Welcome to the Gathering Pod, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast.

I'm Martha Beck.

We might as well get in to our topic of the day, which I called Braver than you believe.

Because of that beautiful quote from Winnie the Pooh, which says,

you are braver than you believe, you are stronger than you seem, and you're smarter than you

think. And I found myself very comforted by that this week because, you know, I bet, I just bet that if we all collectively, on the gathering room here, took one of those online, are you a highly sensitive person tests, all our computers would explode. Because I think I'm definitely a highly sensitive person, all my friends are, and I think probably

most of us here in the gathering room are.

And as a result, I have one of those comfort zones.

It's not that I have a small comfort zone, though I do.

Well, it's hard to say because it starts out small, but I'm constantly expanding it,

but it's constantly shrinking. And then it expands. I was doing my other podcast with my partner

Roe, our bewildered podcast. And we were talking about the pandemic. And I realized that the pandemic,

the lockdown, did in actuality or sort of

externally what a lot of people do internally when they have really high levels of anxiety.

If people are very nervous, they might have a panic attack in a public place.

Then they don't want to go into a public place.

So they shrink their comfort zone. Then even their neighborhood gets too scary. And then it's the house, but then the

house is too scary. And then it's just a few rooms. And then even those rooms get to be scary because

anxiety follows us everywhere we go. It just follows us. And the tighter we shrink our space,

the more it expands to fill that space.

So this is, I know this is how fear works in the brain and we've talked about this often.

You know that that is just how I think. But I was reading online about people who are wanting to

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