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

I'm Martha Beck.

If you've been hanging in the last couple of weeks, you may remember that two weeks ago,

I talked about the three things that make our lives the most miserable in terms of causing pain in the body and anxiety in the soul. And they are self-criticism,

worry, and pressure, especially pressure we put on ourselves to get things done. So as you know,

I set out on a cleanse. And my first cleanse, which I announced last week, was to cleanse myself of

self-criticism. And instead of criticizing myself, I decided I would step back when I noticed

criticism happening and be aggressively kind to myself, hardcore kindness. Some of you said it should be hardcore kindness.

And that is so clever. And I wish I'd thought of it, but I didn't. So I'm going to give that

back to you and say, you go. You like rule the world with that. It's amazing. This week,

oh, and I asked you how you were doing, and I hope some people will send in

the chat maybe a thing like, yeah, I know I'm doing well with that. I have found it transformative,

you guys. Like, it's, it is something I have to do deliberately. It never goes into just automatic

mode. And there's a reason for this. I talk about it all the time.

We have in the brain something called a negativity bias that makes us pay more attention to things that are dangerous or troubling or problematic because that way we can clean them up, get away

from them, do the things we have to do, which is fine unless you have a human brain that

stores this negativity as

a kind of system where it remembers the things that went wrong and imagines new things

that could go wrong and then starts telling stories about that that scare us even more than

the world around us. Okay, so self-criticism does that and it can build up and build up and build up

until you've got a dictator in your brain. And we talked last week about switching out the

dictator with someone kind with like, I don't know, Mary Poppins, someone firm and, you know,

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