Module One

Amy: I always loved a chime! Hello darlings, it’s Amy Ahlers here, and we are so excited and delighted to welcome you to Module One of the Find Your Calling class. I’m joined here by my sisters in inspiration, and welcoming all of you into this Purpose Party, this Life Purpose Party that we’re going to have, that’s going to allow you to really connect in with your soul’s work, and help you clarify what it is that you are here to do. And so I have Martha Beck and Lissa Rankin here with me, and I know all three of us are just honored, deeply honored, that you have decided to take this time out over the next seven weeks to be with us, and to be in community around such a noble, noble mission. And it’s a real honor here. So Martha, do you want to have us get anchored in here, my dear, with a meditation?

Martha: Sure, we were just talking about how frantic the world is today, and how – we’re sometimes taught in courses, school, the learning annex, whatever, to get very very hyper and manic before we do anything significant. But our experience – the three of us have spoken about this – and our experience is that nothing in the world cannot be made better by relaxing, that peace is the ground of creativity, of inspiration, of communion, of love, and that energy comes from that like a spring comes out of the earth.

So the first thing I want to do is invite everyone on this call to sit down, or lie down if you are in a place where you can do that. Maybe you can only stand quietly, but get as relaxed as you possibly can physically, and take a few deep breaths. Everybody says to do that because we are one of the few creatures that can control our breathing, and long, slow breaths our bodies associate with peace. So even if you’re not feeling peaceful, a couple of good long exhales – and no animal running from a predator ever goes...sigh. So teach your body to feel safe by breathing long exhales, and then full inhales. If you are in a place where you can close our eyes, please do that. If you’re not, please turn so that your eyes are still instead of watching something. Maybe put your eyes on one focal point, and then hold them still. You can look at everything around them peripherally, but just let your eyes rest.

And then imagine a huge hurricane. So you’ve seen this on the TV screen, where the news reporter has tied himself to a telephone pole, and there are boards, and cats, and flotsam flying by, and people are boarding up their windows, and everything is chaos, and the winds are howling, and the water is coming ashore, and no-one knows what to do – that is kind of the energy setting of modern life, especially in the United States. It’s enormous turmoil, whether you look at the news, or whether you talk to a friend, or whether you’re with your family, we tend to focus on the stress, the anxiety, the threat. And this turns on the fight-or-flight response and makes our creativity and our power inaccessible to us.

So now just observe the hurricane, and imagine yourself as a point of consciousness that’s going to move up off the ground maybe 20 feet, and then out over the ocean – that grey, frothing ocean where the wind is frothing it up just like meringue. Everything is crashing and smashing, and fluid, and dynamic – but you are still. Feel that stillness in the

place right below the spot where your ribs come together in the front. Above your naval and below your ribs, there’s the geometric center of your body. Find that stillness from which your body functions. And now drop that consciousness down into the water, and notice that nothing can disturb it. The water can’t disturb it, the wind can’t disturb it, the flotsam flies right through it and disturbs it not one whit. It drops down into the top of the ocean, where it’s very very turbulent, but nothing disturbs you. You feel warm, and still, and peaceful.

You keep dropping down, and the water goes calmer. The light gets dimmer, but it’s not a frightening dimness, because you’re relaxed, you’re warm, you’re centered, you are breathing, you are impervious to any object. You are ‘no thing’, and so no thing can disturb you. Continue dropping down, down, down, down, the water gets stiller and stiller and quieter and quieter. And finally you reach a place, 3,000 feet below the surface, that is so still that the blue whales go there to call to each other, and the sound waves can travel a thousand miles. So still. Find the ocean floor, and drop a deep anchor into it, almost down to the center of the earth. Salute stillness. Realize that you are the entire line of energy, running from below the ocean floor, all the way up to the clouds above the ocean, and that this line of energy can experience everything without distress, without fear, without damage – perfect peace.

Now move to the land again, just as a point of consciousness – but remember, that anchor is already established. It’s something you can touch, like a cord. You can reach out and touch it with your hand at any point. You’ll find it near you, and it always takes you down to the depth. It’s from there that all life comes, from that place of complete peace. And all you have to do is grasp it with your hand to feel the whole range of it, whether you’re feeling manic and excited, or terrified, or calm, you’re going to always experience the full range of emotion without becoming trapped in it.

So some lovely poet wrote this line: “All tempest has like a navel, a hole in its middle, through which a gull can fly in silence. You are the gull, you are the silence.”

So anchor that by actually grasping it, closing your right hand in a fist round that line of energy, and know that you can hold it – it’s like a fish wire, it’s so thin, but it’s absolutely indestructible. It will never, ever, leave you or let you down. And hold onto that if you feel any anxiety, any resistance, any extreme excitement during this whole program. Return to the line that takes you from peace to enthusiasm and back down again.

So with that, now that you’re anchored, we’d like to start the process of helping you find your calling. Amy?

Amy: One of the first steps in any process is to really anchor in with that intention. And so on each and every one of these teaching calls, we’ll be setting an intention, and together, in community – whether you’re listening live on the phone, or on the webcast, or listening to the recording later – we want you to actually proclaim and state an invocation. So for this first call, we really view this journey over the seven weeks as a process of remembering that your soul did come in with a plan, that you said ‘yes’ to a purpose, to a

calling, and now you’re saying, “I am ready to remember my calling.” So I’m going to unmute the lines in a moment, and on the count of three, we will say three times together, in community, really saying and stating these words from that space of silence within you, that space of peace within you, and also that space of enthusiasm and commitment within you, to say the words three times: “I am ready to remember my calling.” “I am ready to remember my calling.” “I am ready to remember my calling.”

And this is really an invitation to you to mean it, to actually say the words and mean it from the core of your being, to allow this moment in time to be one of those moments that you can look back up on and say, “When I said those words, it mattered. When I said those words, it created something new for me. It was the beginning of something beautiful unfolding before my eyes.” So that’s the invitation that we’re putting out to you now. So on the count of three: “I am ready to remember my calling,” three times. Okay, here we go. One, two, three: “I am ready to remember my calling.” Whoo.

Martha: Wow, that’s awesome.

Amy: I love it, ladies and gentlemen. How beautiful is that? It is the experience – yes, we’re using all this technology and all of these virtual things, but the truth is that we are creating a community right here and right now, and that I just feel like light bulbs going off everywhere. There’s people from around the world joining together, so tap into that collective consciousness, and use that energy, use our community website, use the energy on these calls to really tap in and allow yourself to feel the sense of being supported, and breathe up in this ocean of people who are coming together for a joint purpose. Beautifully done, thank you everyone for doing that with me.

Lissa: Well hi everyone, Lissa Rankin. And first I want to start by saying it was really fun – I love being able to communicate with you all on Twitter. Social media is one of my favorite things. So we’re going to be using #FYC2013, if any of you all want to reach out on twitter. And Martha is @MarthaBeck, Amy is @AmyAhlers, and I’m Lissa @LissaRankin. So feel free to share your thoughts and we go and follow the hashtag FYC2013, so you can see what everyone is saying.

Amy: A little Tweet-tweet from Lissa. Surprise surprise!

Lissa: It’s been such an interesting time lately, to just look around and see that even since we taught this program a year ago, things are shifting in our collective consciousness, and there are more and more people joining what Martha calls The Team – these people that are really feeling called to be part of the healing of the planet in some way, part of the healing of the souls of other people, or of animals, or plants, or the environment, or our professional lives – all of those things. People are just starting to really wake up these days, and there’s an incredible frustration I think, when you’ve sensed that, you know, “Oh yeah, I’m part of the team,” and you’re not sure what you’re being called to do.

And so, I’m so delighted that we’re here to be able to help the people that are feeling that way. I know there are a bunch of people in my personal life right now who are all in

this place where they’re like, Okay, the phone is ringing, but I can’t quite hear the message yet. And I know this can be really stressful for people, when you know that there’s this calling that’s coming in, and you’re just not quite clear what it is. And you’re feeling like finding your calling is now something else that you have to add to your to-do list in this frantic life, where there’s already so much on your plate.

So Martha, I know you have some definite opinions about all this, like why now? Why are people ready for change? Why do we need to find our calling? What is our role as individuals who are part of this awakening of the collective consciousness, and how can everybody be of service in their own way?

Martha: Well, first of all, I think everyone realizes that this is an unprecedented time in the history of our planet. There has never, ever, in all of history, been a time when the earth was overcrowded by humans. There has never been a time when there was a ball of plastic larger than the state of Texas in the Pacific Ocean. There has never been a time when internet technologies and other communication technologies have created so much ability for so many people to share knowledge and information so quickly and so inexpensively. And all of these things are having profound effects – effects that will change humanity and world history in a way that we cannot know.

Several years ago, a Pulitzer-Prize winner in economics, it was called The World Is Flat, by Thomas Friedman. And by ‘the world is flat’, he was saying that what it once took a government or a huge, huge company to do, like send a message that millions, hundreds of millions of people would get in some way, one individual can now, with very little effort, communicate that broadly and that powerfully. And that means that all the terrain of the economy and business that created our social structure – anything that created society – is now radically changing. So many many industries are disappearing. Many many people are losing their jobs – and it’s not just because of bad politics, or foreign people immigrating or anything like that – or even being sent overseas, though there’s a huge amount of that too. It’s really, the technologies of humans are changing, and it’s almost as profound as when humans first made fire, and everything mushroomed.

Well, we’ve made a different kind of fire now, and we live in a different kind of, what I call chaos. And I don’t mean completely meaningless, like random crap. Chaos actually has a shape, and has patterns, and nature is shaped by chaos into all the beautiful things we see, the plants, the animals, the sky, the mountains – everything is shaped by the laws that govern chaos.

Now, for about 600 years, human structures have been not at all chaotic; they’ve been removed from nature, further and further and further. Human life has become more and more systematized and mechanized. So the whole industrial revolution was about factories and new methods of manufacturing, where, as the basis of the economy for the very first time in human history, people had to leave their homes and go sit in the building, usually a very unpleasant building, and physically attach things to each other. Physically process some sort of product. And this became the basis for what we now all a job. And when the machines were all made, and the knowledge work became more

prominent in the twentieth century, the factory stool was replaced by the cubicle, and everybody competes and struggles to get into those cubicles to those things we call jobs. And in particular, men have been taught to draw their whole identity from their jobs, but also women – very much so. To have a great career has been status, wealth and power in our system.

Guess what? The writing on the wall about jobs, they’re going away. They’re not as stable as they once were. The ones that still exist, people are having to do more work for less pay to compete with the flat world. I just worked with the top-20 executives from the third largest company in the world, and what they were talking about was the competition that they might get from a 15-year-old nerd with a laptop. I mean, this is just a wild, wild time.

So at the same time, all these opportunities are opening up that are not acknowledged, that aren’t seen as written – I told my daughter when she graduated from college, “Don’t think about what you want to do for a living, because what you will end up doing for a living has no name right now. Instead, go out in the chaos and start to feel what feels good to you.” She’s right now an illustrator for on-line fiction, and she gets commissioned to draw pictures of on-line novels – and who knew that job existed? I make my money partly by taking people out into the wilderness in Africa, and teach them to track rhinoceros. Who knew that job existed? Made that one up!

So at the same everything’s falling apart and looking terrifying and chaotic and hurricane-like in the old system, a new system is blossoming from the wreckage of the old system, where there is so much possibility. So it’s like a tidal wave of change, and people are running into buildings trying to stay safe, and the buildings are getting washed away, the jobs, the companies, the industries. And who can handle a tidal wave? A surfer. A guy standing naked on a board. And that is, in fact, the safest way to get through this economy – and we’ll expand on this metaphor as we go. But it is imperative for the healing of the world, yes. But also, to take advantage of the new way things are, and to avoid its perils, it’s absolutely imperative that you find your surfboard and learn how to be balanced upon it, so that this cannot be a time of fear for you, but a time of joy, and exhilaration.

Lissa: I love that. So Martha, you talk a lot about the team. And I love, in your latest book, Finding Your Way in a Wild New World, I love how you talk about describing the team, and describing the traits of how we know if we’re team members. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Martha: First of all, it’s not like, “Yeah, we’re on the team, we’re going to crush you.” Actually The Team is a word that I made up for people whose life’s work is meant to be comprised of service. So in a traditional society, if you’re born to be a medicine person, you will show certain characteristics as you grow up. And these characteristics may cluster in the people who have come to this call, because it’s something that Amy lives in and I resonate with very strongly. So this would include things like, you have a strong interest in the arts, so storytelling, visual art, dance, music. You also have a fascination for

science, things like biology and psychology. And, you’re also interested in spiritual realities, and mysticism, and having deeply powerful inward experience, and helping other people to have them as well.

You may have experienced a long, chronic suffering of some kind, either an illness or depression or an addiction, because you’re also very highly sensitive, and you may be the kind of person that others talk to and they say, “Y'know, every time I talk to you I feel so good, and so relaxed, and like my problems aren’t weighing on me as much any more, I just love talking to you.” And you’re sitting there thinking, “That is so interesting, because I don’t feel that way at all after I talk to you.” So you basically are constantly putting yourself in service of others, and you also have these other characteristics – a passion for animals. So a medicine person is the animal communicator, the herbalist, the psychic, the mystic, the doctor, the poet, the artist – all these things that our culture fractures into very different fields come together in the archetype of the healer. And healers are what the world needs right now. The planet needs healers. Humanity needs healers. God knows, many species of animals and trees and many aspects of nature need healing now, so there’s a strong inner calling to anyone who has that archetype. And as I said, it’s not an elitist thing, because this is a team whose only purpose is to serve all others. If you want to be on this team, that is the sure sign that you are, in fact, on it, because there’s no upside if you’re not.

Lissa: No application necessary!

Amy: Exactly, we’re not going to take a vote later, it’s not for just the popular girls and boys. No, certainly not.

Martha: If you have the desire and a pulse – wait, no, you don’t even need a pulse. If you have the desire, whether you’re dead or alive, you are on The Team.

Amy: That’s right.

Lissa: So Martha, I’ve loved, and you and I have been teaching these doctors and the whole health medicine field together, and it’s been so great to be able to use what we’re going to teach next. But you teach this, what you call the Change Cycle, and you’ve compared it to the process of going from being a caterpillar to becoming a butterfly. Can you walk us through that process?

Martha: Sure. In every traditional culture – and by accident, in many aspects of modern culture, we often divide things into a circle of four stations, North, East, South, West. Those are the points of our compass. In the many Native American mysticism, each of those would be assigned a season of the year, Winter, Summer, Spring, Fall. In Celtic mythology where you talk to the animals, you go and you call it the quarterist, which is to face four different directions.

So the four sacred directions also map really well onto the experience of what it’s like to form an identity, to lose one identity and form another one. So for example, you’ve lost

being a child – if you’re on this call, you’re probably not a child – and you became an adult. You may have lost being single and became a person with a partner – or vice versa. You may have lost your identity as a student and taken on the identity of a homemaker or somebody who does a certain job. So you’ve gone through profound changes. You will go through four stages of change every time something profoundly alters your identity. And in little ways you can go through this in any area of your life on a daily basis, but this is what it looks like. First, there’s an event of some kind that catalyzes the change. So for example, you may get fired from your job, you may get hired for a job. You may fall in love or get divorced. You may have a child, you child may grow up and leave the nest. But there’s a catalyst, and it means that your identity can’t remain stable any more, and it has to fall apart.

So I equate this to a caterpillar munching away. I have some milkweed that I left in my yard because monarch butterflies, their caterpillars eat only milkweed, so I’ve get these little striped yellow and black caterpillars munching away like crazy. And some of them are teeny-weeny, and some of them are getting quite large. Now, when they get to a certain stage, when they’re large enough, something turns on in their tiny little brains, and they say, “Oh, I feel like doing something I never did before. I want to make myself a tiny sleeping bag out of my saliva. Then what could go wrong?” And then they do it, they build a chrysalis, and they shed their skin and dissolve into a liquid. I used to think they just grew antennae and feet and everything, but they don’t. They go into soup, bug soup. And if you cut the chrysalis it would just pour out. And when every single cell has disaggregated from every other cell, that is when every aspect of its structural identity has disappeared, has dissolved something is triggered in the DNA of this being – I won’t call it a caterpillar or a butterfly, because it’s just soup right now. So, this thing is triggered, and it’s called the imago, which means the image, the image of what the caterpillar is meant to become. And so a set of proteins start linking together, and they use every single cell of the dissolve caterpillar to make a perfect butterfly. And all this happens inside the little enclosed are of the cocoon. And then the butterfly has to cut its way out of the chrysalis, which is a very difficult, arduous task. And the butterfly is weak, and kind of soggy, and his legs and his wings don’t really work yet. And getting out of the chrysalis is extremely difficult. But if you help the butterfly by cutting the chrysalis, it will die. It is necessary to struggle to get out of the chrysalis in order for it to live long. And then it reaches the point, its wings blow up with blood, and they dry out in the air, and then it’s this beautiful thing and it can fly away.

And so we go through these four stages: The meltdown of our identity, which I call death and rebirth, or square one. Then the formation of the imago, which I call dreaming and scheming, when new ideas happen to you. What I call the Hero Saga, which is climbing out of the chrysalis, when you put your ideas into practice. And then finally, when you get everything to work right – I call it the promised land or square four. So there are the four cardinal directions, and there are the four stages of change.

So you may have been through this before in many different ways, and we’ll probably be asking you to go through it again, because if all goes as planned, this course can be a catalytic event that is going to push you through an iteration of the change cycle,

because humans can do this many many times in one lifetime. So that’s your image for where we’re going.

Amy: It’s so helpful to go into that big picture place, and so just allowing all of you – there’s some beautiful stuff going on in the Ning site on the chat, of people talking about what their catalyst for change is right now. On Twitter it’s happening, so I know all of you are just kind of tuning in and tuning in to where you are. Thank you so much for that.

Martha: So one of the things I want you guys to do, if you’re not doing it already, I wanted to talk a little more about each of the change cycle squares, and I want everyone on the line to either think of a time in their life when they did go through a transformation, or locate where you are right now. I need to point out that you can be in different squares in different parts of your life. For example, Amy has been doing telecourses like this quite a while, so this would be a square four experience for her. It’s something that she’s been familiar with doing it. But she’s also expecting a baby, right?

Amy: Yes, I am!

Martha: And pregnancy is a classic square one place.

Amy: Oh yeah, baby, bug soup. It’s happening.

Martha: Death and rebirth. The death of the woman who only had one child, and the birth of the woman who has two. That goes along with the birth of the new baby.

So when you’re in that place, it’s called the liminal phase by anthropologists. Limin means threshold, and when you’re on the threshold, traditional cultures consider this a very magical place, because you’re not in but you’re not out. So when you’re pregnant with your first child, you’re not exactly a mother, but you’re not exactly not a mother either. When you’re engaged, you’re not married, but you’re not really unmarried either. So there are these liminal places. And that is very uncomfortable for members of our culture, because we are taught that our progression through life is supposed to be linear. We’re supposed to start, we get to be ignorant and naïve and confused once – that is in early childhood. And from then on, we just get better and better, and smarter and smarter, and more and more powerful, and we never turn back, we never say die. But in fact, if you follow the course of nature, you will die – many times. So think of a place where you’re dying, where you’re melting down.

Lissa: I suspect anybody who signed up for this program is in that liminal phase, and that that probably is what is driving people to be here in the beginning, is that discomfort of not being okay with not finding the calling, or with some other discomfort in the change cycle.

Martha: Yeah. So the biggest help we can give you when you’re in square one – well, the mantra is simply, “I don’t know what the hell’s going on, and that’s okay.” The reason I call these squares, square one, square two, square three, square four, is that people have a phrase,

“Well, I’m back to square one.” I almost called my first self-help book, On to Square One. Because going back to square one means that you are in a linear learning stage, but you’re going around a cycle as you go, so it’s like a spiral. Each time you go around the circle, you move forward. You have more wisdom, more knowledge, more experience to bring to the event. And once you’ve dissolved and found your way back to wholeness, found that you became a new and more beautiful thing after the dissolving, then you can have a kind of peace, even when you’re dissolving. But if you’ve never felt this, or if you’ve always fought it, our culture gives you virtually nothing to hang onto, because you’re not supposed to have this dissolving thing happen to you. So we don’t like to deal with square one, and that might be the most powerful thing you can do for yourself.

So just remember, if you’re in square one, the thing you need is a chrysalis. You need a cocoon of some sort. That could be your bedroom, that could be a circle of friends, that could be a relationship with your spouse or your therapist – but it’s a safe cocoon where you can let the change occur. And sometimes you have to go on with the rest of your life – well, you always have to go on with the rest of your life, so one psychologist calls this ‘denial with a little d’. Most of the day you go through denial with a little d. It’s little because you know you’re in denial, so you’re not really in denial. But you sort of push everything to the background so that you can do your daily job, go to the dentist, whatever. But, there is a cocooned space where you take very good care of yourself physically, in tiny intimate ways – you wrap a blanket around yourself, you get yourself some hot tea, you call a friend who’s been through a metamorphosis, you let yourself feel your feelings – and you don’t fight anything. You let yourself fall apart in those moments, in the cocoon. And just have the confidence that if you do this, it actually passes much more quickly than if you fight and struggle and refuse to dissolve.

So after a while of letting yourself go through square one, when you just feel like you’ve let go and let go and let go, and cried, and been angry – death and rebirth is accompanied by the whole grieving cycle that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross spelled out in her work on dying. First the denial, then the anger, then the grieving and the bargaining – I forget what order she put them in, but finally it gets to acceptance. And it goes around and around and around like a cement mixer. There’s no tidy progression of the grieving cycle. Sometimes it all hits you at once, sometimes you’re drowned in despair or absolutely boiling with anger. It’s a really active time inside that cocoon, and there’s not a lot of help for you in our culture. So hang in, keep yourself safe, go one day at a time, pull back time to this moment. Do not even worry, because it says in the New Testament, “Take no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the trouble thereof.” So that’s square one, is pull right in, hang on. It does end.

Lissa: Thank God, right? What about square two? Tell us what happens next.

Martha: Okay, so, you’re in square one, you’ve been a total mess, you have a thousand ideas about what will get you out of square one, you’ve tried desperately to crawl back into your caterpillar life and it just won’t work, you’re already dissolved. So after a while you surrender, and then you think, Okay, this will never end. And then one day you wake up

and, for some reason, you decide you want to go to the park, and you haven’t been to this park near your house all the time you’ve lived there. Or you, for some reason, decide you want to get the full season of a show about tattoos on TV. You don’t really know why, you’re just like, Okay. Or, for some reason, you really really want a cat, and you’ve never wanted a cat before. Something happens that shows that an imago is awakening in you that is not your previous self. And one thing I can tell you for sure, is that your previous self cannot imagine what you are meant to become.

So when I’m in square one, I’m always saying, “What’s going to happen to me?” And I hear in the back of my head this verse from T.S. Eliot: “I said to my soul, be still and wait without love, for love would be love of the wrong thing. And wait without hope, for hope would be hope of the wrong thing. There is yet faith, but the love, and the hope, and the faith are all in the waiting. Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought: So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.” That’s the only thing I have to hang onto in square one.

Lissa: And you probably just totally memorized that, and just spouted that off of your little Martha brain.

Martha: Yeah. That’s all I can remember. I cannot find my out of the coat closet, where I’m doing this recording, but I can remember quotes from T.S. Eliot that I learned in college. So anyway.

So then when the imago starts to pop up, it’s always something you hadn’t thought of before, because you weren’t ready to think in this new way. I remember for me once, it was that I never, ever, ever had had a hat. Oprah herself once looked right at me and said, “You can’t really wear a hat.” And I was like, “I know.” With my little squishy face, it’s not going to happen. And then I was in Africa very briefly for a book tour, and I bought a leather hat that was kind of like a cowboy hat but African style. There was no way I was going to wear the thing, but I put it in my closet, and every few weeks I would look at it and I would think, “Who is the woman who’s going to be under that hat some day?” And I didn’t know. And then one day it just came to me that I wanted to do these retreats in Africa, and I put on the hat and started spending a month every year in Africa. And I had an entirely new way of sort of visualizing my life and the life of the people I work with, and the life even of this vast healing team, and the life of the planet itself. That was what that hat was for.

So you may have had that experience too – you look in the closet and you’re like, Who got these clothes? I hate these clothes. Why did I get these clothes? Another thing is you might start rearranging the furniture in your house, or change the cut and color of your hair. You might grow a beard, or start wearing little bows in your hair – or both. But these are what I call the dreams, the daydreams. And the night dreams will get very active too about things that you’ve never experienced before. So this is the time for dreaming and scheming, for visualizing, for doing all the stuff that they talk about in The Secret and everything, creating vision boards, making lists of 100 qualities you want in your perfect spouse. And you remember, the imago cells are the cells that instruct the caterpillar how

to become a butterfly. Well, your dreams are the imagoes, the images that are meant to come to you to lead you into the next phase of your life.

So right now, I’m just sort of coming around the bend to square four, and I just had this overwhelming knowledge for many many years that I was going to, at some point, end up on a ranch in California – where I’ve never lived, I didn’t grow up on a ranch, nothing like it. I just knew this. I had the dream for a long time. And then it started to get very very intense, and it started to become scheming, instead of just dreaming. The turning point was when I started seeing this vision, and I made a vision book. I didn’t even make a vision board, I got one of those photography books at scrapbooking stores, because there were pages and pages of images that I’d been having about this ranch. And then I realized that in my daydreams my friend, Koel Simpson who knows how to run a ranch – she’s a horse whisperer – she was also living on the property with me. Now, she was living in Phoenix at the time, so I had to tell her, “Y'know what? I’m getting these dreams, and daydreams, and I’m living on a ranch in California and you live there too.” It was kind of like proposing marriage, without benefits. And her response was, “I’ve been waiting a year for you to get this.” And I was like, “Why didn’t you tell me?”

So at that point I had a sort of companion, which is what we hope to give you, is sort of a social grounding for your dreams and schemes. And we started planning, we started making lists of what we wanted in a ranch. And at first I thought, Well, that’s really unrealistic – but what the hell? The whole thing’s unrealistic. I might as well picture the absolutely ideal. And so I decided I wanted 100 acres near the California coast backed up to a national forest that had never been disrupted, that had a covered round pen and a certain number of pastures, and three different residences – just like crazy, this endless list.

And then I started shopping online, and there was only one ranch that met all the criteria. And when I got to it, it was literally walking into my dream. And that was freaky. It was very hard to stay still. We’ll talk about the importance of staying still. I needed to grab my anchor line a lot, because I was a little hysterical about it. Long story short, I thought I could never in a million years afford it, and somehow it just happened.

I’ll talk a little bit more about that, but it’s been a huge, huge turn of the change cycle for me, and a big stretch. Basically it cost exactly every bit of money I had in the world. So basically I had to sacrifice everything, all the security, to sort of throw in my lot and buy this ranch that I had no idea how to run.

So when you get the fully formed vision of what you need to be and it’s starting to show up in changes, physical changes, in images, and you’re making concrete books and collages, and you’re talking to your friends, because every time you speak a dream it becomes more real that if it is just a thought. And as you start doing that, you’re going to get to the place where you realize, it’s time to saw my way out of this chrysalis – but it’s way, way, way harder than you ever expected.

In fact, let me tell you the mantras for all four squares. The first one is, I don’t know what the hell’s going on – and that’s okay. So if you’re in square one, tell yourself that a lot. In square two, the rule is, there are no rules, and that’s okay. So first I was looking for a ranch that I knew I could afford, and then I realized, Oh, there are no rules in dreaming. Dream for exactly what you want. Go big, no rules. If you want to go surfing every day while living in Oklahoma, fine, just throw it in. Maybe the universe will find a way to make it happen.

In square three, the mantra is, This is a lot harder than I expected, and that’s okay. In square four the mantra is, Change is already coming, and that’s okay. But in square three, the struggling out of the cocoon phase, you need the inventiveness of Thomas Edison and the tenacity of a crazed pit bull. You need to just keep going back to the dreams that feel true. The dreams have to come from your gut. The imago has to come from your gut; it cannot come from your brain. We’ll be talking about this a lot in the course.

So, when you know in the pit of your belly that you are meant to have a certain outcome, you need to hold that vision while you allow things to go wrong in the real world. A lot of people have a vision of what they want, they try once, it doesn’t work out, they say, Okay, it’s not mean to be. And then the dream won’t die. The buried dream becomes the torturer, because the despair at having tried and failed at something you know you’re supposed to have is simply a lie. That despair is a lie. It’s not the failure that kills you, it’s the lie that says, “Oh, you should just quit now. Just give up.” No no no, you just go back, you realize, Okay, something went wrong because I had this or that out of alignment. You figure out maybe it was your energy, maybe it was a person in your world that wasn’t working, maybe you didn’t know enough about a certain type of job or procedure. Okay, so your knowledge base was inaccurate. You go back to square one, you let the person who didn’t have that information dissolve very quickly just by saying, Okay, I was wrong about that, what’s the correct answer? And then you go back into dreaming and scheming of how you’re going to get this thing to go, and you go into square three again.

And one of the times that you do this procedure, it works, and you struggle out. I just did my first-ever workshop for all men, and I was so nervous. I put way too much energy into it, because it was a little bit different from anything I’d ever done before. And I just let myself have my little struggles – my anxieties, my fears, am I trying too hard to make their lives work – everything. I just let myself have it, because that’s how square three works. And it worked! I’d tried to do it before and it didn’t work. The time has come for the men to be freed from their ghastly, horrible cubicles so they can go outside the way men were supposed to go outside. And I’ve been trying to take them that message for a number of years. And this time 12 men heard me, and showed up, and I did see freedom, and I saw the beauty of male energy in its original form, and it was glorious. But it was hard to make it happen – it was hard. I just couldn’t let go of the vision.

So now, once you’ve struggled to the point where – and struggle is a relative term. If you were born enlightened as I am you can just go, Okay, it doesn’t have to be a struggle, it can be a gentle letting go. When you’ve got it to work, then it’s a matter of going into square four where things become easier. This is the second time we’ve offered this

course, so our meeting to develop the scripts was much easier than the first time we did it. We made changes based on information from last year, but we’d already done this once. So we’re in square four with this – and you may be there. You may be there with your job, you may be there with your relationship. You’re probably in square one somewhere, or you wouldn’t be coming to this teleconference, but you may be in square four, say, with your house. It might be exactly the way you want it.

So when you get your whole life to square four – which can happen – what happens, I used to say it’s relatively stable until change comes and uproots it. Well, I had to eat those words, because change is accelerating so quickly in our world that now we can’t even predict the exponent by which it will change. Futurists tell us we’re reaching a point of change so rapid they call it the ‘singularity’. It’s like a black hole, they have no idea what’s going to happen.

So, I told you the mantra, Things are already changing, that’s okay. The way to deal with that environment is to surf. And surfing is this kind of joyful balancing in action. And the way I like to describe it is that your life should be composed of playing until you feel like resting, and resting until you feel like playing. By playing I mean what some might call working. I am not working right now, I am playing. And when we’re done playing, Lissa and Amy and I will all rest until we feel like playing again, and this just repeats for the rest of your life.

Lissa: Can I add something here that’s just coming up for me? I just took a wonderful workshop by Tosha Silver, who wrote a great book called, Outrageous Openness, and it’s all about letting the divine take the lead. And what I loved about this book is that she sort of talks about how, when it comes to change, or when it comes to bringing into being something that we desire, like the desire to find our calling and be of service – she said, We’re taught that there’s sort of the traditional way, and that’s to force it, and make it happen, and push it and strive – you know, the old way.

Martha: That don’t work no more.

Lissa: Exactly, no playing for you, right? And then she said, So then there’s like this new age way that they teach in The Secret, this sort of law-of-attraction way, where instead of forcing it, you’re going to visualize it and affirm it, and pretend it’s already happened, and then just lay back and stretch your arms out and be willing to receive it. But she said, Y'know, that’s actually in some ways it’s more of the forcing and pushing and striving, because it’s really like, Okay, I’ve got a shopping list of desires and I’m going to send them out to God. And she’s like, “God is not your Costco.” And so she said there’s this third way of being – and I’ve been learning this with her for a bit now, and it was such a relief to learn this, especially when I think of the change cycle, because this third way is about the moment you identify a desire, it’s about surrendering that desire, like turning it over to whatever it wants to become. And you talk about this as the ‘everwhen’ in finding a way to -

Martha: And it’s feeling what wants to happen. There’s a feeling of what wants to happen. I can’t describe it any better than that. It’s not just like, everybody wants a Camaro or Maserati or whatever. It’s deeper, it’s intense, it’s often inexplicable. Your choice not to be a doctor for a while made no sense to anybody, right?

Lissa: Yeah, everybody thought I was crazy. But I had that sense of like, there’s this other thing that wants to become. And I didn’t know what it looked like, but I knew it wasn’t that. And so I’ve been living this practice of trying to really align with divine will, divine order, whatever you want to call it – this every-when, what wants to come. And for me it shows up in the form of signs. It shows up in signs that affirm, like you finding the perfect ranch that looked exactly like what you had visualized was a find that affirms your desire. But I’ve often noticed that just as often – well, not just as often, but fairly often – the signs show up as the door that closes, that tells me, Oh, what I desired was not actually in divine alignment, and it’s disappointing, heart-breaking sometimes. But that if I can actually trust that surrendering to divine alignment is actually what’s in the best interest not just of me as an individual, but of the collective, the highest good of all beings – it’s so relaxing to be able to – it’s not about being some desireless zombie, but it’s about identifying the desire and then saying, Okay, this is what I desire if it’s in alignment.

Martha: Yeah, and feeling your way to it. And you never know what it’s going to be. My most current thing that I feel really really drawn to do is to sit in silence for at least two hours a day. I don’t know, that just came out of nowhere. I was like, okay. It’s not something I would have made up for myself, but it came as this intense desire for something that wanted to happen. I mean a deep, deep inexplicable desire. There’s a different feeling – and we’ll talk a lot about this, but there’s a different feeling to something that is being born within the soul, than there is to something which is born within the mind. And the mind structures have very little power, but the soul structures are powerful.

Lissa: Right, and what I find is, when we get into that soul structure, it’s like literally when your desire is in alignment with what wants to become, the universe just rolls out the red carpet.

Martha: Yeah, that’s the wave.

Lissa: It becomes so effortless.

Martha: It’s the wave. You’re standing on your little surfboard, and the wave is throwing you forward at a million miles an hour, but all you’re doing is standing still.

Lissa: Right. And when I’m struggling, when things aren’t going well, especially in phase three where I’m experimenting and I’m trying something and whoa, that door just got slammed shut. I wanted that. Why did I not get that? That’s usually like more of a desire that’s created in my mind, and it’s not in alignment and so it’s not meant to happen. And instead of seeing it as failure, I’ve been able to kind of reframe, so that I can see it as a redirect, as like, Oh, I wasn’t supposed to go right, I was supposed to go left. Thank you. I appreciate that sign.

Amy: It’s like when you have your navigation system in your care, and it’s like Please proceed to the highlighted route. Please proceed to the highlighted route.

Lissa: Recalculating.

Amy: It’s like, oh, I got off course. Please proceed to the highlighted route. We want you on the highlighted route. So let’s actually take a quick poll here, for those of you that are on the live call. Go ahead, if you’re on the live call, on your handsets, go ahead and press one on your handset if you are in square one, that meltdown, death and rebirth phase. Press two on your handset if you’re in the dreaming and scheming phase, if you’re in square two, the imago phase. Press three on your handset if you’re in the hero saga place in square three, hero saga. Press four if you’re in the promised land, you’re in full flight. And remember that there’s going to be probably different things that are going on in your life simultaneously where you’re in different squares, but there’s this sense with your calling, with whatever it is that brought you here with us, where are you in those squares? And those of you on the webcast, go ahead and type it on the screen. So press one on your handset for meltdown, press two for dreaming and scheming, press three for hero saga, press four for promised land.

All right, so we’ve got about 30 percent, it’s going up, in square one – oh, it’s kind of even for square one and square two. And square two is about 33 percent. Square three is about 12 percent. And square four is about 1 percent. Okay, great, so as we suspected, there was going to be a lot of people in this course that are in that square one and square two place. That’s about 64 percent of the people that are here on the live call are in that place, in phase one or phase two.

And a couple of things that I just wanted to highlight that you said, Martha. This process isn’t necessary linear. It’s not like you go one, two, three, four, and out the door, there you go. Actually you kind of bounce around a little bit, and sometimes you go from one to two and then back to one, and then you go over to three, and then you’re back at two – it’s not necessarily linear. But there is so much peace that can happen when we take a moment to go up, just like riding on a helicopter, and look at the big picture of where we are.

And just notice on all of the mantras for all of the squares, the words, “And that’s okay,” were at the end of every single one of those mantras. And that’s the point of really allowing that resistance to release. I always tell my clients, Hold hands. Cradle that feeling. Cradle the meltdown. Cradle the dreaming and scheming like a newborn babe in your lap. Allow yourself to really make friends with where you’re at. There’s no way around it but through it, as they say. Though the minute you can allow this process to unfold for you –and I know we’ve been getting a lot of people on the webcast saying, “I’ve been bug soup land, I’ve been in phase one four years” – and it’s like allowing that to be okay. And I know that’s so much easier said than done, but just literally imagine making friends with the darkness, allowing yourself to hold hands with it. Because the journey is where the gold’s at, so keep trusting and surrendering.

I’ve always loved the mantra – and I use this all the time, especially when I’m in bug soup, phase one, meltdown, and that is, “The universe is conspiring in my favor.” The universe is conspiring in my favor – especially when it feels like it’s not. It’s like, really? The universe is conspiring in my favor? I struggled for a year and a half to get pregnant, and it was like every 28 days it was like having a funeral, every 28 days. And I’d say, “Well, the universe is conspiring in my favor.” I don’t know why the timing is, but when I would get quiet and go down to that anchoring place inside of my soul, I knew that this baby was going to show up. I knew. It was a soul desire. It wasn’t from my mind, it wasn’t a have-to; it really was a deep inner knowing. And I was in this last year when we were leading this course, and Martha had just bought her ranch and was like packing boxes while we were creating this course, and Lissa was putting her finishing touches on her book – and then look at where we are now with all of these things. Martha’s in her ranch, leading cources for men, wearing hats – who knew? Lissa’s gone on the New York Times best-seller list, she’s doing PBS specials, she’s going to hospitals, doing all this stuff.

Lissa: Well, Martha and I are teaching doctors on that ranch now.

Amy: Seriously, the universe was conspiring in our favor. It was conspiring when Lissa you got your second book deal, or your third book deal I should say, where you were like No, and you walked away from it. That was a big moment for you. I remember when you did that. And it was like, a lot of people thought that you were crazy, but your soul knew. Your soul knew. And so for every single one of you, your soul knows. And so keep releasing that resistance.

And the other thing I just really wanted to take a yellow highlighter to was something that you said that was so important, Martha, because I think this, especially with the law of attraction stuff – if you’re on the calling path, everything should be easy. There shouldn’t be any struggle. But you know what? As you said, when the caterpillar is coming out and emerging from that cocoon, it is hard work to break that thing open and get out.

And so yeah, hard work can be part of it, and hopefully when we’re on that path, that hard work can feel like play. But there are moments of struggle, especially when you’re in phase one, two, and three, and coming out on the other side. So don’t let that be a sign that you’re not on the right path. Allow it to instead – because I think so often people can really get confused with that. I always like to use the metaphor of a river, that yeah, you want to go with the flow, but sometimes you still hit rapids when you’re going with the flow, and you slam into some rocks. And so allowing yourself to know, Am I swimming upstream? Am I swimming against of the flow of my purpose, of my calling, of my soul? Or am I going downstream, and sometimes you’re just lying back and enjoying the sunshine, and sometimes the rapids come. And that’s okay. Those are all good signs.

Martha: In fact, psychologists now know that we produce our most blissful brew of hormones when we are at a level of difficulty that is almost too much for us. So if you think about the happiest times in your life, like for me skiing is so happy – but not if I’m on an easy

easy hill. It’s more fun to challenge myself. How would we feel if everybody got together for the superbowl and then they toss a coin and say, Okay, it’s the Bronco’s versus the eagles – “Okay, you won the toss, Eagles win, let’s all go home”?

We say ‘play’ for things like football, or we play the piano – those are hard. But all play is somewhat – there a tension in it that is the joy of learning, and that’s I think why we are human. So to be at a level of some exertions is actually far better for you than to just have everything done for you.

Lissa: I just finished writing my next book, which is call The Anatomy of a Calling. It’s basically a spiritual self-help book disguised as a memoir, and it’s my personal journey of how I found my calling and came to be doing what I’m doing, and all the mystical things that happened along the way. Buy it’s really about how we’re all on this hero’s journey, and I sort of use the Joseph Campbell structure of the hero’s journey. And I loved thinking about it that way because the hero’s journey, if you look at the classic hero’s journey, it is not an easy path. This is not for the faint of heart. The call comes, and then the hero refuses the call. And then when they finally get brave enough to pick the phone up, there’s a long road of trials where you meet friends and allies, but you also meet enemies and people that are trying to keep you down, and there are obstacles and dragons to slay, and then there’s the ordeal in the innermost cave. And then once you find the Holy Grail, you still have to go on the road back where there’s more dragons and demons and enemies before you’re able to bring it back home.

Martha: And then you don’t even want to be at home!

Lissa: Exactly. So it’s not an easy path, but it’s incredibly rewarding. Totally worth it.

Martha: I’d really like, if you don’t mind – I told you I’ve been doing tons of meditation, and I have found such a wonderful way to be happy in the midst of all of this, no matter what is going on your life. And Amy, you really sparked that association for me, so I’m going to introduce an exercise, but I’d like to take two minutes first, and I would love it if everyone could join me in another, very brief meditation, for two minutes, okay? When I say go, the two minutes will begin. And I want you to just allow the world, everything in the world, to be as it is in this moment – just for two minutes. I’m going to repeat mantras like “I offer no resistance to reality as it is. I allow everything in this world. I allow it all as it is right now.”

I had a lot of fun with this. My doctor told me I had some skin cancer on my ear, and I had to take it off, but it was several weeks before I could see a dermatologist, and I wasn’t sure how bad it was, really. So that’s not terrifying, but it was like I’m sitting there thinking, Wow, I allow everything to be as it is, including this little patch of cancer. I’m okay. All right. It’s not going to change in this present moment, so I allow it. I allow it. And after four weeks of doing that meditation I went to the dermatologist and it was gone.

Amy: Mind over medicine, baby.

Martha: Absolutely. Okay, so I’m going to say go, and then for two minutes I would just like everybody to just follow the intention, and don’t resist the words that I’m going to say. Okay, go. Okay. Breathing in. I realize that at moment there is nothing I can do to make reality anything but what it is. Breathing out. I allow everything in the world to be as it is, for I cannot change this moment. Breathing in. I accept. I accept my sorrows, and the sorrows of all who grieve, because I cannot change them in this moment. I allow anger, and the anger of all those who feel hurt, for I cannot change their anger in this moment. I allow all the circumstances of my physical life to be as they are in this moment. I offer no resistance to this moment to the things I cannot change. I lay down the burden of trying to change the world in this moment. I come home to this moment. I surrender to allowing reality be as it is. I will create no more suffering through my resistance. Accept. It’s okay. Allow everything. Acceptance. Even my non-acceptance, I accept. I accept. Accept.

So that was two minutes. Try doing it for two hours. You will be in a state of bliss that I cannot even describe. I mean, I’ve done recreational drugs, but they couldn’t be as good as what I feel after repeating that mantra for two hours.

So thank you Amy for sparking that for me, because that’s been – and the weird thing is, you guys, that when I go there, when I allow in that way, everything that I’ve always intended and desired, but I’ve been clenching, all the things I really want that I haven’t been able to access, it’s in the moments of total acceptance that they come to me, like bullets fired from a gun. It’s like I come out of meditation and there’s all this – the New York Times is here. Why? I don’t know. I don’t even know who let them in. They want to put me on the front page of the business section – what’s that about? I don’t even know. Literally, this is how my life works.

Lissa: Can I just offer one thing that Tosha was saying in the workshop the other day? She said, “The very act of grabbing for the feather creates a wind current that pushes the feather away.”

Martha: Yes. So we’re just going to let those feathers settle. We going to dream up some feathers, and then we’re all going to lie down. That is literally the first thing my business partners and I do when we want to accomplish something – we go lie down. We totally relax. Set an intention and relax.

So, speaking of setting intentions, I’d love everybody to grab a pencil and a paper, because we’re going to do a little writing exercise. Don’t worry, nobody’s going to judge your writing, nobody’s going to read it except you, and it’s only about three minutes long. So just, if you’ve got a pen – and while you’re searching for one – I’d just like you to jot a note about someplace where you feel unformed or dissolving. Someplace where you’re not sure, and you’re anxious and you’re frightened and you’re in the grieving process, even if it’s just little. You sent a warm email to a long-gone friend and they haven’t responded yet. It can be a very tiny thing, or it can be a huge thing, like you’ve been diagnosed with a scary illness and your marriage just broke up. It could be huge or

it could be little. Just write down a note or two that says what that is. If you had a chance, just write a few words.

We’re going to ask you now two write a gentle, kind letter from whatever you imagine your higher power to be, whether it’s your higher self, or whether it’s some form of a divine love – you’re going to write a letter from that force to the part of you that’s frightened. We’re going to give you three minutes to do this. Just feel a part of you that feels so disorganized, in such tumult, and such fear or grief. And then gently move into alignment with the force that is here to heal that child. Okay, the three minutes begin right now. That’s about a minute 30. You have about 30 seconds left. So finish up now. Write ‘Love, God’ – or whoever.

Another exercise that you can do, and I’ll just give you the invitation now, because I think the letter from Love is more important. If you still feel troubled, take a minute sometime today, write down your greatest fear, and then write down all the reasons it may not be true. Shift the focus of your attention from the fear of chaos to the hope that is inherent in all formlessness. To become what you’re meant to be, you must surrender the form that you are now. Your consciousness won’t be lost, but your form may be, and that’s frightening for the little animal that doesn’t know what it is becoming next. So take a minute to just be a really disciplined scientist and write down all the reasons your very worst fear just may not be true.

Amy, would you like to present the homework?

Amy: I’m thinking Lissa might want to, because I’m seeing her on the screen there. Lissa sweetie, don you want to go over the homework?

Lissa: Oh, I thought Martha just gave them homework. I thought you were just assigning them to write down their greatest fear, and write the reasons why their greatest fear was not true. But if there’s more homework –

Martha: I in fact did that, and they were confused by a note that said ‘extra homework’. Lissa, could you walk us through the beautiful meditation that you do?

Amy: Before we do that meditation – because I’m just thinking, since we’re in kind of the homework and all of that stuff, let me just say a couple of things, some divine details as I like to call them for those of you who are in the live class with us. And then we can end with the meditation before we go into our breakout groups, which we’re going to do after the meditation. Does that work?

Lissa: Yep.

Amy: So a couple of things. Your wake-up call and part of your homework would be, in addition to writing down your greatest fear, and writing down all the reasons it might not be true – in other words, really collect evidence of the opposite happening – is to really explore the workbooks. So every week when we’re on it for teaching calls, we will have a

workbook, and that is posted in the Recordings tab of the Ning site, of our community website, which is FindYourCalling.ning.com. So you can explore the workbook. And I’ve seen some questions, the great news is, the workbook goes over all four stages of the change cycle including the mantras and different activities you can do while you’re in those things. So discover and explore a little more of what square you’re in, and then do some of those things that are recommended for that square. So you’re going to find all sorts of goodness in the workbook.

And you also have your first wakeup call bonus expert interview with the fabulous Kristine Carlson, author of Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff for Women and for Moms, who talks about an incredible journey that she had when she lost her husband, Richard Carlson, who started the Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff series. And talk about chaos, and going from chaos and anchoring in to a life purpose and a calling. So, a fantastic interview.

And then Lissa created a wonderful future self-visualization, so that’s also on the Bonuses tab. So check out the Bonuses tab, check out the Recordings tab. And then the other thing is, on the Ning site, one of the pieces of feedback we got last year when we did the course is that people wanted to be able to connect, especially since there are so many people in this course, with people that were local. And so you can find on the Groups tab on the Ning site that you can create a group, and you can create a group that’s based on location, you can create a group that’s based on interest, you can create any old group you want. And you can also go and join the groups on there. So we designed that so you could connect in smaller groups as well. So make sure to check that out.

And I think that that is it for the Divine details and for homework. So with that Lissa, let’s have you do our closing meditation, and then we’ll go into our interactive part of it.

Lissa: If everyone could just close your eyes again if you’re able to, and like Martha said, just rest. Just give yourself permission, rest for a moment. And as you think about the desires that led you to sign up for this program, maybe the desire to find your calling, desire to be on the team and be in service, to healing people or the planet in some way, as you think about other desires in your life, maybe desires that you have in a relationship or material desires that you have, financial desires. Just allow yourself to really have those desires. They’re a blessing, because these desires very very often are guideposts, guideposts on your path, finding your calling and to living your life that is really in alignment for you to be living.

But in this next moment as you think about those desires, would you be willing to just turn them over, to just surrender them? To say, I desire this deeply, I deeply desire, maybe something even as crucial as, I deeply desire a cure from this debilitating or even life-threatening illness. I deeply desire for my sick mother to get better. I deeply desire to not have to declare bankruptcy – whatever it is that you really feel like there’s a desperation to that desire. Just think of that desire, and think of it as a 75-pound box sitting on your heart. And just consider whether you’d be willing to take that box, and take it out of your heart, and turn it over to divine will. Turn it over to divine alignment,

and just say, Here, I give you this box. I don’t want to carry the burden of this desire any more. I want to be free of the expectation that I have to force this thing, that I have to make it happen, that I have to rush it, that it has to turn out the way I hoped it would.

Would you be willing to even let go of any sort of love, attraction, thoughts, like I have to visualize it, I have to affirm it, I have to have the right mindset? Would you be willing to just trust – just trust that if it’s in divine alignment, that you will be shown the way? Would you be willing to just ask that? Make me over, use me, make me a vessel of divine will. Make me a vessel of what wants to become not so much what I desire, although I want that, but of how I can be of service in a way that’s useful, and joyful, and relaxing? And it’s not about passivity. It doesn’t mean that there won’t be inspired actions. But those inspired actions won’t feel like you’re forcing it. It won’t feel like you’re swimming upstream. It will feel like you are going down the rapids, maybe, and maybe bumping up against a few rocks. But it will feel guided. It will feel like there are signs, and some of the signs will say, Yes, you’re going in the right direction. And other signs will say, No, not that way.

And I just ask, would you be willing to follow the guidance with joy, because where you’re being guided is grander and vaster and more mysterious and awesome than anything your mind or your ego could ever dream up?

So if we could just take three last breaths with that, and with each exhale just repeat the mantra to you, I surrender. Thank you all.

Amy: Thank you Lissa. So from this space of surrender and stillness, we’re going to move into our interactive groups, which we highly recommend you are so invited to participate. So here’s the way this is going to work. For those of you that called in on a phone line, or Skype, and you actually dialed the phone number, you are already in the perfect place, you can stay on the line. And for those of you that are on the webcast that would actually like to participate in a breakout group, now is the time to call into the phone line. And you can either use your unique Maestro Conference pin you signed up for, and should have received a reminder of, or you can call in using the backup number.

We are going to keep the webcast going, and those of you that don’t want to participate on a breakout group but kind of want to know what the exercises are that we’re going to give, you can stay on the line. You’ll actually opt in to be in a breakout group. And when I say breakout group, I mean literally you will go into a small group where you’ll actually be able to connect live on the call with other people that are on the call. But we are going to keep the webcast going, which is something new that we’re doing this year, so that you can receive the goodness. But if you want to connect with other people and actually participate live within these exercises, go ahead and call in. And you can also use the backup line, which is 408-520-2444, and the pin is 499546#. Again, that number is 408-520-2444, and the pin is 499546#.

So we are going to take about a three- to five-minute break just so that people that are on the webcast that want to come on, can come over. If you don’t want to participate at

all in any of this, of course you can go ahead and drop off the line right now. Those of you on the webcast again, we’ll be keeping the line live so that you can hear. There’s a lot of goodness that happens just spontaneously on this part of the call, so I want to inspire you and encourage you to stay, and it will be recorded. So no worries if you can’t.

So with that, I’m going to go ahead and put on the music and let you come on over. We’ll take about three to five minutes; you can grab yourself a glass of water or cup of tea, pee if you need to, whatever you need to do, and we’ll be back in about three minutes or so. Come on over!

That music is so lovely, very zen.

Martha: Yeah, Lissa is playing the guitar while she teaches, writes a book, and does a PBS special.

Amy: We’re going to go into a small group exercise, and Martha’s going to go ahead and share with us what we’re going to be doing.

Martha: Yeah, you’re going to be broken out into small groups. What is most personal is also most general, and so each of us, we feel our failures, our disappointments, our stresses. And when the answer comes that is perfect for us, it’s usually perfect for everyone, because those things are so deep and the same truths apply. So what we’d like you to do is, you’re going to have a minute and a half. You’re either going to read the letter that you wrote from your divine self to your worried self, or if that feels too intimate to share with people you don’t know, you’re just going to talk about what came up for you that maybe was surprising, that maybe wasn’t something you knew going in. And what this will do is not only respond to your pain, your anxiety, but it will speak to the others in your group. Because we truly believe there are no coincidences, and if you show up to heal the world, it begins immediately upon setting the intention. So these letters that you’ve written can be healing to all of us. And since we can’t share them all at one time, we thought we’d do it in groups. So how’s that going to work on Maestro?

Amy: Go ahead if you would like to participate in the small group and meet some of your fellow Find-Your-Calling way-finders and team members, go ahead and press one on your handset. Press one on your handset to let me know that you’d like to be put into a group. I’m just going to give everyone a moment to do that. And the way that this will work is I’m going to get everybody into their groups, we’ll have the team here do that. And then when you hear the chime, once we’re in our groups when you hear the chime, you will have an opportunity to just say, Hello, hello, and then you’ll find out who’s in your group.

And you can just say, Who’s in my group? And everyone can go around and introduce themselves, and then you can decide on the order. And each person will get 90 seconds, a minute and a half, to go ahead and either share their letter or share the gifts that they’ve received from their letter, or what surprised them, or Wow, that really made me feel XYZ – whatever works for you. And then you’ll hear the chime again when it’s time to go to the next person. So I’m thinking, say your name and where you’re from, and then either read your letter, or read your letter and reflect a little bit on it, what have you. Last

call, one on your handset. Perfect. I’m going to go ahead and get everyone into groups here.

The other thing that I will say about this – I’m going to put you into groups of four. Sometimes technology, we love technology when it works, and then sometimes there’s a lot of background noise, or you can’t hear anybody, you don’t know what’s going on – just breathe if that happens. And those of you that aren’t participating in a breakout group, just breathe. You can do some more journaling around your letter. Those of you on the webcast, do what have you, and know that we’re going to come back as a group afterwards. So no need to panic. So you are now in your breakout groups. You may begin.

Amy: Hi everyone, it’s Amy again. I just wanted to let you know that if you’re hearing my voice right now, that means that you opted to not be in the breakout group, or you’re on the webcast. And I just wanted to let you know you will be in silence as the breakout group continues. You’ll hear me every once in a while just tell people to move onto the next person. So wanted to let you know that you’re in the right place. We’ll be back in a few. Time to move to the next person. If you haven’t, you should be on person number three.

Martha: Should we share how we all tend to get on the call for the class?

Lissa: Okay Jane, go ahead.

Jane: . ...without feeling guilty like I should be doing something else, but it’s so clearly what I need to do, I mean it really resonated with me as well.

Woman: Did you guys read the book before this course, did you read Finding Your Way in a Wild New World?

Jane: No, I read an older one, The North Star.

Amy: Moving on to your final person, you have about a minute and 30 seconds remaining.

Time to wrap up and say thank you to your fellow group members, everyone. Wrap it on up.

Okay, we are back. I’m going to go ahead and I’m actually going to keep you in your same groups, just in case you want to connect later. I’m going to go ahead and mute everyone. Okay, so we are back. We were like little flies on the wall, buzzing around and listening here and there to what people were doing, and it sounded like some wonderful stuff. Shall we go ahead and just take some general shares, and any questions? Okay. So you can go ahead and press two on your handset if you have a share, maybe something that you noticed or something that surprised you about being in the group there. I’m coming over to Leslie. Hi Leslie.

Leslie: Hi. I’m thrilled with this and everything that’s happened. In our group we found out that the wisdom in the collective was so powerful, and we also experienced among all four of

us the gentleness, and also the power that came from the words written from the higher self. And thank you.

Amy: Beautiful, Leslie, thank you sweetie.

Martha: I noticed that too, the beauty and the poetry that we heard just in our little fly on the wall, things were just very humbling and breathtaking.

Amy: Coming over to Cheryl.

Cheryl: Hi. I just wanted to comment, it really resonated that everyone felt such a strong need for compassion for themselves, and kindness for themselves. And so what it just reminded me is, everyone is so hard on themselves and beats themselves up, and this higher self was telling everyone to be kind to yourself and be compassionate, and love yourself, and be gentle.

Amy: Indeed. I don’t know anyone on the planet that couldn’t lighten up a little bit on themselves.

Lissa: See, that’s what your work is all about, Amy.

Amy: It is. It’s what my book is about, it’s what my work is about, and yeah, I always wonder what would be possible for any of us and for all of us if we could just stop being so hard on ourselves, and put that energy towards what we desire and what we want, and our dreams and our purpose. So thank you so much Cheryl, beautiful. I think we have time for one more. Let’s see here, I’m coming over to Pat.

Pat: Hi. We had a lovely group that was divided almost East Coast-West Coast perfectly right down the middle. And I think what we got – I’ll speak for the four of us – is that everyone’s letter said something to each of us. It was such a gift. Each letter was different, and talked about something else, something different, but it was all completely applicable to each of us. It was really beautiful. Thank you so much, ladies, for doing this for us.

Martha: Oh, thank you for being here. And may I say that also, you know your letters were speaking to, at least to me. I don’t know if I can speak for Amy and Lissa, but these letters that you wrote to yourselves were so deeply comforting to me. Like, wow, these ladies –

Lissa: It’s the voice of the collective. It really is. It’s like, that’s what we all need to hear right now. So thank you for the words of wisdom.

Amy: Wonderful. All right, darlings. So, we are beginning to wrap up here. And what I’m going to do, those of you that are in the small groups is, we’ll actually leave you in the small groups, because I know oftentimes there’s this depth and connection that happens in just a few minutes on these calls, and you might want to exchange contact information, or get people’s last names so you can connect on the Ning site or on Facebook or what

have you. And so I’m going to put you back in those groups, and you can stay on for as long or as little as you’d like. So you’ll be able to just go ahead and continue in that.

And then a reminder that next week will be our first Q&A call, where it will be completely interactive, we’ll be taking your questions, your comments, and that is going to be so juicy and wonderful. I’m really looking forward to that.

So Lissa and Martha, anything you want to add before we send these lovelies off into the rest of their day, or evening, or night?

Martha: I just want to say that I’m really astonished by the level of sort of an energetic depth that I felt on this call – after you’ve meditated a few hours a day for a few years, you start to sense the presence of energies very very strongly, and the energy on this call with this particular group of people is so profound and so powerful. And I feel very humbled to be speaking to you, and very very grateful.

Lissa: You know, Martha, when you and I were together a couple of weeks ago, you said to me, when you’re thinking about spending time with other people, look for the stillness in them. And it was so profoundly helpful to hear it just worded that way, because I feel that too. I think that’s what you’re speaking to, is that there’s a stillness here that we’ve all tapped into. And by tapping into it all collectively, it shifts. Something moves. Something’s different. And for anybody who did this program last year, it’s like a different energy. It’s different than last year. And we all have that capacity for change, and I think that’s what the change cycle is all about. Like that willingness to pull up our roots so that we can shift, and then put our roots, put our anchor back down in the ocean floor and just be still with wherever we are, even though it’s not the same place that we were. So thank you all for being anchors in the ocean with each of us, and with each other, and in doing so, helping us shift the collective. I’m super-grateful to you.

Amy: Indeed, a lot of gratitude, and love. And you can come back and listen to this recording as often as possible. I love just being able to sit for two minutes and just accept everything as it is in this moment, and just reminding you to take that with you today and throughout your week. And we can’t wait to be with you again next week, at noon Pacific time, 3 p.m. Eastern. And you can submit your questions on the webcast screen for next week’s call, and we’ll be answering and interacting with all of you.

So with that, lovelies, we will bid you adieu until next time, and those of you that were in a small group, I’m going to go ahead and unmute you so that you can go ahead and connect in with your people that you were in the small group with. And again, you can stay on as long or as little as you’d like.