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

I'm Martha Beck.

So we're going to do this thing at the beginning, those of you who are just joining.

I'm sort of doing a little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down your pants as the saying goes,

so that we can all sort of be gathered before we begin. Not something we've done before,

but ever after this, y'all are going to be getting familiar with this as the beginning

of every gathering room. The thing that brought this together was a brief exercise that I did,

and I'm going to talk a lot more about it today. I've been rereading the research on which it

was based. Doesn't that just sound yummy, rereading the research on which it was based? Doesn't that

just make you feel like killing yourself? No, it does not.

It turns out to be good. This research is on the way the brain pays attention to the world.

And it just so happens that the way we pay attention to the world has everything to do with how good

we feel. People have known this

for millennia in contemplative traditions, but it's not something that's really a big part of our

culture. As you know, I, or maybe you don't know, I'm very interested in the fact that our culture

encourages us to use primarily the left hemisphere of the brain and actually

discourages things that are usually the province of the right hemisphere. So the left hemisphere is

verbal and analytical and time bound and measured. And the right hemisphere does things like

imagination, metaphor, poetry, art, all the different, and connecting, connecting,

connecting, feeling connected to the whole world, where the left hemisphere disconnects.

And as my friend Jill Boltey Taylor says, the best thing is to have the whole brain at work all

the time. Now, in 2007,

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