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

Let's get started on today's gathering room.

First of all, those of us who are in the Northern Hemisphere are pulling out into the spring again.

Oh, Netherlands and Poland in one.

Oh, yeah. And someone from, is that a Danish flag? Sorry, bring it in, Marty, bring it in.

All right. So today what I want to talk to you about, now, if you have followed any of my books or the

life coach training that I do or any of those things,

you know that I talk a lot about metamorphosis, how there are times in our lives when

change inches forward. And then there are times when there's a huge leap or something happens

that makes it impossible for us to avoid a massive transition in identity. So I, my whole career, I've been

dealing with people who are undergoing that. And it could be that something, you know,

something terrible happens. Your house burns down. Something wonderful happens. You win the

lottery. Something. You just grow too big for a relationship and need help

getting to the next place. These are all times of personal metamorphosis. But there's something

happening nowadays. The pandemic is the first time in human history that all of us from around the

world, like the incredible international scope of this one little gathering, that wasn't possible before a few decades ago. And during the pandemic, for the very first time, people were all coordinating their actions, not just, you know, in friendship groups or meeting circles or

anything, but around the globe all looking at the same thing. Not everyone was reacting the same

way to the pandemic, but everyone was affected by it. And we all, those of us who were sort of

in the know, we realized there was a pandemic, and we were thinking

similar thoughts at similar times. So this is kind of the ultimate catalytic event. That's what I call

an event that makes it impossible for us to maintain the same identity. We have to change who we

are at a very fundamental level. And the pandemic happened, and that was a

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