Frantically Going Nowhere

The Gathering Room Podcast

Martha Beck

Business, Entrepreneurship, Self-improvement, Courses, Education

5 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 20 March 2025

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Do you ever feel like a hamster running on a wheel? Hamsters may love to scurry, but it tends to make us humans anxious and exhausted. Unfortunately, we live in a world that constantly pressures us to keep up with an increasingly frantic pace. And while we run faster and faster, the only place we ever reach is burnout. It’s when we start to get to burnout and the wheel is still going so fast that we start to get frantic to keep up. In this episode of The Gathering Room, I’m talking about how you can get off the hamster wheel by taking tiny, true steps towards whatever brings you a sense of relief. By “tiny, true step” I mean any small movement or action that feels like relief to you, like a relaxing exhale. In fact, a relaxing exhale could be the one tiny action you take. Or standing up to stretch. Or taking a bathroom break. Or doing just five minutes of any creative practice. Whenever you’re feeling frantic or overwhelmed, taking one tiny, true step is enough to move you toward peace. And then if you do it tomorrow and the next day and whenever you feel exhausted and frantic, those tiny movements toward relief will start to change everything. Remember: You are meant to live in peace, and nature never requires you to do more than you can do in peace. Although embracing this mindset can be challenging in a society like ours that values constant busyness, you have to trust that small steps are enough to radically transform your life. Try it and see. To learn more about the profound transformation that can come from taking small steps toward your true destiny, tune in for the full episode. We’ll even take a small step together by doing my guided Space, Silence, and Stillness meditation. Join me!

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, the lovely peoples. This is Marty, Martha, inviting you to a free masterclass that I have made called
0:08.0	Five Paths to Your Purpose. Probably the most common question I get from people is, how do I find my purpose?
0:14.7	Why don't I feel that I'm on purpose? Well, it turns out there are certain things you have to do to find your purpose, and I broke
0:22.0	them down into five, and I made a little masterclass about it. So if you'd like to see it, just go to
0:28.3	marthabeck.com slash purpose, and you will be able to watch it without any charge at all.
0:49.2	Welcome to the Gathering Room podcast, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast. I'm Martha Beck. We all come here as creatures short-lived and sparkling in the sky. And today I wanted to talk about
1:00.0	the feeling that I think many people have, that we are hamsters running on a wheel that just keeps
1:07.1	speeding up. In our bewildered podcast, Roe and I always talk about the difference between what
1:13.4	the culture is telling us to do and what our nature wants to do. And when you think about little
1:18.6	hamsters, my first pet was a hamster, Corrig and the hamster. I love that little guy. And his
1:25.6	instinct was to scurry. He scurried all over the place. I used to put him inside one of my
1:31.7	sleeves and he would scurry up to my shoulder and it was very, very sweet. And I also eventually
1:40.4	bought him a hamster wheel because they like to scurry the hamsters do and they're doing
1:45.2	it for the joy of scurrying. Like I love to scurry, they say. You can see it in their little eyes.
1:51.2	So they love getting on a wheel that just lets them scurry and scurry and scurry. Although if you
1:55.5	watch them on YouTube, which I frequently do, they sometimes get thrown clear by the centrifugal
2:04.2	force. They go so fast that they get caught and the wheel sort of spits them out. They love it.
2:10.6	They're having a great time. But there's a metaphor for that in our culture right now and for the last several hundred years.
2:20.6	And that is that we're supposed to get up every day and just do things because they're things
2:25.3	you have to do. And the pressure to do them, to get out of bed, to put on the right clothes,
2:32.4	to put on the right makeup, shave the face, do whatever it is
2:37.0	you have to do, and then go through the commute and do the work or be the mom who gets the
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