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

How is everybody? I hope you're in the middle of a really wonderful transition. Because as you know,

I have this obsession with enlightenment, with awakening, with the transformation of consciousness.

And I have read thousands of books about it and I have talked to many, many, many people all

around the world. And one thing I know is that we grow spiritually and we grow psychologically in phases.

And I talked to you once about the way babies grow.

They don't grow at all in length for like weeks on end.

And then suddenly in one day they'll grow like half an inch longer.

And then the next day they'll grow half an inch again. Can you imagine if you

got up two days from now and you were an inch taller? That's how babies actually grow. But then they just

are stuck again for like three, four weeks and then boom. So I was talking a long time ago about how

this seems to be characteristic of many things in nature that they build

momentum.

I mean, a quantum leap is literally when a molecule or an atom is getting to be, to hold so

much energy that it can't sustain its identity and it, boom, goes to a different, it becomes

a different, a different substance,

a literal different substance. So it gathers energy and then boom, it gets bigger. Babies gather

energy, boom, they get bigger. And we do this intellectually. We do it, you may have had this

experience learning a language where you're, oh, you're trying so hard and then one day, boom, you get a lot more information. I remember doing it. You may have had this experience learning a language where you're, oh, you're trying so hard,

and then one day, boom, you get a lot more information. I remember doing this when I learned to

ski. I learned to ski a little bit when I was like 12, but it was a debacle. I'll tell you that

right now. I was like using somebody else's used skis and they didn't fit me in. I didn't have ski clothes. I had this

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