The Joy of Drudgery

The Gathering Room Podcast

Martha Beck

Business, Entrepreneurship, Self-improvement, Courses, Education

5 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 7 March 2024

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“How do we adjust to the drudgery?” Martha was asked this question by Ro when they returned home from a wonderful stay at the Imiloa Institute in the Costa Rican jungle. A lot of upkeep is required to sustain ordinary living, and much of daily life gets consumed by repetitive tasks. In this episode of The Gathering Room, Martha talks about a shift we can make to transform drudgery into beauty. In traditions where they have the concept of awakening or enlightenment, Martha says, the emphasis is not on what you do, but how you do it. It's the quality of presence in your body, mind, heart, and spirit while you carry out each task. As the Zen saying goes, “Before enlightenment: Chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment: Chop wood, carry water.” When you are fully present and engaging with all of your senses, any experience can become sublime, even mundane tasks like washing the dishes. You can look at even the simplest object and say, “You are so beautiful.” To get more insights about transforming drudgery into a spiritual practice, tune in for the full episode, which also includes Martha’s guided Silence, Stillness, and Space meditation. And if a retreat with Martha sounds like just the thing to help you return to your life with fresh eyes, read about her Pure.Wild.Self Retreat in Costa Rica at the link below!

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Gathering Room podcast, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast. I'm Martha Beck.
0:09.6	Welcome, welcome, welcome to the gathering room. I'm just coming from a very busy day and I bet you are too. So let's do the
0:19.9	deep breath. I still want to do our meditation at the end
0:26.2	because folks are coming in for a few minutes in the beginning, even though I love our space,
0:31.7	silence, and stillness meditation. And I'm doing a little bit of it right now just to come down
0:37.2	from being pretty hyper.
0:39.4	Because I've been in a very hyper state.
0:43.5	I just, in case you haven't heard, I've literally told everyone that I could possibly find.
0:49.2	I just spent a week in Costa Rica at a place called the Imaloa Institute, which is a retreat center where
0:55.0	row and I will be doing a retreat based on, it's called Pure Wild Self. It's kind of based on
1:03.9	our bewildered podcast a bit. And we met with other people who do retreats there. And Andrea is one of those people and she's here now.
1:13.4	Maybe more people are here that were there.
1:16.0	The point is, I got to live in the jungle of Costa Rica for most of a week and it was
1:23.1	exquisite.
1:25.6	Talk about retraining your nervous system. I have told you before that research shows that
1:31.9	if you go into a forest, if you've been living in the city and you go into a forest around trees
1:37.2	for just three hours, your cancer killing cells like triple and they stay elevated for six weeks. And we were designed to live
1:48.5	in that all the time. So that nervous system readjustment is so powerful, but it's a little frightening
1:55.3	to realize that that's the way we're meant to be living and that what's really true here is not just that trees and nature
2:02.6	are good for us, but that being away from trees and nature, that's not good for us. I had a friend
2:10.3	who was an animal psychic and she got her book published by the same publisher that was working with
2:16.9	me.
	...

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