never want to hard sell anyone into taking Wayfinder Training, but if you like it, then buckle up. We’re going to have some fun. We’re going to take your passion and my passion and everybody else’s passion and we’re going to make new traditions for all of us. And that’s something I just continue at the holidays, but it’s a way of life.

All right, question: “What about overthinking afterward? Overthinking the facts that we did what we wanted to do.”

I give you full permission to overthink because you will. I promise you will. That’s the other side of the ironic monitoring process. That’s Lila going, “I don’t even know why!” You need to process it. That’s totally, that’s part of the fun. When you’re not obsessed with keeping a set of absolute rules and you’re just giving yourself permission to be all over the map and then talk about it later, all of it, even the craziness, even the places where you thought you lost control, they all become the stuff of future legends, of sagas, of stories.

I mean, while Lila was just absolutely running amok, and I lost my crap. I did not be like, “Lila, honey, you need to,” I was like, “Banished! You are banished!” And the whole time, part of me was thinking, “This is going to make a great story.” And by the way, she was not, she really wasn’t fazed. She was thrilled with the whole thing. And she told me, “Do you know what I learned on SpongeBob?” Then she leaned in and whispered, “Life’s but a walking shadow.” She was quoting Macbeth, the only line of Shakespeare in a whole episode of SpongeBob, and she nailed it.

So we were in there, we were communing big time, and then there was a brief war, and then there was commiseration and repair. So yeah, you have full permission to do something radical, overthink it later. Repent in sackcloth and ashes, gravitate toward the pound cake or whatever it is that helps you cope. You have my full permission, yes. Okay. And the permission of all the other people here in The Gathering Room.

Question: “Do you think we’ll ever get back to a place where the holidays are not the thing we have to get through, but the thing we enjoy? So many of us have tough muscle memory with the season.”

I thought I’d never get there. Whoa. The first year after I was estranged from my family of origin, oh, that was a bad, bad time. Yeah. I thought, “I’m never really going to be into holidays again.” Wrong! Because if you start living from your heart and you start being with people where love means having permission to live from your heart, the holidays really are everything they say. They really are a time when you just wear pajamas and you lie on the couch with your favorite people and life could not get any better. If they gave you a golden Cadillac that you could ride to the moon, it would be less fun than lying on the couch in your pajamas, eating popcorn with your people.

Oh, the tissue in the crotch—it found its way back. Okay. I give myself permission to deal with this later.

Okay, final question: “How can we stay out of ruminating about the past this holiday season? Like about what this or that family member did to you?”

You can’t stop ruminating. I give you absolute full permission to ruminate about that stuff. I do not give you permission to destroy yourself over it, to do something that feels really, really, really painful to you. But I do give you permission to go, “This is coming up again for me.” Find somebody who’s not involved. “This is coming up. I need your permission to bitch and moan.” And make sure you have permission buddies who will be like, “Yes, I will listen to you bitch and moan and I will validate you, and then I’m going to bitch and moan and you’re going to validate me.” And it only takes a few holidays. Yes, it’s several years, but it does go away. The fun comes back, the joy comes back. The absolute, pixelating gorgeousness of—that used to have no name, pixelation used to just mean something in a funny movie, and now it means something. But the absolute intoxicating joy of celebrating the end of the year with your family, it comes back, yes. And it comes back because you let yourself ruminate and you let yourself hate the things you hate, and you let yourself do the things you want to do.

So this is the way to find your way, wayfinders. Give yourself full permission to know what you really know, feel what you really feel, say what you really mean—though not always to the person who needs to hear it but won’t—and do what you really, really think is right. That is worth celebrating. And I give you permission to get there the ugly way.

Now go get a ball of dough, cover it with blue food coloring, mash it into your face, lie down on the couch, and think, “I am a wayfinder.” I love you! Bye!