Thanks very much for the invitation to share some ideas with you. This talk draws both on my own research and on my interpretation of trends in the emerging field of transparency, participation and accountability. The subtitle here from participation to accountable governance points to this talk's focus on identifying some of the missing links between the two. Today I'm gonna discuss some concepts that can help to identify how participation might contribute to accountable governance. Next slide, please. The presentation draws from the keywords approach, which is used across a wide range of disciplines to unpack big concepts whose meanings are often taken for granted, yet in practice their meanings are often constructed and contested. And I make the case that this exercise is relevant for research collaboration because we need a shared vocabulary in order to communicate effectively. Next slide, please. To start off, it turns out that the concepts of participation and accountability both share the major conceptual challenge of being taken for granted. For each one, we think we know it when we see it. It means all things to all people. And the meanings get stretched so far that they get watered down. And this is especially problematic if we're interested in understanding what works when the concepts are defined with a very low bar. For example, tests of the impacts of tiny bits of participation or accountability are unlikely to tell us very much about whether more ambitious efforts could make more of a difference. And similarly, when it comes to measurement, it turns out that numerous field experiments in this field use very fuzzy proxies to draw what turn out to be rather shaky conclusions. The studies that use field experiments very rarely use robust indicators of participation or accountability. Next slide, please. To follow up on the issue of conceptual stretching, it's also relevant to clear the air by recognizing that there are a whole series of terms that are often used as synonyms for accountable governance. And the point here is that terms like good governance, for example, overlap with accountable governance, but they are not synonyms. After all, competent technocrats can produce certain kinds of good governance without being publicly accountable at all. Next slide, please. Now, here's an exercise in visualizing this conceptual distinction. This diagram depicts both the overlap and the distinction between responsive governance and accountable governance, terms that are often used interchangeably in different programming, for example. On the far left, the diagram indicates a zone of responses from authorities that do not involve answerability or some kind of an enforcement of standards, just concessions to actors who are exercising some kind of voice or pressure. And on the far right, one has top-down accountability processes that do not involve responses to voice. The term rule by-law refers to judicial or administrative processes that are selective or biased in some way, in contrast to the principle of the rule of law, which we associate with accountability, which requires that all are treated equally. And then in the zone of overlap between responsive and accountable governance, we have public answerability processes, where authorities meet their commitments and do what they say they're gonna do. Next slide, please. If we then turn to what counts as accountability, most analysts in this emerging field agree that it involves these two key processes. Answerability, where decision-makers or duty-bearers must render an account, must explain and justify their actions, usually in some kind of forum. The classic case would be when cabinet ministers report to parliament, or when ostensibly co-equal members of a multi-stakeholder forum report to each other. And the second key element involves some kind of tangible consequences related to that account, involving enforcement of standards. And this can involve both negative sanctions and positive rewards. Some analysts lean more towards emphasizing the answerability process, others focus more on tangible consequences. And I would add that the conventional approach to accountability is mainly ex-post. It's mainly retrospective. But one can also consider preventative approaches, approaches that try to make the likelihood of accountability failures, to reduce the likelihood of these failures. And as the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, or in Spanish, más vale prevenir que lamentar. And this points to a new frontier in this field, which involves thinking about how to maximize the synergy between preventative and reactive approaches to accountability building. Next slide, please. Now, since accountability is necessarily a relational process, actor X is or is not accountable to actor Y, it's also useful to consider spatial metaphors that can capture this directionality. Three adjectives make this distinction. And first, we have vertical accountability, which can go in two opposite directions. It can go upwards, like from NGOs to donors, for example, or downwards accountability, which is the ostensible relationship between say elected officials and voters or citizens. And then we have horizontal accountability, which refers to the mutual accountability between ostensible co-equals, as in the case of political systems that have checks and balances between the executive and legislative and judicial branches, or also between the co-equal members of classic common property resource management institutions. And then diagonal accountability, as the term suggests, is cross-cutting. It refers to power sharing institutions or forums that bridge power holders and often underrepresented stakeholders, as in the case of multi-stakeholder forums or participatory budgeting, or some kinds of social funds or social audits that bring together citizen watchdogs and public oversight agencies. Next slide, please. When it comes to figuring out what works in this field, much of the empirical research has concentrated on testing only one specific theory of change, which is inspired by an idea that comes from a century ago in the early years of public interest law. You may have heard the phrase, sunshine is the best disinfectant. And this can be diagrammed as transparency drives accountability. And this frame was then revised when donors and analysts realized that the formulation took for granted a missing link, because the ostensible causal mechanism is that transparency or that disclosure of relevant information is expected to inform and motivate participation, which in turn is expected to drive accountability. So in that diagram, T leads to P leads to A. And we also have in the middle a relatively widely used acronym, TAP, which is widely used, for example, in the sustainable development goal context. And this means the same thing as TPA, but it's easier to say, even though the acronym implicitly flips the causal arrows. Now, this proposed theory of change is quite linear. Next slide, please. And my emergent and many change initiatives in this field suggests that we also, we've considered other causal mechanisms that may be more difficult to test in a field experiment, but which may more closely reflect the way the world actually works. So in this view, accountable governance is driven by processes of reciprocal interaction between participation, transparency and accountability. For example, participation may turn out to be a precondition to get the kind of transparency that is needed to inform and motivate the broader and deeper patterns of participation that turn out to be needed to get some degree of accountability. So in terms of the diagram, this dynamic would be captured as P leads to T leads to P leads to A, for example. Next slide, please. So today's presentation draws from a work in progress that is tackling the job of unpacking a series of keywords that are significant in the accountability field. And for reasons of time, I'll focus on just two of them, social accountability and strategy and tactics. Next slide, please. Social accountability is a term that began to be widely used in the development industry about 15 years ago. And it's a broad umbrella category that covers very diverse initiatives that share the goal of encouraging social and civic actors to get directly involved in the public oversight of governments and also private corporations. Some would argue that the term is an example of old wine in new bottles since it covers much of what used to be called participatory development. And in response, advocates of the term would contend that while both indeed emphasize citizen voice and action, the idea of social accountability focuses more on both the systemic monitoring of how authorities exercise power and on whether and how authorities actually respond to citizen voice and action. And if we look beyond the English speaking world, diverse Latin American governments began promoting social accountability initiatives back in the 1990s long before the term was used in English. Under the rubric of terms like control social, velduria or contraria social. Next slide, please. So there's now an extensive body of research on social accountability that tests the T-A theory of change that I mentioned before. And the results are definitely mixed with many initiatives leading to little or no impact. The participatory processes that were supposed to link participation with accountability often get little attention. And invited spaces turn out to be limited or captured. And even when public oversight managed to identify problems and local watchdogs spoke out, their voices were easily ignored by authority, limited bite. And yet at the same time, sometimes if these efforts did pay off. So what makes the difference? Next slide, please. I propose an interpretation of these mixed results in an article back in world development. And the idea here is that where social accountability initiatives are limited to tactical tool-led approaches, one should expect little to no impact. Whereas the results are more promising for strategic approaches. And this underscores the relevance of unpacking the ideas of strategy and tactics as keywords themselves. Strategies refer to change goals and the pathways to reach them. Whereas tactics are the specific actions and tools that are deployed on these pathways. Next slide, please. Tool-led approaches to social accountability share several features. And the first is that they emphasize information provision easier through local interface meetings between service providers and communities or through some kind of civic tech, like an app for reporting on service delivery performance, do the irrigation districts actually deliver the water they're supposed to. And tool-led approaches focus on encouraging voice without actually changing the institutions that are supposed to listen. They're also exclusively local rather than multi-level or multi-scaler. Next slide, please. Strategic approaches in contrast bring together multiple tactics in a coordinated way so that the whole can be greater than the sum of the parts. They also involve proactive measures that can reduce the risks or the costs of collective action. And maybe they go farther by bolstering the capacity of social organizations to both represent their constituencies. And ideally, they also involve changes on the part of the authorities that bolster their own capacity to respond, such as grievance redress mechanisms, for example, that actually have the autonomy and the capacity that is needed to actually redress grievances in contrast to the complaint collection boxes that are easy to ignore. Strategic approaches are also not circumscribed to the local arena so that voice and action can project upwards, can reach higher levels where the key decisions are often made. So to sum up the subtext behind this distinction between strategy and tactics is the goal of bringing a power analysis to bear on the question of how participation can leverage accountability. Next slide, please. As an example of a strategic approach to social accountability, consider vertical integration. Next slide, please. And this multi-level approach might resonate with those of you who are concerned with scale. Our research centers engage with several counterpart public interest groups around the world that pursue this approach which seeks two different kinds of synergy. First, it involves positive feedback loops between independent monitoring of what the public sector does for private corporations and advocacy targeted to improve those institutions' performance. Second, this strategy coordinates monitoring and advocacy across multiple levels at the same time. The goal is to ensure that voice and action are targeted to the decision makers that actually have authority over the problem that people are trying to address. For example, why focus participation efforts on municipal governments if they don't have the authority or the resources to address the issue at hand? This might make sense on the other hand if the goal is to recruit those municipal authorities to advocate upwards to the provincial or national authorities, but it's key to know where the real power lies. This multi-level approach also tries to address the problem of squeezing the balloon where representatives of social organizations reach out to one level or branch of government and those authorities then point the finger at another set of authorities who in turn point the finger at another set of authorities sending the social organization in circles as no authority takes responsibility for the issue. Comprehensive systemic independent monitoring of the full supply chain of decision making, if you will, is intended to reveal where the key decisions are really made to inform social actors' decisions about which door to knock on. Since many of you are interested in multi-stakeholder forums when considering their role in vertical integration, they could themselves be the actors who are doing multi-level monitoring and advocacy, but also independent actors that participate within those multi-stakeholder forums could also be engaged with their own multi-level monitoring of relevant authorities that are present perhaps both inside and outside of those forums to understand better what the rest of those authorities are doing. This can help to better assess the authorities' claims about what they can and cannot do and to assess whether those authorities are actually meeting their commitments. One last point about multi-stakeholder forums, what happens if we look at them through the lens of the distinction between strategy and tactics? This raises the issue of different positionalities because for some participants in multi-stakeholder forums, they might constitute strategies, while for others, they might simply be tactics, one of many that they're pursuing. Where you stand depends on where you sit. Next slide, please. The final conceptual point I wanna make here offers a way of thinking about social actors' voice and action and how they interact with institutions to identify possible pathways towards improved governance. So first, if we're starting from a low accountability point of departure, it's worth recognizing that that could constitute a low accountability trap in the sense that the problems are self-reinforcing. The challenge then is how to turn those vicious circles, self-reinforcing, into virtuous circles of self-reinforcing motion towards more accountable governance. This recalls the reciprocal model of dynamic change processes mentioned earlier. So voice here is shorthand for the aggregation and the representation of underrepresented actors which includes the capacity for collective action. This goes well beyond simply having a seat at the table in invited spaces. Intuitively, the term teeth can refer to possible sanctions which is a key element of accountable governance but here the term is used more broadly as shorthand for institutional capacity to respond to voice. Next slide, please. This final diagram illustrates the proposition that synergistic interaction between voice and teeth can drive movement towards improved institutional performance. Possible pathways can be more voice led or they can be more teeth led as shown here but the proposition is that action is needed in both arenas to trigger and sustain virtuous circles, processes of mutual empowerment where each reinforce the other. So to conclude, when we step back to consider what works in the social accountability field, the main takeaway and next slide here can be summed up in the next slide. To voice needs teeth to have bite but teeth may not bite without voice. Thank you very much. Just a comment on the relationship between multi-stakeholder forums and accountable governance more generally. The first question, I think it's important to break this down into at least two distinct steps. One is how does participation of different actors influence the forum itself and this raises the question of where are the proactive measures to address the power imbalances among the actors who are going in? What are the, to what degree are there processes of capacity building and that can help to address the very imbalanced power relation among the participants. But the second point is how then can multi-stakeholder forums influence other actors who may not even be in the room as in some of the cases that we heard about. And this really gets to the question of how to go beyond thinking of participation as somehow always good, even if we only get little bits of it and step back and think, what difference does it really make? It raises the issue of what are the goals of these forums and if the goal is really power sharing over the management of resources, how to really go beyond getting a seat at the table as an in and itself to really tangibly influence the management of resources, including the role of actors who are not even in the room, but who may be the main problem. Thank you very much. I'm gonna just say a few words about two cross-cutting issues that I'm seeing. One is governance and the other is scale and scaling and on them, the first cross-cutting issue, it really strikes me just how consistently the issue of overlapping governance regimes comes up in these presentations. Primarily focused on overlapping governance of property rights and land rights, but not exclusively. And it raises the question of what happens if one starts by looking at landscape and then ends up with governance, you see the world one way and if you start by looking at governance and then look at property rights, when things may look somewhat differently, I think both approaches are complementary. And when I think in terms of overlapping regimes, it makes me wonder who, how do those regimes decide who has standing? Who are the key decision makers in each of those regimes? How do they engage with each other? Because property rights in those regimes are the results of each respective governance process. So how does one unpack those respective processes? And if one is interested in accountability, then how does each governance regime, do they allow forms of recourse if there are disagreements about how rights are allocated, for example. And specifically, of course, we have the cross cutting issue of the interaction between customary and formal legal land tenure and many of the presentations engage with that. And I'm curious, what happens if one goes upstream to look at how those systems engage to then produce the kind of diverse results that one actually sees on the ground? And this would be, I think this kind of diagnosis of the interface or interaction between governance regimes is very relevant, for example, for identifying, what are the possible entry points for addressing issues like gender equality? The context is what are the synergies and tensions between those overlapping governance regimes? How can the tensions be managed? How can the synergies be maximized? In this context, one has issues to call, some of the issues I mentioned last week, different actors may have different understandings of responsiveness, of what responsible leadership looks like, about what accountable governance looks like. Those are all concepts that are overlapping but distinct and may reflect the different, not only cultures, but positionalities of the different actors involved in governance. Similarly, in the context of multi-stakeholder forums, which would be potentially a hybrid or bridging of different governance regimes, my question would be, what do the multi-stakeholder forums actually govern? What do they have power over? Seems to be a key question. And then in terms of what's the context going further upstream for governance itself, I think I saw in a couple of presentations the reference to the distinction between strategies and policies. And it may be worth pursuing that distinction if we could think of policies as referring to official or governmental frameworks and mandates, what are the rules and what is the resource allocation that's coming from official authorities. And whereas strategies makes me think more of the actors involved, both inside and outside official authority structures. So what's the interplay between policies as a framework and strategies as an idea that refers to the goals and actions pursued by specific actors that are navigating those policy contexts. And then turning to the issue of scale and scaling that came up in the context, particularly of agroforestry, this also recalls some of my comments for last week, which is that when it comes to scale or scaling, it's very common to think, well, you know it when you see it. And I think it's useful to, I'm gonna offer a brief conceptual framework that distinguishes between one particular approach to scale and then other approaches to scale. The classic and dominant approach to scale thinks about scale in terms of scaling up of more and bigger. And I think that it's important to distinguish that from three other approaches to scale. And the umbrella frame that I'm gonna propose is how does one take scale into account? That framing is broader than looking at scale in the sense of volume, bigger, or, and so if we go beyond scaling up, then another approach to take scale into account involves looking at dynamics of diffusion. What does the dynamic of horizontal replication pilot to spreading that pilot, that's the dynamic of horizontal replication is not the same as simply doing something more or bigger. The second alternative way of taking scale into account involves the concept that political sociologists talk about as a scale shift. How do initiatives jump scales from the local to the subnational or to the national? Or how do they jump scales from the national to the local if we think about scaling down? So scale shift is, I would argue distinct from, say, scaling up. And then the last alternative way of taking scale into account involves multi-level approaches. And here we heard a couple of references to multi-level governance. So this is an alternative approach to scale that thinks about levels. And that's distinct from scaling up, which involves, again, the assumption of how to get to more or bigger. And in my own work, the particular approach to multi-level governance that I've been focusing on is working with vertical integration of independent monitoring and also a public interest advocacy, which involves the simultaneous engagement with multiple levels of decision-making at the same time. And I mentioned that briefly last week. So just to sum up, these four ways of taking scale into account involve scaling up, diffusion or horizontal replication, scale shift, and multi-level approaches. And I'm thinking specifically of vertical integration. And so just to then sum up, to keep it short, I think it's useful to think both, how does one go from landscapes to governance and how one goes from governance to landscapes? And the underlying issue with landscape governance seems to me to be who decides, who has standing and how do they decide? Thank you very much.


Hello everybody. Happy Friday. I'm so excited. This is the second round table I've had today with Stephanie and Catherine. This morning we got to sit down with Tamara. It was very early for us over here in America. Now we're at a more decent hour and we've got the awesome Cindy who is one of my friends here in Atlanta, not just on the Internet, but also in real life, although I do consider YouTube to be real life as well. But we have a really, really exciting show today and it's interesting because yesterday Catherine and I, most people know that we had a episode together where we kind of were talking about how we were feeling a little bit down in the dumps and just kind of having like a little bit of pity parties and you know, that the hardness of growth and I realized something as I was getting ready and it's interesting because today we're going to be talking a lot about Kali and I know I had a subscriber ask us to talk more about this in this dragon energy and the divine feminine, the divine mother and I will say after the episode I did with you yesterday Catherine and then sitting down and doing the round table this morning with a bunch of powerful women and then being here again with powerful women right before I signed on to Zoom to do this with you guys. I had a renewed sense of energy and I thought that was so cool. You know, my sister, when she was in college, she used to say, I'm here to meet my bridesmaids, not my husband. Now she ended up meeting her husband in college, but she had this goal that she was going to meet her bridesmaids, that it was important that she had really strong women around her all the time and I think that is the renewed sense of positivity. I feel now is that I've gotten to, you know, in less than 24 hours, I've been able to spend time with really fierce, powerful women who are again like the bridesmaids, you know, like it's a women, you know, we're coming into this new age where women have always been competitive with each other to get that man, but now that Divine Feminine is coming back into the play, we're able to have these really strong female connections. And so I have to thank you guys for that because it's made me feel so much better to have these girl chats with a bunch of really strong, badass women. So thank you so much. And I took, after we got off with Tamara, I took a bar class online and it kicked my ass, but I was loving it. And, you know, the female teacher was so powerful. I might still a little shaky. My hair is still a little wet. But, uh, but, you know, so I just have to thank you guys. And I thought how appropriate we're going to be talking about Kali. And it's interesting. So I have this deck of tarot cards, the Jungian tarot cards and the high or the Empress card. I don't know if you guys can see this in the back. There's a dragon and Kali is often associated with this like fierce dragon energy. And I thought how appropriate for what we're walking into in this new timeline where the divine feminine is being brought back into the playing field. And so I actually, I want to actually pass the ball over to Cindy because she's kind of doing these courses to bring up that divine feminine and people. And this is something Cindy, you've kind of been doing a lot in this life, like really honing in, of course, everybody knows Cindy on this channel. She's approving and descent. You come from a line of women that were very strong and very magical. And so I think that's in your DNA as well. Well, as we do as well, but I think our ancestors, we got a little bit more separated from, from their, their witchiness and their, their cool, magical ways, you know. So, and I apologize, guys, that the sound goes in and out. We're having a little bit of issues, but we're just working with what we got. So, so Cindy, do you want to, you want to take the ball with this and start us off and introduce who Kali actually is? Yes, the one thing I feel like I need to say though, because I get this question a lot as well, especially when you're talking about some little more of these fierce energies, like Kali or Dragon.  Yeah, there you see. Are you showing the images?  Right.  Yeah, heads and necklaces of skulls. And, you know, she, she comes out with bangs and her, her tongue sticking out. And it's a frightful image. And the reason that like the dragons and the Kali's, they come in so fierce is because they are devourers, but devourers of the ego and aspects of you that are no longer serving you.  But you're having a hard time making the transition to that change. And they'll like the dragon and the Kali energy will come in and they will literally just tear things apart. And at first it feels, it feels hard and it feels difficult because you're going through these processes of ego that's and they're not always the most pleasant experience.  But when they come in, while they're, they're going through this, this process of, of destruction and it might feel even, you know, oh, wrathful, but it's done from a place of unconditional love and from your highest good.  She's she's coming to you, even though she looks fierce and with things and with arms and with skulls. She's also holding you and nurturing you while you're going through those transitions and and just telling you, just just be like, can you, can you be with it? Just be don't, don't fight me. The more you fight me, the worst it's going to get. Yeah, but they're not yet, but but this idea that, you know, my gosh, is this is this demonic or what am I getting myself into here? And I can tell you from doing energy work, I know what demonic energy actually feels like, because I've actually pulled that off the people. And that's a it's a very different feeling than than Kali or Dragon.  The those particular energies, yes, they can be frightening, but they're they're usually frightening to to the part of you that's resisting change. Yeah.  You're more likely are going to go through this destruction, this destructive process. And I went out to I was just telling this to Stephanie. One of the biggest misconceptions about the Hindu faith is that people believe it is polytheistic and it's not. The Hindu faith is actually monotheistic. They have the tri head like Christianity. We have fathers on Holy Ghost. They have Shiva Vishnu Brahman. That's their tri head. And I asked a man in India once, like, what's the difference between Christianity and Hinduism? He goes, oh, Christians believe God came to earth one time. Hindus believe God came to earth many times. I just kind of laughed at that. I was like, well, that's very humbling. You know, like, like we he's got to keep coming back. And one thing, too, you know, we've been talking a lot about like Jesus or Yahshua and the Magdalene, the Mary Magdalene. That's we've talked a lot about Sunni that's coming back into the forefront now that it's not just about, you know, down with the patriarchy. It's finding that balance between the divine feminine and the divine masculine. And that's one thing you see in the Hindu faith as well, as that these avatars of God all have a masculine and a feminine. Kali has her divine masculine and but they're both equally powerful. And something to do with a lot of these Hindu deities is that they a lot of the time their skin is blue with Kali. Sometimes she's depicted with black, very dark skin.  So they take that from you, which is not serving you. And that's why their skin changes colors. You see there because they're they're taking up that. And like you said, that very nurturing, loving, loving way. And yes, I know I've had episodes, Kali, Kali seasons in my life where I think we all have where all of a sudden out of the blue, everything just goes topsy turvy and you don't know what's going on. You feel like you've lost everything. But then out of it emerges a new path, a new path because she is the bearer of death, but she's also the bearer of life, which is what Ganesh does as well. There's a lot of similarities between Ganesh and Kali. But Ganesh is a little bit more mild, I would say, a little bit more mild in his approach to it. But but yeah, yeah. And another way that I've heard it explain to me to about the different the deities and such and the pantheon, the Hindu pantheon is that they're pieces and aspects of the bigger God. Yep, that are our ancestors, the people who came up with the idea of these deities. It was God, the idea of God is so big that it was too hard to wrap your human mind around the bigness of God. So they they took they took the idea of God, he, she, whatever you want to call it, the creator, the creator, tricks, however, however you envision God for you. And that they divided his energies into more bite size pieces. So, you know, Kali is the fierce feminine energy of death and destruction. But that's also an aspect of God. You know, like Ganesha, he's the remover of the obstacles. You know, the I love Ganesha. But that's also an aspect of God, you know, Lakshmi and, you know, she's an aspect of the divine feminine. It's all about luxury and abundance and all those and prosperity. But that's also an aspect of God, you know, so it's like taking taking this this huge idea of God that's too big for our minds to wrap around and putting it into smaller pieces for us to be able to comprehend. And I just made a video yesterday with a friend of mine, you know, we talk about the mystics axiom, which basically it says, as above, so below. And what these deities represent, no matter what pantheon they come from, whether it's the Hindu pantheon or the Greek pantheon or the Roman pantheon is that, yes, they're bite-sized nuggets of God, God itself. But they're also aspects and representations of you. Yeah, that when you forget something about yourself yesterday, we were talking about the aspect of Jupiter and Zeus to represents the aspect of God, which is all about expansion and abundance. But, you know, we sometimes we contract and we come into our smallness to forget how expansive and abundant we are. And then, you know, we might work with an essence like like Jupiter, let's say, to help us remember our abundance and expansion. Yeah, that's the way that that the traditions work with these different these different deities.   You know what I mean? It's like it's like that power, that Kali essence, that power, it's it's within you. I mean, she she comes and she helps you out, but it's pulling from you. Yeah. And isn't that like what's happening right now, though? We talked about this morning with Tamara, that the opposite of war isn't peace. It's creation. And there has to be destruction before something can be rebuilt. We talked about this morning. That's what you all say. We're in like a Kali season as humanity now. We have them for several years. Yeah. I mean, you've really got to look at the way nature works in terms of, you know, nature will have fires that seem to destroy something. And then everything comes back renewed and stronger from that. And I was just looking at my daughter, clear one of our areas of our garden. And it's just incredible how quickly it's recolon, colonnaded and how strong the new colony of plants has come back. What is the significance, Cindy, of the tongue, the sticking the tongue out? I don't know that one. You know, I think I used to know that, but I can't remember that anymore. But it's because everything, if you look at her, the symbol of her, like she's she has her foot standing on this little feast or this little, you know, sometimes it's a person and that's like the ego. There's a lot of DTs that are standing on something and that's like them standing on the ego. It's like the death of the ego. Like, yes, you know, I've got you the tongue. The part I'd have to I'd have to look it up. I can't remember that exactly, but I'm pretty sure, like with all of those, there's a deep meaning to every part of it. Everything I was asking is because, do you remember a couple of years ago and one of the pop stars and things, it was this whole thing where everyone would take their picture with their tongue out. And I'm just wondering if it's related in some way. There was a phase where for about a year, everyone's selfies of the younger people were coming out. Yeah, you know, I remember mine. You know, I'll have to research that because that's a great question. But that's I'm sure it means something. I like how you point out the details because all the Hindu DTs, like one of my favorite things to do in India is to go to these really old Hindu temples that it's funny because India is like it's like a country of chaos. But there's like order in the chaos and there's like a relaxation. And and they have these old temples that some of them are abandoned and you go in and like look at the the structures and how they really taken so much time to to like chisel these beautiful DTs and these beautiful characters on the wall. There's just so much detail. Like a lot like with Ganesh, for example, a lot of people think Ganesh is the elephant god, but only his head is elephant.   And he put an elephant head on. And so this poverty was very upset because the national was the son of creation of poverty or shock. Yeah, well, she found out that Shiva cut off her son's head, man.   Let's have no fear. Like a woman's or the first animal. And put the head of that on Ganesha, Ganesh. And I love the beautiful thing about Ganesh is you see with the head. So the body is the body of technically of a human being. You can see that with the feet.  So he's there to listen. And he's one of the most famous of all the Hindu Hindu deities, one of my favorite deities. And we see that a lot with because Stephanie, you were asking me earlier before we started filming, if these were like mythological or if they're based in any type of like true story. And when I first started going to India and really started to understand the Hindu faith, I perceive them as being fully mythological. But at this point, because we have all these this idea of like off-worlders and we know that we see all this stuff in the Bible that was taken out. I'm starting to wonder if they aren't off-worlders, if they aren't some some reality of something. And I know like one of my favorite stories of Hanuman from the Ramayana and Hanuman is the monkey God. And in the Ramayana, Ra is the is the. Hi, so Hanuman, here we go. He is the Ra is the avatar of God and Ra marries Sita. Well, Sita, so if Ra is God, Sita is the representation of the soul. Well, the ten-headed demon, demon, Ravana ends up kidnapping a Sita and bringing Sita to Sri Lanka, the island off of the coast of India. And Ra is distraught because he's missing his wife, Sita. Well, that's God missing the connection to our soul, that that that because the ego. Ravana, again, that demon represents the ego.  So he has to defeat Ravana, who is this ten-headed demon that every time you cut off a new one goes back, it's the ego. So his mission through the breath, through the courage of breathing, through the courage of action is to return the soul Sita back to God. And we are Hanuman. We are Hanuman and we are Sita, and we have to take that courage. That's a fierce looking Hanuman right there to go. And there's a very famous line that Hanuman says. And he says, when I forget who I am, I serve you. When I know who I am, I am you. And makes it when I think about that line, it's just when I when I when I when I forget who I am, I serve you. When I know who I am, I am you. And in the aspect of Hanuman's story that I think goes very well with what you were talking about at the beginning, Bryce, where you were you were saying how you were kind of feeling down in the dumps. But then you were gathering with everyone and you were, you know, you felt much better. Well, there was a point where at the beginning of the story, right, that Hanuman he free, he has superpowers, but he didn't know he had superpowers. He completely forgot that he had superpowers. That was part of his punishment for trying to eat the sun. Yep. He thought the sun was a mango and he completely forgot that he had he was a he's a sent he was a part God because he's the son of Vishnu. And what made him remember were his friends. His friends told him it was the bear for the bear one. I can't remember what his name is, but the bear said to him, he was like, Hey, don't you remember that you're the son of Vishnu and that you have superpowers? And just from that, he remembered in all his glory who he was. Yeah.  Yeah, it's a beautiful story. We have a big Hanuman on the wall at our Shala here in Atlanta. It's it's a Hanuman's a beautiful story. I have actually a little Hanuman in my car that hangs off of my my rear view mirror, because yeah, I remember that story of him, like that courage to remember because he Hanuman has the ability to drop jump from the banks of India all the way to Sri Lanka. He's the only one that's able to defeat Ravana to take the soul back to God. And you're right, that's showing it as our friend Janine says, we are magical beings. We just don't know. I mean, they they they want to tell us that we have 97 percent junk DNA. But are we Hanuman is that junk DNA? No. And when you were you were asking whether they're mythological, you know, maybe in a sense they are mythological, but your your energy, like your prayers, human prayer and energy has has power to it.  That is that is how powerful our belief is, though. That is how powerful our prayer and it is it is it is our most highest superpower is that your imagination and your belief that when you pray into something with with all your faith, that that the energy of that thing actually expands and grows. So Ganesha is alive and well, because he has so many so many, you know, especially in India, so many people who pray to him as this colleague, colleague is alive and well. Oh, yeah. Or, you know, some of the ones who have lost lost their rank, lost their lost their prayer, you know, that they they actually lose their strength with with us. I asked the Hindu man in India once. So how many how many times has God come back? How many avatars are there? And he goes, well, too many. Yeah. And I will be right back. My my son is at the door and he won't go. So I'm going to go. That's right. That's right. Yes. No, too many. I love I love the Indian culture. They're so funny. They're so funny about life. But, you know, yeah, it's it's funny because I know Cindy, we've talked about this a lot because we both run courses. And one of my favorite, most impactful books I've ever read and continue to study periodically is the Bhagavad Gita. And of course, that's Krishna is is the avatar in the Bhagavad Gita. And you talked about this idea of God, the creator, the source being so huge that we we have to kind of break it down into bite-sized pieces because our we just can't fathom something. First of all, yeah, our body, we can't even imagine something that never had a beginning or an end that just always has been like that. What, you know, that it's just always been because we live in a natural cycle of birth, life, death. And in the Bhagavad Gita, we have there's a scene for those who've never read the Bhagavad Gita.  He's a warrior. He has to go to battle for this land in India.  And now he has to go to actual war against them. And he's having this like moment of panic where he doesn't want to do it. And so Krishna, who is with him, who is the avatar has these conversations with him and Krishna is a very, you know, the Christ. The Krishna is where the Christ cut this idea. He's a very loving. He's very similar to the Jesus from the Bible. Like there's a very loving aspect. He's not, you know, they all have their different ways of maneuvering within their environment and their different bite-sized pieces of God. And Krishna, first of all, tells Arjuna, like, Arjuna's going to get out of this. Like, you know, I do this. And Arjuna, Krishna's kind of like toughen up buttercup.  This is your Dharma, which is kind of what a lot of us are dealing with right now. We're having to go up against and we're losing friends. We're losing. It's almost like this toughen up buttercup. Like this is your, this is your Dharma. And then Arjuna begs Krishna to show him the full extent of who he is, the full extent of God. And Krishna's like, bro, you don't want to do that. I'm telling you, bro, not, not going to be good for you. But Arjuna's like begging him to show him.  And he, he let, allows himself to kind of break out of his body into that avatar to show his full extent. And Arjuna's just can't even look. Like he's just in so much pain to actually try to see the full scope of what God actually is. And so then Krishna has to come back into his Krishna body.  But that also, that also forges his belief because until that point Arjuna doubted the whole time.  And you're like, man, you know, am I doing the right thing? And no, you know, I don't think that this is the right thing. And, you know, all the self's doubt that comes in.  And when we go through like these Kali seasons or these difficult situations, your, your, your perception shifts and there's a cleric of Pankola Estes. I don't know if y'all've read her book, Women Who Run with the Wolf, but it's one of my, one of my favorites. If you're talking about, if you want to, you know, enhance or grow or understand woman, primal, instinct and all this stuff, dragon type, you know, feeling wolf, that wolf feeling is she talks about the skull light. And it's the, it's you being able to see through the clear lens of perception, like, but when you're seeing things through the skull light, it's not pretty.  Kind of like how Arjuna saw, you know, that was the skull light, the perception of seeing everything. And when we go through like the processes that you're talking through, when did you see, like when you see clearly it first is just so very unpleasant. You know, it can be to see the truth is not always that pretty, but it's the truth that you need to see to gain your discernment and for your, your instincts, for your true instinct, primal instinct to kick in, your skull light must kick in. Yeah. You know, and we've gone through that. I think we've gone through that big time. I mean, we were, we were talking this morning, we were like, well, who's it? You know, seeing the reality of the situation, I think that's what we've all been through this. And I've heard people say, I've said this before too, like even just the crumbling of our perceptions in this timeline of what we thought was real and what isn't real. And we were laughing this morning about how we don't even know like how close continents are to each other because we're doubting everything we've been taught now, how that, that facade is falling. But then you look at people who, who are not at that point yet to even entertain an idea like that. And that, that idea, I know we talk about the red pill a lot, but there's also this idea of the black pill that when you go through the dark night of the soul, when you have to face certain truths that totally blow your perception of reality out of the water. And it can cause that, it's that hard truth as you were saying, like that you have to face and you have to acknowledge and you have to be in that, that sense of almost mourning in order to break through, which again goes back to the Kali energy and the dragon energy. And we've, we've heard Janine speak a lot about the dragon. We've heard Ashley speak a lot about the dragon. You see dragons, right? Cindy, when you were- Yes, oh my goodness. When I was, when I was working with it, it came in really strongly when I was working with Mother Mary, Mary Magdalene, which was really strange because I wasn't ever associated dragon energy with them before. But it, it was this idea that we were talking about is the fierceness of unconditional love. And see Mary, both Mary Magdalene and Mother Mary, my opinion, this is my opinion, their power has been, was deluded, like extremely deluded to, and then that also carried over into just women and into general, where we were deluded to like the optimal divine feminine, I mean, I don't think it was divine, but it was maybe what was considered, it at the time was more like soft and nurturing and is always the martyr and, you know, always giving back and, and can't really have anything for, for herself. No, this idea that the feminine was more, more demure in there simply to serve in a more subjugated, subjugated way. Yeah. And even Mother Mary, Mary Magdalene were portrayed that way. You know, Mary Magdalene was always like crying and she was a prostitute and all this stuff. You know, in other words, her, her, her essence was very much deluded, as was Mother Mary. And what I came to figure out from the dragon coming in with them was like, no, we are actually very, very fearsome. This is the part of the sacred feminine, I think that's, that's really coming out right now, which is why the dragon energy is coming in to so many people, not just me, but it's been happening to a lot of women in just the time, I mean, because it's funny when energies come in, they don't just come in to one person. You'll start hearing lots of people talking about it at once. That means that, that like, like that energy is coming in and full force and the dragon aspect of the female energy is to bring back that sense of, no, you know, we're, we're feet, we're the mama bear.  That is a dragon. That's not some just like, like, boo-hoo mama, you know, that's a dragon. And then Mary Magdalene who stood next to him in the same light, in the same power, she stood next to him in ministry. You know, that is a dragon. That's the dragon female energy that's wanting to come in. It's like, it's time for women to understand and it's okay for you to step in, in your power in a fierce way, not in just like a martyr way. And I always have to be giving like, it's been Lilith.  And she is, and she's like, Adam's first wife, right, in her story. And she, she got kicked out.  And Adam was like, no man, you can't be on top. And they kicked her out of Eden. And you know, anyways, I love her story. Well, this is not a book of Esther too, where I think it's the book of Esther, where the king she marries had a wife before Esther, but he like divorced that wife, kicked her out because she wouldn't submit to him. Like he would like summon her to the bed and she was like, no, I got to wash my hair. And he was like, get out of my kingdom. And then she was painted as this like bad person because she wouldn't submit, whereas Esther submitted. And so it's interesting to see the, I think it was Esther, yeah, where it's interesting to see how these strong women have been. I mean, you were talking about Methuselah the other day in class too with the snakes in the hair and, you know, her story and how she was just totally wronged and was totally just demonized. Well, if you look at the story, she was, did we talk about this already? I can't remember where I'll talk about what, but anyway, it's like Methuselah's story where she was an apprentice of, I think it was Demeter or Aphrodite. I can't remember which one. It was Aphrodite Demeter. You know, yeah. One of those higher ones. I can't remember which one. And she beautiful. Methuselah was a beautiful, beautiful goddess who was just in love with Demeter Aphrodite or whichever one it was, I can't remember. And was her servant and, you know, just absolutely loved her. Well, Poseidon was having an affair with Aphrodite Demeter, whichever one it was. And Poseidon saw the beauty of Methuselah and came in and violated her. And then Demeter Aphrodite, yeah, I need to look it up, got like jealous and turned her into the org that he is, with the snake heads or with the snake hairs and with demon eyes. And she got, you know, putting into caves, in a cave. And men were sent there to, you know, to try to kill her and everything.  You know, and whenever men, the only thing she could do was turn them into stone.  Like, which Mary Magdalene talks about, right? The sacred, the wisdom of the wrathful person, like having that wisdom within rage and anger. Yeah, I love that. Yeah, it's interesting. You know, yesterday in America, we kind of, I don't know if we spoke about this morning with a, but we just had a Josh Duggar who was yesterday convicted of some pretty awful stuff we can't talk about on YouTube, but you guys know what we're talking about. And I've done a lot of deep dives into the IVLP, which is a very, very, very conservative fundamentalist group led by Bill Gauthard here in the United States. And the role of women in these like super, super, super conservative fundamentalist groups is basically, you're not really even a human. You're kind of just a vessel for the man and you have to submit. Like they don't believe in marital R-A-P-E. They don't, you know, you have to be completely subservient. And this guy, that's his wife. Like, you know, I've been thinking a lot. My empathy for people like get mad at her because she's still married to him, but she's totally brainwashed. But I've been thinking a lot about with Kali in her life. Like her husband just got found guilty of CP. So you guys know what that is with young, young, young people. And now she's probably going to get like, what, 20 years maybe in federal prison and how that this is such a Kali moment for her. Because she's been so brainwashed and led to believe that everything about who she is as a person through this very toxic theology comes through him. And now he's been, and there's been many opportunities where he's done things where she should have left a long time ago. But of course, and the only reason why I know that all the sub guys, people who are not in America is that they have a reality show. So they're pretty famous here in America. And now he's been forced away from her into federal prison. And I can't help but like be so, I know she's at the depths of despair right now because she's lost who she believes is the only person that can really give her life, which is her husband. But now that Kali energy is there for her to empower her to walk away, to give her the power to stand on her own two feet. And this is an extreme example of religious AB USC, an extreme example. But we see that in a lot of like through the age of Pisces of how women were taught to be demure. Women were taught to be submissive. I remember when I was a little girl, we would go over to my, my mom's parents passed away when I was relatively young. But my dad's parents, we'd like go over to their houses, their house on some Sundays and have like dinner. And my mom's before my parents got divorced, we get really mad at my dad afterwards. She always get mad at him because she would be like, Lee, your mom, you literally boss her around. We're all sitting at the dinner table.    Like let her sit meat. But we've been trained and my grandmother was a badass. Like she meditated and she believed in reincarnation, but, but we've been trained to treat women. They're the mother that has to give everything for their children, give everything for their families, everything, even when their kids are grown, that grandmother's getting up, getting everything, not even eating herself. And this, this paradigm shift is, is, is, is totally happening right now. And we're seeing how, and again, it's not to diminish the patriarch. We need men. We need divine masculine as well. But we're finding that balance now. Between the divine feminine and the divine masculine, where they can work in equal parts to each other. And, and it's, I think it's incredible. And I think you're right. It's like it's a collective moving forward. You're seeing this with so many people are experiencing the same type of, of energies coming into their lives.  Yeah. And, you know, the, when I was working, so I was working with Mother Mary, Mary, Mary, Magdalene, and soon after that, I started working with Poignant. And the dragon that was present suddenly shifted. It was, it was a dragon number that nonetheless, but it was more of like a white, pearlescent, more of a, of an Asian looking type of dragon. The dragon that came in with Mother Mary, Mary, Mary, Magdalene, Mother Mary, Mary, Magdalene, were game of thrones dragons. And I never watched that, but they were like, yes. Well, I was like, oh my. But it shifted with Poignant, but it was still a dragon. And it was interesting because I've always, I was never really that attracted to working with Poignant, but just because she seemed more mellow, right? She's the, she's about us of Cretaceous. And I was always attracted to like Holly and Lilith and Medusa and all these, you know, like all these, all these more, more fierce ones. So, you know, Poignant is about us of compassion. I thought, well, you know, she's soft. Yeah, that's what they look like. It was the game of thrones dragon. It was like that kind of a dragon. But anyways, Poignant came in with her idea of compassion, but the dragon aspect of compassion and of Poignant is to cultivate true compassion from the heart, it's forged in suffering. Yeah. You know, it's forged in your own suffering. It's forged from realizing that, wow, you know, there's really a lot of yucky stuff that's going on there right now. And it's not running from the suffering. You don't turn your back on the suffering. You lean into it and in that leaning in, it breaks open your heart.  And that's something we usually try to avoid, right? We usually like, we think suffering like, you know, we turn our backs on it because we feel like it's too much for our heart to hold. But one of the things that I think we're coming into in this new earth is we're evolving as a human being is how much our heart can hold. Yeah. And we get, you know, the idea of like the grant who has this little tiny heart and it expands out beyond the box in the, in the movie, our hearts are needing to be the same thing that they're, the container of your heart is so much bigger than what we allow it to be. You know, sometimes we think, oh, you know, the heart, it's loving, but it's a, it's a, it's a depth of love that also comes from a willingness to look at the suffering and pain. And that's the dragon aspect of that as well. That is how your heart grows. You were talking about that yesterday, Catherine. Yeah. It's really fascinating because I know so little about this. So I'm just loving just sitting here absorbing us. But I don't know why this just keeps coming up for me over the last couple of weeks is it's not shutting off in. But I'm wondering why we're so focused on the suffering and then it has to be through suffering that we learn and grow a lot of the time. And I'm wondering whether when we move into the age of Aquarius that we can move past that and learn through other ways because yes, that's one way we can learn. But for example, you know, Joe Dispenster talks about you don't have to wait until you've got some terrible disease to change your lifestyle happens. It's one way of learning and evolving. But I do sometimes feel we're so focused on that as a way of evolving. Are we actually attracting that in? And I'm not saying I completely agree with you, Cynthia. It's so important that we don't shut out suffering and turn our back on it because we all do go through that. But I just feel, I don't know, that the focus is so much on it and yet we can learn and evolve through other ways as well. I would agree. I mean, I think you can. I think it's just like what you said, Catherine, that you don't turn your back on it, but you don't need to invite any more suffering in your life. I think it's the relationship. The way I see it, it's the relationship that we have with it. And what I was talking about, and the suffering that we do face, transmuting it into something more beautiful, like compassion, that's the alchemy part, right? It's like transmuting it into alchemy, but no, you don't need to have suffering in your life. All the time that would be just absolutely miserable, like collie seasons in your life. They should be few and far between.  They just kind of happen when they need to happen because we're stubborn, because we can't see. But I think that there are plenty of people in life that don't need that, that they don't need to have collie seasons. They're here to just be pure, beautiful, love, light, and share that. I think that people are here in different parts. The reason I focus on it is because it's kind of what I do. That's what I help people with. I'm a shadow worker, so that's what I do. So I tend to talk about it more than an average person. But not everybody is a shadowy person.  I mean, you're just like, I just want to love. I just want to expand. I just want to do this, and I just want to shine more of that. And yeah, I mean, if that's what you feel like, you're dharma, like that's what you want to do, and you're not attracted to that other part, then yeah, I mean, go your route. You still help the love work. You know what I mean? Like, do that. Yeah, I think it was so helpful to say that it's really helpful to know that people, when they're going through the cally time, that that's nothing to be ashamed of. It's to be embraced, and you're going to learn and grow and move forward from that. So I think that's so, so positive, because I don't know anyone that hasn't been through a cally time. Quite honestly. I think a lot of us are going through a cally time right now. That's fine. So I can see it's really, really positive. I just, and I suppose perhaps it's a lot of what I've heard people talking about over the last few weeks because of where we're at at the moment is just they're sort of very focused on, well, it has to be this hard. It has to be this way. But I just do feel that moving forward, we're moving forward into a different way of learning.  Or as humanity, we don't have to go there. And if we're more aware of that, suppose more people talk about it and bring awareness to it, the less you have to actually go there. Yeah, to focus on the beautiful things, for sure. Because there's a lot of, there's so much beauty in the world that's happening right now simultaneously. Like there's a lot of death and distraction and all this stuff, but there's so much beauty. If there wasn't beauty in the world, we would be in an apocalypse for sure. But it's the beauty in the people and the love and the kindness and the people who can see things.  You're ready to see the light and you're ready to move into that new golden age and like you see it and you feel it. And there's a lot of that that we need, for sure. A lot of, hey, look, there's another side to this. There is a lot of beauty and a lot of love and a lot of good people. Like not everybody is bad. There's a lot of good people in the world too. And yeah, let's focus on that as well. That's an important point, isn't it? Because with the, whatever we want to call it, the awareness, the awakening we've all gone through, by the very nature of learning about it, I mean, certainly, I've come across so many things over the last couple of years that I didn't even know existed, would just be completely not in my reality at all. And I suppose because we've been going through and talking about that, like you were saying the other day, Bryce, that you don't need to talk about the look of people as much anymore because you've been through that curve, that learning curve. Whilst of course, so many people haven't been through that yet and that's where they're going to need so much of that support, isn't it, Cindy, that you offer? Because when you do realise, I mean, a lot of people are blissfully ignorant and just, they can't understand what's been happening because it's just not in their consciousness that, I don't want to even call them people really, I don't know what to call them, but you know that psychopaths could act in this way because for most normal people, that's beyond their comprehension, that level of evil. Yeah, yeah. I was just going to say one thing, just a response to what you were saying, Catherine, yes, I mean, people, I mean, not just me, but people mean you, people like you in the world who are, who's the light on the other side who says, okay, here's, here's like the other, there's like all this, you know, sometimes we've got to go through all this mucky stuff, but look, here's the beauty that's on the other side. Come here, so like you're the light that directs.  You know, there's some people that guide through the muck and they're the ones that are on the other side that are saying, hey, there's, there's something better. There's something more beautiful here. And so Mr. T keeps saying throughout the whole of, of, of his, uh, his term was what the best is yet to come, the best is yet to come, the best is yet to come. And I know, and even if we look at like the law one, which we, I speak about a lot because it makes a lot of sense as to what's happening now, combined with the book of Revelation and this idea of timeline shifting. Again, as, as I said yesterday, you know, consciously we hear people talk about we're moving from third density to fifth density, or excuse me, third dimension, third dimension to fifth dimension. That's a conscious approach, but the physicality of our bodies and our earth are moving from third density to fourth density. And what I understand from the theories behind the law of one is that in third density bodies and in third density planets, you are a planet of polarization. So you have the dark and the light. You have the suffering and the joy, but moving into fourth density positive, a fourth density planet can't be polarized. It either has to be positive or negative. I don't know what that looks like because we only know the polarity side of it. So when we move into 4D, well, we might not need the suffering anymore. That might not be a part of the patterning of that density. I don't know, you know, so that and this beauty, this peace, this joy, it's the truth that has always been the truth from the beginning of time is that it's all available to you right now. You don't have to wait for it. It is all available to you right now. Every single bit of it is available to you right now. We're just veiled. That's what happens. We just get veiled. We forget.   When that is destroyed, then you'll be able to see that it's been with you all along.  I know. So something that just came to me too is actually came to me a couple of weeks ago, but more or less now that we're talking about this is a lot of us divine feminine too. I feel like the divine is stripping away the old to allow us to take a step forward first so that we can usher in others. Does that make sense? So a lot of the old stuff, a lot of the old relationships, a lot of the old habits, a lot of the old belief system has had to be, it's like an onion. And you take away the layers of the onion and the beauty is in the middle. Well, not really in an onion. That's a bad analogy, but you know where I'm going with that. It's like you have all these layers and layers of programming, of relationships, of all these different things. And in order for us to be healers in this next world, whatever it looks like, we kind of have to, I think us awakened people have one foot in that other world already without even really realizing it. In order to bring in the next, the usher in these other people who are still sleeping or might be a little bit sleeping and a little bit awake, we're going to be the ones who I think form. Does that make sense? Like we're trying to come up with the correct wording. No, you're right too, Stephanie. The things about the healers and the teachers and why they often have to go through the chaos, it's because it's through, like my chaos, the chaos that I have had to go through, I can recognize it in someone else.  I understand this. I've been through this and I've helped lots of people go through this and I can help you better. And that's one of the reasons for teacher, like teachers and healers, why it's not always, the mystics path is not always the most. I mean, it can be a pleasant path, but it's not, it usually comes with lots of ups and downs. It's that you can understand the descent so that you can help people. When you go through your descent, then you have to come up through your ascension and you can navigate people through theirs. So you can, you understand the descent, you understand the feelings that are there and you can help navigate people up through the ascent because you went through it. Exactly. Yeah, that's exactly what I was alluding to. So yeah, it makes perfect sense. Go ahead, Catherine.  That just makes such perfect sense. And the thing is, that's the beauty of life is you don't all have to, you learn your lessons and then you help pass them on to others that won't do because you're then constantly speeding up the process and making it smoother because not everyone has to go through the same death. All the lessons that every healer has learned, every coach has learned and everything, they're then helping other peoples to get through it a lot quicker and a lot easier, hopefully each time they go through it, which is just moving all of us in the direction that we want to a lot quicker and speeding up that whole process. Exactly, how everyone has to go through it. I agree with you on that 100%, Catherine, not everyone has to go through, not everyone needs to go through it.   But in the next life, you get to rest and things get to be easy, you know? And it's like, and we never, Sherat said once, my teacher in India said once in conference, he was talking about with the practice of yoga, how you practice yoga every seven lives. And what I took that to mean is that it takes seven lifetimes for the lessons learned in one lifetime to really settle into your psyche. So when we go through these battles, when we go through these, you know, writes of passage, dark night of the soul, even though we learn a lot in this life, we have no idea the extent of what our consciousness is actually understanding in that moment, beyond the mortal brain.  You know, David Greek used to say, this is the golden ticket. This is the golden ticket.  You just don't realize it. It's kind of like Hanuman. You just don't realize it, but you have this opportunity to ignite something that other people might not ever have that opportunity to do in this life. So I guess it's all about perspective, isn't it? My husband is one of those people who don't need to go through a whole lot.  He didn't need any of that.  He's my only guy. He always has a smile on his face. You need those, you need those anchors of just people who are just naturally that way. You know what I mean? Yeah, my husband, that's so funny, Cindy, because mine is exactly the same. My husband is so laid back. He's horizontal. Nothing stresses him out. It doesn't take attention. It doesn't care what anyone else thinks. Not in a nasty way, but just it's just not in his awareness. He's just very happy in his own world. And he's completely oblivious of a lot of the stuff that we're all talking about. Because he's like, why would I put any of my attention on that? I'm quite happy where I'm at. And it's just lovely to see the different approaches. It's just really fascinating, isn't it? To see if there is no right or wrong. We'll hear for our own lessons. But you were saying about the perspective.  And the age old analogy, if you asked us to describe the physiological symptoms of we're experiencing when we're standing in that queue, she'd be saying, I'm so excited. I can't wait to get on. And I'd be saying, I'm terrified. I don't want to get on. How do you know you're terrified? Well, my heart rate's up. I'm sweating. I'm breathing faster. How do you know that you're excited? My heart rate's up. I'm breathing faster. I'm sweating. Same symptoms, different perspective. I'm telling myself. I'm scared of it. She's telling herself conscious or subconscious level that she's excited. And that's like life, isn't it? It's like the breath.  Yes. Both times you're holding your breath. It's funny. Sydney and I, we've talked about ayahuasca before, and I've never done ceremony, but I know a lot of people who have and not something I'm against. I definitely would be interested in doing diet at some point. But somebody I know did it, did a ceremony. And a lot of people go through that ceremony and come back completely changed. Have just a completely different outlook on their life after they're taking the plant medicine. And he said, I said, another yoga student who, this is the whole concept of yoga too, but he got it in an ayahuasca ceremony. And he was like, I realized that my happiness and my sadness are coming from the same place. And it's within my control. That makes so much sense. Yeah. Like even if you look at like childhoods, like for me, there's certain things about my childhood that bring such happiness to me.  So but it comes from the same source. Comes from the same source. When you and you're able and you, you know, it's like, I love what you said yesterday, Catherine. Like I didn't break your heart. I broke your expectations. You know, like we have, we have patternings that that have directed what how we perceive certain actions, action, you know, people get all big, you know, that guy that called us all a witch, he tried to compare karma to the kama sutra, which are two totally different things, which is kind of laughable. Because one quick Google search will tell you the difference. You don't even have to go to duck.go. All karma is, is cause and effect. That's all karma is. It's your work. We call it your work. It's your calls in your in effect. You know, if I if I call someone a bad name, they're probably not going to like me. That's karma. That's cause and effect. That's science. It's as my as David Green, you say that's the law. That's how it works. And so and I know Cindy, you've always said, I'm just trying to live this life, not to build up any more karma, not to build up any more work. But when we look at karma, it's it's neither bad nor good. We label it as bad or good, but it's just action and reaction. It's all it is. And so if you can learn how to react differently to the action, to perceive the action differently, you change the outcome of that energy that's been passed to you. If that makes sense. So and no, it's not the kama sutra. The kama sutra is something very, very different. That's for your next. That's funny. Yes. The next. That's why we're John Claude. It's a good one. He figured out that one. So I don't know anything about that. I've never studied that. So oh my God. It's hysterical. So ladies, it's been an hour now. That was so fun. Can't be an hour already. Yeah, it is already. This is fun. We should do this more often. I just thought that it's so ancient at the start. I was just absolutely fascinated by that. I'd so love to know more about that Cindy. I really would. It's just so lovely to see that it explained in such detail the different meanings behind these characters.  And that was just absolutely fascinating. And I'm almost quite blown away by all, by the depth and how much there is to all of this. So thank you so much for that. Thank you for having me. Yeah. I mean, the cultures are so rich with information. Yes. Simply open our sights or our minds to it. And not just think that one way is the only way. Cultures are so rich and have so much, so much to give. I love, that's one thing I miss the most about Mother India. And as a Westerner, when you go to India, it's, you're going there to study, but literally it's the country. That's your main teacher because you're having to deal with so much that you can't. It's so different from the Western world, but being there and learning the details of this, these old, old, old systems of belief. And I know I was saying in class on Sunday, because I teach at Sunday Shala on Sundays, like even the different hand mudras that you see people doing, like every aspect of your hand within every joint is a different point of energy that represents these different deities or avatars that we talk about, that you can press in and these pressure points to connect to that pathway of energy within you. And each finger represents an element too. Yeah, exactly. I mean, we do that, we end our practice and you see people do this a lot in the West, which is a bad symbol. It's not this. If you look at all the structures, that mudra is this. It's the pads of the fingers together. My teacher in India gets very upset if you do this. It's not this. It's this. It's the pads of the fingers. And that connects. That's the joining of God and man, like the painting of Adam and God touching hands. It's that joining through that pathway, which then goes up the value of the arm. And it's just all so beautiful. These old, old, old faith are so just inside of you. It's all about what you are and who you are in relations. Like we talked about Krishna earlier when Krishna was a baby in his human form. He was called Govinda. And there's a famous story where as kids do, they put things in their mouth and dogs. They put things in their mouth. And his mother saw him eating dirt. She went to open his mouth to pull the dirt out. And when she opened his mouth, she saw the whole universe inside of him. That's us. The whole universe is inside of us. I mean, Jesus said that the kingdom of heaven is inside of you.  Which one do you want to be?


Hey everyone, it's Gabrielle with Oxmerotic Group. We're here today at Oxford Toyota for our Facebook Used vehicles of the week. So this week we have three certified pre-owned Toyotas to share with you guys We're gonna go over some information on this one right here. This is a certified pre-owned 2016 Toyota Corolla. It's an LE The exterior color is a slate metallic This vehicle does have a clean car fax had one previous owner It was locally owned. It did just come off a lease. It has a back-of-camera and Bluetooth Interior is a gray mileage is twenty six thousand five hundred and one Price is fourteen thousand six hundred for our second vehicle This is a certified pre-owned 2015 Toyota RAV4 XLE Exterior color is a magnetic gray metallic This vehicle has one or had one owner does have a clean car fax vehicles equipped with navigation Bluetooth Back-of-camera also a sunroof Interiors a black mileage is thirty four thousand seven hundred and fifty two prices seventeen thousand nine hundred For our last vehicle, this is a certified pre-owned 2016 Toyota Camry it is the special edition the exterior color is in a blizzard pearl Now this vehicle does have heated leather seats. You can see it does have the alloy wheels The vehicle has a backup camera Bluetooth There is a sunroof the vehicle did just come off a lease It had one previous owner with a clean car fax now the interior is a black leather You can see that blue insert in there as well mileage is twenty three thousand seven hundred and seventy four prices seventeen thousand seven hundred If you guys have any questions on any one of these vehicles that we just went over Please feel free to let us know best for numbers five zero two two one four seven zero eight five You can also visit our website. It's oxmertwayota.com I'll make sure to have a link to each one in the comments below. Thanks you guys. Bye


All right, I don't hope you don't mind me sitting here, since the rest of the boys do it. My name is Paulika Poteano from Saudi Soul. I want to thank each and every one of you for making time today. This morning to be here, I want to thank the sponsors and all the kind words they said. I think each and every one of you have really played a big role in the music industry. So we're really thankful for that and you keep doing it, so thank you for that. And I mean, for myself I think this is a very emotional festival that we're about to do. It's our third Soul Fest and we have been really preparing for this to give you the best show possible. It's going to be great three and a half hours as BN said. So we are giving this our all and we hope that everyone really enjoys it. This is memories for life for sure, for each and every one of us. Thank you. But anyway, we went to Congo. We had a show in Congo. And from the time we were at the border in Gisehne, between the Congo and Rwanda border, everybody who met us there met us because of the song we'd done with Fali in Kok Studio. And we had never even rehearsed that song in our set because it was for Kok Studio, you know. But we were well received in Congo because of our participation in Kok Studio. So thank you to Kok. So thanks man. Santasana, Santasana, Santasana. We appreciate the life. We didn't question them. By then that was my question. It was not anywhere on the script or anything like that. So guys, we still have a bit more time if anyone has a question. I can see one here. Good morning. Good morning. I think my name is Jackie. I'm from Define Africa. My question would be to Policap. I understand that you're the music director. We're keen to know or find out what does the music look like? How have you planned the set? What's the experience like? What should we look out for? Have you incorporated the entire portfolio? Like how does the set look like? And maybe you can walk us through that journey. All right. Thank you for the question. I must say this being our last show for now before the haters, we've had to really dig deep because our catalogue is quite extensive. We've done music for the past 20 years. How many albums? Four albums deep? Is it five? Five albums deep? Four and a half. So the catalogue is quite extensive. We had to go through all the songs for us with the team and kind of see which one works, which one doesn't. But I assure you that honestly almost 90% of that catalogue is on there. And then also we're trying to really make it an experience and not just performing. So it's like there's a whole production value to it in terms of the storytelling of the set. So from the beginning until the end, you will experience the journey of Sauti Sol from when we started up until now. Okay. Any other questions? We have about three more minutes to take questions. Three more minutes. Any other questions as you're looking for your questions?