- Hello. Hello Instagram, hello Facebook. We are shooting on, what are you doing? Driving on all cylinders. I don't know what we're doing. We're cooking on every
part of the stove, we're, oh, I'm not quick with an
idiom today it would seem. But it's so nice to see you
all, everybody coming in. I see Anna and Adrian and Wendy coming in. I see a few people, oh, here's Tracy on Facebook. Amy is on Instagram and
Karin, hi from Lillehammer. I've been watching lots of
Scandi noir detective shows. I love watching the Danish
and the Swedish and all that. Hello, Catherine, hello,
Christine and Trisha and Susan and Lindsey and Curated
Dwelling, nice name, beautiful. If only I'd thought to
name my children that. Robin and Theresa and Dr. Don as always and Susan and Meg and Johanna. Everybody's here. We're all here. Look around, make sure nobody's missing. Yeah, nobody's missing. So we can talk about The
Gathering Room today. Yes, I'm a little bit slow on the idiom because I'm tired from traveling. I did travel this weekend. I went to New York city to do some stuff, and it was weird because
I'd never been away from our one-year-old baby
because she's a plague baby. And so we all just
hunkered here in the forest and she only knows that there
are three people in the world or for four adults who
have three dimensions and everyone else is just a flat person. So it was the first time ever
that I had to FaceTime her. And I was a flat person
and it was very sweet because we've been teaching
her some sign language and she knows how to say, please, when she wants something like this. And when I FaceTimed her, she
frantically started doing, please, please. And I think she wanted me
to come out of the phone, but I couldn't. So it was, it was interesting
to be away from home after so many years of, well, so many months of not traveling because before that
there was so many years of constant traveling and
it made me think about why I choose to go wherever I go. And this is, it's as true
of staying in a place as it is of going. It's about where am I located in the world and what am I doing at the moment? And it's something that
I've been practicing for more than 30 years. And it started with the infamous incident of my son's diagnosis with down syndrome and making a decision then. Probably the first decision of my life that I ever made based completely
on every aspect of myself. The book I just wrote,
"The Way of Integrity," talks about how, if you're going to know, if you're going to, integrity means being whole and undivided. Thank you, Dr. Donna. And that means that you unite not just your mind's decisions, but your, you unite the body, the heart and the spirit with the
decision you're making as well. So when I had to decide
what to do about Adam, right at the end of my pregnancy, and please, if you made
a different decision, know that I am with you, but I decided not to
terminate that pregnancy. And it was because
everything lined up and said, "Okay, this is the way. This is the way." Now, after he was born, it was such a dramatic decision for me. And everybody told me it would
completely change my life, which it did, but it wouldn't have had to, like Adam was the most
undemanding baby and child I can imagine. He was so calm and lovely and content from the very beginning. And he still is, but they told me it would
throw my life into chaos. So I felt like I was in chaos. So then I thought, "Well, how do you find your way through chaos?" And if you've gone to like my
online courses or whatever, you know, that I'm
obsessed with this question of what to do in chaos, because we're basically all
living in chaos right now. It's not, the future is not plannable. 'Cause it's too, there
are too many elements doing too many unprecedented things. Well, that's how I felt
after Adam was born, 30 plus years ago. And so I decided on this way of living where I would treat that
sense of truth inside myself, like a compass. We're making a course now
called, "The Wayfinders Compass," which will not be available for awhile, but it's going to be awesome when it is. But I decided just to always, instead of looking around me or listening to the cues
of the people around me, who told me, all of them told me, I'd made the wrong decision about Adam. Instead of that, I'm going to look for this
alignment that I feel. And I started going everywhere
that I felt might be a place where my intuition was sending me. So I wrote about this one. It's the first in finding
your own north star. I wrote about the first huge
bolt of inspiration I got was that we were having
some people over for dinner and we were going to
make this Japanese dish that relied on pork
cutlets, and, Katsudon. It's still delicious. So I was waddling along
past a store in Cambridge, where we were living. Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the most intense
feeling came to me saying, "Turn and go into this
little grocery store. They have pork cutlets on sale." And it was like a crystal ball. I was like, "Nothing
could have been clearer." And I was like, "Well that's weird." But I turned, I went into
the little grocery store. Sure enough, they were literally just setting out the pork cutlets on sale. And I bought them and they were delicious and they were inexpensive, but I was like, "Really seriously? Pork cutlets, that's how
magic the world gets?" Well then I kept paying attention and every little hint was something more. And I started, the more you
pay attention to that voice, the more clearly it speaks to you. And I noticed that when I
got excited about something or I started to make my own plan or have my own conjecture about why I was being sent somewhere? I tended to things that were, how shall I say it? Incredibly stupid and
like so embarrassing. I'd feel like I was sent to help someone and they'd be like, "No." (laughs) And then it would be because
I was projecting something and it was just, it was a debacle, right? More times than not. But I started to be able to feel what the compass needle
was actually doing. Now, you may have had
this experience before. I was just talking to some friends and we were talking
about when in your life have you had this impulse, like the one I had with the pork cutlets, but maybe bigger than that. And one of you followed your intuition, gone to a place you wouldn't
ordinarily have gone and got something you
hadn't expected as a result. So I kept doing this
and when Adam was tiny, I used to, I spent a
year going back and forth for one class a week at Harvard. I was finishing, I had one class to finish
before I could get my doctorate. So we had tons of frequent flyer points and I would get on a red-eye flight at night in Salt Lake
City, fly to Cambridge. You go to class in the morning, fly home and be back in less than 24 hours and do all my homework on the plane. And there was a lot of
it, I have to tell you. Anyway, my point is, one day I was going to get on
my flight and something said, clear as day, "You will
see death on this trip." And I was like, "Oh my
God, I will see death?" I was imagining plane
crashes and everything. And I was like, "So I
shouldn't get on the plane?" And the things said, "No,
no, get on the plane. You'll just see death." And I was like, "That makes no sense." But by this time it had been months that I'd been literally
getting up in the morning. And this is what I'm going
to challenge you guys to do. Get up in the morning, sit completely quietly
and feel for any action that you could take. So it could be sending an email. It could be calling a friend. It doesn't have to be going somewhere, but even do I go to this
room and get a cup of coffee? Do I go, like, start paying
really intimate attention to the part of you that tells
you, "Oh, I want to go here. I want to go there." And if you start with these inconsequential mundane daily things, then you'll start to hear it more clearly. And then it will be able to
speak to you in very overt ways. So the thing said, "No,
go, get on this flight, but be very, very careful
and expect to see death." So I got on the plane and I was like, "Maybe it's going to crash." And I went, I was connecting in like
Minneapolis or somewhere. And I got off the plane in Minneapolis and I was waiting for my
next flight to Boston. And as I looked out the
window in Minneapolis, I saw just a few snowflakes. And because I had had that intense, weird, you will see death. I was like, "Should I be
paying attention to this?" And the inside voice said, "Absolutely." So I just went and booked
a hotel at an airport hotel in Minneapolis, just in case. And there was no bad weather
forecast or anything. Well, out of nowhere, boiled
up this ferocious blizzard, it was crazy. Not only were people stuck in the airport because the planes couldn't take off, but people couldn't come
pick up arriving passengers because nobody could drive there. And I remember looking out the street and the streets were
covered with sheet ice within minutes of the
sleet storm beginning. And the wind was so strong
that I was looking out and I was watching people trying to walk. And they were like, people
walking up the down escalator, they were walking into the wind. And because it was so icy, they were literally walking forward, but being pushed
backward, it was horrific. And immediately all the
hotel rooms were gone, but I already had mine, right? And it was like, (mumbles). And I was looking to see, is
somebody going to to crash? Is there going to be a car wreck? What's, what's this death business. So I go to my airport hotel, so grateful. You can hear my dog agreeing and talking about the things she does, the places she goes by instinct and the dead things
she finds to eat there. Sorry, slight diversion. So anyway, I go to the
Minneapolis airport hotel, I was sitting there, (snores). It was great, lovely hotel. Went back to the airport in the morning and I'm in line to go
get my flight changed so I can still get to Boston. And I still get there before class. And I was waiting in a
very long line of customers who needed to reroute their flights. And as I was standing there
completely hammed in like, I couldn't move. 'Cause I was in this very big
line that went back and forth. Somebody was pushing a wheelchair past me with an old lady in it. And it was an airport attendant and it wasn't like a family member. It was clearly an official person and he was pushing the wheelchair past me. And suddenly the lady went limp and slumped and fell on the floor. And the guy was horrified. The airport employee was
horrified and he was like, he got down on the floor and
he's like, "Are you okay? Are you okay?" And she wasn't responsive. So he got up and ran away to get help. And I was literally right next to her. I was looking down at
her face as she died. And I had never seen a person die before. I'd seen dead people, but not a person actually
going from life to death. And it was so fascinating
because there was a woman, there was a woman, there was
a woman, there was a body. It was like that wasn't a woman anymore. It was so weird the moment the life left, it was so observable. And it made me see, oh my God,
we really are consciousness. And we are just wearing these meat suits. That is like, as Byron Katie says, "We just, we walk around
in them for a while. And then when they stop working for us, we put them down and walk away. And when other people's
bodies stopped talking to us, we just bury them." So, I mean, it's her sort of whimsical
way of talking about death. And it actually was a very
profound experience in my life, but it was especially profound because I had been prepared for it. And it's so little experiences like this. A lot of people tell me, "I wish I could have woo-woo
experiences like you do. And I wish I could manifest
things and everything." And manifestation is not about,
I want a million dollars. I want a million dollars. Give me a million dollars, pooh. I got a million dollars. It's about, am I in my integrity? Am I following the compass? Am I in agreement with
all the parts of me? Which I'll talk about in a second. Am I telling the truth all the time? Am I telling the truth to myself? Am I going where I'm
sent by that inner voice? And if you do that, then
stuff starts to manifest. Yeah, then a million dollars comes in. You can't get away from it if it's something you've tried to create. So that's why I traveled this
weekend for the first time in, I think since the lockdown. I mean, we've driven around as a family, but I haven't traveled away from my family and been with people who, I didn't know what their
COVID protocols had been or whatever. And, but the opportunity
came up and the impulse came. Now here's what it feels
like when the impulse comes. Let's say, okay, it could be
something that you'd wanted to do for a long time. I had a friend once who had a Pen Pal when she was a child starting at age seven in another country. And they corresponded for
years and years and years, like every week. And they fell in love through the mail. And he was from a very different place. And she always longed to meet him and tried to manifest a meeting somehow. And then she married
someone else, had children. One of her sons grew up to
be a martial arts champion. And he got to the world
championships in the very place where her Pen Pal was living. And she called me and she's like, "Oh my God, it's finally manifesting. I'm going with my son and I'm
going to meet my Pen Pal." And then her son got
injured and couldn't go. And she came over to my
house and she was like, "I really thought it was true. I thought, I felt so lighthearted. It felt so good, it felt so right." And I said, "Is there any other way
you could get over there? Like, besides going with your son to a martial arts tournament?" And she was like, "Well, I do have like 400
million frequent flyer points because my ex-husband is
a pilot or something." And I was like, "Okay, well, we could work
this a number of ways." So the next day she bought
a ticket to the country, went to the country, met her Pen Pal. And they had this, they were
married to other people, but they had this incredible
bonding experience and tons of love. And it was, it was like a soul connection
between these two people. So you can almost get too
much if you feel like, "Oh, I really, my whole
body, heart and soul are leaning towards something." You can try to manifest it
and make it come by magic so that you feel like, "Oh,
now I know it's special." Or you can just do it. Like, how about that? RO is from, my partner, as
you know, is from Australia. And she actually went to see
Liz Gilbert speak in Sydney years before we would all become friends. And she had, she said, "It's very Australian for
people to be like, "Oh, well, I guess she thinks she can
just take off around the world. We have responsibilities,
very responsible culture." And she heard some people
talking and saying, "Okay." So she went, so Liz Gilbert
went around the world. "I would have to sell my
house to go around the world." And Ro was thinking, "Yeah,
she did sell her house." But there was, and in Liz's life, I've told this story before. She said, "Everything was a mess." Or it's in Eat, Pray, Love. "Everything was a mess. And the one thread of sweetness was the idea of learning Italian." So that's where she was sent. And she just freaking went. Find the threads of sweetness
that are calling to you, or pulling gently on you, okay? So go through your life right now and just think about
everything you did today. Everything you'll do this week, everything you did last week and look for threads of sweetness, right? Like for me, it was
rereading a book that I loved and then having a chance
to meet the author. And it was like, "Oh, that's sweet. That would be sweet." And then there was a little synchronicity that went on where her
friends connected us while I was thinking about it and stuff. So I was like, "Oh yeah, magic. Now I'm really going to go." But still we had to arrange everything. I had to go to my, the rest of my family and say, "How do you feel about me traveling?" And what's interesting
is once you're clear, like, do I really want to go? Check with your mind. Actually, don't check
with your mind first. The first thing you
check with is your heart. You enter through the heart, which is actually the
biggest decision maker of your whole system. I could get into the physiology of this, but we don't have time. Get into your heart and feel, does it feel like sweetness? Do you feel pulled forward? Then go to your gut. Does your gut feel calm? You're looking for calm,
relaxation, and sweetness. Pull forward. Then you've talked to your spirit and say, "Does this decision, if I make
the decision to go somewhere, do I feel more free or less free?" Because every decision that's trying to guide you through life
will take you into freedom. Every single one, it may scare you. It may be painful. It may be terrifying,
but it will be freeing. So, and then bring your mind in and say, "How could I do this? Now that all my systems are aligned. And if there's a way to
do it, and that works, it's like, all right,
everything's lined up, click, click, click." It's almost like tumblers
falling into place and a door opening, a safe or something, and you go through it. So when you do that, what happens is that
your life becomes large, your life, because you're
not waiting for something to force you to go and act. And in our culture, you don't do it if it doesn't have a reason, and the reason better be that you're going to
make some money, right? Or at least have an affair or something, and something that is
related to the things we value in our culture,
romantic love, money. Those are the top two. But if you're just listening
for harmony within yourself, and then you find
harmony within the world, you start to get pulled and you get these little
beautiful little coincidences that happen to show you that
you're on the right path. And then some really big things like expect to see
death and you see death. And what this does is it
starts to build your trust, not only in your own intuition, but the fact that your
intuition is connected to the universal consciousness that is operating in all things. So you give up control in
a way by seeding control to the compass of your
body, heart, mind, soul, to your own integrity. You become one extension
of an intelligence. That's much, much, much, much, much, much more intelligent than
any human being could ever be. And you can begin to trust that sense. And like the friend I had that set up, the trip that I did today
just called and said, "Yeah, this could happen or it could not. Up to you." And I thought, "Oh, this is a person who
follows the inner compass. This is a person who
goes where they're sent." So I wanted to challenge
you all to take this week and every single day in the
morning if you think of it or later if you get a break
and you remember to do it, set an alarm on your phone
or something that says, "Check the compass." And that means sit down and say, "Is this the right place
for me to be right now?" Okay, go through all. Is there a better place
for me to be right now? Oh, wow. It would be nice to have warmer feet. That's an instruction. Go get slippers. Go put on some fuzzy socks. You have to, it's like the
game you're getting warmer. You're getting colder. You don't just sit there going, "All right, I'm going to
have to get the whole thing on a silver platter, or I'm not budging, that wouldn't be sensible." You have to blunder. You have to go around and you have to go toward what's warmer and you don't really know why. And then you'll make a mistake and you'll feel like
everything goes into disarray and it's colder. And then you play this
game of warm or colder and you can play it with every
single moment of your day. And it will guide you to
the most interesting things. Sometimes there'll be
very sweet and simple. Sometimes there'll be spectacular and beyond your wildest dreams. And sometimes they'll just be weird like that trip to Boston was. But there's an intelligence
helping us and guiding us. And it's a fun, fun way to navigate. Okay, I'm going to do some questions now. All right, Kira says, "I've noticed that when
I'm in a period of life, in which I'm particularly
on purpose or in alignment, I have so many deja vu moments, always weird little ones like watching a movie I've never seen, but remembering the dialogue. This happened to me last week, right around a big
personal accomplishment. I'm so curious, what's
your opinion on deja vu? Is this the same flavor of magic you're talking about today?" It is in a way, because that huge consciousness that's much more intelligent
than any human could ever be is also outside of time. And it's not separate
from our consciousness. It doesn't send us letters
from another place. It is, we are saturated with it. We are made of it, right? We are that consciousness. And so the human part of us can't see through time into the future. We can look back, but the part of us that
is pure consciousness, looking at the universal consciousness, sees everything past future and present as one huge internal presence. When you reach the speed
of light time stops. And I think it works
at the speed of light. So what happens is, as you get more connected
to the universal presence and you drop the inhibitions
of the small human self, you can see through time more easily. And you remember, you pre member, one of my clients used to call it, odd little things that there's
no real significance to, but what you can know is you are now connected with
your larger consciousness and it's showing you what's
happening through future time. And it's a very cool experience. So, I'm glad you asked. Jessica says, "When I
was working as a midwife, I had a voice tell me to
prepare for a postpartum hemorrhage that was this clear. We listened and were
ready and all is well. It's my first memory of
such a clear message." Yeah, when it's time to do something that's really important, like saving a life like that, it can be like, bam. It seems to break through the sort of veil between the mystery and us. Sometimes it shouts. There was that. I don't know if you remember, there was a Hawaiian jet that took off from Hawaii many years ago, and then something sheared the top right off the airplane passenger jet. And they had to turn around and fly back. And they landed successfully. But like six people were sucked
out of the plane and died. There was a woman who was
getting into that flight and putting on her seatbelt and she'd never had any
woo-woo experiences. And she said, a very
loud voice said to her, right in her ear, "Buckle your seat belt, you're in for the ride of your life." She was like, "Whoa, all right then." And she was. The suction tore the earrings off through the lobes of her ears. That was how intense it was. So sometimes it comes right
through and shouts at us, but that's rare. So Dr. Gunner says, "How do you distinguish the real impulse from an ego's desire or fear?" The ego's desire and the
fear will tighten you. It will tighten your mind. It will tighten your mood. It will tighten your body. A real compass reading opens
your mind, opens your heart, relaxes your body. Even if you're doing something scary, you'll feel a sense of that sweetness does not come in to fear or to ego, but when it's something real, even in very peculiar circumstances where it shouldn't feel good,
it will, but it's slight. It's subtle. So if your fear is up,
it can block it out. Laura says, "I mostly
feel things in my body. And sometimes it's
frustrating to not understand what those sensations mean, especially if they're really intense. When intuition strengthens, does it start talking
to you with a voice?" It will always talk to you
in primarily with feelings because no words can describe things as quickly as the other
sensory apparatus of the body. So, one experience of going
into a frigid icy blizzard, for example, like the one I talked about will tell you a lot more
than someone describing the properties of cold
to you in a voice, right? So we tend to over emphasize language, but intuition is very much about the body. So you're really on track Laura. And it's a game of you're getting warmer. You're getting colder. I have a feeling, I don't know what it is. Go different directions. See whether it feels freer or less free, tight, or loose. Go towards what feels
loose, relaxed, free, open, and sweet and you will
eventually get there. Megan says, "What if you don't feel
any threads of sweetness?" If that's true, your mind is actually blocking you from part of your perception of reality, because the, a clear mind in even people, I met a man once who was
kept in solitary confinement by terrorists. And he said, "Even in
solitary confinement." When he got calm and clear enough, there was a sweetness
helping him, feeding him. And so it's the worst possible situation, but it gave him an
opportunity to get very quiet. And he said, "The quiet
itself, taught him that." And if your mind is very noisy and you don't feel any
threads of sweetness, the prescription is to be still. Be still and focus on things
that bring you pleasure, ordinary pleasure, like
things you love to feel, smell, hear, touch, taste. I think I got one I missed one there, but with your five sentences, like focus on something
that brings you pleasure or joy that is sweet in your life. And it opens the door for the
sweetness that your intuition and the other parts of
you want to bring in. So Della says, "Is manifestation listening to your soul's desire?" Yeah, I believe that it's
your body, heart, mind, soul, but your mind is always
the last one to the party. It may not know, like I wanted
to have a child like Adam, I just didn't know it. So I always say your life is actually pulling you by the heart. And if you're really listening to it, there's a physical feeling
almost with the heart wanting to go to a certain place. So Buddha Field says, "Do you think there was a reason you had to see the woman die?" That's what I thought. I thought, "What does this mean? What does this mean?" I kept trying to make it mean something. "Would I recognize the signs
of death and save a life?" Now, looking back from decades later, I feel as if it was a gift
given to me to teach me that my intuition could be trusted. And that was the whole reason. I may be wrong. I mean, like die and
find out from Saint Peter that there was a different reason, but that's the one I hold. And that was enough. It was more than enough. That's, that's everything. 'Cause then you've got the
rest of your life wide open. Okay, so Caitlin says, part of her brain is
constantly giving her warnings that something that sometimes
really do intermingle with my true intuition. "How can I pull out the overwhelming fear and keep the intuitive thread
of sweetness you mentioned? PS, the voice told me to
watch The Gathering Room live today and here I am learning about listening to the voice." That's so cool. I think of a book I never read
right before we went live. And I thought I'm just going
to open it to a random page. And it opened to trusting your intuition was the bold print across
the top of the page. So here's the thing,
you can sometimes get, some people have like, they're very pression about disasters or you'll have dreams of
disaster that then happened. I believe that this is part of the consciousness seeing
through time, that whole thing. And sometimes you'll get a
nudge to warn you, be prepared, be safe, buckle your seatbelt. You're in for the ride of your life. But the voice itself or the
feeling itself will never, the thought of the
thing it's talking about you will see death could scare you. But the feeling of the impulse, the information that comes in is always done from a place of peace. There's a stillness to it. Even if it's saying buckle up, you're in for the ride of your life, it will never try to frighten you. It will never say be
afraid, be very afraid. You better be scared,
bad things are coming. In fact, if you look at mystical accounts from every religious
tradition in the world, when beings show up to help
people, angels or whatever, the first thing they always
say is don't be afraid. Don't be afraid. Fear not, like, the Christmas story, the angels come to the shepherds. And the very first thing
they say is fear not. And then they can get
their message across. So our job, I'm really
glad you brought that up and we're kind of over time, but I have some more questions. Oh, a lot of questions. Any votes for whether we
should end now or keep going? It's like the fear not
is actually the preface to everything I've been
talking about today. I'm going to end on this question because it really is, your question brings up the first step that I was leaving out. And that is to come to a place where you can put your fear
aside, just for the moment. So we know this is a dangerous
world, but look to your left, look to your right, right now, nothing is coming at you
in this very, very moment. If something comes at you
later, it may, but it's not now. So put brackets around this moment, realize I don't need
to be afraid right now. Even if I don't have the
rent money, even if I'm sick, even if, like right this red hot second, I'm going to let myself be okay. I'm going to put brackets around it. I'm going to let myself be okay. Fear not, fear not, fear not. And then say, "Wonder where I would go, if I got up and went?" And you start to feel for this weakness and you get up and you
go, and I can tell you, after 30 years of doing this, the ripple effects that come out, that reflect back into your life and into the lives of other people. They create miracles beyond
anything you could imagine, like you really are being
guided if you let yourself. So let's all fear not this week. Get up, calm your fear, feel
for the threads of sweetness and then play I'm getting
warmer, I'm getting colder and go towards what's
warmer and see what comes, see where you go. Because the thing that
sending you has lots and lots of delicious
adventures in store for you. (blows kisses) I'm so glad that you're here. I'm sorry for the
questions I didn't get to, but we're going to be here next
week on The Gathering Room. Thank you so much for coming. (blows kisses) And, bye.
