Welcome to the Gathering Pod, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast. I'm Martha Beck. Today I'm talking about one of those things that you see online. A simple trick that makes everything better. And it literally is true. And I have been using it all week because it has been a week of extremes for me.

A lot of exciting things happening, a lot of difficult things happening. I've got people I love who

have been struck ill. I've had tremendous opportunities come to me. And all of this has led me

to a bit of ups and downses. Okay, here is Road to Help with the

Instagram. Okay, thank you. So, how have you all been? While she sets that up, I just want to see

how y'all are doing. Hi, Robert and Denise and Laurie and Eileen and Linda.

Okay. I am now live on Instagram.

Thank you so much. Thank you so much.

Okay. Roe, did I do?

Oh, sorry.

Cancel. Okay, we're live everywhere.

It's 402 my time and I just had a classic example of why I need

what I'm about to tell you guys. Hi everybody from Instagram. It's great to see you guys. Sorry,

I messed up the technology. All right. I've just been telling the folks on Facebook that there's a simple trick that you can use to make everything better and it actually really works. And it comes from our neighbors in the far east, as so many of my gathering room topics do. So when I was 20, I went to Singapore and I lived in Singapore learning Chinese for about a year.

And then I traveled around Asia for another several months with a little knapsack.

And I had a fellowship to study folklore in China.

So I went to China and I gathered fol folk tales from people and it was very exciting.

But the whole time I was kind of alienated from what I saw as the philosophy there.

First of all, it was a bit flattened by communism when I was actually present.

But I kept reading about Buddhism in Western sources

as a kind of life-denying philosophy,

that it was stultifying and dead.

...