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

I'm Martha Beck.

As you know, I am a fan of spiritual practice.

Like, I really do believe in there is a lot of good research to back me up,

that having some sort of spiritual practice is

one of the keys to being happy and having an even keel in your life, being able to deal with

loss and the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, right? So it really works for me.

Like it's very dominant in my psyche, always has been. So I have done

meditation and centering prayer and basically any kind of spiritual practice I ran across to the

point where I actually broke past that initial boredom and what is this.

And I actually started to experience states,

which I believe are brain states and also real metaphysical states.

So I believe in both, science and metaphysics.

And I get to those states that there's a word in Sanskrit,

satchitananda, which means the bliss of things being thus.

It means like just in this particular moment, actually being conscious in my particular

body in my particular situation goes into a wave of absolute bliss.

And it's very addictive.

Like it really has seen me through a lot of difficulty in my life.

It's seen me through a lot of emotional pain.

It's seen me through a lot of physical pain.

So I am a

...