At the end of this. This is a new program where, I mean, I've used Riverside a few times, and it's the recording quality is incredible. But the only thing is at the end, it will it'll take a bit of time depending on your internet to upload. So I might just have to ask you just to leave the screen open while it show upload. But yeah, just go about your day. However, you need to, I won't hold you off. It's just that we just need to keep that open. It's all, All right, so I will do a quick little intro, and then let's talk about your book and all the juicy things that. Yeah, research and everything that you've done. I'm so excited to. Yeah. Pick your brain. So today we are speaking with Valerie Ringland, author of the transformative book Healing Through Indigenous Wisdom. In her work, Valerie drops some pretty profound truth bombs and gives a 52 week, 52 weeks worth of practical activities that are designed to help us explore and deepen our connection to ourselves, our land, and our ancestry. Valerie, who holds a PhD and has extensive knowledge, extensive experience in both Indigenous and Western healing practices, is here to challenge cultural expression and help us break free from the patterns of diseased thinking. She's on a mission to inspire healing and connection and reconnection, but guiding us to recover our indigenous identities and integrate supportive tools and practices into our lives. So welcome, Valerie. So nice to have you here. Thank you. It's a lovely intro. You're so welcome. So I'm only halfway through your book at the moment, and I just what I love about it is, is the, the tie between. There's just so many concepts and so many things within it. You know, you go from grief to ritual to ceremony to trauma, and there's so many avenues that you not only just read about, but you're unpacking your internal landscape by doing the practices. And I would firstly just love to know and hear your story around wanting to write this book and dive down this path of helping people to recover their indigenous identities. Thank you. I can't say that I had this conscious idea any time. It just emerged after quite a lot of work. But, I'll just quickly say that I'm very privileged to be on beautiful UN country on the south coast of New South Wales now, and to currently be looking out my window at the beautiful Goolagong Mountain, which is, a mother mountain to all of us here, and very sacred to the UN peoples. And there's something really healing happening that had very strong human mother figures about feeling this connection with, a land for mother figure. And I feel like that's really important in a lot of this work is, I think we've been over relying on humans in a way that's quite ungrounded for a really long time. And I hadn't sort of consciously realized that, until farther in my journey, because on my dad's side, we're indigenous to northern Germany. We're a small group called East Friesians. He was the first one to move away from country that we know of. And so we used to visit there every second year, and it was like I got this refueling being on the land, but then being, also from my mother's lineage, which is Jewish, Sumerian and very ungrounded, having been away from country for many, many generations, dating way back to southern Iraq originally. I feel like I always had this dual lens of having some understanding of that depth and belonging and some understanding of the struggle and dislocation. And then my father, having moved, had this first generation dislocation. So I was born on Shawnee land, what we would call Ohio in the US and grew up in the US. So then there's that other piece of multiculturalism for me, which is my body is from Turtle Island, and so I have this very profound connection there. And to, some of the indigenous practices there. And I've been really fortunate to do quite a lot of, knowledge sharing work with some of the indigenous peoples there, specifically, a elder and his community named Joseph Real. And. An Aztec dancer some years ago. So then I grew up as well, on former Cherokee land. That was the start of the Trail of Tears. And it was also slavery, land. It was also Martin Luther King's birthplace. So very tumultuous land with lots of trauma in it. In the South. And I feel like I just got this sort of cocktail. Growing up, I always knew I wanted to do conflict resolution because it was just constantly in my world. I had this Jewish, German, indigenous, slavery, black, white, genocide. Like I just had all this stuff around me. And then in my own life, I had a lived experience of, sexual trauma and some other intergenerational traumas in my family that wasn't dealt with well. So in my own healing journey, I got into the restorative justice movement. I did that for about a decade. I was really passionate about it. Sort of culminated for me. I was working in Melbourne and I was facilitating circles on clergy abuse with what we called priests of integrity, who really wanted to take responsibility on behalf of the church and people who had been abused or had family members who'd been abused. And I found it really amazing that, level of healing that people were able to go through when it was linked with spirituality, because previously I had done a lot of restorative justice in more sort of sterile environments in a school or university or, you know, something like that. So that really got my juices flowing, and I thought, I know it's taboo, but how would you do the spirit of restorative justice in sexual trauma healing? Because that's what I feel like I need. And at that point, like a lot of people, I been looking around, I had gone to an energy healer. I'd, you know, been to the jungle and, worked with a shaman and done some ayahuasca. And I tried a lot of things, and I just found certain things were not enough. I found therapy, which was this sort of standard approach to trauma. Healing was just not enough for me. It wasn't getting to what I needed to. I really needed ritual, I needed ceremony, I needed community. And so I ended up deciding to do a PhD. I thought I was going to apply restorative justice to. Some of the sexual trauma healing. But I ended up, finding colonial roots and the restorative justice movement and, the leaders that I went to work with ended up in lawsuits against each other, which seems so wrong for what we claimed we stood for. That I pulled back and I was like, okay, well, restorative justice is based on indigenous understandings of justice. So why is it that that occurs differently for me than for these people I'm working with? And I realized it was a real world view issue that I hadn't got to the bottom of until then. I had been coming from this indigenous worldview because of my father's ancestry, and I'd always had that lens, and that's how I'd been able to do knowledge sharing and different things with some other indigenous peoples. But, other people who are coming from purely what I would call the Western or Judeo-Christian world view. And so my way of sort of describing it was recognizing that there was some level of judgment and then forgiveness in everything that I perceive them to be doing. And I was taught that in my Jewish worldview, but in my indigenous worldview, I wasn't experiencing that. I was just expressing acceptance of whatever happened and rolling with it. Right. Okay, I've accepted this. And now what? Boundaries do I need? Or, you know, like I can still feel the anger that set the limits, but I didn't feel like I was in that process of judging, forgiving, judging, forgiving, and in fact, in my culture, that's not considered like the role of us humans to do the judging and forgiving. That's considered like, something that separates larger than us take care of. Right. So, I was noticing that conflict. So I ended up doing this sort of funny dual PhD where most of the people I worked with at the university didn't understand half the work I was doing, or maybe more than half because I was apprenticing with, indigenous elders and community members and working with my own ancestors, doing a lot of, ritual and ceremony work. As well as the university work where I was reading a lot of work by indigenous scholars and trying to weave people's knowledge in that space with knowledge in the indigenous science realm. So I ended up doing a PhD on indigenous trauma healing. And just in the flow of life, when you want something, you know, life tries to bring it to you. I met a woman whose ex-partner had sexually abused their children. She was in touch with him. Her children were grown. He'd already been through prison. He'd done a lot of work to improve himself, and he wanted to do a surrogate dialog with me. So this is what I'd been wishing for for years. Was this opportunity to dialog with someone who'd been in that offending role, but had done a lot of their own unpacking and wanted to share their journey and listen and not judge, but be in that exchange space of accepting each other and learning from each other. So I did a dialog with him and we both found it quite powerful, and he was very emotional at the end. And then he put me in touch with a group I didn't know existed, which was a support group for people who were sex offenders, legally in the US or family members of sex offenders, because, it can be quite hard, for example, when you get out of prison to find a place you're allowed to live or a job, or there's a lot of rules around having that, label on you for the rest of your life. Basically. So I got put in touch with a support group and sent out an email. Who else would be interested in Dialoging? And I got more responses than I could accommodate. So I decided to just, meet with people who could meet me in person. And I did dialogs with, other people who had offended and also family members, moms and an a partner of someone who'd been accused. So. The people at the university where I was were, pretty scared of what I was doing, to be honest and very hands off of me. It's still considered quite taboo. It took me over five years to get that research published, and I had some of what I consider the most absurd critiques. I was called a, victim. Blame her, though in this instance I would have been the victim. So I was told I don't understand the limits of empathy. It was a real struggle to get that work out. But for those of us who participated, everyone, including myself, reported feeling really profound healing and I was asked to continue doing more. But I ended up moving to Australia. Also, to be honest, it's quite painful work and it was a different sort of pain to sit in than the pain that I had been through myself. Which was really valuable in terms of feeling like I was more fully holding the experience. But not something I felt a calling to put myself through for years and years. So that was a big part of that journey of, for me, really feeling like whole and then saying, all right, for me, justice is healing. That's where I landed. And what does that look like practically? And how have I got here? And what can I do that people don't all need to have that particular experience. Right? But what can I do in terms of unpacking my process of how I landed on this and had these experiences that felt really healing in the process leading up to that, and during the time of those, dialogs. So I worked for some other number of years in Australia and some Aboriginal communities, non-Aboriginal communities, government, nonprofit work. But I sort of kept coming back to feeling like I had something brewing in me that wanted to be born. So we ended up as life organizes things, moving into this little shed in the bush. And my husband had enough work that I didn't have to make money for a little while, and I could birth the book. So the 52 week book came to me week by week. So I wanted it to have that integrity of feeling like quiet, very slow and deliberate of people wanted to do it that way as well. And I just would get the topic, for the next week, at the end of the week. And then I'd have, you know, insights and experiences during that week that then led me to feel like all of a sudden one day I'd sit down and it would just come out of me. That was my experience of writing the book. And I took a break when I had a child, a human child, in the middle of writing it. So then I finished it when she was about six weeks old. So it took me slightly longer than a year. And then I prayed for about six months and waited, and I got the name of a publisher come to me in a dream. I wrote them a submission, and I waited a few months, and the day I was giving up in about to email someone else, I got a call saying, we want to publish you. So thank you to Rockpool for following through with that. So that's been the process. It's been very magical and very for me, based in like that sense of flow and trust and faith. Like if I'm doing the unpacking in the building, the rebuilding that I need to be doing, then what I need comes to me and that sense of trusting that life is always there for you, even when it's hard, it's there for you. So what's the lesson that you can turn that hard stuff? You know that crap into fertilizer in your life? So that was maybe a long answer to your question, but that it's still not perfect. It's really beautiful to hear your story, because I think I think, you know, you always see the golden thing at the end of someone's journey, but you actually don't see the the mud and the muck and the, the soil that you had to birth from to create something. And I think the fact that you were brave enough to explore some of this stuff, and I think a huge thing within, in our society and within the world is the fact that, you know, so many of us have moved through trauma, and often the behavior that comes out from trauma can be, shunned. It can be, you know, pushed to the side and, and it and healing happens so much more within community. And so actually calling people out more for their behavior seems to be more productive than, than pushing them out to the side. And then there it just kind of circulates. I would love to firstly, before I would love to talk about trauma at some point because I think it's a really it's really, interesting stuff. And I think the more we, we process trauma individually, but also within community, the more we have capacity to show up for the people in our lives and for ourselves and for the earth. And I think it's really important in this time. But I firstly would love to, to unpack belonging and what belonging means and, and the disconnect that we all sort of share in a sense of like, you know, a lot of us share that, you know, my ancestors are from England and, Ireland and I've never even been there. Right. So there's like, I don't know what their rituals are or the ceremonies are. And so there's this deep longing, I think, for many of us to have that sense of belonging, and that sense of community as well, through belonging. And I would love to hear you how how you've helped others as well rediscover that connection with their ancestors and why it is important that you know or why we can start moving towards that, you know, how can we spark people's curiosity about doing that and why that's important? Yeah, it's an interesting question. When, you know, whoever's culture it is, when your culture, what that means to you stopped honoring and festers. Right. Because some people I've talked to in Australia don't even know where their grandparents were from. And, that's really new in human history that we would be that disconnected and that we would have that level of mobility possible as well. Right. So my perspective on ancestors is you could look at it in the Western science of epigenetics, you could look at it in a more spiritual way of, you know, looking at your lineage. Or you could look at it in past lives, whatever resonates with you. But it's it's spirits, people, energy, however you want to think about it. That wants you to succeed because it led to you, you know, being a seed that has blossomed into being alive. So there's there is a desire from some amount of these energies that you thrive here and carry on that legacy of connection. Right. So, That doesn't mean that you resonate with all of those energies. You might have some values conflicts. There might be some trauma in there. Right. But there is something to work with you are you are wanted. So that's sort of the human energy side. But I think we're thinking about indigenous science. The deepest trauma you can have from that worldview is disconnection from country. And the vast majority of us on the planet right now experience that daily to a point of, I think, being numb to it and the pain and grief of that, most of us have lineages that have been disconnected, you know, so multiple times, if not, multiple lineages being disconnected. Right. And all of the people with European ancestry who think you're the bad guy, as we call in, as other people. Sure. But you were colonized by the Romans and the Mongols and the, you know, just keep going back. We don't know how it all started. A lot of people have experienced both sides of, in your ancestry being removed from your country and then removing someone else. It's been a cycle going on around the world for a long time, which isn't to excuse it, it's just to help have compassion for the different angles of it. And there's a sense to, for me, of trusting that the earth is wanting us where we are and that it's actually possible to feel belonging where you are now, there's some reason that you're there. So I want to bring in a concept, that comes from some Native American cultures. Sometimes called Wendigo or where to go. Or would Taeko I learned of it first from Cree and Ojibwe peoples. And it's personified as a cannibal that is never satisfied. It's just constantly needing more and more and more and more and more. So the idea is actually when we look at a number of cultures and we say, oh, look, you know, the European colonists came to Canada and they brought smallpox and they brought this and that in a lot of the indigenous people died. That's the Western perspective on it. And that's valid. I'm not belittling that, but in an indigenous science perspective. So from some of those cultures as well, actually, there's this, cannibal virus, we, we consider it a psycho spiritual virus, meaning it starts in the head and then enters your spirituality. So the idea is it's really natural that we sometimes have thoughts like, I'm more valuable than you, or that trees better in that tree because I can do these things with it, or my tribe is better than that tribe or whatever the stories are. But the problem with having those thoughts and not reining them in and processing them is we can start to believe them. And when we start to believe in these stories of supremacy, we disconnect ourselves from the interconnectedness of life from the rest of the planet and the Earth. So the story from some of the Ojibwe people they have passed down and shared is that when some French fur trappers first came to some of their communities, they weren't trying to steal the land. They were taking animals and mailing them back home to turn into hats, fur coats, etc. but just encountering, like three men who were trapping their perspective was they had so much of this psycho spiritual virus, they believed so much in these stories of supremacy and disconnection from country, and that their culture was better than another culture, and the men were more valuable than women, and just layers and layers of these stories that encountering them. That community was constantly doing sweat lodges and purification and vision quests and using all of their tools. They had to try to heal. And I couldn't it just absolutely overwhelm them before more people even came and wanted to settle and take any of the land. So for me, that concept, really resonates. And I see it a lot. You can see it, and in capitalism you can see it in certain politics and social groups. But to me, any of those stories of supremacy, when we put belief into them, become incredibly destructive. And when we believe that in any of those, then it's like a stop from us connecting back with what I would consider the all because we've removed ourselves literally from that web of life. And so what I see around the world and struggling is a lot of people experiencing social connectedness, and maybe they would call it social belonging. Full of supremacy stories and yet not experiencing it with other cultures and societies and with the rest of the web of life. So it can be challenging. I find when we doing some of this unpacking and ourselves, we might actually lose some sense of social connectedness. So, for example, I can say I went through a period, of my life where it's like there's a shared wound, in a large way among people with Jewish ancestry, and I could be anywhere in the world, and another person could pick me out of a crowd and say, you're Jewish and come talk to me. And I had that experience very many times. And at some point in my healing journey, I started having dreams and visions of pre Jewish cultural roots. And I felt some things in my body shift and change, and I experienced complete social disconnection from people who still identify as Jewish and practice that religion, which never really resonated with me personally. Now obviously I have some friends who are Jewish. It's not like this big, block, but it's just now no one would pick me out that way anymore. Something's changed inside me and in my energy, in the way I move through the world. And what I carry. So that has been a really interesting, very visceral experience of that social belonging changing, through doing some of this ancestral healing work. And I want to say to when we look at ancestry, we definitely look at our lineages. We also look at ancestry of land. So land where your ancestors have been born or lived for periods of time, land where you live now, land where you were born, and then land where maybe you feel some connection that is important to you, but you don't consciously know why. And then what I call ancestors of spirit. So maybe you just feel some kinship with a particular culture or place. And again, you don't consciously know why, but that's something that you also want to honor. So when I talk about ancestry, I'm thinking about those different definitions of it. And then how do we honor that in our lives? I feel like is an eternal question we could mull on every day. Right. You might honor it by, having a little altar in your house. You might honor it by cooking a favorite meal that your great grandmother passed down. The recipe for. You might honor it by cleaning some, bush near your house that has been mistreated, right? There are so many different ways, but it's more just that the way that you hold the value of it, that then the actions will move through you is what I've found. Yeah. And that's so beautiful, being able to do these practices that we can actually reconnect back. And I feel this even with. So my, my grandpa at the moment has dementia and he seems like he's transitioning. And, you know, he feels like he's in two different worlds in a sense. And you know, every time I start singing, I, I feel his presence and I feel his like love and it's been a beautiful way to reconnect, even though I can't connect with him physically. And so there's it's it's just so beautiful to be able to come back to that and to know that even when we grieve, there's there's this love and this deep honoring within that grief of when someone's passing over to, And I love how you spoke as well about the the never enough this you know, I think that that happens a lot within our society and we're always not and not so much being present in our reality. And we're constantly seeking that, like, okay, but when I get here, I'm going to be happy. But when I get here, I'm going to be happy or, you know, and I think, you know, you spoke in your book as well about addiction and that developing through trauma and yeah, I would love to hear about hear more about those underlying causes of trauma and how they play out within our society and how, you know, coming back to, to, indigenous wisdom can actually help us move through that. Yeah. Well, one of the things that, really strikes me when we look at different cultural perspectives on trauma is even just the, the definition. So the way you look at something is then the way you think about healing or in more of a Western mind, maybe trying to fix it. So if you think about trauma with our Western mind that we all have at this point, right. It's usually pretty negative, right? We have this idea of, oh, well, get through it, build your resilience, you know. Oh, that was tough. But you'll be a stronger person, right? It's not that inspiring. And nobody is really like, oh, I want to go through trauma. They're like, oh, okay. I got, you know, I got it this time. Let me see what if I can get through this or what it looks like on the other side. And, and trauma certainly has an element of ordeal to it. And that isn't necessarily fun, but our understanding around the value of that can make a huge difference to the way we experience it and also the the community and social support that we experience around what we learn. So there's this idea in a lot of indigenous cultures of, for lack of a better word, in English, what I would call a shaman's illness. So if you are a really great swimmer, chances are, as you were growing up, people around you noticed. And if you wanted to develop that gift, they probably, you know, offered you some help. We could take you to these lessons. You could try out for this, right? If you are an a really amazing empath, you are an amazing visionary and can just see all sorts of things with your inner I. I mean, I could name a number of different guests. We would consider more spiritual gifts. In our current culture, you're much more likely to at best feel invisible and more likely, feel problematize, and really struggle to develop those gifts with not a lot of guidance. So in a more traditional, you know, communal indigenous cultural setting, which we all have had somewhere back in our ancestry, wise elders would have picked out people with all sorts of different gifts, you know, physical gifts, spiritual gifts, emotional gifts, whatever it is, intellectual gifts. And then offered guidance on how to, you know, slowly, slowly, step by step, develop them. In lieu of that, I find that a lot of us with spiritual gifts and modern culture, Experience a number of traumas, near-death experiences, have all sorts of things that are pretty dysfunctional in our lives by the time we leave our parents house and often are struggling to understand why things are so hard for us. But some of it from this perspective, is a calling, and it's actually a huge spiritual gift. And it's really important to heed that calling and say, for whatever reason, I wasn't picked by, you know, life to be the best swimmer I've been picked to heal some, you know, ill in my family or culture or whatever it is. And so this is my gift to my family, community, etc., to go through this ordeal. Learn. Because when we go through trauma, we change our sense of identity and self, right? Learn, change my understanding of myself in the world and then come back with this new knowledge and share it. Now. Ideally we would be supported through the process recognized when we're going through it, and then our knowledge would be valued and implemented when we get out the other side. And in the current society, sometimes none of those things happen, and it's just hard. But part of valuing ourselves and valuing our own lives is continuing to go through it and and find our own, you know, community and support networks where we do feel that. So that's been a big drive for me in creating the book. And the small community that I can help sustain is helping people feel a bit more social belonging. When we step out of some of those supremacy stories of belonging that most of us grew up in, so that we feel some social support while we're also feeling all of this interconnection with the rest of the earth. And I do really have an attitude of like, people often will say, why me? And I think that's quite a victim. Thought what it's really it's, you know, why? Why not me? Like there's so many species going extinct on the planet. There's trees trying to grow out of concrete and all sorts of terrible chemicals in the water. Fisher breathing like, why not me experiencing trauma to, like, why wouldn't I be right? There's just a lot of it going around right now. We're kind of big transition. So, so that's a big one is really valuing that. And and seeing it potentially as a spiritual calling, to become an elder, maybe before you feel ready, to bring some gifts to the world and then work out where they're going to be valued and how you can share it in a creative way in the current society, that some people might receive it and it might not be the people you want to receive it. You might really want your family to listen to you, but you find that they're just not ready. And these people over here are really ready. You know, going where it's fertile is important. I think. So that's a big part of trauma healing from that perspective. And then two others I'll just touch on and we can unpack more potentially. I said disconnection from the Earth as a big one. And, we talked about that. The other two that I found through my research was, a concept called soul loss, sometimes called Sisto in some, Latin American cultures where there's this idea that if we experience, like, a real terror, it's, it's like part of us dissociates to protect ourselves, but then we don't feel whole because that part of us is not connected with the rest of us. So there's this idea of like, well, somehow we have to call that energy back. And usually when it when that comes back to us, it's, it's a challenging process because it was a trauma that disconnected us in the first place. Right. So in Western science, I found it really helpful to keep in mind that as far as we're aware, neuro biologically trauma lives in our brains at the intersection of terror and aversion or disgust. So consciously, why would you walk into a part of your life that feels terrifying and that you feel like you don't want to go, but you would do it consciously if you're trying to heal trauma? And that's where some of our discernment comes in, is like, okay, is this actually something happening right now that is threatening me, or is this something I'm carrying that I have the power to move through and, and allow healing to occur in my life? So that's part of the work in soul loss is reconnecting with parts of yourself that have been, very wisely hiding because it wasn't safe to be present. And now you can bring that energy back in your life. And that also relates to another idea of trauma and indigenous science, which is unhealed ancestral trauma. So, years ago when I went to the jungles, and did some ayahuasca ceremony with some, indigenous peoples in Peru outside of Iquitos, the shaman, leading the ceremony had been doing it for 40 years. And he said, most people come here and think that they have really big egos that need to be knocked down and and changed. And he said, I feel like 10% of their problem is ego. And 90% is ancestral trauma. And that really resonated with me. And I feel like it helps as well to recognize work and not personalize and individualize a lot of what we go through and just say, all right, well, I'm not going to heal all of my ancestral trauma in this life. It's not actually possible. But, if I have the opportunity to experience some amount of healing and, and dedicate some amount of attention to that, then I can stop certain cycles. That feels like a win, right? And then I can at least have some tools to pass on so that the next generation has more tools to try to stop what comes up and emerges in their time. Right. So, yeah. So ancestral trauma is a really big one for all of us, whether you look at it as epigenetics or you look at it in a more spiritual way of, Disconnection from, you know, knowing your cultural identity, knowing your ceremonies, knowing your rituals, knowing that you belong to the land, where to do certain ceremonies, where the sacred sites are, what to do different times of year, what your cultural creation story is. I could go on a whole list and we might both say, I don't know that I wasn't taught that right. It's just a lot to revive sometimes. And sometimes when you're not on your traditional lands anymore, or your ancestors from multiple lands, you might sort of throw up your hands and go, well, I don't even know what's mine anymore. And you just have to be with that not knowing for a while and see if it comes to you. So that that seems to be my answer for that question about. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And it's it's interesting. I feel like I, I started reading about epigenetics. I think it was through Bruce Lipton. He's, he does a lot of studies around that and research. So it's such an interesting way of unpacking, you know. Oh, I see that in my parents and I don't want to pass that down. Or I see that my grandparents and I don't want to pass it down. And that could be a behavioral thing. It could be an energetic thing or. Yeah. So I really resonate with that. And yeah, I something else I would love to unpack with you is, you know, shame and grief and humility being some of the key theme themes within your book as well. And underlying a lot of these cracks as well, that we do have within us in many cultures. So maybe we, we unpack one at a time. But speaking to shame, I mean, shame is a huge core wound that a lot of us have, you know, whether it's through the education system and, you know, the whole rewards and punishments and you get punished for something that you then carry shame throughout your whole life just from one fracture moment within, you know, your teacher said something that you were bad at and you feel really shameful about that and you don't carry that on. And so, you know, it might be like sharing your voice, it might be singing and someone might say, you're a really terrible singer, so you feel shame every time that comes up again throughout your life. And so, yeah, I would love I'd love to hear your perspectives on on shame and the blocks that it creates in our lives. Yeah. Thank you. I feel like when people even have an interest in looking at ancestry, then shame is often a big thing that starts to come up and can be really deterring. I've watched some people start an ancestral altar practice, have something like that come up and then throw the altar away and I'm like, oh, that probably isn't going to work out well for you. But, so I, I feel like shame, in the Western way that it gets talked about, we have, on the one hand, someone like Brené Brown has a really big voice and has done a lot of interesting work unpacking it, but from an indigenous science perspective, to me, she unpacks a lot of the ins and outs of it and what's sitting there, but not the value of it. And she'll she'll go to the level of saying, okay, we'll just get rid of it. It's not useful, but actually it's there for a reason, spiritually from my perspective. So for example, I have a mixture of ancestry on my, indigenous German family who were Nazis and were against the Nazis as a lot of families had. And there's a lot of shame around that whole experience. And so. That shame created a lot of dynamics through my life. Even though my father was born after the war, he carried a lot of cultural shame. It led to him marrying a Jewish woman. It led to really bad power dynamics between them, where she bullied him because of his shame and all sorts of things played out in my life, right? She wasn't alive during that war either, and her family wasn't in Germany. But never mind. Those are still some of the dynamics that happened. It also led to him moving to America because his father was so ashamed of Germany. He decided with the supremacy story, America was better because America had rescued people and ended the war in his mind. So it created a lot of flow on. That's led to me. And being with that same. Has helped me then feel what I can be proud of in my culture and in my ancestry. So I'm making the space to be with that rather than pushing it aside and saying sort of defiantly, while I'm proud, which I'm watching a number of, people do, I feel like in, in the US at the moment is saying, I'm not going to unpack it. I but I'm entitled to be proud of my culture. And I actually do think we all have things to be proud of. But I don't think we are entitled to be. So it's sort of going, what was the what was the purpose of that shame? And for me, the purpose of that shame was actually really reinvigorating inside of my being the the value of truth, the value of justice, and actually standing up and and being willing to physically die and leave my body. And I'm not saying that dramatically because I've had that experience and say, I actually I stand for truth because I am not going to go like my grandfather tried to fight a bit for the Nazis and then deserted and then got caught and have these really terrible experiences of being tortured. But I think he hated himself for having thought that. Oh, basically, and I had the opportunity then to try to shift that cycle and show up in the world and say, okay, I'm actually putting my physical life on the line. And this happened in my 20s when I was working in South Africa and say, I stand for truth, and this is what needs to be said here. And then in my own family, I had the opportunity to again and say, well, I stand for truth and I was abused. And if you're all denying it, then I guess I'm not in a relationship with you anymore. If you're siding with the offender and not willing to look at this, right. Like, I've had these opportunities and it's been really painful to live with them, and yet I've had this knowing that I couldn't do it. Another way, because that would be such a betrayal. And my ancestors know that betrayal of values so deeply, that's the value of the shame, is having unpacked that, I know that so deeply. I value we value truth, justice. Right. Some of these things. Yeah. And that's been about a big part of the gift of unpacking. The shame for me is getting back to what you might hear Aboriginal Australians call law or law, but every culture has law and law, whether we're conscious of it or not, we all have some way of holding justice and holding each other to account. And it's a bit different in different cultures and different in different lands, but it's still there and there's still some core values in common. Right? So for me, that's a big part of the value of shame is what why is it there? What was betrayed like what value is so important that was betrayed, that has led to you carrying this shame? Was it that you didn't treat another person with dignity? Was it that you judge somebody? Was it that you lied to yourself? Like what was it? Yeah. And then when we get to the root of that, it's like this blossoming of knowing ourselves on this deep level and knowing something about our, our culture and our community. It's a it's a real, for me, revival of the human spirit, really to sort of go, actually, I stand for this. I'm not in the shadow anymore playing any of these games that don't feel quite right, you know. Yeah, absolutely. It's also me is making the unconscious conscious and that like the inquiry into the many parts that we actually hold within us. You know, I think we do we often have these hot, feelings of like, shame, guilt that we want to just push away, like you said, just hide away. And actually, if we inquire about, well, why are they there? Why is that coming up and why is it different? And for me, compared to the person standing next to me? And within that inquiry, you just learn so much about your true essence and your true gifts that you have for the world and how you can show up better or how how you want to show up differently, or it just it creates, and like you said earlier, it once you change that in a landscape and bring awareness to it, it also shifts, the way people view you and the way that people behave around you too, because you're showing up differently. So I can't believe we're almost at time here, so. But, if we want to quickly just, I know, probably can't quickly go over it, but like, grief and humility, if you just had a few things to say about those two things I would love to hear, hear about about. Yeah. How they play out as well. Well, I will just say about grief, grief takes a lot of energy. It takes time to to be with that sadness. And I find, especially in terms of that disconnection from, from the earth and that, like, essential mother energy, that when we first start to feel that grief, it can start to be overwhelming. But I promise there's a bottom is the best I can say is just making a bit of space for it and allowing that energy to flow sort of over time. We just have moments of feeling it and then it flows, and then we feel that deeper connection. Every time we move through the grief, then we feel that little more deeper connection. Usually we feel more in our bodies, like maybe we'll have some energy awaken around. Probably like your your hips, what we would call like lower chakras or something, maybe your toes and feet. You'll feel that little more energy coming up from the earth, into your body. But that often can be hard, that grief. And it it really is just a patience practice a lot of the time and persistently just allowing yourself to be with those feelings. And it could be just sitting and doing an earthing practice, walking barefoot, just sitting somewhere in the bush for a bit regularly, and just allowing yourself to feel what you feel. And in terms of humility. For me, it's a really important spiritual value. And it's, arrogance can be quite dangerous. I don't think there's an answer. And I think it's really valuable to always have a little bit of doubt, even when we feel very strong and certain about something, because zealotry can be quite dangerous and disconnect us from the all other people, Accenture, anyone who thinks or feels different. Right. So even when I'm really, really confident I'm going to act on it, I still intend and aim to hold a little bit of that doubt. Like, I may feel so sure, but I may fall in my face. It could happen. And that that humility helps ground us literally. Right? Like there's so many spiritual traditions where you bow to go through a doorway or you have to lower yourself to go into a sweat lodge, or you literally pray on the ground. There is something really valuable at that. Physically humbling ourselves and just recognizing we're human. We make mistakes sometimes. There's all sorts of signs and messages around us and I'm like, I'm sorry. I'm the, like, silly human. I know there's messages and I'm not getting it. Try again. But be patient with me. Right. But I find if if I start having thoughts of like, I've got it all figured out, usually life will find a way to humble me anyway. So usually that works itself. But yeah, that arrogance of I've got it and I've got the plan and I've got the path. And you know, I get actually quite scared of it. I find it dangerous if someone is talking that way. I'm really wary of them. And I think at the moment we are in pretty uncharted territory around the planet, and a lot of us are reviving and, traditions, but then having to adapt them to a new place, to a cultural blend, to a modern context. And so I feel like even with revival, with indigenous people on our own lands, we still have to maintain a lot of humility and say, well, we're not doing this the same way. We can't do ceremony for ten days because we don't have ten days to do it anymore. We've got to somehow condense it to one, even if we know what it's supposed to be still. Right. So, yeah. So really valuing that humility. But that isn't the same as low self-worth, right? So recognizing if we're sitting in low self-worth that that isn't very healthy either. And, and sitting with that and trying to unpack, like, where are we punishing ourselves? Where are we putting ourselves down? And that's a really valuable process, because that isn't the same as sitting in that space of allowing yourself to not know or not be sure. Yeah, humility is a big one, isn't it? Because sometimes it really can be that fine line between doubting yourself too much and showing up with too much doubt. But then, on the other hand, you can you can walk around with a mask on with this like, no, I've got this, but really you don't. I'm so insecure. Yeah, I'm so insecure. Yeah, yeah. And yeah. The amount of times I've fallen flat on my face too. And it's just it's the human condition. We're always continuously learning and I think, you know, I think if we continue to have humility and we keep this open mind, the more we can actually step in and, and come from a place of like, oh, I'm just a human here learning, you know, learning about the world around me, learning about myself and how to show up better and how to do the the best I can with the tools and the resources that I have and really go from there. But before we wrap up, I would love to hear. So this whole series is, future studying. Obviously, but, this sub series is all about stories from the heart. And I feel like, you know, connecting to our ancestors and doing this deeper work is really connecting back to our heart as well, and coming from the place, from my heart. And I would love for you to tell. Tell us what you believe being heart lead means and coming back to the heart and how how we can lean in as individuals towards that and as a community towards that. That's a big question. It's a beautiful one. For me, growing up in a lot of, Christian evangelical culture around me, I felt a lot of people in the heart that were grounded in different values to mine. And I also would say I felt a lot of people in the what I would call the back of the heart and not necessarily the front of the heart. And I feel like that that can be tricky. So I think that's my contribution is coming from the heart and querying yourself like you can, can you physically feel where is it coming from? Is it coming from sort of the back of the heart, which is a bit shadowy and maybe needs to be unpacked more so it's more of a front heart shine? Is it coming from the heart connected to a belief that disconnects you from somebody else or from the earth or, what is that coming from the heart grounded in for me, coming from the heart is really, really important. And, it has to be grounded in the earth. So that's how I look at it. That's beautiful. I think it's a beautiful way to end it, too. Thank you, thank you, thank you so much. I'm just going to press stop, but we can, continue.