Welcome to the Gathering Pod, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast. I'm Martha Beck.

So I think everybody's here. We got plenty of people. Let's start on today's gathering room.

And the topic today is befriending ourselves, which is a pretty big deal, but very quiet. And I thought about it today because I

was talking to a loved one earlier who's having one of those days, you know, where it's just

everything looks pretty darn bleak and it's looked bleak for a while and you don't remember

anything ever looking not bleak and you can't you can't imagine it getting

less bleak in the future one of those days and I'm such a freaking life coach you guys folks it's not

it's not just that I do it for a living or that I decided to be it I just was it and then they

labeled it and I knew what I was so I was always like you can do this and you can do that and your life can be it. I just was it and then they labeled it and I knew what I was. So I was always like,

you can do this and you can do that and your life can be amazing. But you know, here are three

steps. Here, let me chart it out for you. People were like, just leave me alone. But I have learned

that I was fighting too hard. I was fighting everything. And the more I look at our culture and our

vernacular, the way we talk about things, the more I see fighting words everywhere. They sneak in

everywhere. There must be a zillion things out there that are about the way of the peaceful warrior,

the way of the spiritual warrior, the way of the, like, warriorship is such a major archetype for

us. And then we talk about fighting for things. I'm going to fight. Like everybody in my

house has a cold. We've had it for like a week it's not horrible but

it's just icky and it's like yeah I'm fighting this cold right now and people are fighting depression

and we're fighting uh one of my clients is fighting for a love relationship and fighting to do better at

their business and we're just always fighting.

Like, I got to go get this. I got to bring this down. I got to whatever. And I thought to myself,

what if nothing out there wants to fight us? What if really we're the ones that see it as dangerous and we start to,

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