And I used to make, the thing is I used to make vision boards based on what I thought I should want, because I’d do it with friends and I would capitulate to peer pressure. See, I don’t have to do that here. I’m not afraid that you guys would judge me for being myself, but I used to be afraid that people would. So I would think, “Oh, what am I going to, I’ll put this car, people like cars. I’ll put this car. This looks like a nice car. I don’t know.” And then two years later, no, no, no, that’s not what it was. I put up a car that was two years old. I didn’t know, it was from a magazine that was two years old. And the next day I was driving my regular car down around in Phoenix with Karen, my lovely Karen, and Karen said, “Look at that car dealership. Isn’t that the same car that was on your vision board yesterday?” And I said, “Huh, I think it is.” And we went to look at it and it looked brand new. And Karen said, “Well, how much is it?” And the man said, “Well, it’s two years old and it’s been owned by a snowbird who didn’t spend much time in Phoenix, but he needs to get rid of it.” And we said, “Well, how much is it?”

And it turned out that he would trade me straight across for the regular car I was driving. So I just got my stuff out of the regular car and put it in the car from my vision board and drove off in the car from my vision board going, “Wait, is that coincidence or is there a little magic going on? I don’t know. I don’t know.” But the point is, I didn’t really care what kind of car I had. It took me a long time to start identifying the things I really wanted, and putting those on my vision boards. Because, in the words of my beloved Roe, you know there are three of us, a good way to be happy is to do what you like, even if it makes you look strange. Feeling good by looking weird is our motto.

So I was putting all these things on our vision board this last weekend and my friend said, “Well, you have all these different things. You’re not making any one coherent thing. It’s not like you have a coherent business strategy here for how your life is going to prosper.” And I told her something that I have written up in the book that’s coming out in January, but I really love this because I’ve never seen it so clearly. I’ve written a lot of books where I say, “Do what you love, the money will follow, blah, blah, blah.” It’s happened for me, but I’m always crossing my fingers, my toes, my eyes, hoping that it works for other people too. Because sometimes it seems to and sometimes it doesn’t.

I think that may be because they’re putting stuff on their vision board they don’t really want. It doesn’t tend to be as important, so they don’t reach for it, select for it, notice it, and then it’s very flat energy. But when you put in things you really love, really love, if you dig deep into your preferences to find out what you genuinely desire, and then you allow yourself to be creative. What my book was about is letting go of anxiety by going into creativity. And if you go deeply into your creative self and find out what it wants, what you get is what I call an economic ecosystem. In fact, I called it, oh, this is a fine new phrase, “Constellating an economic ecosystem.” Constellating means coming together by natural forces. So it’s not like you go out and you build it. It’s like you sit in the center of your desire and your creativity, and this thing forms around you as a constellation.

And you can see this happening. Ecosystems form everywhere. If you don’t clean your fridge for a couple of weeks, not that I would know. If you just open the vegetable drawer after it hasn’t been disturbed for a couple of weeks, you will find a complete independent ecosystem in there at work. I can’t believe walking around in the woods in Pennsylvania, how little ecosystems pop up. There’ll be people doing road work and they just bulldoze the whole thing and it looks like just a manmade catastrophe because it is. And I walk by the next day and there are already flowers growing out of the dirt because now it’s loose and they can find, it’s easier for them to push up through it. Ecosystems just form everywhere. They can go down to the deepest, deepest deeps, where it’s incredibly cold and the pressure is incredibly intense. And what do they find? Everywhere there’s a thermal vent, that is heat energy, you get creatures, you get ecosystems.

And ecosystems are complex groups of organisms where each organism helps balance the system for every other organism in the ecosystem. And the balance is always waxing and waning, but it’s basically this group of organisms that are symbiotic. They help each other get along. So any place on earth that you have space, energy and water, you’re going to get ecosystems. You don’t even have to try, they constellate by themselves. You might not want them, but they will happen. In much the same way I realized that by tapping into your desire, desire is a form of energy. If you get in touch with what you really want, it powerfully moves you forward. We all know what it feels like to yearn. That yearning is fuel, it’s energy.

And then when you release your creativity, if you just get out of your anxious self, move over to what makes you curious and start doing things you love to do, putting things together in ways that delight you, that creativity is the water. Yes, yes, I got that right. I tried to take notes in case I did it wrong. It’s like your creativity comes from this deep well, that feeds and nourishes and hydrates everything in the ecosystem. And then the space that you would give it is the time that you spend on it in your life. Here’s what I found. Oh. My watch just talked to me for no reason.

So here’s what I found. When I see people who are living according to their joy, and allowing their creativity to have some room in their life, and then giving time to being creative in the pursuit of their desires. Income, that is money, constellates around them. We are not used to seeing our economy, our personal economy, as a complex system of things. We are used to something that I’ll compare to something called mono crop agriculture. Mono crop agriculture is when you wipe out all the plants in a patch of ground and you plant one crop. And you just keep planting that one crop and it just comes on like gangbusters until it eats up all the nutrition in the soil that would have been replenished by things like other plants and animals coming in and leaving their droppings and things.

So suddenly what was a thriving field of corn or wheat becomes the dust bowl that nearly killed America in the 1930s. They didn’t know that mono crop agriculture is ultimately destructive. We live according to the same mindset that created mono crop agriculture. It’s not even just a metaphor, it’s the same mindset. You get a job, you get one job, you go to that job, you get your money, that’s where you get all your money forever, the end, then you die. Okay, that didn’t work for me. I could never get, I wasn’t a morning person. I couldn’t handle a job. I had kids, I had autoimmune illnesses, I had ADHD. I’m not a mono crop agriculture kind of girl, just can’t do it. But when I allowed myself to connect with desire and then I said, “I’m not just going to say, well, this can’t happen. It would be too wonderful and I really should get a job.”

I got as creative as I could with my kids and autoimmune illnesses and everything. Like what can I do that will actually create some kind of useful thing for the world? And the first thing I did that way was the book Expecting Adam, where I wrote about my experience with his Down’s syndrome diagnosis and deciding to keep the baby and all that. And I always say some of my advisors at Harvard told me that I was throwing away my career when I kept him. And it turned out that the book I wrote about him got on the bestseller list and launched my career. It was exactly the opposite of what they said. And from there, by the way, you cannot live off book royalties unless you’re maybe Stephen King or something. So I was like, “Oh, wow, this is great. I love being able to write for a living, but I wish I could get more cash consistently.”

And somebody looked me up and asked if I would be a magazine columnist. I’ve told you all these stories before, but I have seen this kind of thing happen. Oh, and then I started, people just wanted to know how I was doing all these things. So I started coaching and then they were like, “Oh, we want to do that too.” So I started training coaches. And so all these different forms of economic vibrancy came into my life, but I’ve never just had one. It’s never felt safe to just have one. And as I was writing this next book, Beyond Anxiety, I interviewed people who were living according to this equation. Deep desire, liberated deep desire plus liberated creativity, plus time, equals the creation of an economic ecosystem. And I found many people who are out there doing this, and it’s become more feasible in our economy to have an economic ecosystem than it is to live by mono crop agriculture, because a lot of things are collapsing because of technology and competition and everything.

Okay, all of this is very, I’m getting very sociological, which I love. But my point is, in the night when you wake up and you yearn for something, write it down. I believe that yearning is a message from your higher self or whatever you want to call it, saying, “This is what you are meant to experience. This is what you are meant to have.” This feeling, this love, this abundance, whatever it is, write it down, own it. And then instead of saying, “Well, I hope somebody brings it to me,” or, “I hope I get a job so I can have the money to fund this,” or whatever. Instead, think of it as just be creative the way you would be creative if you were going to create a bird feeding stand in your yard.

I put out a bird feeder in Phoenix and it didn’t get any customers for like six weeks. I put it in the wrong place, there were no birds around. Then I figured out what kind of birds were living around my house already, put the feeder in a more interesting place, they started coming. I added different feeders, I figured out how that some of the birds there liked fruit and some of them liked insects. And then once there were a lot of birds, chipmunks and squirrels and ground squirrels started coming in. And then hawks and then weasels, and then these little pig-like animals named javelinas. And I started giving this as an assignment to my clients. I was coaching a lot one-on-one back there in Phoenix. And I would just say, “Start bird feeding.”

Because if you just watch that feeder and think, “It’s not working, it’s not working,” and then it starts to work, and then you start to be able to figure out what’s working, and then you put the things out for the different kinds of birds, and you get to know about birds, and you create a literal tiny ecosystem. Especially if you put out water as well. We had water out there too. So that water energy, that’s the bird seed, and space, a place for it to be. Your desire written down, get creative about how it’s going to come to you. Start creating little bits of it, even if it seems ridiculous to you. Start focusing your attention on it. Give it a little time. Every day give your passion a little time and a little creativity, and then feel it start to take.

And then you’ll start to see, and I don’t know how this is going to happen for you, but I interviewed several people for whom it had happened and it was remarkably similar. Little rivulets of cash coming in. Okay, a little bit here, a little bit there. Oh, suddenly a big bit comes from over there. That doesn’t happen again for a while, but over here there’s a little, and it all has this biological, this delicious natural rhythm to it. Like a tidal pool, or a glade in the forest here in Pennsylvania, or that beautiful vibrant desert out there in Phoenix. It’s actually the most biologically rich desert. Yeah, biologically rich desert. Has more species than any other desert in the world.

And just watch abundance start to come to you from various different avenues. And then you may have the guts to quit your mono crop agriculture job that is leading to a great dust bowl in your soul. Or stop trying to get a mono crop agriculture job even though you know it turns your soul to dust, and watch it happen. Watch it happen. It’s starting to actually look logical to me, where before I was just like, “I think I’m really lucky. I don’t know how this works.”

All right, so here we are with some wonderful questions. Lots of them, so let’s get to them. Lindsay says, “When doing a vision board, how do you separate what you should do from what you actually want to do?” Well, you look at something and you think, does it actually make my heart lift? Does it physically make me smile without trying? You know the difference between a fake smile and a real smile, a polite laugh, “Ha ha ha,” as opposed to a real belly laugh. Only put the belly laugh things on the board, they have to light you up a little. So if you can only find a few things, that’s all you need to put on the vision board, as long as it lights you up. And you’ll start to get associated things, that’s how ecosystems work. They’re little, it’s just one bird one day and the next day he brings a friend, and the next day a whole flock, and then it sort of exponentially tends to grow.

All right, TF Butler says, “Is it important to examine why you want certain things before deciding if they should go on the vision board?” I’m sure it is, in some existential way, it’s always nice to know thyself. But you know what? If it pings a deep desire for you, if you feel yearning for it? I have often yearned for things that I didn’t understand. Once I got them, I started to learn how amazing they were and how much I had needed that in my life. But beforehand, it was just yearning. I didn’t even understand what I was asking for, but my body and my heart and my soul were yearning towards something. So I just go on pure desire, creativity, time, boom.

Molly says, “How do we manifest or believe, keep an open heart when we’re sad and maybe don’t believe that we will or can have something?” This is what you do. You out love yourself. There’s a part of you, “Oh, this can never happen for me and everything.” I’ve been doing this with my health lately because I’ve been super healthy, touch wood. See, I’m nervous about it. I’m nervous about it going away, but what I can do is say, “Oh, I’m afraid this is…”, like I’ve been taking walks every day, and then I got some blisters and I had to take a couple of days off. And I sat around, I’m going, “Oh, my long walks will never happen again.”

And instead of trying to fight that, I just brought in another aspect, what I call Self with a capital S, as they do in IFS, that I search for a part of myself that can love the part that’s sad about the blisters and afraid I’ll never walk again. I can say, “Yeah, I understand how you’d feel that way. It’s okay. You can feel that way as much as you want.” And you just sit with the parts of you that don’t believe and you love them. You don’t have to convince them that everything’s going to come out right. If you sit there with love, things change, things happen. If you try to force them to change, they don’t change, because they have something to push back against. But if you have doubts and you’re afraid, guess what? You’re human.

Another thing is if you have community. And I think Ro and I already talked to you about how we’re starting this community, just for folks who feel alienated, we call it finding your kind of weirdos. And once you’re in with a community that can help you hold your vision, it becomes much easier. Often we don’t believe in ourselves because the people who socialized us don’t believe that we should go a certain direction. But when you find your pack of weirdos, they will support you and help you keep your heart open until that sadness heals, and the optimism is still there.

Eva says, “Martha, what’s your favorite way to build a vision board?” It used to be magazines. Now I just go online and I put in, “Healthy, happy feet.” My feet have gone through so much the last few years. And up came a picture that said, healthy, happy feet, with two feet that have smiley faces on every toe. I put that on there. So I just Google print and paste. Jessica says, “My question is about the liminal space between vision and form. I think my mountain house vision is manifesting in an unbelievable way. Thoughts on staying receptive instead of too excited or manic?” Yeah, watch TV. Get or read a book or listen to an audible book. Get into a story that isn’t yours.

Because if we get too focused on our own stories, we put much too much pressure on them. And once you’ve got desire, deep desire, plus creativity, a great way to feed the ecosystem is to learn other stories. And I could say, “Go through your mind and take away all the thoughts that are scaring you.” But it’s much easier to say, “Oh my goodness, did you see the last season of, what’s the… Fargo? The last season of Fargo? Have you binged that yet? It starts out a little slow for me, but holy smokes, I love that show!”

While I’m watching Fargo, when I’m looking at a great drama, and that’s what I love about coaching so much. This is what I tell coaches when I’m training them. It’s like reading all the best novels in the world. People who would be incredibly boring if you just met them at a party are wonderful when you’re sitting with them, really puzzle cracking. Getting creative about how they can realize their own desires, because they’re feeding your ecosystem, you’re feeding their ecosystem. And that’s the thing, the ecosystems don’t compete. They’re symbiotic. They support each other. So go watch TV, Jessica, you’ll be fine. Everything’s happening for you.

All right, Michelle and Magenta says, “I feel like envisioning future want would help me, but I’m frozen by actual traumatic events. How can I make this envisioning happen?” Again, the part that is traumatized needs compassion from the self. If you can’t get to the self, I would really encourage you to read the book Self Therapy by Jay Early, or No Bad Parts by Richard Schwartz. You can find a part of yourself that was apart from the trauma. It was a part of the trauma, it was apart from the trauma. It was watching, and we do the meditation, we’re going to do our meditation at the end. And when we’re in contact with the part of us that is space, stillness and silence, which is eternal and nothing can disturb it. It can hold compassionately the parts that have been traumatized.

And that should be job one. If I were in trauma, if I had just gone through a trauma or just started dealing with one, my whole vision board would be about comfort, space, loved ones who could help me, and healing. That’s why I make so many vision boards. So it changes all the time. And it’s interesting how even that, like the whole thing with Expecting Adam, I was going through one of the worst times of my life. It ended up turning out to be, it’s the last thing I thought would help my career and it made my career. So, love the part that is in trauma and connect with desire, connect with creativity, and give it some time. You will not only heal, you will constellate an economic ecosystem.

Dr. Donna says, “How do you tap into desire if you’ve been conditioned that desire needs to be denied in favor of status, money or acceptability?” By framing that up the way you have Donna, you have told me that you’ve already seen that the lie of rejecting need in favor of status, money or acceptability, has been taught to you by people who did not know what they were doing. So don’t do what they said. Boom. As soon as you can frame that up, you’re free of it, if you choose to be. If you choose to just say, “Okay, I’m not going to do what they told me to. Because it’s not right for me.” Boom, you’re free.

All right. Laura says, “How do you let yourself ask for things you have a hard time believing you can have, such as a European trip or a hiking in the park with a group, especially when you have a big list of things on your to-do list to take care of. That is maintenance of house, et cetera?” This is why you’ve got to give a little time. Just give it 15 minutes, if you’re super busy, get the kids to bed, take a long bathroom break and sit with your own desires, your own creativity, even if that’s the only amount of time you can give it, it will still grow an ecosystem. And what you’ll see is that once you’ve attracted a whole bunch of birds to the bird feeder and the squirrels are coming and the hawks and there’s a cat involved and then there are foxes, oh, and there’s a snake. It’s like, “Oh, I can manifest big things.” Big things can come from small things. Gosh, we’ve got too many. I think we can hit all these questions before we do our meditation.

SJ Kramer says, “How do you cultivate desire to the max?” There are two ways. One is just like, “What do I really want? What do I really want?” That’s accessible to some people. For those of us who have had maybe a less functional worldview, it doesn’t come that easily, but pain, suffering, lack, those things we’re familiar with. So what you want to do is go to the things that, like I had this thing with, I’m afraid I won’t be healthy anymore. And I found that deep down, I had this belief, “I don’t deserve to be healthy.” But I really want to be healthy. And I had to go deep, deep, deep into the part of me that did not want to be sick. And way down deep, there was this part of me that said, “I deserve to not be sick.” And the desire coming from that part, I just sort of gave it a space. I deserve to not be sick. Okay, then there’s a possibility, I could actually stay healthy. Okay, all right.

So you either cultivate the desire that is already coming up, or you find the place that you feel suffering, what you feel like good has been denied to you or evil has been imposed on you and you wish things were different. That difference is what you’re desiring. And the more you have suffered, typically, the more intensely you can decide what it is you want. Okay, Molly says, “Yearning for a soulmate while grieving the loss of current partner. How do we balance something like that? How do we keep love in the forefront? Do we focus on loving ourselves?” Yeah, and she says, oh, “Clarifying, loss is not through death, but the end of the relationship.”

You know what I said about it all waxes and wanes? Sometimes the bird seed runs out, and suddenly there’s no bird seed. There’s still water though for the birds. So you still get some animals, but then you notice, “Oh, I have to go get more bird seed,” and for a while the birds won’t be as plentiful. And this happens economically and it happens with relationships and everything else. And the key is that we know that something waning is not a problem if you’ve got an ecosystem. I’ve been talking about economic ecosystems today, but there’s also a relationship ecosystem, where you have friends, family members, pets, other creatures you can turn to and you let that love carry you through the grieving. But guess what? You have to do the grieving. That is a healthy response. It’s like my blisters healing. We wish we didn’t have to wait for that to heal before we can do the fun stuff, but we learn a lot of patience and better manifesting skills because we’ve encountered the waxing and waning quality of the ecosystem.

Faye says, “How do you generate an income doing things that you love when you don’t want to spend a lot of your time and energy selling it?” Aha. You just keep doing what you love. And the ecosystem in my own life and in the lives of other people that I’ve interviewed, some of them have just a friend who shows up who’s really able and willing to help them do the accounts and help them be, oh, something paused due to poor connection. I’m back again. Okay, paused due to poor connection. Okay, we better get into our meditation. So yes, if you don’t want to sell your stuff, then keep doing your stuff and imagine it selling and people will show up to help you sell it.

Oh, hello. It’s paused due to poor connection. Okay, so we’re going to do a quick meditation and then Rowy Joey, no. Okay, Rowy Joey says, ignore the post she just sent me. So what we’re going to do is… I’m going to calm myself down a little. I do tend to get a little manic. It’s just how I roll.

But I want you to, as we think about your deepest desires and the infinite power of your creativity, we’re going to give this next minute or so just to imagining the part of us that is eternal. And that is a way of giving time for our desires and our creativity to do their work. All we have to do is find the stillness, find the silence, find the calm that we really are, and the magic starts happening. It happens much faster than if we focus on it intensely. So let’s do our meditation and let all of it go, because ecosystems run by themselves.

So first, get comfortable and ask yourself the key question, can I imagine the distance between my eyes? If you’re looking at a screen or listening on audio, see if you can watch the space between the screen and your eyes. Can you imagine the empty space between your eyes and the screen you’re watching? Can you imagine the silence underneath all the sounds you can hear? Can you imagine the distance between the top of your head and the soles of your feet? Can you imagine the vast emptiness that is most of what you are physically? And can you imagine that most of you is not that? Most of you is the space, the silence, and the stillness that is holding us all right now, as you’re hearing these words?

As we do this, as we become who we are, the incredible intelligence of nature, of the universe, begins to work on our desires and give us creative ideas. So by giving this time to come to the Gathering Room to do this meditation, you’ve already begun to constellate ecosystems. Economically, in terms of relationships and physical health, everything. So breathe that in and know you’ve done the work for the day, you can let go. Go have some fun, watch a story that isn’t yours. And just notice how everything in the world loves a beautiful story, and that’s what’s really coming out of your desire and your creativity and your time.

Thank you, thank you, thank you so much. Love you. Thank you. And to all you coach trainees out there, feel free to teach the economic ecosystem lesson. It’s a whole new tool for Wayfinder coaches. And all the rest of you, let’s see what happens if we put the bird seed of love out into the world, and the birds of happiness will come and eat it. I love you and I’ll see you later on the Gathering Room.