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

I'm Martha Beck. It's so great to see you all. I love this just like, we're all together,

and we're all over the world, and it's the gathering room. And today, since we have over 100 people, well over 100 on Insta,

still sending things in from all over the world, just a moment of awe and gratitude that we

are all over the world in this moment. Like I'm always talking about the present moment, right?

It is so mind-blowing to think about the distance, the physical distance we would have to travel. And we are together

here now in this moment. Boom! Like, wow. Every single week, it blows my mind. I am eternally pleased by

things. So let's get started. Today I nabbed a title from Eleanor Roosevelt. I don't know.

It's attributed to everybody in their dog called You Must Do the

Thing You Think You Cannot Do. Because recently, I started getting some feedback on something I did

that I thought I could not do. And that is that I wrote a book. I'm just going to hold this up.

And those of you who've read the book will know what I mean.

Most of my books are, most of my books are nonfiction, memoir and or self-help or like,

truth telling.

Maria Shriver, my publisher told me the other day. It's not self-help. It's

truth-telling. I like that. And because it's not self-help. You don't have to help yourself.

If you write a book to help people, that's you trying to help them. It's not saying you just have to

help yourself. It's just trying to tell everybody the truth

so we can all live in it. But this, I've written my basic life philosophy in a hundred different ways.

And one time I got, I got tired of writing to typical nonfiction genre. And I thought,

I'm just going to write everything I think right now as an allegory. And at

the time I was living at my enchanted ranch in California and tracking bears and mountain lions

...