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

So today's topic is the uses and misuses of the imagination. I have been reading a lot about imagination

as not only a way to make sense of the world,

but as a brain function, right?

So I've always believed that the main cause of our suffering is the misuse of our imagination.

Some people may say, yes, but in the way of integrity, you said that an untruth,

believing something that wasn't true is the cause of emotional pain. And I would say yes,

because to believe something that isn't true, you have to imagine that something's true when it

isn't. So it's the same thing. You're using your imagination to say, for example,

you know, that guy looked at me strangely. He doesn't like me. It may just be that the guy has a

weird, maybe his face is just like that, you know, you don't know. So we imagine things like,

oh, no, catastrophes will befall me. I'll lose the ones I love. I'll run out of money. And they're all

valid concerns, but anything that's not in the moment is in the imagination. Anything that is in the

future is only in the imagination, right? So for years and years, I've been doing this coaching

and coach training, and we talk a lot about finding the beliefs that are causing somebody to suffer

and then looking at them and seeing, okay, without imagination, just with looking at the facts,

are we sure this is true? So the Byron Katie work does this,

cognitive behavioral therapy does this, act therapy does this. I've played with all these

modalities, as we used to say at Harvard. Sorry, drink. I apologize to anybody for whom that was a trigger. So we imagine and imagine and imagine things

that frighten us, that depress us and all of that. And a big part of getting healthy is seeing

where our suffering comes from stuff that is not knowable. Or we can actually, when we look at it closely, we see that

it is not true. Like you can go to the guy who looked at you funny and say, does that look on your

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