- Hello. Hello, interweb. Hello, Facebook. How are you all? Oh, (throat clearing) the
live video is starting. I'm here. Are you here? Somebody is here. Oh, (hands clapping)
several somebodies are here. Good to see you all. Oh, what a sight for sore eyes all those little icons with
your beautiful faces are. You are so wonderful. Seriously, I can feel
my heart just calming as people come into the Gathering Room. I used to get really amped up. Now, when I feel your
energy, it calms me down, which means somebody out
there is actually listening (laughing) to what I say because everything basically boils down to just calm yourself, (laughing) and now you guys are calming me. What a sweet thing to see you. Buddhafield, how you doin'? Mag is here, Shelly. Long Gone Dragon is here. Yeah, I loved the Long Gone
Dragon and Carrie and, oh, Katarina and Marsha and Oshicon, Oshicon, Florence and Lorraine and
Bianca, (deeply sighing) Laurie and Emily and Marcia who is obsessed with Grit Magic. Who isn't? Once you get your teeth into Grit Magic, you never want to let go. (deeply exhaling) We're here. I'm breathing. This is all we need. So welcome welcome. We've got enough people. I'm going to jump into our subject matter. First of all, behold the
false of the eyelash. You will not often see this, people, but the reason you see it today is that, as I may have mentioned before, my book, "The way of integrity,"
I sent it to Oprah. I try not to bother her
with things, but she said, sure, I'd love to see it, and then she wanted to do an
"Oprah Daily" class with me. So we have to film "Oprah Daily" things. Now, if you've ever done TV production, you know it is the single most hectic job on the face of the earth, okay? The producer is everything. You have to get all the objects. You have to get all the people. You have to get the words right. You have to get the light right. You have to get the makeup right. You have to do all this stuff, and if you know anything about
the Oprah show, (gasping) if you watched it back
when it was a thing, it was so beautifully produced. It took... Somebody once told me they'd figured out it took 37 hours of human
effort for every minute of the Oprah show that ever ran, and it ran every weekday for 25 years. Imagine the amount of human labor. Anyway, when I got
invited on the Oprah show, I was like, (squealing) so then you start to
hear from the producers. Here's what they want. They want video of you at
every stage of your life, including your own birth. They want still photos of you at every place you've ever loved to be. They want pictures of
you bouncing on the bed with your children. They will send a photographer
to videotape you bouncing on the bed with your children, which is something you never actually do, but I remember bouncing on the
bed so hard with my children that we all became seriously
physically exhausted, and we had to keep doing different takes. I remember once I did an
Oprah show where I was helping a woman paint a wall. So it was one of those
redo your room shows. So we were painting on the
wall, and they were like, can't you be more
cheerful, and we were like, (whining) we're trying
to be more cheerful, and then they'd be like
your sweater's crooked. Start from the beginning. Okay, can you be cheerful painting? (panting) More cheerful. (squealing) Paint, yes! Then they'd be like, oh, we forgot to turn off the refrigerator. Start all over again. So like 98 takes later (panting), and they're always running
in to do your eyelashes, do your hair. Well, that was before the pandemic, but see, it got in my head. Now, whenever I have to do something with the Oprah business, I know that it's going to
be very highly produced, and I know what went into it. So I try to do all the parts. Now, thank God I have the gracious badger, my partner in crime, Rowan Mangan, who is also something of a producer, and she's like, get the shot right. Get the things right. No, you look dumb in that shirt. No, she never says that. I say that. That shirt's not perfect for you, honey. I look dumb in that shirt. Yeah, so we've been running around trying to get "Oprah Daily"
all the stuff that they need for this class that we're doing. Every single corner of my
house looks like a cruise liner crashed into it during
some sort of weird party, and everything (voice garbling)
landed all over the room, every room, because
we've been in every room, like where's a reading nook in your house? We don't have reading nook. My reading nook is bed. Where does Martha sit to write? Bed. Where does Martha call her friends? Bed? I do everything from bed. It's a habit. After 12 years of chronic
pain, I just lie down a lot. I mean, the Romans ate lying down, and they did okay for a while. All of this just to say that
it's been one of those days when, in the past, I would
have been absolutely flooded with adrenaline and moving
as fast as I could all day, and I did that pretty
much for 10, 12 years, and I was so exhausted. At one point, I hit what I
then called adrenal burnout. I know people argue about
whether that's a real thing, but I believe that my
adrenal glands had produced all the adrenaline they ever
could in my life, (chuckling) and I remember giving a speech on a stage, and there was film, and there were people
cheering and everything, and I was absolutely flat lining. I couldn't feel anything. I was totally numb, and it was because I had just been
frantically going full speed for so long. Now I know better. Now I've done things like
I've lived in the forest and watched the wild animals, and speaking of the wild animals, I remember in Africa when I'm there with my South African friends, and something goes wrong,
in his wonderful book, "The Cathedral of the Wild" and I think also in "The Lion
Tracker's Guide to Life," my friend and co-seminar
runner in South Africa, Boyd Varty, says, he
describes various things that have gone wrong, like
a hippo attacking someone, or there are a lot of
things that can go wrong in the African Bush. So one of the things they
say is when a crisis hits, slow everything down. So Boyd was actually
grabbed by a crocodile as he was swinging his feet
in an African river once, and it would have killed him
if he hadn't grabbed a branch and hung on and then kicked
down the crocodile's throat, and it caused the croc to let go, but it still pretty much took off his leg. I mean, it's a miracle he recovered, but he describes that and how he knew to slow everything down, and everyone around him slowed down, slowed down at the time you would think you have to move fastest, right? Back here in America, (chuckling) in much less fraught circumstances, I always try to write as fast as I can. All my Oprah articles,
how many, well over 100, maybe 150, most of those were
written during all nighters because I was so busy during the day trying to raise my kids
and run my little company and do book publicity
'cause it's a busy life. I traveled a lot. I spoke a lot, and those articles were
almost all one nighters. I would think on a plane
or while I walked around, but then (fluttering) all
the way through the night. Yeah, I got tired that way, people. I think I thought some good thoughts, but the whole time, I was
just moving way too fast. Then I got to know my
friend, Stephen Mitchell, who is one of my favorite authors in all the English language
and also a former zen monk, and he said, how long do you honestly
think it would take you to do a writing project? I said, well, I think I could
do, like I could do a book in a year, and he said,
okay, two years then, and I was like, no, no, a
year, and he said two years, and part of me said but it has
to happen faster than that, and another part of me,
the wiser part of me said he's absolutely right. Double the time you think. Relax into the process, and I have never enjoyed
writing as much as I did. This was with this last book. I've never enjoyed writing so much because I gave myself time
and because every day I said I am going to write slowly
instead of writing quickly. So when I was working with horses, some of my horse handling
friends also said if you're working with a horse and you want it to do
something, slow is fast. It also translates to children
and adults, for that matter. If you push people, they push back. They brace themselves. If you are relaxed,
easy, just hangin' out, people like that energy, and it tends to make things start to move. Like when I'm trying
to write fast, I block. When I'm writing slowly,
my mind can get into it. Right just before we
turned on the cameras here, Row came running down
the hall, and she said we have to do one of the videos over for the Oprah people. She's like I'm so sorry, and then I was like, cool, that's fine. It always happens like that. It's okay. You always have to redo
things in film production. Everybody knows that, and how wonderful that
we only have to redo one, and I could see her go from (yelling) to, oh, it's going to be
okay, all right, all right, and at that moment, you guys,
quality becomes possible. Joy becomes possible. Relationship becomes possible. The task itself becomes possible. Everything speeds up when you slow down. One of the ways that this really happened for me was that, when I
decided I didn't want to be a professor, and I was going to go off and try to make my fortune as a writer, and my then husband and
I both quit our jobs, I was like, okay, now
we're doing what we love. The money better follow fast! No money. We found ways. We found part-time jobs. We patched it together. We did a little debt, no money, and I was like the money has to come now! I must have said that
every day for 18 months, at which point, I may
have told you this before, somebody gave me a coupon
for a book for my birthday. Lord knows I didn't have
enough money for a book for my birthday to buy for myself, but I went to the bookstore
where I got the coupon, and I got "The Artist's Way,"
and I pulled it off the shelf. It was one of those books
that jump out at you, and I opened it to a random page, and my eyes fell on the sentence,
"God has lots of money," and I just went, oh, all
right, I get it, okay. Literally I'm tryin' to get money from all these different employers. I'm tryin' to sell books. (sighing) Actually, ultimately,
God has all the money. So it's not what you know. It's who you know. We all know God. All right, I'm going to relax, and I went home, and I
said to my then husband, we can relax about money, and
he said did you get a job, did you sell a book, and I was
like, nope, but it'll happen. I'm just going to relax.
I'm going to slow down. The money came after a while. I actually don't know how long it was because I stopped fretting. I stopped pushing. I stopped speeding, and it came in time. It came in its own good time, but I will tell you it
would have come much faster if I hadn't been trying to go quickly, if I had slowed down to begin with. So I wanted to say to you
guys think of something that you think you should be doing faster, whether it's reaching a goal of some kind or something you want to
have to happen to you, meeting the perfect mate or whatever, and think about the
time you'd like to spend getting this to happen, and double it. See if there's a way to double it. Now, I know some things,
like paying your taxes, you kind of have to do on
a schedule, but even that, you can file extensions if you have to. If you really, really are determined to go at a nice, steady pace, if you slow down to what
feels like the right energy instead of (gasping), you
should feel (throat clearing), like in Steven's copy of "The Translation of
the Doubt of DJing," it says, "Rushing forward,
standing on tiptoe, you lose your balance." So if you feel like you're rushing forward or you're on tiptoe,
you're going too fast, and the solution is
settle back, slow down, become present in the now. I keep telling you all
this over and over again. Well, it's true, and the
moment you become present in the now, keep tryin' to
get some questions going here, the moment you become present in the now, you suddenly have the means
to work in the real world, which is always and only now. So the cogs engage. The cogs of reality start to
engage with your little mind. If you allow it, whatever you're doing, to take the time it takes and realize that the ultimate result and your co-pilot in this whole endeavor, your co-producer on whatever
you're trying to produce is divine consciousness. It is capable of doing anything
in a very, very short time, and all you need to do is relax into it, and the way you know you're
going at the right speed is not that you see
the products coming out but that you feel centered, and you can feel the cogs engaging. You don't feel like you're
doing it alone anymore. It's coming at the speed
that it wants to come at. If you haven't had that experience, then you'll have to just try and see, but if you have had that
experience, you know what I mean, and you can go back to it. Oh, I was going to say to you that, when you're working with a horse, and you want to train it to do something, if you push the horse to do something, it will get very nervous,
and it'll slow down. It'll balk, and it will get really leery of the very thing you're trying to do, but if you gently, gently wait as the horse gets used to a command, or you start reinforcing
a certain behavior that you want, slowly, slowly, the horse learns fast.
(fingers snapping) So that's how we are. So onto our questions, which
the gracious badger herself is pumpin' out while
balancing a one-year-old. Oh, and we also, it was our one day of beautiful
weather with a coating of snow, and we had to go sledding. I mean, we had to. Let me tell you something. The most incompatible thing
with doing an Oprah show is sledding with a
one-year-old, just going to say. Anyway, Jody says, Marty, pre-pandemic, I was really leaning into this idea. Now I feel like everything
outside of me is changing at light speed, and the
goalposts keep changing. You are not wrong, Jody. This is happening. Can you say more about slowing down, even though the world is having
major shifts all the time? It's this paradox, and I
always compare it to surfing, although I have never surfed, but it looks like surfing. (chuckling) If the waves are big,
and they're moving fast, the answer is not effort. It is balance and grace, physical grace. If you watch these super surfers, they are balletic in their
dance with the ocean. They are really relaxed and
balancing by slight adjustments all the time as this
thing hurdles forward. Some of these big wave surfers,
those waves they're on, aside from being like 70 feet high, are moving forward at
40, 50 miles an hour, and these guys are on there with their bare bodies, just balancing. So the pandemic is like a very choppy sea, and all change in our
culture is speeding up, speeding up, speeding up. That's not going to slow down, and it's not due to the pandemic. It was already happening. It just got accelerated. The more it speeds up, the more you relax. You slow down everything in here, and you let yourself be carried. Don't push things. They go by themselves, and what you'll find is
they go by themselves now faster than they've ever gone before. So the more you relax, the more power is ushering you forward, and I keep having these
experiences where things that used to take me a much
longer time are happening faster because I'm more able to relax. Slow is fast. Slow is fast. Okay, Natalie says, I've quit my teaching job
to start my online business, and I get paid through August. After that, I hope to
be supporting myself. How would you infuse this
advice with having a deadline or goal and trying to meet it? Well, if you're doing a job deadline, relax into the job deadline. If you're thinking by August, I have to have this amount of
money, and you're just tense, and you're clamped around it, I'm telling you that is an illusion. There are so many things that we can do that I have done in my
life to keep coasting in periods between incomes. The longest I did it was 18 months, but I had three kids, and
things were pretty dire. Now, I just notice that
as I work with people who are dropping jobs... I train a lot of coaches. Typically, a lot of them
will quit other jobs to become coaches, and it's the ones who are most at peace in
the work they're doing, they love the coaching process itself or whatever they're doing
that's coaching related, and the love of the process
is more dominant in them than the need for the money. The need for the money is (growling). That kind of energy, it scares a horse. Money is like a horse. It will scare if you say, I need, I need, and if you say, I love this
stuff, I love this stuff, it will come over like a
curious horse and look and say, oh, can I come, and then it will come, and I know it's the hardest thing to tell people, have faith. It will come if you slow
down and enjoy the process, but it's absolutely true. Okay, Linda says, I have a hair strand that did not get sprayed, and anyway... Okay, so Kiwi says easy to stay in the now when things are moving, and all is well. How to stay in the now when
feeling depressed or stuck? I once had a client who came in and said I'm really depressed. Only, he was so depressed, and he'd slowed down so much
that he said I am de-pressed, and I thought, he'd said
I'm having deep rest, and I was like that's a
great idea. (chuckling) It was like, thanks a lot, dude, but I thought about it, and I realized the times in my life when I've been depressed, and I don't want to go back
there, but it was a lot of time. What I really needed was
to get off the rat race and rest into myself. I was in a winter of the soul. I remember that beautiful line from Camus, "In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there
is in me an invincible summer." The only way I found that
invincible summer was to stop, I mean to slow to an actual stop, and depression does that to you. It literally makes your
body heavy, your mind slow, but it's doing it for a reason. It's not an enemy. It's an ally, as awful as it feels. It is an ally. Everything that happens
from within you is an ally, and if you say, okay, what do
you want from me, depression, it will say, be still, be still, be still, and if you get still enough, then it's that beautiful biblical passage, "Be still, and know that I am God." Eckhart Tolle says that's a
repetition of the same thing. Be still is the same as I am, is the same as no, is the same as God, and so in the core of depression, that absolute stop that can come, everything can open up into the summer, the invincible summer. It is in there, and sometimes, we have to detach from
the world and listen to the voice inside that
says don't just slow down, but stop for a while. Typically, during my depressions, if I allowed myself to
stop, I found myself going, slowly but going. If I put any pressure on myself, the depression would get so intense, I would just be like lying on my face. Okay, so Linda says do you find that taking the
time it takes sometimes results in things just falling away? Yeah, a lot of things
don't have to happen, and a lot of things that have that urgent, speedy energy don't have to happen. The things that want to happen... I did this with our podcast. Row and I do this podcast, which I love doing more than,
I mean, it's the most fun, creative thing I've ever done in my life, but we've been in the middle
of all this other stuff, and I was like, no, we
have to record a podcast. So we tried, and the energy wasn't there. It was like trying to talk
with a mouth full of glue. It was like, this is my favorite thing, and because I pushed forward on it, the energy just stopped me, and so we just said, you know what? Let's go where the energy wants to go, and we're going to put out
that episode more slowly, which I regret, but that's how... I want the energy of it to be right, and that's the only way
to get the energy right, to cooperate with the
energy of that project in the universe. It's not just yours. It belongs to your Self with a capital S, which is continuous with all selves, which is part of the divine
consciousness of the universe. That job knows how it wants to be done, and if you listen for it, things will fall away because
they're not meant to be, and the things that are
meant to be will arise in the blank spaces
left by our letting go. Okay, so how do I not
get lazy and do nothing if I slow down? I used to say to people
what would you do... People are always saying
if I won the lottery, I would just, it was always the guys that said this, I would just buy a bar on a beach, and I'd go lie on the beach, and I would drink beer
from my bar on the beach, and I would say, okay, that would be fun for the first six weeks. Okay, now it's been 42 days. Every single day, you've been lying in
the sand drinking beer, and they go, all right,
that would be boring, and if they ever did, even if I could get them to
imagine lying down in the sand and drinking beer for a couple of days, they would start to get
ideas about what to do with their lives. Huh, maybe I could, and then
things would start moving because they had slowed down sufficiently for their souls to catch up. You won't get lazy. It's not in your nature to be lazy. Try living with an 18 month old. You're not lazy. We're all born like little
perpetual energy machines. We are so curious. We are so creative that
we can't be stopped if we're in our real energy. If you think you can, then please come take care of our child because she does not stop. All right, Lorraine says can you please distinguish
between the ideas of God has all the money
and the faulty secret style I can manifest anything
without doing a thing? Yes. The God has lots of money comes through when you align yourself with truth. So another word for God is truth, reality, Byron Katie says. If you're telling the
truth about yourself, if you're living the truth
of your heart's desires, then the things you want weirdly and often miraculously do manifest. They arrive. When you are out of your integrity at all, this is why my book is called
"The Way of Integrity." Integrity means being one
thing in all your parts at all times. So if you are speaking the
truth to yourself, to others, unless they're like crazy dictators who are trying to kill people, I'm saying there are exceptions, you tell the truth with your actions. You tell the truth with
the way you treat yourself, the way you treat others. When all those things are aligned, what comes up as a genuine
desire, bang, (fingers snapping) will manifest so miraculously, and I've tried and
tried to prove it wrong. I'm like, let's do a science
and just look at the facts, and the more I look at the facts, the more I bring my mind into alignment with what really feels real
to the body, heart, soul, everything, the more things manifest, and so slowing down when the
energy wants to slow down is a way of keeping my integrity, and that's what keeps the magic flowing. So if you're out of
integrity, it will not work. Jessica says I've been
fretting about money, as you described when you quit your jobs. My stress is, for sure, a trauma response. Good catch, Jessica. How do I calm myself physically
once I'm in turbo mode? I can talk myself down,
but my body is manic. Such a good catch,
Jessica, because trauma, even if it's the trauma of
having somebody tell you you're too poor or whatever,
if it registers as true fear that you're helpless to address,
it can leave a trauma scar, and that is a physiological
response of the amygdala activating your fight
flight freeze system, and it will stop you dead in your tracks. So when you are in a panic mode, you can't always just slow
down by saying slow down. Sometimes you have to burn the adrenaline out of your muscles, and the best way, I've said this many times, but there's good research that
says the best way to do that is to let yourself
shake, physically shake. You can also dance, jump up
and down, kick your feet, go out and sled with a one-year-old. Move your body because
the fight flight response wants you to move your body. All those hormones need to
be burned up by activity, especially the shaking. Every animal that is under
threat and then escapes shakes until the trauma is gone from the body. So there's a great guy named David Berceli who does something called
trauma release exercises. Look those up online, and
they can really help you. I've had a lot of good success
dealing with my own traumas by letting my body shake in the ways that David Berceli teaches you to do. Okay, Maria says do you
have a coaching program to sign up for? Do I ever? I've spent 30 years
building a coaching program. It's called "Wayfinder
Life Coach Training," and it's the best crowd of
people you will ever, ever, ever come to meet, except
maybe the Gathering Room. Now, it really is, it's something that is
more of my life's work than my writing. It's something that wanted to happen and created itself around me, and I'm still confused
as to how that happened, but I've got such great
people who are in the program, such great people running
it, and I love it. So if you feel like
joining up, come on ova'. Katarina says, could
you please say something about seeing missed opportunities go by? I know they obviously
weren't my opportunities, but they feel like defeats. You know what I just
said about you have to be in full integrity? That means you're not
hanging on to any beliefs that you know, at a deep
level, to be untrue. When something's gone by, and you think, oh, that was supposed to be mine, it's obviously not true because, if the course of the universe
meant that to be yours, it would be yours, and it will be yours. That's one of the things
that can be troublesome is, when you see an opportunity go by, the part of you that
lives outside of time, your soul, I believe,
lives outside of time, and sometimes it says you're meant to have something wonderful, and
you can kind of feel it, and you see someone else
getting something similar, and you think, wait, wait,
isn't that supposed to be mine, and reality says not yet, but don't let go of it's
supposed to be mine. Just realize, oh, it's coming
more slowly than I want it. All right, how do I slow down? Enjoy this moment. Have a cup of my favorite Earl Grey tea. Go online to some of my
favorite funny animal videos or TikToks or whatever, and
be here now in the slowness. What is meant to be yours, what you truly yearn for in
your heart is just something that you already know is yours, but it hasn't reached you in time yet, which is quite confusing. Slow it down, and it comes faster. Finally, Dr. Donna says how can we help other people slow down? I work with people who
move and talk so fast that their urgency makes me feel urgent. How can we help them? Well, they're doing
something called entrainment. They're broadcasting an energy
that's affecting your energy. This happens all the time. We all infect each other
with our energy frequencies, but we can deliberately slow the frequency that is sort of emanating from us. The problem comes from saying I'm a victim of the other person's energy. I can't help it. I'm just pulled wildly
by whoever's near me. Slow down because you can do it. It is your power. Nobody can make you speed
up your energy except you. Now you may have to shake. You may have to talk yourself down. You may have to use a lot of the methods people have been talking about, but if you're in a room with
an urgent person, slow down. If a crocodile has just ripped
your leg off, slow down. I once saw a horse handler, a groom, when two horses who were tied
up together started to fight, and they fell, and they
got all their ropes crossed around each other's necks,
and they were kicking, and they were screaming,
and there was dust flying, and I watched this guy, this
Mexican guy, get so slow, and he walked over to those
horses who are just kicking and screaming, and he was
just, (calmly exhaling) and they calmed down, and slowly, slowly, but faster than any other way, he got them untangled, back on their feet, and calmed down, and everything in life
is just that, you guys, couple of innocent creatures,
kicking and screaming 'cause we're terrified of
the way things are here, and nothing seems to go the
way it was meant to go for us, but it goes exactly the way
it was meant to go for us. We just have to find the pace
at which it wants to happen, and that's almost invariably slowing down. So remember, take whatever
you want to have happen. Think of the time you
want it to take to occupy. Double it, and go have a
nice cup of tea, relax. Enjoy the rest of this
beautiful day or night, wherever you are in the world. Thank you for joining me. It's just so fun to come
from the hecticness of things into the Gathering Room
and feel your amazing, beautiful energies calming me down. So (lips smacking) I
will see you next week, and thank you so much for being here.
