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Expand your world and realize every challenge that s ever been brought to me has made me more.
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I ve become more so I can serve more.
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So I can enjoy more.
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That s why we re here in this life.
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To bring more good, more great.
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To bring insight, to bring strength, to bring action.
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That s why we re here.
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Welcome to the Tony Robbins Podcast.
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You re listening to an episode that s part of a special season on contribution called Force for Good.
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We re exploring the 10 gifts of life.
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Emotion, drive, growth, joy, gratitude, connection, consciousness, grace, presence, and forgiveness.
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You ll hear an explanation of each gift and stories of true heroes that illustrate how they show up in real life.
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In this episode, we have the honor of hearing from both Sage and Tony Robbins on the power of grace, what grace means, how it manifests itself in our lives, and the perspective of a special guest, their close friend Michael Singer, author of The Untethered Soul.
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Here s Sage Robbins.
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Welcome back, everyone.
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The gift this week that we re going to be sharing is the gift of grace.
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You know, I can truly say I didn t recognize grace at the same level until this chapter or stage of my life.
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I ve just slowed down.
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I m more aware, and I m just more awake to the miracle and preciousness of life.
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You know, I find that just the more spontaneously and instinctually that I experience life, rather than more pre-planned and always thinking ahead and wanting to control a situation, the more that I allow myself to flow and be intuitive, the more that I experience grace.
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Sounds crazy, but even every morning at this stage, I just feel like I wake up and it s like, wow, God, another day of life.
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Thank you.
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Thank you for beating my heart.
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Thank you for this beautiful day.
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Thank you for my family.
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And in that state of gratitude, I experience grace.
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And as I notice it and as I m aware of it, I just find like life cultivates it.
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And it s cultivated by awareness and gratitude of the state that we don t do anything.
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We wake up in the morning.
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Our heart beats on its own.
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That s grace.
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Really, if you think of it, it s the invisible force that connects us all, or that s the fabric of existence.
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It s like a web of benevolence that is invisible, but it weaves our precious life together moment by moment, human by human, heart to heart.
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It s just all the intangibles.
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It s that state of existence that invokes awe and wonder.
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And it s my experience, if I m in a stuck state, or if I m fighting with reality, or if
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I believe that the circumstances are unfair and unjust.
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In that state, I miss the beauty and I miss the magnitude of grace.
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And so, you know, if we re struggling with life, if we re feeling divided, we miss being gracious to ourselves.
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We miss being kind and gracious to each other.
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For those of you who feel like grace isn t intangible, I ll share a couple of my simple moments that I feel grace on a daily basis.
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If I see any of my loved ones laughing so hard that they will have tears rolling down their face, it feels like a grace-filled moment.
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I have the privilege to just witness their joy and witness their love, and I don t even have to be involved.
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Just actually witnessing and experiencing that level of joy, it moves me to grace.
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My family always tell you because I m an obsessed animal lover.
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So I can be watching out the window or outside in nature.
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And if I see a little squirrel, you know, gathering its goodies and building a nest, I could watch that little fellow for hours.
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And I just, I feel grace.
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I m doing nothing besides just witnessing the beauty of nature.
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And, you know, I remember a moment this summer, we were all sitting out on the patio and my mom said, Honey, just look at the clouds.
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All of us stopped what we were doing and we stared up at the sky.
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Grace connected our hearts in that moment.
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We all witnessed just the beauty of nature and life, these clouds moving by.
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I ll never forget that moment.
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Honestly, it s lingered in my being.
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And that was grace.
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We have a little pup.
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Her name s Halo.
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And in the morning, she ll get into her toy box and actually get right inside of it.
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And she ll, like, self-select her favorite toy of the day.
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And she has this whole little thing that she ll go out, and she s trying to hide this little toy, this little chicken.
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She loves this little chicken.
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And she ll dig in the couch, and she ll flip it in the air.
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And just like her utter joy for this little toy and just her playfulness and spontaneous nature, I feel grace.
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I feel grace in that moment.
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Grace has experienced, if you could almost think of like a simple definition, is it s like the perfection of life that exists with or without me.
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Tony and I went to India in our family.
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We went to Varanasi, India.
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And it s just incredible.
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It s almost like this explosion of humans and different faiths all coming together and all coming to the Ganges.
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And we re standing on the side of this river and all this life happening in the vastest, most diverse way.
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It almost felt like I was landed on another planet.
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And I felt so small, and I felt so beautifully insignificant, because all of this life is happening with or without me.
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I just felt like such awe once again and grace that I got to be a part of it.
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I got to witness it.
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This gift of grace is sometimes missed.
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You know, it s missed if...
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We re conflicted.
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It s missed if we re divided.
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It s missed if we re judging.
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It s missed if we re blaming.
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And this holiday season, be blessed with the gift of grace and allowing yourself just to slow down and notice just the little miracles around in a smile or in laughter and the sense of walking in and smelling whatever s cooking on the stove or the music that s playing or the dog that s barking or whatever s happening.
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Just slow down and notice the miracle of existence of itself.
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That s the gift of grace.
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God bless everyone and have a beautiful, beautiful holiday season.
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One of Sage and Toni s dearest and most respected friends is Michael Singer, the author of The Untethered Soul and The Surrender Experiment.
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Listen as Michael explains how grace is the one thing that transcends human concepts, and how it shows up everywhere, especially when you re not looking for it.
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Let s talk about grace, as people have a misunderstanding, really, of what true grace is.
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Grace is not something you ve earned.
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Grace is not something that s a reward or that you even pray or ask for.
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It s a gift that s much purer than that.
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Grace is something that s given for absolutely no reason.
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You don t earn it.
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You don t deserve it.
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It falls upon good people and bad people.
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It has nothing to do with your karma.
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It has nothing to do with your past actions.
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It s not like that.
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Grace is the one thing that transcends all of our human way of thinking about things, that people who are good get good things and people who are bad get bad things.
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Grace goes past all of that.
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Grace is something that exists in the universe because it s just the nature of the universe.
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The universe is made of grace.
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That s what it is.
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It s not a reward.
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It s just something that exists that is given to you for no reason.
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You don t owe a thank you and you can t do anything to bring it to yourself.
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So for example, if it s hot out one day and you feel a gentle breeze blow across your face, it feels good.
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It s refreshing.
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That s grace.
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You did nothing to deserve that.
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It blows across the face of good people and bad people, rich people and poor people, anyone, anywhere.
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And you don t know a thank you.
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You don t even think of saying thank you.
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You just accept that there s something beautiful in this universe called a gentle breeze, and it falls equally upon all beings.
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That s easy to see in the sense of a breeze, but it s much, much bigger than that.
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Wait till you see how big it is.
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So for example, I m told you have 24 trillion living cells that make up your body.
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Your body s pretty important to you.
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I don t think you d like to not have one as you go through your life on earth.
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It allows you to do so.
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What did you do to deserve the 24 trillion cells wake up and stay awake even when you sleep all day and do their thing?
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Liver cells, spleen cells, kidney cells, they re working constantly, they re communicating with each other.
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They re living cells and they have to work together to give you the gift of this body
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This body is grace.
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You do not do anything to deserve it.
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You do not do anything to make these things happen.
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You don t ever say thank you.
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You should.
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You don t say thank you to your liver, your kidney, your spleen, or your pineal gland, if you even know where it is.
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But they let you have the gift of life.
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They let you have the gift of experience.
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That s grace.
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the Earth itself.
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You did nothing to put yourself on this planet.
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You could be on Mars.
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You could be anywhere in the universe.
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All kinds of things exist of which you don t deserve it or not deserve it.
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It s just a complete gift of grace that is given to you.
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The problem is we don t see grace.
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Why?
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Because we develop within our minds concepts and views about what we want.
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And we consider grace, we limit it to
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only when suddenly we get what we want.
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If we work to get what we want and we get it, we don t consider that grace.
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We say, I did it.
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The ego is so big.
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I did that.
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I deserve that.
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All right?
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But if somehow something we want comes unexpected, we say it s grace.
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But I hope you re seeing grace is way bigger than that.
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You didn t do any of these things, even your mind and your heart.
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You didn t make a heart that feels.
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You didn t make a heart that s capable of feeling love or sorrow or anything.
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It s a gift that was given to you.
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It s just grace.
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Your mind, everybody s so proud of their minds.
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They do so much with their mind.
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What if your mind didn t think?
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What if the thoughts didn t come?
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What if memory didn t work?
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You wouldn t know what to do.
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You can t do anything.
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It s grace.
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The fact that you have a mind that can think and dig up the earth and make all these products and build rocket ships and fly to the moon and build handheld computers and so on, the fact that the mind is capable of that is not something you did.
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You may have learned something, but it s only because your mind is capable of learning.
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The whole universe you live in is grace.
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It was just given to you.
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And we don t appreciate it.
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We think that grace only exists when we re trying to get something and we didn t think we d be able to and suddenly it happens.
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We can t explain how, oh my God, that was an act of grace.
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It s so much bigger than that.
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Eventually, if you look properly from a distance to step back from your ego, you will realize that the very fact that you have a mind that can think,
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You didn t earn that.
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Everybody has that.
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Human beings have brilliant minds, all of them.
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Their mind is phenomenal.
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And the same thing with the feelings of the heart and with the fact that you have a body and the fact that you re on the planet Earth where there are all of these things, the trees, flowers, the fact that it rains so that it can water the trees and take care of the forests.
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All of this is grace.
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It s all grace.
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The real gift of grace is when you stop that little way of thinking and you start appreciating.
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The only answer to grace is gratitude.
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You re listening to the Force for Good season of the Tony Robbins podcast.
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To learn more about the 10 gifts that we re featuring this holiday season, including emotion, drive, growth, joy, gratitude, connection, consciousness, grace, presence, and forgiveness, please visit www.TonyRobbins.com slash gifts, G-I-F-T-S.
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And to find Tony Robbins products and events that can help you identify your gifts, go to TonyRobbins.com slash shop, S-H-O-P.
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As you just heard from Michael Singer and Sage Robbins, grace is in every moment.
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It s like rain falling everywhere, but we often hold up the umbrella of ego to make sure we don t get wet.
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But there are times when we need it most, when we most need to put down the umbrella and just get soaked.
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The story you re about to hear is how grace showed up in the life of a woman who was open to receiving it.
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Because as Tony says, the more you acknowledge grace, the more it shows up.
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Jen Ferris could have put a negative meaning on many things in her life, things that were out of her control.
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But listen as we see how grace appears in the most unlikely of places and times, but always when your heart is open and your faith is strong.
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We re about to take you to Date With Destiny.
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You may have heard of it from Tony s documentary, I Am Not Your Guru, on Netflix.
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Date With Destiny is an event where thousands of people not only make the decision to transform their lives, but do the hard work needed to make real, lasting change.
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Here s Jen.
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My earliest memory was I was a young toddler, maybe two or three.
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I was laying on a hard dirt floor in a rural village in southern India on a straw mat and a cotton blanket covering me.
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Around me is the straw walls of our little shack in a village where my family members resided.
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My mother crawled out of the bed, stood up, covered me.
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She was troubled.
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I felt she was torn out of the love for her baby daughter.
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She had to make a choice of keeping this blind girl who might never become anything more than playing in the dirt.
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with badly deformed eyes, not to marry, not to bring a dowry, not to bring pride.
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Or she could give the child to God and take her to the streets where a police officer would find me and take me to the children s orphanage.
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When Tony asked me to look into the perspective of God, I found God s truth.
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And God s truth said, the product of the sperm and egg are not what you are.
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You re to be a child for a different family.
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And so I m sure God protected my mother
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comforted her while she had to make that choice to give me away and leave me there on the bus stop while other children played in the schoolhouse behind me.
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Not wanting to wait around because I don t like waiting and being told to stay here and wait for me, wait till I come back for you, I decided I would explore my surroundings
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I was so adventurous that I took steps away from the bus stop at the bench and decided to go back down the road to follow her.
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I heard a dog barking and that took me back to the bench where I scrambled up onto the top rail.
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And I was screaming and crying and then a police officer found me and he asked me, what are you doing here?
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Why aren t you in school?
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And I said, oh, don t worry, my mother s coming back for me.
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He said, sure.
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He sat there on the bench with me and we talked for a while and then I guess it was obvious.
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Those wise police officer knew looking into my badly deformed eyes what was the truth.
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But of course I didn t know.
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My truth was my mother was coming back for me and my father God had me in his hands.
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The police officer took me to the orphanage, and I came into Canada only because another child who was promised to my parents was ill, and for three times she was denied entry into Canada because of her illness, dysentery, diarrhea, fever, and the officials kept denying her entry because of her sickness.
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And this mummy, Sandra, in the Families for Children Orphanage presented me to Ronald and Janet Ferris and asked, we had a new blind girl called Tangamani who had arrived in our orphanage.
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Would you like to take this child and bring her into your home?
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Because we know that she is showing great promise here and she can be successful given the right environment.
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And my parents said, we want our original daughter, Rani, and as soon as she is healthy enough to travel, we want her on the first plane.
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But we will take Tangamani.
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And so, I am Tangamani.
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It was a long time for me to accept that my Father God had a plan for me.
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I always felt that I was abandoned and never good enough.
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And out of my abandonment, recognizing that God s grace is so huge in them, where I am and because of what s happening, it s all part of God s plan that s unfolding.
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All that joy knowing that
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What we called abandon was actually grace.
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So often in life, you come up with the most painful meaning because it s painful in the moment.
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We don t look at the full span of what those painful moments can often create.
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A greater beauty than could ever have happened without them.
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You have touched everyone today and you ll continue to.
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Hallelujah.
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Hallelujah.
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By the grace of God.
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That s what hallelujah means.
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I used to do a program.
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for 14 days and nights called certification.
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And one night towards the end, we would go pick people off the street, homeless people, people in the worst shape.
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And I would turn to teams in those days that were about 20 people.
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And they d spend about 12 days learning all these amazing skills.
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And I d say, you have one hour to turn their life around.
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And they would all start to fight.
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trying to do different techniques, and then gradually they d merge and something beautiful would happen.
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They d not only change that person s life, but they d be changed as well.
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But I will call the night, you have no problems.
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Because the people we brought on stage had real problems.
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The problems most people in this room have, no matter how intense they are, even those that you think are life and death, are usually preferences.
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They re problems that someone else would die for.
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Most of our worst problems would be somebody else s greatest dream in most parts of the world.
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We lose track, especially if you live in a modern Western culture.
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We forget all the grace that s around us.
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We take for granted the streets we drive on that we didn t pave, the books we read that someone else took years to condense.
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the internet or the phone that connects us to the world instantly because someone created, or the men and women who died to give us the freedom to make such choices.
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We forget the power of just even one of our senses.
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The ability to actually hear what s not being said, that s what real communication is.
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The ability to look and see all the colors.
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And our friend without sight is able to do that with insight.
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You can feel her.
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the ability to feel, and the ability to remember the truth that everything that s ever happened in our lives has been a gift, including the pain, and it s our job to use it to make life better within us and all those we have the privilege to touch.
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If you ever lose track, just remember, contrast is the way to come back to reality.
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Contrast your life to so much else that s going on on this earth, and your biggest problem will have a new perspective.
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The traffic seems like a problem.
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Till the car breaks down, remember?
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Till you break your ankle.
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Till you lose that relationship.
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Till someone tells you your life is being threatened.
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What if everything was a gift?
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What if life was always happening for us and not to us?
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What if that was the truth?
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And all we had to do is committed to find the beauty in each moment.
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and to trust that there s a higher purpose in it all.
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We need to do our part, but that there is a higher purpose and that we can find it.
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With that, life is magnificent.
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And with that, with whatever resources we have, from the dirt floor and the straw, there s something greater than anything exterior, and that is your spirit or your soul.
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That is the higher emotions that are waiting for you to appreciate them and to express them and to use them
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Not just to be good, but to do good.
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Whatever that means to you.
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And that s when we rise.
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That s when life is so meaningful.
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It s not always happy, but it can always be meaningful.
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And meaningful s better than happy.
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It s deeper.
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It lasts more.
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If you re happy all the time and that s all you have, your face hurts.
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I m sure you felt it.
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Life gives us variety.
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I m grateful for the sunshine and the clouds and the rain.
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I m grateful for the good times and the bad times.
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I m grateful for the success and the failure.
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I m grateful for the mistakes and the grace.
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I hope you are too.
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Stand up for just one moment and make the sound of your gratitude and a sense of grace for everything that s ever happened in your life now.
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Make it now.
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Make the sound of such gratitude and grace.
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Knowing it s all been guided.
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All of it.
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Every moment.
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And then Ennis, as of this day, is a new meaning maker.
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One with better insights.
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One that knows that memories only last from one perspective.
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We look at another perspective, they mean something else.
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A new set of values, a new set of rules, and new things to move away from.
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Some new questions that bring new answers.
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A life filled with a transform of emotion of appreciation, and gratitude, love, and faith.
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and the courage to push through whatever seems like it s not that.
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With that, there is no limit to the depth of your life experience.
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If you are completely obsessed and totally focused, if you re taking massive action and getting better and better at executing, there s only one more thing you need to get whatever you want, and that s grace.
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Some call it luck.
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Some call it grace.
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You might call it God.
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But there s no question in my life that grace is there.
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It s those things that show up to guide you when you ve done the first two steps and your intent is something larger than just yourself.
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That s when all of a sudden things are great.
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You can benefit, but motive does matter.
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If you re trying to do something that supports you, but it supports your family as well, it supports your community, it supports your country, it supports the world, a different level of insight comes through you.
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And that happens, this thing called grace.
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And I think the more you acknowledge grace, the more it shows up.
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So I m not here to tell you what to believe spiritually.
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I don t believe in that.
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I believe you got to figure out what you believe and live it.
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But if you think there is no such thing as grace, or God, or infinite intelligence, or whatever the right words are for you, because words can get in the way of what s real.
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If you don t think there is, it s kind of like saying the universe is a result of an explosion in a print factory.
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It all just came together perfectly in sync by accident.
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I just don t personally subscribe to that, but you can subscribe to whatever you want.
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I just know that those that acknowledge that something is giving me the gift of life, the more you acknowledge it, the more of it you experience.
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You just heard Tony Robbins explain how when you re serving something higher than yourself, that s when grace shows up.
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And it s what pushes you through the hardest times.
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And it can bring you the clarity and insight you need to solve your hardest problems.
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Now we re going to hear from Janet Taylor, a mother of three whose eldest daughter has been struggling with mental health issues and addiction for the past seven years.
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She s now 19 and living in a group home where Janet visits her with her two other children.
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But this is not a story of desperation and grief.
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This is a story of strength and hope.
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This is also a story of grace.
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I have three children and I always knew I wanted to have children.
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Avery was my first child.
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Beautiful.
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I remember when she was born, it was a long labor.
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She came out and she didn t even cry.
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So I m freaking out as a mom.
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This child did not cry.
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What the heck s going on?
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And the doctor told me later that she was just staring at him with this intensity, like, I got things to do.
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Avery growing up would probably been what we consider nowadays a very hyper child.
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And she was always the child I had to keep my eye on out of all three of my amazing children.
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through kindergarten she was the spirit like that s how I look back at my daughter and through elementary school in grade six she really came into her own this child wore tutus to school this child did whatever she wanted to do she was this ultimate little bubble of joy and hyperness and she was Avery it was amazing when she left grade six there was this like powerful child she was going to run the world
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She had an amazing summer and she was going into grade seven in high school.
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And in looking back, I can honestly say that that summer, her friend group started to change.
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She entered grade seven in this new high school and she was all excited and she was still that bubbly personality.
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But school starts in September.
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About November, this child was changing.
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It was still semi-warm at that time of year, and she was wearing sweatshirts and long pants, and she was starting to want to dye her hair, and she was becoming really negative.
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She was pushing back.
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Her taste in music started to change, which is fine, absolutely fine.
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But the friends she was hanging around with, I m like, wait, these aren t the same friends.
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This is a child who was really good in school.
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She loved school.
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She loved connecting with her teachers.
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She was joyous.
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She liked writing.
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And she really started to struggle with certain things that she was like, Mom, you don t understand me.
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There s all this stuff going on.
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I can t identify it.
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I don t understand why I m hearing things, why my life is getting really dark.
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And she was just changing.
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becoming more emotional and a fighter almost in a negative sense.
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It s incredible how quickly kids turn into teenagers.
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And while it s completely normal for there to be changes that are unsettling to parents, like new types of friends, a change in music preference, and how they dress, it s the psychological changes that are the most difficult to understand.
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Janet didn t understand what was going on inside the head of her little girl.
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Avery didn t understand it either.
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Within months, those psychological changes started having impact well beyond her choices in clothes, music, and friends.
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Her grades started dropping.
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Her behavior got worse.
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She was sullen, angry.
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Avery s feelings were so powerful that it was like an invisible force had taken her over, taken over the family.
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And then suddenly, the invisible became visible in a picture that at first, Janet couldn t even comprehend.
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I remember sitting upstairs in the front room at home and my son comes to me and he s crying and he s two years younger than his sister.
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And he comes to me and he s crying.
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I m like, Oh my God, what s going on?
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What s going on?
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He was devastated.
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He s holding his little thing in front of me and there s a picture on it.
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And he s like, Mommy, what is this?
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All I see is this arm, but it s like a bloody arm.
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And I m like,
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It s like got this heart in it, but it s been carved into this arm.
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I had no idea what this was.
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I m like, what is this?
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He goes, Avery did this mom.
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She took this picture.
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And I m like, I don t understand.
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I don t understand this.
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So I go and see Avery and I m like freaking out because I m just not understanding what this is, not processing now.
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But I understood something was very wrong.
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And she flipped.
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She was throwing stuff at me.
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She was to the point of what I see now as a very violent episode.
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Her father and I were not together at the time.
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He s a social worker, so I call him.
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I m like, Rob, this is what Michael found.
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This is what Avery... What do we do?
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And time stood still from that day for probably those four years.
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What Janet and Rob experienced with their daughter Avery is not a rare occurrence.
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Self-harm in teenagers is shockingly common.
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About 8% or 1 in 12 teenagers have deliberately hurt themselves, most often by cutting or burning their own flesh.
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It can manifest as lightly as pulling out hair or as serious as suicide attempts like swallowing pills or trying to hang, electrocute, drown, or suffocate themselves.
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Psychiatrists believe that this behavior is caused by the surge of hormones and unfamiliar emotions that teenagers  brains are just not mature enough to cope with.
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And self-harm can temporarily relieve that tension and numb or distract from their emotional pain.
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In 90% of cases, teenagers stop doing it all on their own.
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But for many kids, they need professional help.
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So we took her to see the psychiatrist and she sat down and we had many sessions with her, with Avery, on our own.
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This self-harm led to a lot of bad scenarios with over-the-counter medication.
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And at home now, the suicidal ideations are coming in.
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Where I remember specifically one day, she took 43 Tylenols.
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So within this year, she s now failing school.
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We come now into June, July.
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The family is cracking.
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We are under such stress to keep her safe that she s running the family, and that s not fair.
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I was mad.
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There was definitely a level of anger that I do not ever want to see again.
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I would get so angry at her out of sheer fear.
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I realize now that that sheer fear of losing my daughter.
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And how could she choose this?
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Why was she doing this to herself?
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Why was she hurting herself?
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But I love this child.
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Like, how did she not see how much I loved her and I hated her all at the same point?
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But I wanted her to survive.
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I wanted to survive.
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Imagine yourself sitting in an emergency room, your daughter s being looked at because she s overdosed, basically.
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She s high as a kite.
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So I m angry and I m sitting.
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I m being told that I need to go wait where else.
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And on top of that, my daughter has cut herself to the point now where one would think that this size of self-harm would require stitches.
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And the doctor comes in and says, Avery, do you want stitches?
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And I m like, she s 13, 14 years old.
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She doesn t get to choose that.
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You need to stitch that puppy up.
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And he looks at me and goes, I m speaking to your daughter.
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And I m like, she s 13 years old.
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I m her mother.
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Stitch her up, please.
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And he s like, well, your daughter s over the age of 12.
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She gets to do this.
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I m looking at the doctor and I m going, you took an oath.
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You have to help her.
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I get asked to leave.
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So I m forcibly removed from this room and I m sitting in the emergency room and I remember looking up at this sign that said, 75% of emergency room visits are for mental health.
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And I begin to cry in that moment and go, my God, what have I done to my daughter?
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I m stronger than this.
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You know, I had this great family, this great upbringing.
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Why has my daughter chosen drugs?
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Why didn t she know better?
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And I m like, oh my God, I ve let my daughter down.
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So that led me to this darkness of, oh my God, I ve got to do even more now to help her.
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This is my fault.
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We re living in a culture of blame and you and I have to free ourselves from it.
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Blaming others or blaming yourself never solves anything.
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Plus, you re judging too soon what things mean.
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You don t know what it really means yet.
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So it s good to ask, what else could this mean to follow through and find out where it is?
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If you do, you can have a very different experience of life.
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We re all gonna face tragedies.
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We re all gonna face things that are incredibly painful.
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We re all gonna face things we can t control.
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The secret is for us to find the beauty and the grace in whatever life has offered us, even if it s painful.
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And if you can do that, if you can find a beautiful state even in the middle of those situations, you ll do that.
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I remember getting to the point where I wrote my daughter s obituary for my own sake, just in case that one of those phone calls was going to be the phone call.
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And there was a certain freedom to that.
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And I believe that that moment opened me up to realizing I had two other children.
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And in four years, I had lost a little bit of sight of these children that were in the background still, and they needed me.
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I ve realized that there were points where I forgot I had an oldest child, but I also forgot I had these two other children, and they needed me just as much.
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And in that moment, I said, OK, Janet, if you get to control one thing for the rest of your life, what s that going to be?
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And I said, I m going to step up as a mom, and I m going to be these children s mom, all three of them.
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I realized I could take control of my own life.
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I had been listening to Tony s audios and CDs for 20 some odd years before that, just in my life path.
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And he was coming to New Jersey to do this UPW.
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So New Jersey isn t very far from where I am in Ottawa, Canada.
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And I m like, well, I m going to go see this man in person.
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I m going to take control from this point forward.
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I went to Newark in 2017, and I did Unleash the Power Within with 14,000 or so other amazing people, and I went by myself.
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And for one of the very few times in my life, I felt absolutely connected to each and every one of those people there.
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And I started to open up to what I now call faith, but what I realized then was my purpose.
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And in taking control of myself, I became blessed to realize that I truly was giving that control to something else, which I now call faith.
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I m blessed to realize that everything happens for a reason.
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And in feeling that inside me, that grace and that faith truly in me like a little light, I realized, oh my goodness, I can actually make a little difference.
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So I m going to make that difference with parents.
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And I m going to share my story.
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When you re sitting in an emergency room and you feel that utter helplessness, when your child is suffering at a level that they ve chosen, that piece of her that was choosing that was that same piece of me that was choosing to be that disempowered parent, that helpless human I look at.
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Inside my daughter was also this grace, but inside each and every one of those parents sitting in the emergency room with me or sitting wherever they are in the world, feeling that shame and that grief that they ve left their child down, there is no such true feeling because that is ultimate love.
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That is a love inside me and inside all of us as parents.
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As far as my daughter goes, she s doing great.
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She s back into school for as much as she can do.
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I don t judge.
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I don t criticize.
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I just love her from this faithful light inside me that allows me to appreciate who she is and to really truly appreciate this journey she s allowed me to take with her and to appreciate my other two children.
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my own larger family and every moment that I get here to make a difference and to connect with others.
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freedom to run my own business now and supporting other parents, having this amazing life I now embrace because I control it, I appreciate these moments.
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I ve come full circle that life s a gift, and I ve given life to three beautiful, beautiful, amazing souls.
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And they re all so unique and different.
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And as a mom, I appreciate now them together, their sister, themselves, their relationship growing as the three adults they re becoming.
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They re 14, 17, and 19.
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You know, whatever that looks like for them, I hope they get to have the relationship I have with my sisters and my family.
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The Tony Robbins Podcast is directed by Tony Robbins and produced by the Tony Robbins editorial team with audio editing and sound design by Jeremy Enns.
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Today s first guest was Jen Ferris, a woman who shared her incredible story in front of 5,000 people at Tony s Date with Destiny event in December 2019.
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Our second guest was Janet Taylor from Ottawa, Canada, who created Parents Never Give Up, offering support to parents whose children struggle with addiction and mental health issues.
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Copyright Robbins Research International.
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