How to Compose Yourself

The Gathering Room Podcast

Martha Beck

Business, Entrepreneurship, Self-improvement, Courses, Education

5 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 1 February 2024

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

What does it mean to “compose yourself”? The usual definition is to calm down and control yourself, but Martha has a very different meaning in mind, and she’s exploring it in this episode of The Gathering Room: How to Compose Yourself. As Martha defines it, you are literally composing your life—the being that you are—through the act of creating something new. Whether it’s a watercolor you’re painting, a meal you’re preparing, a business you’re building, or a child you’re raising, the act of creation is also creating you—and according to Martha, this is the actual point of creating. (Not, as the culture would have us believe, to make money from it.) Tune in for the full episode to learn more of Martha’s insights about the beauty and importance of creating “for no reason” and to participate in her guided meditation on imperfection, impermanence, and the essence of creativity.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Gathering Room podcast, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast. I'm Martha Beck.
0:09.5	So I want to talk about how to compose yourself. Now, the typical English use for that phrase, compose yourself, is call down. Be composed. But the way I mean it is that it's as in
0:27.8	composing music, that you actually, you can calm yourself down, but at the same time you are
0:33.9	literally making yourself. You are composing the life, the being that you are.
0:40.6	I think that's why we're here on this line of time, even though I believe our consciousness
0:45.0	probably exists outside of time. But in this line of time, we go from being these little
0:50.8	plasma pets who weigh about seven pounds and can't do much, to beings who
0:56.3	had the imagination to create almost anything. And by creating almost anything, we create a new
1:02.7	creature that is creating. You see what I mean about this? If not, you'll see in a minute.
1:08.2	I got the idea because I was painting. I finished my book.
1:12.8	And although I stared at my computer screen so hard, I can only see things at exactly the level
1:18.4	my computer screen is away from my face. I still wanted to get back to my drawing.
1:23.9	The book is about anxiety and creativity and how in order to stay out of anxiety, use the parts
1:32.3	of your brain that are necessary for creativity because they don't work at the same time.
1:37.3	The parts that imagine all kinds of terrible things in the past and in the future, especially
1:41.3	in the future, can't function while you're literally in the
1:45.2	process of creation in here and now, using that right hemisphere.
1:50.1	So one of the things I did, you may remember this, a year ago I spent an entire month
1:55.9	doing nothing but stuff that would definitely call upon my right hemisphere. And I had the best time. Oh my God. I had the best
2:06.5	month I remember since I was a child. And in fact, I felt like a child. I felt frisky and joyful and
2:12.9	full of energy and I wanted to learn everything. And I was just that the one stipulation was that I had to
2:18.9	create and I had to create for no reason except to create and to see what the act of creating did
	...

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