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

I'm Martha Beck.

Welcome, welcome to the gathering room and to our topic of the day, which is how to ask.

Now, I had a friend once who was very new age and very psychic.

I happen to believe, you know, she seemed to have a gift.

And what she told me was this.

People don't get what they want from life because they don't know how to ask.

They don't know how to ask the force for whatever it is they want.

They're asking, but they're not asking in a way that gets results.

And she said, here's the thing. The universe is dying to give you stuff, but it can't give you

stuff unless you ask. And once you ask with an open heart, no problem. You'll get what you want.

And I said, I'm sorry. I don't believe this because I, sorry, I have been asking the force for things my whole life. This time I was probably about 35. And I was like, it's not happening. And she said, well, tell me how you've been asking. And I said, well, I asked like anybody. Asked like, help me. She said, oh, no, that won't work.

She said, what happened when you were a kid and you asked people for something?

And I was like, well, I remember in Sunday school, they would read us this Bible verse that said,

if a man's child asks him for bread, will he give them a stone? And I remember thinking,

well, yeah, and probably a swift kick to the head, too. And I remember talking to my siblings about this.

My seven siblings with a family that did not have a whole lot of resources. So I think probably the deal was that when we needed something and asked for it, our parents

maybe couldn't afford it or didn't have the energy for it.

So what we got was pretty much a very punitive no.

And as a result, I grew up asking for things in a way that got no results. Well, it got the

result that I expected, which is a swift kick in the head. I think like trying to get a thesis

advisor at Harvard, I just sort of wandered around. I was supposed to ask someone on the faculty to be a thesis

...