The Perfection of Connection

The Gathering Room Podcast

Martha Beck

Business, Entrepreneurship, Self-improvement, Courses, Education

5 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 2 May 2024

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Is there something you’re having trouble with that you’re trying to do perfectly? If so, you’re not alone… As Martha reminds us in this episode of The Gathering Room, we are all trained by the culture to strive for perfection and to look for it in others. However, you are not going to show up perfectly—because it’s impossible! If you show up not to be perfect but to connect, nobody will care that you haven’t done it perfectly. As Martha says, we are here to be connected with a world in which all of us are imperfect. Martha is currently learning Spanish, and she recently stumbled her way through a conversation with a Spanish-speaking friend. Despite her less-than-perfect Spanish, the joy Martha felt connecting with her friend in that language was a “return to the sacredness of communion.” If you've been struggling with the desire to be perfect, and you want to learn how to drop into imperfection and connect to yourself and others, be sure to tune in. You’ll also be able to experience connection through Martha’s guided Silence, Stillness, and Space meditation.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Gathering Room podcast, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast.
0:08.0	I'm Martha Beck.
0:09.0	Today's episode is called the Perfection of Connection.
0:15.0	And the reason that I thought to say this is that I have been trying to learn Spanish. Oh, please don't hold me to this.
0:25.3	As you may know, Roe and I are doing a retreat in Costa Rica next year and we love, love, love it down there, this beautiful place called Imaloa.
0:36.5	And because we don't speak any Spanish,
0:39.7	we're like, it's time to learn. So we've been studying Spanish using apps on our phones. There's
0:47.0	some wonderful, wonderful apps, and this one was recommended, and we've been doing it. And it's super
0:52.0	fun and gamifies it, and I often get it to praise me.
0:57.5	But I am under no illusion that I'm learning to speak Spanish. I am playing a game with my phone
1:02.7	that is setting me up to maybe speak Spanish someday. That would be nice. Because, yeah, I've studied so many languages that I've never felt
1:13.6	completely competent in any of them, including English. So I was, I went to get my haircut,
1:20.9	and I was in the chair while they're like washing my hair and I'm doing my little thing on my phone and trying to get the
1:28.3	answers right. It's so gratifying. When you got an answer right, it gives you a green light and a
1:33.4	sweet sound that becomes your life and breath. And when you put in something wrong and it says
1:38.8	me and it turns red, I literally like go completely blank for a minute and have to find another reason to live.
1:47.1	It's very, very tied into the human nervous system. So I'm doing that and then I go get the
1:53.5	shampoo washed out of my hair by this incredibly lovely lady who is from Central America
1:59.2	and whom always have this beautiful conversations with me in
2:03.2	her second language, English, and she's amazing. And she starts speaking to me in Spanish.
2:09.5	She is on to me that I've been studying it on my phone. And I just went,
2:12.7	everything I knew went out the window. I have learned a lot of words.
	...

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