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

I'm Martha Beck.

How is everybody? I am frazzled because we are doing some traveling.

The pandemic was a time of no travel. I used to travel constantly.

And then it did happen, the pandemic, and we did not travel, right?

And slowly, slowly since the pandemic, pandemic, I've started traveling again, but not very much until now.

Now it's becoming a big overseas year.

Rose folks are in Australia. We're going to see them.

I got invited to speak in Europe. We're going Africa, all the things. We're going all over all the oceans. And I find myself in a deep and meditative freak out because here's the thing my comfort zone shrank when I was not

traveling because I'm not one of those I'm going to travel all my life it doesn't matter what

they do to me I'm not one of those people I always was a bit nervous about travel I I like to say I'm a home body. I like to stay

doing the things that I'm used to doing. But I realized when I was 14 years old that every single

day I should do something that scared me, at least a little, or I would literally end up living in a box

under the bed somewhere. So I learned at that age that there are three zones to life, and we've talked about this before.

In one zone, the center, we are comfortable. It's fine. That is our comfort zone.

Outside the comfort zone is what's called the learning zone.

That's where you're having to push yourself and make new connections in your brain

and create new experiences and learn to cope with them.

Roe, could you come check the, it says my live video has ended on Facebook.

See, we're out of our comfort zone here.

We're into the learning zone.

Now, outside of that, if you think of it like a bullseye, is the panic zone. I'm calling it

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