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

So welcome, welcome, welcome to the Gathering Room again. Here we are together. And today, what we're

going to talk about is something I call grit magic. Now, I like to talk about how, when, for example,

I'm in meditation, I generally feel these days that the moment my soul gets quiet, my mind gets

quiet, there's a kind of dissolution into this vast flow of energy.

And it feels to me like a deep, slow river. It's very gentle. It's very soft. It reminds you of the

Psalms where it says, you know, walking by the still waters and everything. It's very

sweet and soft. And I talk about that a lot here. Be soft on yourself. Be gentle. Life wants you to be

happy. Life wants you to be comfortable. Life wants you to be cared for. It's like a tender-hearted

mother. And then it occurs to me that that's true except for the times when the river goes

through the rapids or goes over a very, very enormous Niagara Falls style waterfall. And you don't even

have a boat. And the moral of that is the Dow is gentle and soft and loving and it will kick your ass periodically throughout your life.

But this is not a bad thing. I've decided because I'm not in the middle of it right now.

Because of something that I've decided to call grit magic.

And this is a different part of our souls, and it's a part that actually would be disappointed

if the river of the Tao were always gentle. There's something in the human psyche that loves to pick up a challenge and even

loves to go through some level of suffering. And we talk a lot on the gathering room about the

suffering of grief, the suffering of fear, the nasty emotional experiences we all go through.

But I'm talking about a kind of throwing oneself into the

hardness of life and seeing what this human body and human mind that we've been given can actually

do in this environment. There's sort of a desire to sort of test the bumpers on the cars that we became. And I've been reading,

I like to read very different books, books that are as different from each other as they can be

...