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

Hello, darlings. I am so happy to see you on the Gathering Room here. And if you've been playing along at home,

you will know that four weeks ago, I said I was starting a program, which would be to

eliminate self-criticism, worry, and pressuring myself from my life. Since those three things

were seen to be the most highly correlated with neuroplastic pain and heaven

knows what other kinds of bad things that can happen. So I hope you guys have been getting

the same results I have because once I stopped self-criticizing, things got really spacious

in my head and this week, oh, this week it was no worries week. I guess, wait, last week was no worries week.

But, and I know that a lot of you, when I looked at the comments afterward, because I can't answer

every question, but I love to see them. So a lot of people said, yeah, if you were in my position,

you would worry too. No question. Like, there are so many

reasons to worry. If you don't know any, I will give you dozens, starting with the very fact that

we're all going to die. So that worries most people pretty much all the time. My attempt was to

stop worrying, even though there are many reasons to be

afraid. Like, hmm, bus going to hit me on, you know, December 5th on my official death date. It's coming

up one way or another. Which would be better to worry between now and then or not worry between

now and then. So I thought not

worrying was better. And I found I was still looking both ways when I crossed the street and all that.

So just being careful is not the same as worrying. And the worry-free life, you guys, all I do is I

catch myself. So the self-criticism thing, just to review,

whenever I find myself self-criticizing, I not only stop it, but I have to say something nice about

myself to myself. And it has to be believable. And at first it looked like pretty slim pickens

...