Did you know that until you are truly compassionate to yourself, you can’t be compassionate to any other person?

In Episode #192 of The Gathering Room, I’m talking about building compassionate communities—and how a safe, loving, mutually supportive community is probably the most important thing we can ever have, especially during chaotic times.

I’ve been reading my way through all the skills that make you a good community creator, and one of my favorites is the book Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg, who talks about creating community by first becoming your own good company.

We have such an individualistic, fragmenting society where we’re always pitted against each other in competition, but we long to experience moments of beautiful company where everyone feels lifted by everyone else. This kind of community is a basic human need.

Marshall Rosenberg says that everything we do is trying to meet our basic needs, and we go off course by trying to meet our needs with things that don’t work. He describes bringing ourselves into that sense of loving community by following a few basic steps:

* Identify any “mistakes” or behaviors you’re upset with yourself about.
* Notice any shaming language you use around those behaviors (words like “should”).
* Understand the need you were trying to meet with those behaviors.
* Allow yourself to mourn the fact that what you tried didn’t work.

Then, if you can empathize with the part of yourself that was trying to get a need met in an ill-advised way, there’s a kind of embrace that happens automatically—and in that embrace is forgiveness.

That’s when, within yourself, you have all of your parts, including what I call the “compassionate witness.” There are all the parts who’ve been trying so hard, and everyone is empathizing with everyone else. There is mutual forgiveness for everything you ever thought you did wrong, and no one is being blamed. That’s the way into being your own best company.

And from there on, Marshall Rosenberg tells us, everything is play.

To find out more about forgiving yourself, becoming your own best company, and creating supportive, compassionate communities, tune in for the full episode. I’ll also guide you through my Space, Silence, and Stillness meditation with a special focus on bringing your inner collective into loving harmony. Join me!

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As I’m sure you’re keenly aware, people are extremely divided these days. From our politics, to our attitudes, to our ways of speaking about others, we are growing more and more polarized—and mutually destructive.

On this episode of The Gathering Room podcast, I’m talking about how upset many of us feel, why that upset is not always coming from a place we can trust, and what we can do about it.

Once upon a time, they invented something called the internet. And on the internet, social media began to play out. And these platforms soon figured out that we pay more attention to things that upset us, so they started feeding us more and more upsetting content.

Because we evolved to be social creatures who are super susceptible to group influence, we’re basically hardwired to want to agree with the group, even if it means pretending to see things differently than we actually do.

Add all that evolutionary and psychological background to social media, and you soon get social media algorithms that keep us online by stoking constant outrage and fear.
We’re terrified of being bullied and looking for people to back us up, so we consume more and more information that’s designed to upset us. Then we lash out in a way that feels like self-defense, but it looks to other people like we’re attacking them. It’s a vicious cycle where everyone feels attacked by everyone else.

A lot of us feel vulnerable and outraged and afraid of the future and of other people right now. It’s been so exaggerated by our media and our social media that we’ve lost our sense of truth in all of this. And when you get people off their basic sense of truth, they will do almost anything. They will attack other people and leave their own ethics in the dust. When you lose your sense of truth, suddenly everything bobs and sways and there’s nothing real to stand on.

Everything is spinning and slanting and trying to get you to feel a certain way, but the only feeling that you can really build a life on is peace.

So, how can you get to peace in an increasingly polarized world?

Find out on this episode of The Gathering Room, where I’ll share the one statement I’ve found to be most grounding and true, how to make peace your primary goal in all interactions, and how peace can give you the strength and clarity you need to navigate life’s challenges.

We’ll also do our guided Space, Silence, and Stillness meditation to recalibrate ourselves toward clear minds, quiet hearts, and peace. Join me!

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When I was writing Beyond Anxiety, I wanted to find a good metaphor for building a life that you love within the cultural bounds of wherever you are and still stay sane. And I thought about crazy quilting!

If you are a quilter, you know that crazy quilting is not the same as ordinary quilting. Ordinary quilting starts with a pattern that is carefully drawn out, and then the quilter sews together panels that follow that pattern. With crazy quilting, you start with a scrap of fabric you love, and you sew another piece to it and then another and another, around and around in a spiral, until there’s a large enough piece of cloth that you can call a quilt.

And I was thinking: That’s sort of how you can make a life, too.

In this episode of The Gathering Room, I’m talking about what I call “sanity quilting” and offering up some practical advice for maintaining your mental well-being during turbulent times.

Like crazy quilting, sanity quilting involves building a life out of the things you love in order to stay peaceful, calm, inspired, and sane.

In the quilt that is your time—your whole life—most of us are taught to follow the patterns set by our culture: Get a job, get a relationship, have a family, buy a house, etc.

However, for me, it’s always been much more interesting to say, “What do I love most?” and put that at the center of my quilt. Then I put things that connect with it around the edges until I gradually fill up my time with things that I love. That’s the way I’ve lived my life.

The culture might view this as “crazy,” but I don’t think it’s not crazy to do what you love. What’s crazy is pushing what you love to the margins of your life—or even worse, never experiencing them at all.

Whenever the pattern of society that we thought we knew is being disrupted, it feels very confronting to a lot of people. At the times when everything around you feels like it’s going crazy, that’s when you must make a sanity quilt. And you do that in very quiet ways.

Join me for the full episode to learn more about stitching the things you love into your life, so you can cultivate peace, sanity, and calm during even the most challenging times.

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