Welcome to the Gathering Pod, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast. I'm Martha Beck.

I was just thinking, do we start with the stillness in space meditation? Or do we end with it? And I think we shall end with it.

So I'm just going to be jumping into our topic today, and it's called holding your seat.

I do not mean clenching your beautiful buttocks and your fists, although if you want to do that,

knock yourself out.

But holding your seat, if you are an equestrian, you know what that means.

It means you stay in the saddle

even though the horse is doing strange things for meditators it means that you stay in your place of

calm you stay in a place internally that's peaceful and joyful no matter what and the world will

try to unseat you and the whole practice of meditation is to find a

place to be that is still and grounded and calm and joyful no matter what's going on.

Trigger warning. I'm going to be talking about the death of a pet today if I look a little puffy.

I'm always a little puffy, but I'm especially puffy today because I will be talking about the death of a pet,

and it just happened. And if you are feeling pretty raw, I'm going to say a few things about that.

It wasn't a horrible death, but it wasn't like super fun either. And yeah, I just want you to know that.

So today was supposed to be the day we got back to normal. Not that we've had anything bad happening.

It's just that we're super busy since we got home from our international travels. I've got my two

books that I'm still writing.

I'm totally revamping my company. I'm doing a lot of interviews. I've got books I've got to read

and blurb. I've got two books. I said that. It's on my mind. I've got this summer class called

The Art of Calm that I'm prepping to begin tomorrow. It's a busy time. But I had set aside all the busyness because we had

wonderful guests. So we stopped work and we spent time with our guests. One group came in,

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