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

I'm Martha Beck.

Welcome, welcome, welcome to the Gathering Room.

It's wonderful to see you all here and everybody jumping in.

Last week, I did the meditation at the beginning of the class, the gathering.

And I think that that is better to put it in the middle or at the end because people were still like popping in.

So the energy is a little different.

And they come in and I'm just like, ugh.

So we're going to do that either the middle or the end today.

Maybe the middle. I think that's a good time to do it because today I want to talk to you about how it's designing your life day. You know, they call me a life coach. But when I started, I didn't know what I was doing,

and I called it life design, because it's really more like an artistic project, like you have

the stuff to make a life. You've been given this human body and a set of circumstances and a set

of abilities, and the life you make from that is yours to determine in this day and age. Now, there are things

wrong with this day and age, like climate change and artificial crap in the ocean and stuff

like that, artificial crap in our bodies. But we also live at a time when I think it might be

unprecedented for such a large proportion of the

people to have such a large degree of agency in choosing how we live. However, we kind of evolved

living the way previous generations live and we tend not to sort of break the mold very much. And so if we're born with a

certain set of circumstances or personality traits or characteristics that seems problematic to the

culture, we're like, oh crap, I'm going to have a horrible life. Or if we just go along and do what

our parents did or do what everyone in our community does and we go work at the

same mill or whatever it is. And we don't ever say, I could make this up. I could design an

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