TrueLife - Rev. Dr. Jessica Rochester D.DIV. - The Circle of Wholeness # 3

Episode Date: April 2, 2024

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/https://www.revdrjessicarochester.com/Rev. Dr. Jessica Rochester is the Madrinha and President of Céu do Montréal, a Santo Daime (Ayahuasca) Church she founded in 1997 in Montréal, Canada.She is a transpersonal counselor, she trained in the work of Dr. Roberto Assagioli and trained with Dr. Stanislav Grof.She worked with Health Canada from 2000 until 2017 to achieve an Section 56 Exemption to import and serve the Santo DaimeSacrament (Ayahuasca).She is an ordained Interfaith Minister with a Doctorate in Divinity.From 1986 to 2018 she has been a workshop leader, teacher, and in private practice.She is the author of Ayahuasca Awakening A Guide to Self-Discovery, Self-Mastery and Self-Care, Volume One and Two.She continues to lecture on consciousness, non-ordinary states of consciousness, self-discovery, spiritual development, health and well-being and personal transformation One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear. Heirous through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Seraphini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Okay, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast, the ongoing series with an incredible guest, The Circle of Holness, Part 3, For those who may just be tuning in, I have an incredible guest, an incredible author, Reverend Dr. Jessica Rochester. She's the Madrina and president of the Sioux de Montreal, a Santo Dime, Ayahuasca church she founded in 1997 in Montreal, Canada. She's a transpersonal counselor.

She trained in the work of Dr. Roberto Isagioly and trained with Dr. Stanislav Graf. She worked with Health Canada from 2000 until 2017 to achieve a Section 56 exemption, to import and serve the Santo Diamese sacrament. She's an ordained interfaith minister with a doctorate in divinity. From 1986 to 2018, she has been a workshop leader, a teacher, and in private practice. She is the author of Ayahuasca Awakening, A Guide to Self-Discovery, and Self-Care, Volume 1 and 2. She continues to lecture on consciousness, non-ordinary states of consciousness, self-discovery, spiritual development, health and well-being, and personal transformation.

She's on a mission to inspire and empower those who seek the adventure of self-discovery, those who hope to awaken consciousness, to rediscover authenticity, to find meaning in everyday life, and cultivate deep connections with oneself, with others, and with nature. Dr. Jessica, thank you so much for being here today. How are you? Well, thank you. It's always a joy to hang out with you and spend time and chat about things of mutual interest and hopefully of interest to the listening community. And I have to say this, as you kind of give me the intro, you know. I feel older each time when you're starting on this, I've been 40 years doing this

and 50 years doing that, you know? It's like the aging process online. Okay, well, I'm super interested to talk about with you the topic today, which is to just take a moment to give us some context to today's conversation. I thought it may be helpful in case we have. somebody joining us who he hasn't listened into some of the earlier or isn't as familiar with some of the viewpoints that I hold and the conversations that are current in the field. And so a lot of my work has been trying to take a larger perspective of how did we get here,

not just as individuals but as a culture as a species as a human species. This is of great interest to me because as we understand the larger picture we actually can understand our small little role in it. Okay, now everybody's got their karma and their life mission and their personality and, you know, the whole set up. And at the same time, we're all in this together, you know? Now, I probably mentioned this before, but it appears repeating because of our conversation today that, you know, when people are born, they often think that that's the beginning of

the story is, yeah, we go to school and a grade school, we start learning a little bit of history It seems a few people are super interested, but most of us dial out in the history classes and in, you know, primary and then it calls secondary, secondary, you know, unless you're really interested in, it just seems like something like a novel for a movie, okay? And we forget that this is the story, this is the story of the human experience that began hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years ago. And yes, there's so many questions around evolution and, you know, all of the things that modern science is finding and discovering more and more about life on planet Earth. And on the spiritual side of things, you know, things that mystics and great teachers have been saying for thousands of years, if not tens of thousands of years, are really managing to come together.

And so when we look at it, that we're born into an ongoing story, you know, and that this ongoing story has so many layers to it. It has social layers and cultural layers and tribal and ethnic and all of these layers, okay? And the history is so dense, you know, that we can't ignore the impact that it has on each of us and the society in which we live. Now, how do we sort ourselves out from that. So today we're actually going to be talking about relationship. But I felt like I had to say that to put it in perspective. That what are we in relationship with? Now, many of our earlier conversations have focused on me with me and who with you, right? How do I relate to myself and how am I taking care

of myself and how am I taking responsibility for myself and accountability and what I'm thinking and saying, doing. Okay. And now we're going to take that one step further with looking at how am I in relationship, how am I functioning in relationship with others? And that may be the individual relationships, a personal relationship, family relationships, social relationship, cultural relationship, okay, national relationship.

Okay, it's quite, it's like concentric circles. It just keeps opening on up until we realize, wow, I am. really connected to you and all of these things have an influence in my life and somehow I'm a little bit of a pebble or a grain of sand that somehow makes a little ripple too. Does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so where would you like to start? Also, I thought today it would be really interesting to not only discuss the benefits that we receive, the gifts that we receive from relationship and the teachings and everything. But to come to understand more,

also a bit of the dark side of relationship and what we can learn to watch out for and what we have to understand about ourselves. So if that's all good for you, George, then we can open the gate and start going. Yeah, I like that. I think we learn the most in darkness sometimes. Yeah, so let's stop there for a moment and say a few things in general about that.

One of the most important things that I learned, not only my own deep self-discovery, the difficult dive into the lower unconscious, but from great teachers who I have studied with and studied under, is that the exploration of what we consider to be our inner darkness is where we will also find great treasures. Yes, we will find bits and pieces of ourselves and our life story that were difficult, that we're painful, areas of ourselves that we don't like, that others didn't like, okay, that others still don't like, that we still don't like, okay, and that's real. But we also find great treasures. We find things that we didn't even know we had inside of us that we can develop, or things that we locked away because they felt vulnerable. where we locked away because others and society and culture didn't approve. And so the rediscovering of those things can be profoundly empowering.

And here's another piece that's really delicate to talk about. But how do we go through? I mean, this may be a whole other conversation, but how do we go through that journey of self-discover, it's discovery, and really embrace those parts of ourselves without really getting stuck in the victim story of it. Because, you know, that's a real pitfall on the journey. Is, yes, difficult things do happen.

Sometimes they are really, really difficult, okay? And yet, do we choose to empower the circumstance, or do we choose to empower ourselves? And if we're going through the process of recovery and support that is usually needed to, you know, understand and refine ourselves, do we use these things to rewound ourselves and possibly others, or do we use them to learn and transform? So anything you want to say about that?

Yeah, I think the idea of victimhood can be looked at as like a shield. And there's nothing wrong with a shield, as long as you understand that the shield is not something that propels you forward. It's something that blocks. You know, so it's okay. And maybe perhaps you do have to fall into a period of understanding that you were a victim so that you can come out of it and fight it. Like maybe that's a natural course. Yes, you're right.

I mean, I've never met anybody who didn't have, you know, Buddha says no one escapes illness or suffering. And, you know, got you right there. All you have to do is look at how many lawyers there are in town and how many laws there have to be to try and manage human. behavior. Okay, then what do we have laws in the world? Okay, to manage human behavior. Right. Why do we have lawyers to and justice courts and and police and everything as well? It's all trying to manage human behavior. And and so human behavior is what it is. And a lot of time we're not a very nice species. And so we all make mistakes. And self-responsibility means taking accountability to address them on them and do our best and set them straight.

To speak to what you've said, you know, yes, I think that we all have to take ownership of the circumstances in which we have been a victim of something, a person, an experience, a, you know, sometimes it's a large event, you know, bombs draw thing, okay? And sometimes it's just a personal thing, getting will be in school. I don't want to diminish the impact of that, by the way. But do we continue? If we don't own our victim experience and grieve it, and then empower ourselves to move past it,

and whatever process we choose to do that, and there are some beautiful processes that help us learn how to forgive ourselves and forgive others, not just a mental construct, but a true understanding of ourselves. and the power of transformation, the inner transformation. Because as long as we stay, you know, if we're going to set up camp in victimhood, and I don't mean just going through it with support to understand it and deal with the consequences. Those are very serious.

They need to be supported and respected. So I'm not talking about that. Okay. I don't want anybody misquoting me. What I'm talking about the people who set up camp there. They pitch their tent next to the Sea of Lost Souls in the Valley of the Shadow of death and they live there and they make sure everybody knows that they're living there. This is not healthy for them.

Yeah. It's not healthy for them. There's no life there. You know, there's nothing nourishing or sustaining. There's no light. There's only that, you know. And so all of us need to wake up to the fact that we've got one foot in the sea of lost souls. Yeah. We don't want to dive in deeper and find our way forward, asking for help, getting help. you know and getting the support that we need in whatever form that support comes and there are many different ways you know and so yeah and then you know here's the power of it is you know flip the coin do we take ownership of when we have been the perpetrator that's a hard enough yeah that one is a hard one you know i'm not going to say it's easier harder than the flip side of that but we can't look at one side without looking at the other side you know in many of the powerful prayers you know even as simple as our father forgive us our debts as we forgive our daughters or whatever version you like i particularly like the aramaic version which says untangle the

tangled webs okay untangle those untie them you know because there's this understanding in that Aramaic version of the Our Father that we have tangled up our karma, whether we're the victim or the perpetrator, that there's something we are in a karmic level that can be resolved and transformed. So any more to add to that? Yeah, you know, I think it speaks to the idea of, and correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't Shiva like the bringer of life and the bringer of death? Like when we think of victim and getting out of and being the victim and being the person that is the oppressor, like we're both at the same time. And it's really difficult to see both the same time. It's like one of those illusions where if you look at an illusion and there's this one illusion of like it's a young woman and an older woman at the same time. But it's very difficult to see both of them at the same time.

Like that's who we are. So when you find yourself in victimhood or you find yourself as an oppressor, it's imperative to know that you're both at the same time. And I think that that kind of takes you out of blaming. It takes you out of pity. And it puts you in a position of like, okay, which one do I want to see? I think there's something beautiful about that. And I think it speaks to the idea of untangling the karma. It's like, okay, I'm both.

Which one am I going to choose to do? Well, you don't want to be either of them, really. I want to understand, you know, in my writings, I use a lot, prey and predator because those energies we can all relate to that I am somehow the most in the cat at the same time. So victim and perpetrator, when we take ownership of it, and I love the shamanic language and acknowledge all my indigenous ancestors and brothers and sisters

and their worldview on this, of using nature as an example to understand our selves. And so if I accept that the mouse and the cat are inside of me, then I need to become aware of when I'm being the mouse and when I'm doing the cat. Okay? And, you know, the mouse needs to understand that just my furry little body is going to attract predators. Okay.

So we need to look at when I twitch my whiskers and, you know, do my whole thing. But there's something about me that's going to and how do I transform that? Because I'm not a mouse. I'm a human woman. Okay. And I'm not a cat. I'm a human woman. Okay.

But those energies are there. So when am I on the prowl? Okay? on the hunt and the prowl and when am I feeling that I have to all constantly look over my shoulder, wondering when I'm going to be snatched up and eaten. Okay. And so we have to take ownership of that, and then we have to disidentify with them. And this is really powerful.

When we can say, okay, these forces, I'm connected to them. They are in me. I can become aware of when they have a, are in effect in my life. But then I need to in long, slow, deep breath and step back and disidentify. I'm not the mouse. I'm not the cat. What you were saying, how am I not the victim or the perpetrator and both and altogether at the same time? And it's when we see this duality and we understand that this is part of the human experience.

But then here again, very Buddhist, what is the next right step? That's the only question that we ask. What is the next great step? And that's all we need to know. just the next one, not three down or ten down or something like that. Those will take care of themselves if we just do the next right step. You know, whatever that is for each person in each situation. Anything you wanted to add?

I'm just trying to soak it in. That's all you really can do, the next right step. The next right step. We need to be willing to let go, open up and say, okay, this feels real. It looks like it's real, but what's my next great step? And then I just do that. And I keep on doing that until however it's going to transform, it will transform. However it will shift, it will shift. So bringing it back to relationship. So we've been talking about the internal relationship again, which is always so fascinating,

the mouse and the cat and the victim and the perpetrator and that's still an inside except in every single relationship we have we project that onto the situation and the person so here's where what's inside becomes what's inside and so then when we look at relationships so where would you like to start to want to start with personal relationships but you'd rather start with something broader cultural social community We start with personal and we move outwards, like the concentric weeks. Start and and move it. Okay.

So here's what's fascinating is that, you know, some, in the transpersonal field, you know, most of us will consider the couple's journey as part of the hero's journey. Right. Right? Yeah. It's part of the hero's journey. So that we kind of choose people based on certain criteria, the main being that there's something to learn in this relationship.

Okay, whatever you're going to call that. You're going to call it a karmic relationship or what happened. A saying that I really love that I share from time to time is that in personal relationships, there's different kinds of personal relationships. And I wish I could credit the person who said it so many decades ago, but I can't remember. And this person described relationships as being like trees. You have the pear tree where the fruit, the, the, is, is about 25 years on a pear tree,

or not a peach tree, sorry. The peach tree will bear fruit for about 25 years. Okay, beautiful fruit, beautiful tree, beautiful blossoms, okay? The apple tree goes for 100. Our relationships can be like that, just peach tree, relationships. They can be short, they can be beautiful. There's lots of fruit.

And then, that's it, it's finished. Now, it seems that there's not so many apple tree relationships around. If we look into the people we know in our society, it's not so much. Everybody falls in love and it's fabulous and it's wonderful and it's going to fill our romantic dream. And we can talk about that for a minute. And then until it doesn't. Okay. And what people don't understand is that every relationship goes through the process.

Okay, there's the coming together, the uniting, the meeting, the falling in love. I love Chinese food and pink and you love Chinese food and pink or green or yellow or whatever it is. so I'll love yellow or green or pink or whatever it is, okay? And then all of a sudden your individuality and your differences start to come out. And that's where the tension starts to develop. And then our unconscious starts to take over and we start to project any unresolved longings, wishes, needs, wounds, behaviors, unconscious beliefs, attitudes.

And guess what? start acting them out in the relationship. And it takes kind of a form of humility, humbleness maybe, to recognize that we're doing that and to take ownership of it. Instead of just going, this fault, their fault, okay? They're the wrong one, the bad one. Instead of saying, whoa, wait a minute,

why am I acting like this? Why am I believing this? Why do I have these unconscious, now conscious expectations about personal relationship. That this person is going to fulfill my needs and fulfill my wants and fulfill my longings and be everything to me that I can't even beat for me. So why am I expecting some other person to give me that? Right? Yeah.

And most people enter into a personal relationship. Now, partly at fault is the unrealistic ideology in Western civilization. You know, we've been spoon-fed romance in films and novels and songs and, okay, spoon-fed from whatever, however long ago about this romance and one day my prince will come, right? We fought into this mythology, so, you know, if we can just, we will just for a moment speak in kind of a heterosexual language, so bear with me everybody. but, you know, this is part of the package, okay, of dreaming that the prince will come, and how unfair is that to men? Do they have to be a rescuer on a white horse and shining and brave and courageous and wonderful and know-all and capable of rescuing and all this jazz?

How unfair is that to man? You know? And how silly of it for women? that they have to disempower themselves and tie themselves to the train tracks, you know, or get locked in a tower or fall asleep under a spell.

And the only way we wake up is with a kiss. I mean, this is all gone thudding into our collective unconscious, okay? And then it just plain doesn't work, you know? It just doesn't work. And so we have to wake up to the mythologies in our own personal stories and our culture

and say which ones do we choose to keep? Which ones do we choose to have a smile at and let go? And so we look then to what arises in the personal close relationship, let's call it a romantic relationship, the intimate relationship, first of all is going to be our own unresolved stuff from our family origin. whatever wounds we've had there, whatever patterns have become there and beliefs and attitudes and behaviors are going to get repeated.

And the next thing we know, our beloved is showing up just like our mother or our father or even worse. All of a sudden, we're behaving like our mother and father and not the good parts of it. We're saying and doing the exact same things they said and did which we didn't like when they were doing it. Now we're doing it. Right? And you need to have a little bit of a sense of humor about this because it helps you ease through it. You know, if we can laugh out ourselves, we're halfway there. You know, my God, I've turned into my fill in the blank, you know.

And so how do we find and acknowledge the qualities and the strengths and the gifts that we received in our family of origin environment? and then how do we look at the things that we want to learn, the things we want to forget, the things we want to transform, the things we don't want to carry anymore. I think it was Robert Blyne and American poet who said, you know, it talks about the great black bag we dragged behind us. But I think it was also him who said, you know, when you sit down and you start to open it up,

you find out that most of it's not even yours. You know, it's got Uncle Harry's baggage in there. and you've got grandparents' baggage and you've got all this baggage, this collection of stuff that doesn't fit and you don't want. And then how do you shed that with dignity and grace? Right?

Yeah, that's a tough one. On some level, I think the behaviors that we repeat that we're unproud of are the things that we have yet to forgive people before us. And it's like that repression of like, if I'm mad at my mom or my dad for doing this thing, and in my relationship, if I repeat it, on some level, it's because I never forgave them for it. Or maybe forgive is the wrong word.

Maybe I never really addressed it. And so I'm doomed to repeat it. What do you think? Yeah, yeah, you got it. So we are doomed, your words. The very things that we hated, okay? the very things that we complained about, we find ourselves doing. And, you know, is that possible to transform?

Yes. It's possible to transform it for any of us. It may take time. It may take effort. It may take support. You know. But, okay, what else were you doing with your life? Right.

You want to dig that hole and go back in it. Okay, God bless. Okay, moving on. But do you want to do the work and do you want to transform and do you want to actually have inner peace? No one's going to guarantee anybody happiness because that's silly. Happiness is like sunny days it comes to goals. But we can find an inner peace or an inner contentment with the knowledge that we are doing our best in any good given day, that we are content with, how we are co-creating our life.

And so yes, the family of origin does play a large role, but then peel that one back. You know, what's really interesting is when, you know, 40 years of working with people and a private practice, how many times I've helped people realize that, well, it didn't just start with mom and dad, they only learned what they learned from their parents. And they only learned that from their parents. And so there's this kind of legacy of repeated parents. and beliefs and behaviors. And then a lot of it was mother culture whispering in the ears and social norms,

okay, being imposed on situations. And if we just get stuck pointing a finger at mom and dad without understanding the larger picture, that it's kind of like being angry with mom and dad because they didn't teach us to speak Japanese. They didn't know how to speak Japanese. or play the guitar. They didn't know how to play the guitar. Okay, so they didn't understand healthy boundaries. Nobody taught them healthy boundaries.

You know, and it wasn't a conversation. We can almost mark on the calendar when conversations such as we're having today started to emerge in the larger population. That wasn't even until the 1970s. And even then, a lot of it was clouded by other things. And so through the 70s, the 80s, into the 90s, conversations that we never had, okay, were coming forward and being discussed.

And so decade by decade is people we've been opening up and talking about. And, you know, understanding that, again, the story didn't start the moment we were born. Mom and Dad aren't cast in stone. This isn't, you know, this isn't a film. They emerged from something. And before them, those people emerged from something and understanding our story. I'm not sure if I've ever shared this before, but my father was an officer during the war, the Second World War, British officer.

And he'd been stationed five years before the war in India. So he was exposed to lots of things. He was only, I don't remember how many kilometers outside of the earthquake when it happened. So he went in with his troops right after the dust settled to try and see what they could do. And then he, you know, he served in the Second World War, part of the time in Germany. He was with the British troops when they opened Bergen-Belsen, the death camp. So he saw lots of things. And it was in a dream.

He was still alive, but it was in a dream that I had this profound experience with him. But he came and he sat with me and he said, the things that I saw as a child and during the war affected me. And that's where I am. That's how I am. And he was a wonderful man, but there was like some kind of shield there. There was some things he couldn't access. He felt like his soul was behind it.

And we would call that poor traumatic stress disorder today, right? but in 1940s there was no conversation about that I mean if you did have effect from the war

you would hold buck up and carry on and that's what you did he bucked up and he carried on and he went on to make a successful life and a healthy life

and it is best to be a dad and raise you know work with assist with raising two girls and my sister

and my son And yet there was always that something that was untouchable there. And so these profound understandings, it wasn't personal. And this is the first and major problem is we personalize everything. Things that have nothing to do with us that our parents live through, our family members look through, that we don't understand or don't know. And so when it's trying to understand ourselves, we kind of need to understand a little bit about our family origin and our ancestors and what they went through and the struggles they had and the challenges they faced and

and how they coped with them and then what we learned from all of that and then how we bring that into our understanding of our life and how to be. So that's just a little bit about family origin now. We want to resolve ourselves and our issues. We look at We look into our family story, find out what we can. I always ask people, go and ask your relatives about their memories and their stories and ask your uncles and your aunts and grandparents while they're still around. Ask them to write it down or do a family tree and say who everybody is and things that happened. And then you'll have a larger understanding about the ongoing story. You know, we were born in Chapter 512 or maybe 400,000,000,

you know, of an ongoing story. So a relationship. And, you know, so learning what we can about it, and then the gift of relationship. How I've heard many people share with me that towards the end of the life of a parent, usually a parent, sometimes an older sibling, but they're sitting with them and they realize,

but they've been personalizing a whole lot of stuff that doesn't be personal. and that they were so focused on the out-using the boo-boos that they never actually saw the gifts and the good things. John Boroshenko in one of her books, she describes an American physician. And she positions the call. Anyway, she has a PhD, not an MD.

She describes sitting with her mother and she realized this that any hostility that she had around stuff that happened between them was gone. And she was actually able to say to her, mom, thank you. You actually being the way you were allowed me and gave me the opportunity to become a strong, independent woman. And so she took what had happened to her, you know, kind of self-involved distant mom is the, take away that you get. Okay, instead of boo-hoo, Mommy wasn't there for me,

it was, wow, okay, that put me in a position where I could either stand on my own two feet and develop my own independence and find my way forward. And I'm looking at that as being a gift. So how do we, how do we do that? There's forgiveness, there's understanding,

there's recognizing that, we're not perfect. It's so easy to condemn others for things actually that we're doing ourselves. Yeah, they're looking really thoughtful there, George. What are you thinking about? Yeah, it's true. I feel that it's necessary.

Like, it's necessary to go through these difficult times. And for me, like, it happens in midlife. Like, maybe it's because I'm getting towards the age of 50. And I look back and I see the way in which I was raised and I'm thankful for so much of it. But still, there's like, oh, well, if this would have happened and that could have happened and this could have happened. But at a certain age, you realize it's kind of irrelevant because where you are right now is the summation of the choices that you've made. And you have an opportunity to become the person that you want to be if you let go of the person that you thought you were. I'm not sure if that makes sense.

But I think that that is part of growing as an individual and letting go of some of the generational trauma is letting go of that so that you can become the person that you're supposed to be. I think that kind of speaks to the idea of relationships a little bit. Yes, absolutely. I agree with everything that you've said, you know. And there's so much power in that.

Yeah. Wait a minute, you know, the phrase that's sticking out for me is the choices I've made. We want to kind of blame somebody else for the choices that we need. It's your fault I did this. It's so easy to do that. It's your fault I did that. Yeah, of course.

Yeah. And so abdicating self-responsibility always leads to not good, healthy, well things for us. You know, when are we going to get that? That only taking responsibility for what is ours, you know, being a hyper-resolution. responsible and taking responsibility for other people and their things. We don't want to do that. That's not healthy. But just simply taking into account our own thoughts, words, and actions

leads to a great deal of empowerment, you know, and so on and so forth. And so here we are in relationship. And we're struggling. And what we do? Because we find that our beloved has turned into mama and her dad. and then we're alternating between being our angry 14-year-old and our dependent 6-year-old and all these dynamics that go on and on and run. The most thing we have to do is wake up, wake up, wake up.

Okay. Wake up. And realize, wait a minute, I'm in a game here. And how do I change my side of it and stop acting out? Because the more we act out, the more it reinforces the pattern, the more it calls out the acting out in the other person, etc. And so we have to stop, assess, change our way of communicating, change our way of thinking about things, try and see things in a different light. You know, and look at the couple's journey as being part of the hero's journey. Why did I choose this person to be in a relationship with?

What is my teaching here? What is my here to learn? You know, a teacher from decades back when her heart started. started ask that turned into a new form that turned into something else. But anyway, way back from the beginning, he says, I love you is the biggest hook in our relationship. Somebody's saying, I love you. When you're halfway out the door, but I love you, okay?

And it's a hook that will bring so many people back. You know, why are we so needy for love? Without it, you die. Well, we're tiny, yes. I'm sorry, I'm not going to buy that. as adult. Or condition to it. Well, yes, and there's something bigger than, much bigger than that, okay?

It's when we're really little, yes, we will die without nurturing. If we want to call that love, that's okay, we can call that love. It doesn't matter. Let's again use the animal kingdom. All mammals nurture their young until they see. that they are self-sufficient. So when Mama Cheetah looks and sees that her two cubs have now accomplished their first hunt, bye guys.

When Mother Autor realizes that, yes, they've got her little ones now, they're all geared up and they found their little box that they can do their thing or whatever is, all those creatures do. They've got their thing all going. Then what she does is wonderful. She spends an intense period of time with them. She plays with them and hangs out with them, and then she makes a real kind of nest and rubs her scent all over it, and she just goes. Okay, so in the animal world, it's about, surely, this is also love? Why is it? How is it not love?

You know, it's investing yourself completely into the wellness and the survival of the next generation. You know, we could do a whole series on what is love. Okay, I think we've already talked about it. a while back, but it's not usually what a lot of people would get is, you know. And so let nature teach us. Okay, but we create that we need something, but we're confusing love with needs and wants. Needs are genuine when we're little. We need shelter and safety and comfort and nourishing, and we need all of those things to develop

just the way, you know, Mama Lion or whatever, you know, Mama Dolphin gives it. you know, nourishment and safety and shelter and comfort and all of those things are given. And we need them as humans and then we get stuck because we like it and we want more. And then we have this illusion that we're special and we somehow deserve it. And that we are then entitled to it. And that's where I see that for some strange reason that love has gone to in Western civilization, that we're somehow entitled to love, and that we have the right to demand it from people?

I'm sorry, am I, like, so far out of the ballpark? Right? Am I? Is it not part of today's culture that people think that they're somehow entitled to love? You know? Has our culture kind of sung that song enough and written that book enough?

But now we think that instead of, loving ourselves and being love something that we share and something that we give through nurturing, through providing, through investing time and energy, because that's what love is, creating a space in which we invest in energy and support, okay? That's what it really isn't. It isn't a few words that we toss out. I love you. We've hooked you back in again.

And so if you. look at that, that no one's kind of entitled to that. Small children, yes, but even after a short period of time, healthy parents are teaching their children to have respect and to have manners and to understand healthy boundaries. Yes, darling mummy is coming. I need to finish this and I'll be there in a minute. Here's a book. Have a little look at it and I will be coming and then you go when you can. We're teaching healthy boundaries. You know, and so in a healthy environment, then we do our

best with communication. We do our best with boundaries. And then children learn the love is there that actually they're the source of it as much as mom and dad are the source or their parents, let's say, are the source of it. You know, there's diversity in families these days. So whoever, whatever the parents are,

the relationship is healthy with good boundaries and good clear communication, then that leads to the best opportunity for children to understand that they need to love themselves. And then they will take care of themselves and that they can count on the nurturing, this nurturing aspect that will be available with support and care. What do you think? Yeah, it seems that our definition of love has changed through the years. And I'm not sure if that is a,

if that is something that is been conditioned into us. You know, maybe that came from, if you just look at society, so many people have decided that a loving relationship is something that they saw in a commercial with a puppy

and a new car and a new house like these ideas that have been on some level transmuted to us first through our parents but mostly through our culture and society it's it just speaks to the idea of the the i think it speaks to the idea of the poor disintegration of the stories we tell ourselves whether it's a community story that gets passed down to us or the one maybe it's a maybe it's a degradation of the story tell her. Yes, excellent. You're going exactly where it's like your psychic. Okay. You're going exactly where I was going to take us on the next, you know, the next step in the conversation. So I want to say first of all, there's many forms of family. There's the family of origin,

then there's our cultural family and our social family and our religious family. Okay, for a lot of, in a lot of cultures and nations, that's really important to them. They're religious family. The people who believe this have the same set of beliefs that they do. And these days we need to broaden what we're calling religious family, religious, spiritual, philosophical, perhaps. People who share philosophical views about life. And in so doing, create that sense of family, that sense of tribe that is missing and lacking so much in modern civilization. And let's say spiritual family, for people who are not religious or who can be religious, but consider it to be part of a spiritual family.

Okay? So all of this changes with time, with science, with modernization, with the diaspora of human kind, as all the doors of transportation opened in the last, more so frequently and increasingly in the last few hundred, years, we went from taking a month in a boat to get across the ocean and, you know, to zipping over in seven hours. And so, you know, with every increase in transportation and the ability to move around the earth, then the effect of culture upon culture, belief upon belief, philosophy upon philosophy has been woven into the fabric. And a lot of times, because we may be so fixated on one particular level, and this is again a whole big conversation.

We can get very identified with one part of that multi-layered experience. We can very strongly identify with our social family until we think that that is it and everything else is a them. Or our cultural family, our ethnic family, our religious family and anybody who's not part of that is a them okay and these divisions anytime we have belief systems within these layers of family of the human experience every time we have belief systems that are separate separation belief systems we're better because we have something whatever something is okay that's the social

We have more money, we have more power. We, whatever. Okay? We do something that's important and you don't. So the separation, every time we do that, it creates problems. Our religion, whatever it is, it's the right religion, your religion is the wrong. Okay?

Well, we can already go with that one. That's a huge, long story in the history of the human experience that brings suffering over and over and over things. So everywhere we see separateness instead of unity, every time we focus on the what is different in a wrong way, a bad way, a them way, instead of an us way, let's find common ground, let's focus on the perennial philosophy, let's share values, let's open a conversation, okay? Those are the things that can lead to help and wellness in our culture and nation and society. But as long as there's an us and we're right and there's a you and you're wrong, then we're going to keep suffering and suffering and suffering. So a sense of community. You may or may not be familiar with this as a philosophy and that's okay and we gave us who I think is brilliant anthropologist, ethnobotanist.

And anyway, history reveals that the human race is a tribal race. And I've heard it said that the best tribe operates around 100 people can go up to about 300 people. And at that point, it may face different kinds of issues. Okay. But if we look at the human race, it's always been tribes and clans and nations. Okay. And, you know, have they always got along? No.

Okay, why? Because you have something I want. That's the bottom line on it. It's human greed. You have something I want. You have access to water I want. I'm not looking at the fact that I have access to the forest, so perhaps I have something you want.

And if I was smart, I would come and sit down with you and say, listen, you have access to the water so you get the fish. But we have access to the forests. So if we share what we've got, we're going to end up both being better. Instead of the people who have access to the water, fighting to own the forest as well as the water and the people who have access to the forest,

fighting the people to have, do you know what I'm saying? And this is a history of the human race. I don't know how to move it. You want something, I'm going to go and take it. Instead of saying, how can we share the resources that Mother Nature gives us? How can we share them so that everyone has an opportunity?

What Gandhi did, you know, walking India. and the largest transfer of land in the history of the human species. So back to Wade Davis, okay? And he talks about the loss of wisdom keepers and the loss of true understanding of kind of the benefits of a tribal mentality. We don't want tribalism, okay? We don't want that, like our tribe. We're back to our tribe, this is the right tribe and what we believe is the only thing.

And by the way, God loves us best. Okay. That's not healthy for anybody. Anyway, what he says is, together the myriad of cultures make up an intellectual and spiritual web of life that envelops the planet. It's a beautiful imagery. Is every bit as important to the well-being of the planet as is the biological web of life that we know is a biosphere? You might think of this social web of life as an ethnosphere, a term best defined as a sometimes, total of all thoughts,

oops turning the page, all thoughts, intuitions, myths, and beliefs, ideas, and inspirations brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness. So this is the best of the best, he's talking about. The ethnosphere is humanity's greatest legacy. It is the product of our dreams,

the embodiment of our hopes, the symbol of all of we are and all that we as a wildly inquisitive and astonishingly adaptive species of created. Beautiful point. Beautiful point. But that's summing up, you know, the possibilities of all people being willing to recognize the contributions and the benefits that all cultures bring. And yes, is there a dark side?

and let's wander around that for a minute. Is there a dark side of all for that? Yes, I just sort of said, you know, I want what you have, and I'm willing to fight for it or kill you for it. That's certainly the dark side. You know? And how do we face that? How do we have that conversation?

How do we do that, you know? I think we can look back at history and see that if you look at the way manifest destiny in the United States made us less of a species because we wiped out so many indigenous people you can see that we're worse off because of it you can see the same thing playing out in Israel today

like they're wiping out the indigenous people like when you genocide a group of people killing yourself like you can't be free unless everyone else is on some level has access to that same freedom I don't have the answers but it seems that we can look back history and go, this is clearly two wrongs don't make it right. Clearly, this is wrong. But I don't have the answers.

I can see that it's making us less. It's showing, like right now we are seeing some of the darkest times, I think, in history, seeing what's happening in our world. I don't know about that. I think the inquisition was darker. True, true, maybe in our life. One was horrific. My God, the men dying the trenches and, you know, Gallipoli coming over the hill

and all getting killed. But, you know, the only thing is, is we don't have access to the records. I think that this has been happening since Kane and April. Yeah. How far back do we need to go? We need Dr. David on the show to give us some dates.

Yes. Yes. Yeah. How far are the roots of this in human experience in which this aspect of humanity, of aggression and greed, to selfishness, you know, how it's there all the time. I mean, I looked it up for someone because they didn't believe me,

but there's something like 34 active wars on the planet. Yes, two have been in the news and they're horrific. And we all, most of us, pray that there will be peace, that there will be stop fire and that there will be restitution and that will be some kind of, you know, peace accord that is going forward. But at the same time, there's genocides happening. We don't pay attention to it. There are Rolinga people over in Myanmar.

Why don't we pay attention to it? Because there's no Ralingans in the United States. They don't have a big voice. Okay? So there's people going through this. And, you know, every now and again, because I'm British, somebody decides they're going to hold me accountable for all colonialism. How dare you?

Okay. Okay, so that's fine. The thing is that I say yes of the British Empire has an enormous amount to account for. And let me offer you an ancestral apology. Although I wasn't there, I am very happy. So people that I need, they're Irish, for example. I take their hand and I say, may I offer you? Okay, I'm very willing to do that.

Why not? And so, although personally, I wasn't there and I had nothing to do with it, but I have to assume that somewhere at the tree, somebody was involved in it. Now, the difference is, is what people don't understand is when I say, okay, and I give you the other side of this, and I start to list off how many invasions and destitutions and deprivations, what we call Great Britain went through, the Vikings, the Normans, the Saxons, the Romans, I mean, go on and on, you know, with how many times Britain was invaded and taken over and slaughtered and killed and the people who lived there. And then the people who live there integrated and became what we call modern Britain, which hasn't been modern Britain since the last 50, 60, 70 years because of the diaspora of the human race. Okay. So if we look and we, if we start to choose, you know, go around the world and we just peel it back a couple of centuries.

And you peel it back a couple of centuries. we can see that there's no place this story started. It's not like bad Britain or bad France or bad Portugal or bad Spain or bad Germany or anything like that. I mean, it's so easy to point the finger at some of the more modern nations who within the last couple of 100 years have absolutely, you know, cooperated with, initiated, okay, acts of violence and terror against other peoples and other lands and a greedy, the acquisition. Yes, can't say that any nicer. It's just the facts, folks. Okay, but that happened to them too. That's the weird thing. Peel it back a thousand years, peel it back 2,000 years, people it back, six thousand years, and you're going to find over and over again who were the perpetrators, were then the victims, or then the perpetrators. When does this story end?

When does it? It's called the cosmic clash. in transpersonal and, you know, kind of language and understanding. And the cosmic clashes of archetypal experience in which there's always good and evil fighting, good and evil fighting. Part of the problem is, is when we mistake, we're the good ones. Yeah. You know? Yeah. What, there's a great quote that says if a, if a crime fighter fights crime and a firefighter fights crime and a firefighter

fights fire what is a freedom fighter fight oh well that's a very good question I want to stand it depends depends it's semantics I mean if you're a freedom you know my understanding is they're fighting for freedom they're not fighting against freedom for freedom okay mm-hmm for freedom and a lot of the times that's what it takes you know and unless you're unless you're able to do a quiet revolution, a respectful revolution, unless you're able to sit down and say, this is not working. You know, I mean, we live in a democracy in every four years or what have you, not different vastly from the United States. Every few years, we go to the bowls, and we vote in who we think is going to do a better job than the last guys.

Okay. Or we vote for the same guys thinking they'll do the better job, whatever. Okay. But it's a democracy. We each get one vote. we get to exercise our vote and the majority of people choose what happens next.

And if we don't like it, then we make another choice the next time. But at least so far on the planet, that seems to be the system that seems to work better than some of the others. Not perfect. Nobody's going to think it's perfect, right? Because there's still humans in Georgia.

Yeah. So where does this take us to? We're talking about relationships still. Where are we now in relationships? It seems that it's the cosmic clash is a reflection of what's happening inside of us. So maybe we can look at it from that angle. Like we're constantly fighting each other the way we're fighting inside ourselves. Yes.

That's a good observation. The place that we find peace is first inside of ourselves and then we try and be. And I don't, I'm not talking about the fake piece. You know, I'm not talking about people who go along. to keep peace. Because that, you may be, you know,

maybe there's a situation at work where there's small accommodations made just to ignore small things, okay? But in the long run, being that kind of a peacekeeper, is not really peacekeeping. That's just denial and avoiding,

you know? Right. And sometimes you have to be the rebel, and sometimes you have to stand up, and sometimes you have to be, you have to sacrifice everything. I mean, look at Martin Luther Kings. Yeah.

On the Gondis and other people and other great teachers who said, okay, you know, I'm probably going to go to the cross on this one, but I'm probably going to get shot or stabbed or any of those other things. But I've got to stand up and speak my peace and let the chips fall where they do. Yep. And so everything in the end is inside of us and how we manifest it. Okay, all of the people who are making more, would it be possible for them to sit down and absolutely possibly to have a conversation and say, okay, how do we settle this so that works for both of us? Is it possible for humans to sit down and say, can we discuss this? Can we sit down? So if we can do it with ourselves and we can do it with our partner, if we can sit down in our relationship and say, listen, There's some things that aren't working. I don't want to blame you.

I'm taking responsibility for me. I realize that I fill in the blank, that I withhold, that I stonewall, that I argue, that I pick, you know, all the common ones, right? Mm-hmm. Okay? Ficking, nagging, stonewalling, he's slamming the door on the way out and giving you the cold shoulder.

These are all common. They're childish, they're petty, you know, that we feel empowered by slamming the door and going out. It's not being charged. So can we sit down with our partner and say, listen, can we identify the things that we need to work on? So that we can have a more respectful and fair and caring and nurturing relationship and create a better environment for ourselves to living. And if we can't do that, then maybe we should be saying goodbye.

Maybe it was the be each tree and the tree is done now. And maybe we should just bow to each other. And so, you know, there is that closure that can come when we realize that we've learned what we need to learn and it's time to find. It's like a graduation, this kind of spiritual graduation. You know, so many people have asked me, how do you know what it's over? You know, you know, you know, you know what's over. And if you're not sure, then you need to sit down with your partner. and you need to talk about what's not working.

And then hopefully you get to the place where you can bow them. And you say thank you for the teachings and thank you for the good experiences. And thank you for everything that I've learned. And we're done here. And that's really hard. Right? Yeah. Because it's not human nature to do that.

It's human nature to blame and pick and argue and complain and bargain and. punish, right? Punishment is big. Yeah. And that's all coming from the victim experience. If we don't, if we stay in the victim experience, we will argue and punish and revenge and all of those things. If we go, wow, okay.

Now, absolutely and genuinely, I am not at all discounting that in some situations, absolutely, there have been completely unfurately. often illegal things that have happened. That, you know, a person has every right to be hurt, angry, upset, even scared about. But then why are you still in a relationship? You get out. Where'd you go?

You have such a thought for what on your face. I question the idea why people don't leave. You know, I feel like it's such a great question. Like maybe the lesson, you know, the same way. I think life continually throws us this test until we pass it. Maybe people stay because they haven't learned the lesson. And maybe it's not painful enough. It's a weird thought to have.

Like maybe it means to be more painful for the lesson to set in. But maybe that's what it is. Do you mean like hit bottom? Yeah. Like, like Get bottom. And I don't even know if that explains it well enough. Like sometimes the bottom is like the ultimate pain, you know, and you just stay there.

Like, why do people stay? I guess they have to have enough pain in order to thoroughly interrupt the pattern to stop it. That's a really good question. I'm not sure if there is an answer. and only if we had somebody here with us who's going all the way down to the bottom of that you know who could who had the courage to share what that was about you know again

you're going to often hear what I've heard which is oh but I loved fill out in the blank girl I loved him even when he cheated on you so many times even when she stole from you But I loved him and and it takes an in-depth study to understand that that wasn't love. That was a attachment, that was a dependency, that was something else, but that doesn't even come close to what we're talking about as love. Because the moment that we love somebody more than we love ourselves, okay,

then we're crossing a line in which we are volunteering to be in a situation. We have surrendered our will. We have abdicated our power. And we are now volunteering to be in a situation. And when people get to the place where they can say, oh, right then, there, at that point in the relationship, is where I recognize now I gave away me power. I gave away my power.

Wow. That's a deep hard teaching. And then we have forgiveness for the self. Understanding of what I learn from this? How do I go forward from this? How do I come to terms with that and create a better situation for myself? Maybe the pain, the pain of forgiving,

yourself is more difficult to forgive yourself than it is to give up your authority on some level. Say that on a game? It seems to me that on some level that it is easier to give up your authority than forgive yourself and that's why people stay.

I can see that on some level with relationships of people I know and people that I know who have tried to commit suicide and people that have the suicidal ideation. Like it's easier just to give up your authority than it is to forgive yourself sometimes. To give up everything, really. Yeah. That's a really hard place to get to. That makes me want to cry.

Yeah, that's really the bottom of the bottom, you know, when it looks like the only way out. Yeah. Okay. And, you know, let's take a moment and send lots of light to anybody within that situation. Lots and lots of light because that's what we all need. We need light. We need enlightenment. We need awakening.

We need to know that there is goodness around us. We need to know that the divine light is always here and that we can all, each of us individually, however we experience that, that we can turn to it. and we can embrace it and we can find it inside of ourselves, and that that can be the only way we can go forward. You know, they see that the hardest person to forgive is yourself. Yeah. You know?

And how is that achieved? It's achieved through humbleness and grace. It's the only way I know through is humbleness, that we are human, that we can make mistakes. reconciliation we're needed, repairing where required, and then finding the way this is where karma comes in. You know, I remember I said quite a few times,

you know, how do you do what you do? Like, the same thing, how do you stand it? It's so like crazy. And, you know, like, and I said to them, I say to people, well, you know, I'm not sure if I'm paying back or paying forward. you know and you know i'm just thinking okay this is a life of service so i better just get on with it yeah find joy in every day and so you know here's the part is is when we feel like we've fallen into

the deep pit okay how do we find our way out and that's where we need nurturing and support and we need to reclaim our will and we need to reclaim our self and our soul. We need to get our soul back from where we dumped it. And when we get that we dumped it, okay, we will punish ourselves. And at some point, do you remember that marvelous film? Who's in it? Journey Irons, Robert De Niro, maybe the mission? Vaguely. Yeah, okay. And this for me is anybody who's self-punishing, I say, go watch this movie. Okay, then come back and talk to me. Because there's this person who was a mercenary campaign and he has an awakening and he realizes everything he's done.

And so he punished himself and he's dragging this net full of all of his weapons. This whole, he's following the priest who I believe is Jeremy Irons, really done. And he's dragging this behind him. And the other people say, keep saying to the priest did. And Ryan, why are you letting me do this? And he says, I lunch Tom put it down. And he says he's not ready for anything. He will know when he's ready to put it down.

And so that's how it is, is we drag all our recriminations behind us and in our napsack of pain. And at some point we have to sit down and say, I've punished myself enough. Yeah. And it's enough now. It needs to stop. There needs to be closure on it.

There's beautiful prayers and rituals that I offer people to do when they're having difficulty. you know, going through those kind of passages of blaming themselves and, you know, find they can't forgive either themselves or others. And there's some absolutely beautiful rituals and beautiful prayers to that one can do that can bring you peace. And I say, okay, I'll give them homework and say, here's your homework. Go do this for 21 days. Go do this for three months, for months.

And then come back and tell me, you know, it's not an important. instant thing. Yeah. You know, meditation teachers will give you a tool and they'll say, come back and train us. You know, we all want it right now. We want it instantly.

A cup of hot water stir and it's ready. And that's not how it is. And so, well, we've been, we've wandered around a lot today. I know we're coming close to the end of the show. So, let's do a little

kind of wrap up here. We're talking about relationship, relationship with ourselves, relationship with our culture, with our tribe, with our, you know, just a few words about that is that I don't want anybody to come away from this conversation thinking that I'm romanticizing,

okay, that I'm romanticizing tribal life or anything and say, you know, right now we look and we can see that people are trying to find their tribe. They're trying to find something to identify with, something to belong to. And if they feel out of society that it's painful for them and I think that in some way like social

media has tried to you know I have 4,000 friends and all that stuff but they aren't friends you know go join a choir go go join the knitting club you know take a course in I don't know whatever language Italian Spanish they learn at the dark okay but do something real that's creative not just endless stuff on your phone that isn't real that is in the end will not nourish your soul, how many likes you get of your picture of the lunch or your cat doing something funny. It's not going to nourish your soul.

Go sing in a choir. You know, learn a musical instrument, learn another language. Take up a hobby. Join a group of some kind where you're actually with people who have a, and it doesn't matter what it is. It could be golfing chess.

It does not matter. Find something that you like and get involved in it. And be the kind of person you want others to be with you. Be that person that you look forward to seeing and speaking with and sharing with.

You don't want to be Debbie Downer. Tracking all your troubles and blues in. Okay, unless you need a support group and then absolutely please go to a support group where you can put that stuff out and get the support that you need. And so the answer to a lot of this is we need to reconnect on a human level. We cannot expect to, you know, find instant partners through all of these dating sites

and expect that instant partner to be the, you know, answer to our wants, needs and et cetera. And then expect society and culture to conform to us and our person. and stuff. We need to co-create. We need to be part of it. And we need to reach out and actually physically show up. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does to me.

Get involved in life. You know, go and help with cleanup on the mountain. Every spring we have here in Montreal where Montreal is an island in the middle of a big river called the St. Lawrence. And it has what we call a mountain. but it's not really mountains more like a big hill okay but it's a beautiful national bar and um the provincial park and um right on the top and bird sanctuary and everything else and of course

humans being humans what do they do they walk all winter and litter and so every every every spring there's a you know bring your garbage bag and your rubber gloves and clean up the mountain go and help nature bring positive things into your life bring positive things into your relationship your life, being positive things in your community. What did, was it John Kennedy who said, you're a person who won't the American president, says, don't ask what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.

Okay. Okay. Well, repeating and quoting him right here. So I think we have this very selfish, needy, you know, view right now is it needs to give to me instead of, okay, maybe I do need something, but let's balance it with what do I have to, offer and share.

I can bring this and then hopefully we can share. Yeah, I think it's beautiful advice. And so we should actually be hopeful, hopeful knowing that if we recognize our dark side as individuals and as nations and as countries, okay, and as peoples, if we recognize our dark side because the shadow is individual and it's the family shadow and it's the nation, and shadow and it's like, it's everywhere. There's humans. There's a shadow side to it.

So if we recognize that we have this and we take ownership and self-responsibility for it and we account for it, then we have the best opportunity, the best opportunity of building a foundation with others in which hopefully we can create a community that people will feel is nourishing for and beneficial. that it takes putting it in to get it in. Yeah, it's well said. And I think that that is the light, the hopeful. Being hopeful is seeing a ray of sunlight that is like a beam of sunlight that shines through a hole in the roof into the dark.

Like that's hope. You can see it right there. And let's join voices on positive. As I said, let's send light. Let's send light. Corrace, has this amazing letter to a young man. I can't remember the full title of it, but everybody go and look it up because it's beautiful. And she knew this young man, whether it was a son of a colleague or what happened,

and she wrote him this letter, and it's a stunner. And she talks about how we have to keep positive and we keep hope, and we have to recognize that there's darkness and we have to recognize that there's trouble. But we need to be like the people on board ship. That we can say, I can throw a life preserver, but you got to pick it up. You can get on it. And we can send light and we can give goodness. That's all in the end we can do.

It's be a ray of sunshine and be willing to own the dark and the light. And be willing to serve the light while we acknowledge the dark. You know, all the great teachers, but oh, Saddamara's right there. Satan's right there, not going away. All of these wonderful mythological beings that represent the darkness, okay, the Greek teachers didn't ignore them. They didn't hide them under the bed and then in the closet, right? They were right there.

And so when we have the courage to do that, and yet maintain an open heart full of compassion, a mind full of healthy, positive thoughts, and taking the next great step. Yeah, it's well said. I can't hope I think of the eclipse that's coming up. Sometimes the darkness gets in front of the light, but it passes. You know what it passes by?

Everything comes away and it's not the darkness. All it is is a thorough of this. That's right. I have no idea why everybody's making such a big deal about this. The last one was only seven years ago. I mean, it's not like Haley's comment that comes around once in a lifetime. Okay. Why is, can you explain to me why everybody's making such a big deal out of this eclipse?

Because I don't get it. Remember the year 2000, everybody was up in arms. And then remember it was about the main calendar and the main calendar. We're finished. And it's like, no, no, no, no, no. It's like, wake up, wake up. You know? I don't know.

We're a funny species, aren't we? We are. We are. But I think people can see it. I think I'm a huge fan of symbolism. And I think people can use this. however they want to incorporate it into their lives. Like, hey, I remember when this thing happened,

that's when my life began to change. And if you can use it as that catalyst, by all means, use it as that catalyst. Here is the chance to do it. Yeah, absolutely. Use whatever our lives is a teaching. Yes, yes. As a teaching, as an opportunity, as a caution.

Right. A lot of tails have a caution in them. You know, all of you guys want to go out look at the eclipse, you better get those special glasses. Don't say you weren't forewarned. But on the news, every single light here in Canada, because it's supposed to be good spotting over in Ontario. So don't say, nobody should say they weren't warned.

I agree. So the darkness and the light. There it is. Always a pleasure, Dr. Jessica. I love our conversations. I love learning and getting to explore these. different areas. And it's very helpful to me. I'm hopeful that it's helpful to other people that listen. But before I let you go, would you be so kind as to share with people where they can

find you, what you have coming up and what you're excited about? Okay, well, I'm excited about that is spring. Okay. Mentral winter for those of you don't know, it's really long and dark. Okay. And in March, we actually change our clocks and we go into daylight saving and all of a sudden it's late until 7 o'clock at night instead of dark at 3.30 in the afternoon. And so spring, is ah and the trees are starting little buds and little coquises are coming up so it's April. So that's a mean thing that I'm looking forward to is just just spring shedding the heavy coats and the boots and just being able to and then waiting for the moment when our outdoor pool opens. People can find me if you're interested in my work you can find it on my website which is Reverend Dr. Jessica Rochester. That's R-E-D-R-Jessica Rochester. And you will find lots of videos and audios, publications, access.

You can find my books on, I would just go through Amazon or through the publisher on my website. And just a note that most of what's on my website is available for free, for educational purposes, because I want to do my part and wake up, wake up. Well, I think we're definitely doing that here. doing that here and everybody who's listening i would recommend buying both books iawasca awakens volume one and volume two their guidebooks and you don't while you will probably want to read them all the way through you can find particular chapters that speak to you i found them incredibly helpful and i think that you will to go check out the new website it's redone it's beautiful it's easy

to navigate and there's so much free information and good information i hope everybody takes a moment to do it if you're interested in in having dr jessica come and speak or or or reach out to her. She's available. And that's all we got for today, ladies and gentlemen. I hope you have a beautiful day. And I hope that you realize you're a miracle and that the light is out there. All you have to do is look for it.

That's all we got, ladies and gentlemen. Aloha.