How's embossed summer been for you so far?

You know, it's funny because before I even like was getting ready to come on the call, I was reflecting on how I feel I've been in a little bit of an altered state like for a few weeks now.

So conditions to have this conversation.

But yeah, just the combination of the heat like above and below and side is like the flavor of agitation that puts you in a little bit.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that's where I'm coming in from.

conversations which i love um but i'll just throw that out there and you guys can dive in and i can jump on too

But I'll just throw that out there and you guys can dive in and I can jump on to.

Yeah, I guess it's important to say, too, like where that question has been coming from is just noticing that.

In my own practice and also trying to write and trying to prepare curriculum, like whatever it is, it's the sense of... creating the conditions in myself for something to emerge, but also that last thread around like the hunter and being hunted came from an experience I had last week where I was like going out to try to almost catch the spirit of the story.

You know, I was, I've been doing that in my practice where I'm like, I'll spend some time writing and accumulating ideas and then I'll just go out and go for a walk and try to like catch the story, you know?

It

was so wild because I was walking and I was very leaned in to like looking for something.

And I felt out of my periphery, like suddenly the roles were reversed very imminently.

And I felt fear in like a... really beautiful activating way but I realized like the story was almost like hunting me you know the yeah and it was such a good wake up call so fucking humbling because I'm like oh I think I'm in control here I think I'm in the lab like creating the conditions for something to come through me and meanwhile like it's just watching and waiting to see if I'm paying attention and actually kind of teasing me a little bit you know um So that's where that thread comes from.

We don't have a context for it, right? So how do you work with Westerners, people who have a Western mindset, a material mindset, and we're wanting to, we're craving that belonging, we're wanting to plug back in, but it's so much conditioning to unwind.

Yeah.

Oh my gosh, that's such a, it's...

I mean, that's the whole kind of nexus of why I feel this work is so important and also so challenging, [chuckles] because it asks us to actually like sift through our whole sense of reality in many ways, you know? And I actually will say that in order to begin to bring folks who are really doubting, I mean, the, the number one, I, I think I've heard it every time I've held an ancestor circle or worked with folks one-on-one, is this question of what if I'm making it up? How do I know if I'm not just making it up? And it's such a s- like, a holy question, [laughs] you know? Because that right there is, like, our whole sense of reality in that question, right? And so in, in many ways, I don't, I don't feel it's possible to force trust, right? I don't think it's possible to, um, try to just get past the doubt, and I often tell folks to use that question of, like, "What if I'm making it up?" Rather than allow it to be a barrier and, and start to create resistance, it's like use that question as...

I, I picture it almost as, like, a boat that we're using to carry us somewhere deeper.

Like, we can't resist the question, because in that is the threshold between individuality and relationship to everything else.

Um, and we have to sit with it for a while.

At the beginning, you mentioned this piece that not all ancestors are well, and we can inherit both the gifts and also the traumas and the pain points, and just kind of fleshing that part out a little bit deeper.