When Stopping Is the Way to Go

The Gathering Room Podcast

Martha Beck

Business, Entrepreneurship, Self-improvement, Courses, Education

5 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 28 September 2023

⏱️ 31 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

"“Be prepared to stop.” This is serious life advice, Martha says, because no matter what we’re doing (or how much we want to continue doing it), at some point we’re going to get interrupted by life. Whenever we have to stop something we thought was going to continue indefinitely—like a job, for example, or a marriage—it can really hurt. In this episode of The Gathering Pod: When Stopping Is the Way to Go, Martha talks about how we can make peace with inevitable interruptions by embracing another perspective: “In the flow of time in this earthly existence, stopping and starting are the same thing—every time we stop doing something, we start doing something different.” Tune in to participate in a guided meditation with Martha and learn how you loosening your attachments can ease the pain of stopping, so you can start observing the delicious flow of life."

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Gathering Pod, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast. I'm Martha Beck.
0:09.0	I was driving along today, coming back from the dentist, and I was thinking, what shall we talk about on the gathering room today?
0:16.4	Like, what feels inspiring? So I opened myself to inspiration from the universe and I turned a corner
0:21.9	and I confronted a sign that said, be prepared to stop. And I was like, well, there it is,
0:29.2	isn't it? Be prepared to stop. That is some serious advice. Because everything we start to do ends up getting interrupted by life.
0:44.0	And it's particularly salient to me because I'm writing a book.
0:48.1	And let's see, when did the book sell?
0:50.1	Ages ago, months ago.
0:51.8	I had like a year and a half to write it.
0:53.8	And I did. I started out really,
0:56.0	like, religiously. Oh, no, spiritually, but not religiously. I was working away, got about
1:04.7	a hundred pages written. And I hate it when I get interrupted because research shows that somebody who's in writing in
1:13.3	particular, but like composing a song or anything where you're doing something creative,
1:19.1	that you're pulling something out of thin air and putting it into some kind of order.
1:24.1	If you're doing that kind of stuff and someone interrupts you, even if they just say,
1:29.7	do you know where I left my whatever, my tomahawk or whatever it was? And you stop and say,
1:37.7	oh, I think I saw it out on the patio or whatever. And then it takes you 21 minutes to get back into your darn book or whatever creative
1:48.9	thing you're doing. It's very hard if you stop. So I, during the course of writing this book,
1:55.5	I went to South Africa for several weeks. Then I came back and tried to write some more. Just was getting back
2:02.4	into it. Went to Australia for several weeks. Well, a few weeks. A couple weeks. Came back,
2:10.6	tried to get into it again and realized stopping was the end of the book I was writing. Like, I'm not the same person anymore. So I had to
2:20.6	start over again. I was very, very anxious about having stopped. I felt like now I don't have time.
	...

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