Staying Sane, No Matter What

The Gathering Room Podcast

Martha Beck

Business, Entrepreneurship, Self-improvement, Courses, Education

5 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 6 February 2025

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When I was writing Beyond Anxiety, I wanted to find a good metaphor for building a life that you love within the cultural bounds of wherever you are and still stay sane. And I thought about crazy quilting! If you are a quilter, you know that crazy quilting is not the same as ordinary quilting. Ordinary quilting starts with a pattern that is carefully drawn out, and then the quilter sews together panels that follow that pattern. With crazy quilting, you start with a scrap of fabric you love, and you sew another piece to it and then another and another, around and around in a spiral, until there’s a large enough piece of cloth that you can call a quilt. And I was thinking: That’s sort of how you can make a life, too. In this episode of The Gathering Room, I’m talking about what I call “sanity quilting” and offering up some practical advice for maintaining your mental well-being during turbulent times. Like crazy quilting, sanity quilting involves building a life out of the things you love in order to stay peaceful, calm, inspired, and sane. In the quilt that is your time—your whole life—most of us are taught to follow the patterns set by our culture: Get a job, get a relationship, have a family, buy a house, etc. However, for me, it’s always been much more interesting to say, “What do I love most?” and put that at the center of my quilt. Then I put things that connect with it around the edges until I gradually fill up my time with things that I love. That’s the way I’ve lived my life. The culture might view this as “crazy,” but I don’t think it’s not crazy to do what you love. What’s crazy is pushing what you love to the margins of your life—or even worse, never experiencing them at all. Whenever the pattern of society that we thought we knew is being disrupted, it feels very confronting to a lot of people. At the times when everything around you feels like it’s going crazy, that’s when you must make a sanity quilt. And you do that in very quiet ways. Join me for the full episode to learn more about stitching the things you love into your life, so you can cultivate peace, sanity, and calm during even the most challenging times.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, the lovely peoples. This is Marty, Martha, inviting you to a free masterclass that I have made called
0:08.0	Five Paths to Your Purpose. Probably the most common question I get from people is, how do I find my purpose?
0:14.7	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
0:22.0	them down into five, and I made a little masterclass about it. So if you'd like to see it, just go to
0:28.3	marthabeck.com slash purpose, and you will be able to watch it without any charge at all.
0:49.0	Welcome to the Gathering Room podcast, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast.
0:50.2	I'm Martha Beck.
0:51.3	The topic today is how to stay sane no matter what.
0:57.5	And originally I was going to talk, well, I am going to talk about something I call sanity
1:03.9	quilting.
1:05.0	It's in the book I just wrote.
1:07.3	Come here, are you?
1:08.9	As if I haven't shown you that a million times.
1:13.2	Nier.
1:16.7	In that book, I talk about something called sanity quilting.
1:20.3	And what I was going to say, I'm so tempted by all of you coming in from all everywhere.
1:25.7	I love you.
1:26.9	All right.
1:29.5	What I was going to talk about is this process called sanity quilting. I was writing away in the book and I thought,
1:34.2	what's a good metaphor for building a life that goes outside the cultural bounds that you can
1:40.3	make inside the cultural bounds of wherever you are and still be sane. And I thought about
1:46.5	something called crazy quilting. Anybody out there a quilter? I bet you are. There are all sorts of
	...

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