Hello, the lovely peoples. This is Marty, Martha, inviting you to a free masterclass that I have made called

Five Paths to Your Purpose. Probably the most common question I get from people is, how do I find my purpose?

Why don't I feel that I'm on purpose? Well, it turns out there are certain things you have to do to find your purpose, and I broke

them down into five, and I made a little masterclass about it. So if you'd like to see it, just go to

marthabec.com slash purpose, and you will be able to watch it without any charge at all.

Welcome to the Gathering Room podcast, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast. I'm Martha Beck. Let's get to it. I have been rereading a book that I really love. It's called

The Awakened Brain by Lisa Miller. I'm obsessed with her. You may have heard me talking about her before.

And one of the things that amazes me so much is that she is a very well-regarded Columbia professor,

so very Ivy League has degrees from all the most hoity-toity institutions.

And yet her body of work is all about what she calls a spiritual docking station in the human brain.

And what she found, and let me tell you this,

when she was doing her original research,

people were not pleased with her.

They did not want to be reading

about spiritual docking centers in the brain.

When I was at Harvard,

I literally never met another student who was a mother. And I, I, there were like, I think I knew one professor who was a mother.

And that was it. But Alice Miller writes in her book, The Awakening Brain,

not only what, Lisa Miller, sorry, not Alice Miller. She wrote, um, she wrote a whole bunch of

things called like the drama of the, of the gifted child. She's a beautiful, brilliant

psychologist as well. But Lisa Miller is the

Columbia professor who wrote about the research she did that showed that when people are open

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