This is Delicious Dignity, where we cultivate a self so potent, so clear, so vital, so truthful that our life is all the more luscious for it. Let's call ourselves into being, shall we? Hello, lovelies. It feels like it's been so very long since I last spoke with you. It's just I've been letting so much time pass in between recording each episode, just because it's honestly been feeling like the universe is co-writing the episodes with me, which sounds like really new agey woo-woo crap, but that's literally been what's been happening. The more time I allow in between episodes, the more I get these events and situations that happen that end up being my research for the episode. It leads me into a deeper and deeper understanding of the topic that I myself was presenting. So I start off with a topic because I know this is part of the pattern I want to talk about, or part of the episode I want to talk about. And then bam, all of a sudden, events, people, situations, things start happening to deepen my own understanding of the topic that I myself chose. So that's why it feels like it's being co-written with the universe, spirit, God, whatever you want to call it. And that's what happened with this episode too. And I'll talk about that as we go through it. But anyway, in this episode, this is part five of us exploring how we self-abandon and why we self-abandon, and how that's directly related to whether or whether or not we can carry a sense of dignity within us. In this episode, I am positing to you, I am offering you the explanation that a lot of us have been through an education system that relied and even required us to abandon ourselves. This episode in this series is about talking about how we're trained to self-abandon by the education system, and therefore we start to develop kind of an imposter syndrome, which causes us to further abandon ourselves on top of the already existing self-abandonment as we grow up. Throughout this episode, I'm gonna give you stories as usual. I'm gonna explain how this happens. And at the end of this episode, as always, I will give you prompts, journal prompts, just contemplation prompts, and even offer you a solution to this pattern. And it's likely gonna really surprise you with the insights you will get. So I'm really, really super excited about this episode. So before we go into more detail, I mentioned imposter syndrome. And just in case you're not familiar with all the self-development jargon that is out there, that was sarcasm. You totally don't have to be familiar with it. But imposter syndrome is mostly a psychological pattern, and you see this often in women, but also in some men, where a person doubts their skills, their talents and accomplishments, and is kind of like overwhelmed with this fear of being exposed as a fraud. Even when there's clear evidence that they are successful, that they are competent, that they are well liked, there's always this feeling like they are some kind of an imposter, some kind of a make-believe person inside their own body that's playing a part and a role in their own life. It's like you're an actor in the play of your own life and you're afraid that you will be found out. People will finally know what kind of idiot you are, what kind of bad person you are. You know, there's always this feeling of being found out. So that whole puzzle piece is the imposter syndrome, all the little puzzle pieces. This constant self-doubt, this fear of being exposed for being a fraud, just this chronic feeling of being like an actor in their own life. That's all imposter syndrome. And then I also use the word education system. So when I say education system, I do actually mean the system or the machine that is behind this thing that we have dubbed education, which I will say is more like a grandiose version of just saying sanctioned brainwashing. But when I say education system, I do mean the system. It means the schools, the teachers, even religion, if religion was the bedrock of the school, parents, how they reacted to the system, other kids in the system, all of that comprises the education system. I'm not just talking about the books and the teachers, I'm talking about all of it. So this connection between education system, imposter syndrome, self-abandonment, dignity, I can assure you, is not something you've ever seen before discussed or heard before discussed in our case. So it might be a brand new perspective. So just take your time with it. And I'm also going to remind you, as with every episode in this self-abandonment series, I will remind you this is about recognition. It's not about trauma dumping, it's not about fondling your trauma. It's about seeing the matrix, the matrix of self-abandonment that we've created as a society and as a planet. Now, in this episode, I want to say that I'm being highly, highly critical of the education system. But some of you might take offense to that. And maybe you're a teacher, you know someone who's a teacher, maybe you loved school. I'm not sure what I can say to you. I'm sure there are a lot of teachers that are great. I'm sure there are a lot of people who think they've had a great schooling experience. But again, the system is fundamentally flawed. And those flaws cause a lot of pain to children who grew up into confused adults and don't even realize that the pain started and was amplified in the school system. And I honestly think that anyone who tries to refute that and try to say that that's not true, I don't know what kind of Garden of Eve paradise you were born into, but that's not a lot of the experiences that people have had within the education system. And some of you have had a great school experience, and I'm not here to poop on your party. I'm not here to yuck your yum. I would still invite you to think about education and learning as concepts and what that means for you today. Who gets to educate you? Why, and what on? Who shaped what and how you learned? These are really important questions because what we learn is what we take in. We are learning. What we take in is how we bring out into the world. And that's all related to self-abandonment and dignity. I'm going to share two perspectives on the education system. One is personal. So it happened to me, and one that's happened to an entire race. Again, once again, the reason I don't talk about other people's stories is because it's not mine to tell. This is a personal story that I can give you details on. And the thing that happened to an entire race is history that a lot of people just don't want to admit even happened, but we need to talk about it. And the reason I'm giving you these two perspectives is so that you can fully understand what schools have done to our learning and education and how detrimental they can be when they're done wrong. And most of us went through this system where it was just done wrong. Let's get into it. Who gets to educate you, why and what on, who shaped what and how you learn. So just keep those questions in mind as I tell you these stories and think about your own childhood. Think about your own school life. Think about what you learned, how you sat in the classroom, who was teaching you, the other children around you. Think about all of this. I'm not talking your university life if you went to college. I'm talking much before that, because by the time you got to university, you were already in your teenage years. And by then your brain had mostly all formed. Mostly. So I'm talking about when your brain was still forming and how those patterns were set in during your school life. So let's begin. A few years ago, I think it was about maybe seven or eight years ago, I was struggling with this severe inability to act because I was terrified that someone would find me out. I thought I was a poser. I thought, who am I to do intuitive readings for people? Who am I to be a life coach? Who am I to host rituals or book clubs or make art or basically anything that was not a corporate job? I felt like I was a poser. I felt like people would find me out and humiliate me or hurt me or tell me that I'm a bad person. And so because of that, I just wouldn't do anything at all, or it would take a lot of effort just to do something I wanted to do. I remember when I wanted to write poetry, I would write the poem and then sit there and look at it and say really nasty things to myself that who are you to write poetry? You think you're so good at poetry. How can you write poetry? And all I did was write a poem down. There was just no need to think that way, but it was severe. And that's the best way I can put it. It was a severe feeling. I think about every possible worst-case scenario, and it played out in my head just so that I could be prepared for every eventuality, which is impossible, really, but I attempted it anyway. And it all had to do with how other people would perceive what I was doing and how they would hurt me because of the way they were perceiving me, and how they would mock me or tell me I was a bad person for doing what I was doing. And keep in mind, it was a poem or a book club. It was not that serious. At the time when I was going through this, there was a big movement in the self-development community about the imposter syndrome. And when people described it, I thought, yes, this is something that I've gone through and I am going through, and this is a thing. And people would say it came from childhood because you didn't get enough encouragement as a child and this and that. And that was all well and good, but it never really hit home for me. It felt like I was missing something. It felt like nobody was telling me the complete picture. And the important distinction I want to make here is that I never doubted my ability to do something. I doubted whether or not other people would value it and whether they would hurt me for it. That's the difference, right? That's the imposter in there. And one day I just decided to sit down with my intuition and write to it and get answers as to why I am like this, you know? And as I was writing to my intuition, I was taken to this memory in my school life when I was maybe nine or 10 years old. And I was taken to this memory of being praised and being shown off and being complimented for getting good grades. And I just sat there thinking, why am I getting this memory? I was being praised, I was being complimented. Why is that a bad thing? But I remembered the anxiety I felt about being found out, being found out to not be smart, to not be valuable, because all I was good at was getting good grades. My school required memorization. It didn't require learning. We had to memorize entire textbooks. And then I would memorize it, throw it out during the exams, and then forget about everything I learned because I was just going to school to take exams. I was not going to learn. Nobody really was in my school. And I didn't really enjoy school or what I was learning. I didn't like pretty much any subject I learned, with the exception of geometry and English. So to be praised for something I didn't like, didn't actually earn, made me riddled with anxiety. Even when I was at the top of my class, I was just scared that the next time I wouldn't be so lucky. And that blew my mind because that is when it first started. This anxiety about being found out. And then as I went through my education, I started remembering different things about my education. I was given the impression that art wasn't valuable. And it really wasn't. And the art that we did learn was kind of like, oh, we have to take an art class because we have to be well-rounded, ha ha. But nobody really cared. And the art was all about drawing human figures, which I was not good at. And I remember feeling such shame that I was a bad artist, which is so hilarious now because now, if you know me, all I do is art. But I don't draw human figures. But I was graded against something that was the standard because education in art was about drawing human figures according to this school. And I was not good at that, which meant, according to the school, I was a bad artist. In eighth grade, I could choose a track between commerce, science, or arts. And I only chose commerce because I was scared I wouldn't get good grades in science and arts. And since arts was looked down upon anyway, I chose the middle ground. I chose learning based on the grade I could get, not what I really sincerely wanted to learn. I also remember being forced to learn my math tables. And I do emphasize the word force. It was a subject called mental math where you had to do calculations in your head. Seven times seven is etc. etc. And I got so good at memorizing all of it. And now the funniest part is I've forgotten it all. I couldn't tell you what seven times seven is now. And it's not because that I'm stupid or not intelligent. It's simply because I think it's a form of trauma for me to remember those tables. It was just something I learned to get a grade, not something I was genuinely interested in. And the other day in a movie, somebody said, What's eight times eight? And it took me a solid minute to remember what that was. And I felt so much shame, the shame of not knowing what eight times eight was. Because that was the model of intelligence we were raised with. How well you can memorize, whether or not you can do mental math, because that apparently is a sign of intelligence. So you see how the self-abandonment has started. I'm going to choose based on where I can get good grades. I'm going to memorize things just to please the system. And so I can just get past the system and get to the other side. And not to mention my teachers too. The teachers in my school, they were not friends, they were not people who were well-wishers. They were to be feared. And some of them were outright cruel. I remember one time coming to school, I was in fourth grade. And for some reason, I can't even remember what the reason was, she was just in a bad mood. My teacher was in a bad mood and I didn't do anything, but I don't know why she was in a bad mood. And she grabbed me by the arms and flung me across the room, and my head hit the wall. And I didn't do anything. It was nothing that I had done. The teacher was just in a bad mood. So there was this element of fear, this element of control of behave yourself or else. And that was part and parcel of this thing called an education system. Now, a lot of us look back at those memories, and I myself included, and think, oh, I wasn't that bad. Oh, I guess I could have just taken it in my stride, and I did take it in my stride. But when you start looking at the pattern, that is why I call this the pattern of self-abandonment, you start to see all the pieces come into this web of how you see yourself, how you understand yourself, how you behave in the world. And you start to see how all these things shape your decisions. Because the truth is, I loved science. I absolutely loved science. And now I study astrophysics for fun. But back then I just didn't think I could get a good grade. So I dropped it completely in eighth grade. Any system that makes a child feel like they have to pursue the grade over pursuing learning, it's not really education, is it? It's brainwashing. And any school that makes a child think that mental math is a sign of intelligence and not knowing your math means you're stupid, that's not an education system. That's brainwashing. Any system that requires you to control a child by instilling in them the fear of physical abuse is not an education system. It is a brainwashing control mechanism. My point is that shame and fear is a central figure in a lot of the school systems, not just mine. It was there in overt gestures and covert words and gestures that maybe you couldn't quite pinpoint, but it was there. And can you see now what I mean by schooling having self-abandonment as a feature? Now things changed a lot when I went to university, but the damage was already done. It was just done, right? I was praised for things that were not mine. I was praised for things that were not me. I was praised for things that were not learning, not education, and not real success. I was even encouraged. So the messaging I got, and I feel like a lot of children got, is you're better when you're not you. The message we got is who you are is something we need to correct, is something we need to make appropriate. We're not even interested in who you are or investing the time to find out who you are. We're only interested in you being just like everyone else. And now I want to give you a more extreme example, as though that what I just told you wasn't slightly extreme. This is taking the education system to the most extreme so you can see how education and the school system in general has been used as a weapon of control and dominance. You remember in part three of this series, I think I remember telling you, I think it was the childhood emotional neglect part in this series, I mentioned how children are almost never offered any respect. Children are just little things that have to obey you and follow you around and be just like their mommy and daddy, right? And I think that's part of this education system. There's a lot of that. Let's go into this example, and this is the example that applies to an entire race of people. And those people are Native Americans. Now, I'm well aware that Native Americans is a broad general word. There are many, many tribes within Native America, but for the sake of this story I'm going to tell you, or rather, the history I'm going to tell you, I'm just going to refer to them as Native Americans. Now, when white people started to come to America, Native American children were forcibly taken from their homes, or the parents were manipulated to send their children to these schools called boarding schools. And this happened at a federal level. So the US federal government and religious institutions combined removed hundreds of thousands of Native American children from their families and placed them in boarding schools that were far away from their tribes. I think it started in 1819, and the last school in Canada at least closed in 1997. In the millennial generation, these schools were finally shut down. And some still exist today, if I'm not mistaken. But this was a huge movement of removing children from the parents. Now they call them boarding schools, but what the missive was by the white colonialists coming to the land, their literal mission was, they outlined this, so this is not made up. They actually said the words, kill the Indian, save the man. And that was the whole point of the boarding schools. Meaning, for those of you who don't know, Native Americans are called Indians in America, even though they're not at all Indian. It's just that one guy called Columbus made the mistake of thinking he came to India, but he actually came to America. And so that's why he called them Indians, but they're not Indians. But anyway, kill the Indian, save the man. And the whole goal was to strip children of all their indigenous heritage, all their family ties, and force them into basically becoming white American children. It was a forced self-abandonment to the absolute extreme. And they explicitly said that this was their intention. This is not made up. This has actually happened. So the other thing, uh, like children were forbidden from speaking their native languages. They were forbidden by uh practicing their traditional practices, they were forbidden to wear their traditional clothing, they were given forced haircuts. A lot of them had long, gorgeous hair, and they were all forced haircuts upon them because they had to shorten their hair and look more like white kids. And they even replaced their names. So their traditional Native American names, they replaced them with English ones. Now, at these so-called boarding schools, children faced anything from physical, sexual, cultural, and spiritual abuse because these boarding schools were often operated by priests and nuns. And so they would severely neglect them as a form of punishment, even underfeeding them, forcing labor on them. All kinds of things happened at these so-called schools. To give you an example, there's this residential school, a boarding school called Maryville Indian Residential School. I believe it's in Canada. And in that school alone, they found 751 graves at the school. A lot of these children died from disease, from abuse. And there are hundreds and hundreds of burial sites at these so called schools. Before I go any further, I just want to say to all these children. I mean, I don't even know what to say. I I want to say we love you. You're so loved and so cherished and so adored. And I am so very sorry for what happened to you. And yeah, I just want to say that. And also please listen to part four of this series where I talk about patriarchy and colonization and how that's affected our self-abandonment and how that's contributed to it. But depending upon the country and the culture we grew up in, a lot of us suffered similar experiences as these children. Only maybe not so severe, but a lot of us suffered a few pieces of this in our normal schools in India or in wherever else you come from. But even if you didn't, like I said, I would still recommend you need to analyze your relationship with learning and education. What were you taught? And why were you taught this? So in the case of these residential schools or boarding schools, these children were actively told to cut away, and they were abused if they didn't cut away their own culture, their own heritage. Now, one of the things that I told you about early on in this episode is how synchronicity brings more of this to my episodes. And while I was preparing for this episode on education and uh boarding schools and all of this, it was around September 30th, around that day. So it was a few days before that. And September 30th, for those of you who don't know, is Orange Shirt Day, or it's a day dedicated to honoring indigenous children that were forced into these schools and recognizing the loss of culture and identity that's suffered by the generations of these students and just in general respecting what Native Americans have gone through. Around this day, I was just randomly researching all of the information I could find on every single boarding school in Arizona. And all of a sudden, I saw that this movie called Listening and Healing Pilgrimage, it was a documentary done on these boarding schools, was showing only one day as a movie in Sedona. And that day was a few days away from when I was preparing the episode. And that's why I waited because I wanted to see that movie, and it just randomly popped up on my screen. And watching that movie just further elaborated my point and what I was trying to say with these schools. Because in Arizona alone, there were about 47 boarding schools. And they're even saying that in the state of Arizona, it's the third or the fourth largest boarding school located by state in the United States. And so the fact that I'm on this land, I just felt like I needed to know that, you know? And watching this movie, it just showed how the generations that come after the children who've been in these boarding schools also get affected. And that just makes me so sad because so many of us who've been educated by the education system, we pass it down to our children. There was a man who gave his testimony in this movie. His name was Sam Hubbard, and he said something so poignant. He said, our mother wanted us to make something of ourselves. So she sent us to these boarding schools. And we just kept complaining to her and saying, please don't send us here. Please don't send us here. School is awful. And after a while, we just stopped complaining because she wouldn't listen to us. Our mother wouldn't listen. How many of us have felt the same way with our parents after what we went through? We just stayed silent and endured, right? And that turns into dismissing how we felt as children. Because if we complain and the adults don't protect us, then we're also just going to scapegoat ourselves and pretend how we felt in school doesn't really matter. We can endure, we can just fight it off. We'll just take it in our stride. Ha ha, that happened. So what? And the testimony of these survivors, they mentioned a few things that happened to them after coming out of these schools. And I think a lot of you can resonate with what they felt. They said they became super independent, hyper-independent, because they couldn't rely on anyone. They stopped talking about their feelings. They keep things private and make it private family business. And trauma, as we know, lives in silence. They don't talk about it and it just continues on. And then one last testimony I want to tell you about how education is so different and learning is so different from what we think it is. There was a witness from this or survivor of these boarding schools who said, what they taught us was that looking into people's eyes means that we're telling the truth. And in our culture, we don't need to look in people's eyes because it's disrespectful. So they would often look away from the nuns' eyes or the teacher's eyes, and they would interpret that as they were not speaking the truth. And then they would get beat for not looking in their teacher's eyes. Do you see what I mean? It's something so simple as body language is interpreted through the aggressor's lens. If the aggressor says it's forbidden or it's not allowed, or it means you're a liar, or it means you're bad or wrong or insane or whatever, or you're a savage or a barbarian, then that's the only reality you know. Because apparently not looking into somebody's eyes means you're lying. But in certain cultures, it means you're being disrespectful. But if you force a child to do something that's against how they've been brought up, it creates a lot of tension between who to trust, how to trust, and forcing a trust in something just for the sake of protecting themselves and not being abused. And you know, if you think that this is something that only happened hundreds of years ago, like I said, the last boarding school apparently closed in 1997. So that's not that far long ago. And also now with the Trump administration, we're seeing a lot of MAGA theology and doctrines being forced into the school education system here in America. So the brainwashing on a political level is happening right now as we speak. I want you to remember yourself in, let's say, fifth grade or sixth grade, even in your school system. Just imagine yourself back there. And I want you to just contemplate the answers to this question. These are a lot of questions. You might find that you want to pause the episode and write down your answers. I recommend that you do that. But if you just want to contemplate silently, you can. So just go back to that time when you were in fifth or sixth grade and ask yourself, What have you been taught? Who is teaching you? How was your learning measured? How was your success measured? What was considered considered intelligence in your family? What was considered intelligence in your culture? What was considered intelligence in your school? What was considered valuable as an outcome of your learning? How much of what you learned in school do you use today? What are all the things you abandoned in your school to fit in or to avoid being punished or to avoid being abused? What truly interested you in school? What interests you now? Who gets to teach you or educate you and why? So I'm going to answer some of these questions myself just to get your contemplation going because sometimes when a topic is difficult, we shut down so much that we don't know how to open back up unless we have someone else open up first. So that is my whole intention in giving you the answers to these questions. So listen with soft ears and see how it goes for you. So I'll start from the beginning. I was taught to obey how to obey and comply and do what I've been told. That is what I had been taught by sixth grade. The people who taught me were women, men, but people who just seemed really strained and temperamental and overly conservative women were teaching me. The children who go to those boarding schools that I talk about, they would have said the people who taught them were colonizer, colonizers, priests, religious figures, mostly males and backwards women. Also, who has taught me? Fear taught me more than anything else. Fear was the teacher. How was my learning measured? It was measured by pretending as though vomiting up memorized material on paper in an exam was learning, and then grading that learning in a grade by ranking students against each other and putting those rankings up on a blackboard. That was how my learning was measured. It was not learning at all. It was not understanding the material, it was simply memorization. My success was measured in terms of grades, maybe answering questions in class or being the first to answer questions in class. It was always about who comes first, who's the one that's going to answer the question. And the ranking system, as I said, would be on display for everyone to know who's the most intelligent person by who memorized the most and vomited it out on a paper. What was considered intelligence in my family and even in my culture was intellect. There's a heavy intellectual bias. If you don't have intellect, you're not intelligent. If you're a laborer, as an example, or you work with your hands, you're poor and you're stupid. Intelligent people work at the desk. There was a lot of like education being tied to class and caste and religion in India. What was considered intelligence in my culture were doctors, lawyers, engineers. Mostly doctors, if I'm being honest. And what was considered intelligence in my school was just that grades. What was considered valuable as an outcome of learning was grades. Again, how much of what I learned in school do I use today? Maybe 5%. Maybe. What are all the things that I abandoned in school to fit in? Honestly, myself. I abandoned my interests. I abandoned my curiosity. I abandoned my desire to learn. I abandoned my desire to understand. Or maybe I just never even developed those things in the first place. And when I asked myself these questions, you know what else came out of it? Was really surprising insight is that I was not a very physical girl in school. I never participated in any sports because the sports that were allowed or celebrated in my school were sports like running, jumping, things like that. And I was not interested in those. I remember being interested in skateboarding, in rollerblading, in swimming, but none of those things were an acceptable sport in school. They weren't even introduced. I was not a sporty person. I was not considered sporty, but that wasn't true because I was sporty. I was a champion swimmer. But because it was not acceptable in the new school that I had joined, suddenly I was not sporty. I didn't do any of the physical things that I loved in my school because there was just no opportunity to. And I sucked at running and all the other sports that were part of the sports that were acceptable. So, do you see how if the system doesn't support a variety of interests, then those interests become something that's not acceptable and not part of what is considered successful. And now all the things I wanted to learn in my school life, I'm learning now in my 20s and 30s, which is why I'm saying if you answer those questions, you can give yourself the chance to learn again. Like I said, one of the things I learned is I learn a lot of science. I love science and I love arts. I'm learning all kinds of things now, how to draw, how to paint, how to do pottery. And I have absolutely no interest in commerce or business at all, which is so funny, right? Because there's no one grading me. I can choose the teacher, I can choose the subject, I can choose the book and who I want to learn from and how I want to learn it. And you know what I don't do now? I don't blame myself anymore for not remembering things or not being able to memorize things. So I really want you to go through all those questions and see what you can glean from it and see whether that grading system, as an example, just the way the system worked to grade you. How do you grade yourself now? And on what basis do you grade yourself? Even something as small as that might be an insight into how you want to live your life and what you want to choose to do with your career, with your hobbies, or really anything at all. So I did promise you the solution to all of this, right? And when I say solution, by the way, I know this is not something simple to introduce. But I will also say it is something simple to introduce if we're focusing on just the family unit and not on a broad, countrywide system. Because changing a system is difficult. It takes time. But changing how your family operates, how you operate, even if you don't have a family, changing how you operate can really help other people around you. I've seen how my desire to learn has changed my friend's ability to be a beginner at something. I've seen that happen. So don't underestimate how your choices free up and give permission to the people around you to make different choices. So the solution to a flawed education system is to bring back apprenticeship, is to bring back guardianship, is to bring back stewardship. So what do I mean by this? Apprenticeship. Let's start with that. Meaning you work with somebody to as an apprentice. So, you know, we take this concept from blacksmithing, right? If a blacksmith wanted to pass down the trade, the person comes and apprentices with them for a few years or whatever to learn the trade. Similar thing for whatever you want to do now. I mean, if you have a child, that's a different story, how you want to structure that. But let's just say you as an adult now, if you wanted to become an apprentice, maybe you ask your local barista to give you little trainings on how to make coffee art. And you apprentice with this barista. Maybe you follow them around if they let you, not as a stalker with permission, consent is key, please. Imagine following around your local barista with no explanation whatsoever. Oh boy. Uh the second thing is guardianship. What do you want to guard? What is really important to you to protect? Are you interested in protecting water? Are you interested in protecting the trees? Are you interested in protecting children? What really makes you feel protective? Go ahead and learn about it. So if you feel protective towards conserving water or finding new sources of water, maybe read up on water politics. Maybe read up on water harvesting. And the third thing is stewardship that I mentioned. So what do you want to be a steward of? It's kind of the same thing as saying, what do you want to guard and protect? But being a steward means someone that carries the torch of something. So maybe you're not resonating with the word guard or protect. Maybe you're more a steward or a caretaker of something. So maybe there is a community garden that you want to take care of. Maybe you want to build a community garden and take care of it. Maybe you want to plant wildflower seeds that are native to the land everywhere you go and sprinkle some here and there to repopulate the native plants. And that's how you want to steward. Of course, do this responsibly, but you will research it on your own. So that's what I mean. This is what I mean by learning. Learning is something that happens naturally when you're interested in something, not something that's forced upon you. By the way, if you're hearing any background noise, it's because the rain has come here in Sedona and it's gorgeous and it's beautiful, and I just think it's amazing that it's raining as I speak to you. Along with this concept of what is learning, it's also what is something that is worth it to you to be good at. And anything you love is worth learning about. What a concept. Anything you love is worth learning about. And if you have a child and you're wondering how to teach your child, let's say like you have to put them through an education system because you feel like that'll give them a leg up in life. I am not here to say that you shouldn't do that. I think you already are aware of what's happening more than anyone. I would say perhaps give them a supplemental education in whatever way you choose. So, for example, it's really easy if the skill is physical. You want to teach your child something like rock polishing that's random. But that's what I mean. It's just easier if it's physical and it's something they can touch and feel and kind of grapple with with their own hands. And that is almost the opposite of the instinct we are taught, which is intelligence is intellect. What I'm arguing for is that intelligence is so many things. It is not just about knowledge, it is not just about your mind. Our education system has made us so mental. I do mean that as a pun, as a double entendre. It's made us mental, it's made us mad, it's made us a little bit crazy. And let's bring it down from the head. Let's get it into our bodies, into our fingers and into our toes. So it's a lot easier to have a child educate themselves in a good way, in a proper way, if it's physical. So that could be a clue, even for you. Try finding something physical to learn. I think the world today is more aware than ever before. And I think parents are already enrolling their children in earth-based schools and all of that. And I think that's great. I think that's happening and that's awesome. But what about the rest of us? What about our parents' generation, the millennial generation? We need to heal from this. And what I just told you is a way to do so. To give you ideas of what I'm learning. So maybe that'll jog up your interests. So these are all the physical things I've been learning since I got out of the school system. Because it's long, right? I learned pottery, I learned painting, I learned drawing, I learned how to make herbal remedies, I learned how to make rose alcohol, I learned how to design jewelry, I learned how to design, period. I learned how to arrange flowers. Ikibana, you know, the Japanese style of arranging flowers. I learned how to cut glass, all the glass bottles and wine bottles, and turn them into little cups and toothbrush holders. I learned how to make candles. I learned how to write poetry. I learned how to make smoke bundles with cedar and sage and pine. You see what I'm saying? The opportunities are endless. My lovelies, I really hope that we have led you a little bit more, even more, out of self-abandonment and into more and more of your dignity, your beautiful dignity. So, my lovelies, until next time, may your education never get in the way of your dignity. May your education always be in service to your dignity. And may anything and everything you learn be in service to strengthening your dignity. Much love to you. Much, much love to you. Bye for now.