Culturally we tend to think of sensitivity as weakness, but Martha says that in fact, it’s a superpower!

In this episode of The Gathering Room, Episode #186: Using Your Powerful Sensitivity, she talks about how to appreciate your sensitivity and use it to create the life you’re meant to live.

By definition, sensitivity has to do with reacting strongly to very slight stimuli. As a result, our society has come to believe that it’s not a strong position to be highly sensitive, that such people are fragile.

What Martha has come to realize is that sensitivity is powerful, and sometimes it comes on powerfully. People who are highly sensitive may feel its power before other people do.

If you’re highly sensitive and you experience something wonderful, you actually have a strong uptick in your mood—and you may feel more wonderful than someone with lower sensitivities. But if an impulse comes in that you don’t understand, your brain might go into anxiety.

Martha says that the remedy for this anxiety is to check in with yourself by asking a series of questions: Is this physical? Is this mental? Is this emotional? Once you’ve checked in with body, mind, and heart, then you can realistically ground the sensation.

If your sensitivity is telling you that it’s none of those things, then you can safely assume it’s coming from a spiritual place.

Martha believes we’re in a really interesting, unprecedented landscape—politically, biologically, and ecologically—and we need to be guided. The way that guidance will come, especially to sensitive people, is through this unfamiliar stimulus that may feel weird and scary at first.

But as you start to explore what feels true, then the magic of the brain kicks in—your curiosity will bring you out of anxiety so your sensitivity can guide you exactly where you’re meant to go.

As Martha says, “We are the ones who can start to lead our lives in the direction that our higher selves are signaling to us to go and potentially help a lot of other people whose sensitivities may not be quite as strong—and in this way we serve the world.”

To learn how to appreciate, listen to, and trust your powerful sensitivity, join Martha for the full episode, where she’ll also guide you in her grounding and calming Space, Stillness, and Silence meditation.

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Martha’s recent encounter with a flock of wild turkeys made her think about her relationship with wild animals and how they always seem to come when she calls them.

In this episode of The Gathering Room, Episode #185: Calling Yourself Home, she shares several stories of her incredible interactions with animals and how her steps for calling to them can also be used on the wild parts of yourself to “call them home.”

This can be especially helpful during times when you feel overwhelmed, exhausted, or burned out. In Martha’s coaching experience, December is a particularly rough month for many people, and she herself feels scattered during this time.

Martha says the same technique she uses to call animals can be used to call in all the many parts of your Self, as if calling a flock of birds home to roost.

The first step, she says, is to be in complete integrity. This means telling yourself the truth. You have to track the parts of yourself that are unhappy or angry or fractious in some way and tell yourself the truth about them.

The second step is what Martha calls “centering presence” where you focus on a point in the center of your chest and imagine it filling with warm light. When you can feel the warmth, you’ll be able to breathe more deeply and start to relax.

Finally, she says to imagine each part of yourself—the scared parts, the flighty parts, the parts who are tired, the parts who don’t want to do things—and imagine them coming home to that point of warmth and light in your chest.

“Maybe they're wild turkeys that can come home to roost in the tree that's inside you,” Martha says. “Or maybe it's a whole murmuration of starlings that can come perch and go to sleep for the night together on an infinitely small branch in the center of your chest.”

If you have parts of yourself that need to feel healed and included and loved, be sure to join Martha for the full episode. She’ll lead you in her Space, Stillness, and Silence meditation and help you call all the scattered parts of yourself home to rest.

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Our culture generally teaches us that anxiety will keep us safe—but really it’s our intuition that does that. In this episode of The Gathering Room—Episode #184: How to Access Intuition When You Really Need It, Martha talks about how to tell the difference between anxiety and intuition and how to hear what your intuition is trying to tell you.

There’s something Martha calls the “sense of truth,” which is a feeling of concord, peace, and calm that comes into us when we believe something that feels true at the deepest levels of the self. It’s trusting that whatever we’re believing at that moment is actually real.

“It turns out that a lot of the things we are anxious about are not real—not yet,” Martha says. “They’re potential, but they’re not real in this moment.”

Unlike fear, which is a rational response to a clear and present danger, anxiety is a chronic, suffering sense of being afraid of things that may not ever happen.

Martha says that one of the lies anxiety will always tell you is that only by staying anxious can you be safe—because when you’re not anxious, you’re not alert. However, exactly the opposite is true: People who are anxious can’t stay alert.

Real intuition arrives when our anxiety is quiet. So many of us are walking around constantly anxious, thinking we’re alert, thinking we can trust our intuition, when in fact, we’re blotting out our intuition with anxiety.

To access intuition, we have to go into a state of stillness and peace and then listen for the fun—that’s the state of being where your intuition can talk to you.

“Your intuition can come in the goofiest, most wonderful ways,” Martha says, “once you realize it’s meant to be a frequency of joy and never a frequency of anxiety.”

To learn more about listening to your intuition and finding its frequency of joy—and to join Martha in her anxiety-relieving Silence, Space, and Stillness meditation—be sure to tune in for the full episode!

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