Hi, welcome back to Ono Awakening. This is Ono Christi, and I have a really special guest with me today. And we are going to talk about a topic that I think a lot of people don't think is particularly spiritual, but really it can be. And that topic is money and it does affect all of us. And coming into this time of ascension where the world is shifting. It really is important to think about money and to really start to change our attitudes about it for a lot of us, right? Because money is just energy, and as we all know, energy can flow in negative directions or can flow in super positive directions. So Brenda Bailey, it has a lot of kind of like money mojo, and let me just introduce her for you. Brenda is known as the shatterer of income ceilings, and so she does work with entrepreneurs, but today she's going to be talking about topics that are really applicable to everyone. So stick with us. She is a theta healing master and instructor who's owned and operated a seven figure business and has been an entrepreneur for 28 years. She's also a super nice person. She's blended her practical experience as a successful entrepreneur, along with the theta healing practices that allow people to have quick income transformations to create the Shatter Your Income Ceiling Program and her Shatter Your Income Ceiling Instructor Certification. Brenda's work in the world is to help you break down the barriers to help you heal and get into your true zone of genius to serve the people who need your gifts and make lots of money doing it. And like I said, she does work with entrepreneurs, but we're going to talk about topics and she can bring her magic in for everybody. So thank you so much for joining us. Absolutely. I'm not, I always say I work with anybody, but I seem to attract a lot of entrepreneurs, because that's who I am. Right. And I think one of my favorite sayings, Ona, to just start this off with is that money's not the most important thing, but it touches everything that is. Yeah, at least right now in this society. I mean, it doesn't matter. Whatever you do, money's going to touch what's important to you, right? You got to be able to put food on the table, have a roof over your head. Yeah. Like I live in Texas, so we kind of need to have a car because it's got lots of space. So we kind of need a car. We're kind of given. I mean, if like, if you're in New York City, cars not on the top of your list. But here in Texas, no matter what the size of the city, cars are pretty important to us here. Right. Yeah. So tell us before we launch into the whole topic of money and aligning with money right and aligning money with yourself and your own divine alignment. Before we get onto that topic, can you tell us a little bit about your journey here and what brought you to this place because you're really mixing this beautiful like balance between the healing work that you do and this whole very kind of left-brained money and entrepreneurship and that whole bit. What brought you here? So I've been looking and working on myself, well, we'll say probably for over 30 years, but really started doing it in a more holistic sense for 29 years. Okay. So I started looking at different modalities and the deal is that I have 13 different certifications and integrated healing. And it just comes by looking at myself. Traditional therapy and psychotherapy weren't changing things for me. So I knew I needed to go a different route. I just started looking and working on myself. And one of the things I learned very early in my career was that if I actually did really deep healing, which at that time I only knew the things that were really painful and hurt and took a long time, that it made a difference in the amount of money I made. Now it wasn't the reason that I was doing it, but I saw the correlation between it and thought there's something to this. And that's something I've noticed too. It's like, especially for me, it's like the last couple of years, as I've really had to deeply, deeply heal, I've had to really step back and kind of not do as much. And the money has keep rolling in. It's bizarre. Do you find that that's norm? Is that typical for? Yes. And that's why I chose the technique that I do, which is state of healing, because it was quicker, it was easier, it was less painful. Because I think a lot of people think that it has to be this big cathartic heavens parting and angels singing kind of thing in order for this difference to happen in their lives. And a lot of times what happens for people, well now, and now I work with really aware people, even though I know we don't want to, you know, I don't want to make entrepreneurs sound bad or anything, but it's like I'm just working with really aware entrepreneurs. I'm working with really aware people. And I have people that aren't entrepreneurs that still want to go through and go through my processes, because it makes such a difference and it was easy, and they can just feel it. And the deal is that when we release, whether it be, you know, trauma or emotions or whatever that is, our vibration raises. And when your vibration raises, you attract. I mean, if you truly want to be in the law of attraction, you have to raise your vibration. Right. And for those people, the only way that they know how to do it is be real heady with it, and really have to think about it all the time and be aware of it all the time. And we got lives, right, so it's really hard to be able to do that. And so 30 healing actually makes it a whole lot easier for people way easier. How is that a healing difference from the other modalities that you've used or worked with or had, you know, a lot of them work, you know, with the conscious or subconscious mind.  Right. Right. So data healing is called data healing because we go into a theta brain way. We're in a beta brain wave right now, just so you know, so what happens is that it's beta, alpha, theta, and then gamma, and I go like this. But what that really means is, is that your brain wave actually slows down with all of those. Right. Okay. So, and honestly, like monks go to monasteries for years to meditate in order to be able to go into a theta brain wave because that's really considered where that energy of all that is. Right. And, and how that is.  You don't have to be trained to do that. You just what, what we teach in theta healing and what theta healing is, is again about intention and awareness, like, okay, so this is how I intentionally go into a theta brain wave. And this is what all like do. And it truly allows you to be able to work whoever you believe to be your divine power, you're co creating again. Not a super religious person more of a spiritual person but even in the Bible and again I was raised Catholic so I don't know a whole lot about the Bible I'm going to be honest with you.  Right.  And when you can be in that space, which again, people take years traditionally to be able to do this, you could do it very quickly with theta healing. And that's what really allows you to raise your vibration. You can be able to create what it is that you want to create. But as human beings, you know, you can have a feeling and that's what I say about other. With theta healing we do muscle testing we use kinesiology to discover what the before is and the after is, because then that allows our brain to understand that a change has happened. Okay.  Right. But what does that correlate to? And so a lot of times people have, you know, a hard time saying that this made a difference for me. But with theta healing we look for specific beliefs that you hold at a cellular level. We look at specific trauma, specific non-forgiveness. We do a lot of other exercises through theta healing that muscle testing shows you that a change has happened. I call it a science experiment. You have a constant, which is your muscle testing, the yes and the no, and you have a before and an after. And that really helps. But for a lot of people as human beings, we've got to be able to quantitatively measure a difference for us. So whether that's time, weight, money, you know, whatever that is for you. Sure. That's really how our brain kind of wraps around like a change has happened. Right. Right. And tell me, I love this idea of being a co-creator. Right. And creating, because I think that's something that I think in spiritual circles, sometimes there's, there's, you go through a certain phase in your awakening where you're like, I'm just going to let the divine throw forth who me. Or I'm just going to follow, do what I'm told, do what God tells me to do or whatever it is. And what you said was really, really key is like, even with God within you, right? I'd love to hear you talk more about that. When we are in co-creation with God and when we're not looking for something because again, I'm not, but most religions teach us to pray to something outside of ourselves. Right. So there's a big separation. And again, divinely, we have God within us. So if there's a separation in this way, guess what? There's a separation in this way. Right. So when we can be in touch with the divine within us, within God, then we can, we can trust more, which is a big thing. Faith. And again, we're not talking about blind, you know, it's beautiful what Onus said, like I'm going to go with the flow. Because what that means is pretty much I'm going to put that in layman terms. I'm going to get out of my head and stop overthinking it. It's really what we're saying. I'm not putting that down at all. I mean, that's, that's super important. But I think there's a certain point where, where you can realize it's like, Oh, I'm not just a passive, you know, tool here. I have some, you know, it's almost like we're playing, right? And it's like, I can make some choices. There's, you know, there's the free will choice aspect of it that I think you get to a certain point. And that's where it starts to be like, whoa, that's where the miracle zone comes in, right?  But you can do it in a bigger way. You can think, you know, what it is that you want. And that's what we always say, like once you learn the technique of theta healing, to be very aware of your thoughts and your words, because you're going to draw it into you. And people just have a habit, they don't realize it, that they're negative. I think that that was one of the biggest things that the secret did for us. You know, you're familiar with the secret by Rhonda Byrne that came out like, I don't know about a decade ago, is that, you know, people really talked about the law of attraction. But it was that people are pretty negative. And I think it made people aware of how negative they are. And that, you know what, guess what?  But also what we hold at a cellular level, and that's where theta healing is different than other ones, we go beyond the conscious and the subconscious, and we make changes at a cellular level. So it affects your DNA. They work with the body too, which is really important, right? It also helps with the spiritual and the emotional and those are my favorite places. That's why I'm able to talk to people about money and for it to correlate and money, because it really has to do with the spiritual and the emotional. And so it cuts down that learning curve and the amount of work that you need to do in order to have what it is that you truly want in your life. But the biggest mistake that people have on is that they're not sure what they want. Yeah, they're not clear. They're not intentional. And so again, that makes it hard. Right opportunities to land in your, in your lab. Right. Exactly. Yeah. So, um, is that something you help people with them and get clear on what is that they really want. Yeah, okay. Absolutely. Now, initially I do like an intro session. I always say that I prayed, meditated, whatever you want to call it in the whole fact, because people would like show up. When I first started 14 years ago doing theta healing, people would just show up and they would have one thing they wanted to work on one thing. Yeah. And I'd be like, um, you know how we do anything is how we do everything. And it's going to be more than that one thing that we need to change. But you know, people and I, so I really thought about it and really prayed about it and asked God about it. That's who my divine power is. Please don't let that turn you off. Whoever you, whatever you believe to be your divine power, I'm fine with it. I even work with atheists. It's all good. Right. So I came up with a format of a session. That's 90 minutes that people can show up.  If we covered everything on the list, they were good. I would never have to see them again. And that's really what I did for most of my career is just that intro session is people doing that intro session. Now, again, because I was divinely directed, right, I was in touch with my, you know, God within myself and that's where this came from and that's where this was created from. And what I didn't realize was that people would be like so blown away by it that they would do one of three things. They would either refer somebody. They would want to take a class because they'd want to learn the technique because I believe that everybody in the world should know theta healing, right?  It's just the best thing to be able to do. And then, you know, I just really felt like that. And, and, or they wanted to find out how, how else they could continue to work with me. And for years, I didn't have anything else for them to do. You know, I'd be like, this is it. You know, I mean, this is it, but I would have even like say, I'm a psychiatrist that just kept me on retainer. She worked with me every week, because I was part of her self care. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because she was just like I just, she worked in the prison system and she was like, I just need to be able to have an option. She went to chiropractor acupuncturists and me every week. And, and, and that's, that's something I think that so many, almost every super successful person that I know has a healer that they work with and one that they feel comfortable with and that, you know, that they can and sometimes, and whether it's once a week or once a month or whatever it is, but, but yeah, she just had a really intense job, right. So she was like, I do, I need this. And what was really, and this was at the very beginning of my career, I was like, Okay, if you want to put me on retainer like I didn't that didn't even occur to me to offer something like that. And she was, she just said, you know, she would constantly say because she was a psychiatrist, she would say do you know how long this would have taken in traditional psychotherapy. Do you know how long, and then she would always say like, Where did you come up with that and I'd be like, Well, because she would just come and want to have worked and she really didn't have a huge agenda or, you know, which is why I also created that session, because I just wanted to be able to be more intentional for people so they could have more than what they thought could have healed and happen for them in a very short period of time. Yeah. So, so the healing and the money are so connected and as you're saying, emotionally, and spiritually, right, as well as financially. What do you feel like are like the most common blocks that you see especially in very spiritually where people around money that are holding them back. The healing works on four different levels, which is what makes it so great and why it's permanent and what it does and it's like, we inherit beliefs, traumas, you know, non forgiveness, we bring them in from past lives. I don't get to talk to that like on mainstream but I can talk about it here right. So we bring in from past lives and it, and it affects like the group consciousness that we bring in around us. We bring in our soul and then what we create like during our lives after we're born or, you know, from inception on the big thing is in the world according to Brenda that it's all about past lives. Then it's like the family that we attract the, you know, so it's like we may have from a past life. You may have been a very religious person or a healer in a past life, and a very common belief is I have to be poor to be closer to God. Right, so they would give away, you know, we know this right, we, you know, give all the worldly belongings away, right, so that they could live a very simple life in order to be able to get to heaven, right, in order to be able to. So I always say, we have this belief that we've typically either inherited or that we brought in for a past life that we've create hell on earth, so that we can eventually go to heaven. So it's a lot of struggle, people have to struggle so that they have a closer relationship with God to build their faith, we have to be poor, so we can, you know, and of course, struggle with money, so that we can be closer to God, those are past life beliefs. Maybe. And these are very common beliefs like it's not like, and this is the thing, I will have a very mainstream person, and I'm still going to cover this belief with them.  Right, like deals are going through financing is getting approved. And the only thing I'm doing differently is working with you. He didn't know when he met me at a networking event that this was what I did but it sounded good, you know, because I talked to him about preventing people from having, you know, from living the definition of insanity, which is repeating the same behavior and expecting a different outcome. It's those things that we've inherited or that we've brought in from our past lives, they keep us there.  It's because of those types of beliefs that we have on a cellular level that we're not even aware of, right that we're not aware of, because it's not your job to be aware of them you can again you're just doing the but again use 11% of our brain, using the best that we can to figure it out and and that little small percentage that we use. And you know when we think also a lot of times to trauma. And again, trauma is relative. So it can be, you know, something violent or an active war or car accident. It could be your mom being five minutes late picking you up from preschool one day, it does not matter. So trauma is we hold that cellular Lee. And I got to tell you that's like a, you know, like no, I don't want happiness I don't want money I don't want anything. I don't deserve it right so that really affects it and even trauma that your family have injured. And maybe, I think, you know I know we're talking about many but I think it's easier for people to wrap around like addiction runs typically in people's families or a physical deal like diabetes. So you'll typically hear people say oh well diabetes runs at my family or, you know addiction runs at my family. No, it's the beliefs and traumas and non forgiveness that run in your family. I was reading an experiment what they did with, I think it was mice or something and it was like, it was seven generations. And they tracked it because it was like, whatever it was, I can remember what animal was but it was like it had a fear of something was a smell of something and associated with. Seven generations before that was bred out of the line. And that's, I think it was a sense that they gave to a rat, and then. I'm not condoning this kind of experiment but it was like they gave the rats a scent of lavender or something and then shocked it. Seven generations before the offspring stopped reacting to that scent of lavender with fear. And so it's like we don't know what I mean, I don't even know who my ancestors were seven generations back, and what they might have been exposed to that. A lot of us, you know, like, again, we're all like on ancestry.com and you know, looking into our genetics, but that tells you a lot as well. And there's a class in theta healing like there are basic classes prerequisite classes and then their upper level classes. One of my favorite is called world relations, because it deals with all the cultures and religions. And literally when I took that class, you know, like, again, muscle testing, the ones that I what were, you know, had a prejudice against were cultures and religions that I had to Google, like I had never even heard of them. Interesting, like I had no idea. But again, that's going to affect who we are. Right. And culturally, religiously, there are some depending on how you were raised, that's going to come into and how you deal with money. We either do exactly what our parents did, or we do the exact opposite. And it just really, you know, but it doesn't matter if you do the exact opposite, you're still affected by how it was right. There's something that you could maybe do a little healing for the audience here. Absolutely. Awesome. Absolutely. So what I, there are two things that I really love about theta healing one it's very complimentary so it works with any other modalities out there, but it's also very complimentary and whatever you do for a living. Like, I always tell people because again I always look at it like tell me what you do for a living and I'll tell you how to utilize it. I always do. Even if it's just a job right I mean and not just a job. But if it's your, if you have a, if you, if you're not an entrepreneur I can tell you that but the big thing is is also, this is the thing one of the biggest. I think motivators for people to change. It's because they don't want seven generations from now, somebody dealing with what they were doing with it. And one generation from now, because if you do it, you're, it changes for your children as well. It will, especially if they're still at home, they're going to be affected by that. So you're not only doing work for yourself you're doing work for your family. Right and down the line and also I believe immediately because each of us is vibrating at a certain level and we affect everything around us so even if you're sitting in a room by yourself you're still vibrating. And that vibration is heading out there right so absolutely hard to heal or so. And we know right now, let's face it. It. It was funny because I follow one gal who I've been following for like 2025 years. Her name is Patricia Kota Robles, and she's way out there. Again, if that's somebody that you want to talk to like his way out there and talks about way out there stuff it's Patricia. And like to look at her she looks like I don't want to say she looks like your grandma but you can tell she like gets her hair done like on a weekly basis type thing you know goes the beauty salon gets it done type deal. And she's very conservative looking but she says these really profound things and I mean, I've been following her since like getting a snail mail newsletter from her in the mail you know like before any of this like we could have easy access like you do to do this. And you know she said she was actually I just watched a blog, right so she's vlogging now. And on her saying that, you know, everybody keeps saying something really big is happening. And it is on so many levels. So we can look at coven as being the absolute worst thing. But I feel like what's happened for a lot of people in the quarantine is they're having to look at themselves. What do we what do we want to be different people have had to really slow down. I know I'm thinking for like, own on myself that hasn't really happened I know like the floodgates open for me and I'm in crazy busy. I was actually going to take a step back do some rebranding do some things differently hire a team all of this and I've been having to do it like as I'm like, you know getting other things done and that again, I'm not complaining because I felt very blessed. Well, it's because what I and what I'm seeing here is that I'm seeing this true for a lot of healers right now because you know those who are kind of internally ready, because this is, I mean this is the time when the floodgates are opening for a lot of you know, a lot of ways right. And I was I was I was attending a virtual networking event. Yeah, that was with holistic people. I was like, why does this started and all of them were complaining, and they were very negative.  There are some people who are losing their jobs and believe me I pray for the people who have and I was glad that there was a stimulus check I you know this was before we knew something like that would happen. I was glad that there was able to be and that there were, you know, the government was able to get people more money up until like June or something like that and you know it's, it was that those types of things that I was and I said to them. If you're, if the glass is half empty, it is and if it's half full it is, and people right now. I just told them you got to you got to get over yourself, because people need you right now. And you just need to figure out how you can meet them where they need you. That's what everybody's having to do, but especially for people. And people are being more open, right like, help me what way can you help me will this make a difference, or so and so you know people come like I was like so and so told me about you, you know, two years ago but all of a sudden they have the time, and they have the inclination because they're being, because right now we're getting a huge tap on our shoulders, like do something or change, be ready. We're seeing our monetary system change like here in the US I, you know I'll just speak for the US, you know, we went to a gold base system again. We haven't been in a gold base system in decades. There are a lot of things that are changing that I just kind of go well isn't that interesting. And it's, again, these are really heady things and they're very, you know, like grounding and very, you know, vibration it feels like, but they correlate with vibrationally what we're doing and where we want to be. And I say like right now like I can help people being stopped being so empathetic. Wow, that doesn't mean that you're cold heartless and, and, you know, not compassionate right, what it means is is that you're not as affected by the, you know, group consciousness energy a fear that's out there a lot around right that you're able to have some command over your empathy right with that be something that you can do real quick right now. Because we can also you know the thing is is that we want to be able to maintain our vibration. Right. And again things will happen but what they do healing what it does is it allows us to bounce back quicker, or the bounce back even feel like it didn't even happen. Yeah. So you know we can do that. Right. And, you know, it doesn't mean that you're, you're reducing your ability to tune in it's just that you can choose when you want to choose to you can increase. So you're tuning right about us like we have some foremost it's about us selfish as that may sound or wherever it is. And if your empathetic you know because people always say this all the time and I'm like well you know you. You have you have control over that I mean like it's not like I'm at the mercy of my empathy. That's the deal. We don't want you to be at the mercy of it. What allows me to be do as well as I do and work as well as I do with my clients is I'm very empathetic, but I always say I'm an empath with boundaries. Right, exactly it's the boundaries. So, yes, we love love love love. Okay, so I always make sure that and I and that was that was I know we got off on a tangent. We want you need to say yes out loud. For any work like I'm going to say we're going to change this. Would you like to change this. You need to say yes out loud now you don't have to scream it from the top of the mountain tops. You just need to say it, though, it can't just be a not. It needs to be a, you need to say it.  Two, your divine power needs to hear yes you want it and the universe needs to hear you say yes. So that's the big disclaimer there that you need to do it so I always make sure whenever I work with a new client or student that they have three basic beliefs in place. I want an instant healing. I deserve an instant healing and an instant healing it's possible because what I do works very quickly. If you do not believe that you want to server that it's possible to have an instant healing, then guess what it's going to make it really hard for my work to be very be everything that it can for you, but also to if you can think about it, our body is set up to heal itself. Yes, he just want these beliefs so that you can be able to you know if we want to look at it from another perspective, we can do instant healing. Our body is designed that way. We've seen it happen over and over and then we get these stories or we get these things that. So we want to be able to have a massage a chiropractic adjustment and for it to stick.  Right. So we went ahead in the direction of healing. So if you would like those I want an instant healing I deserve an instant healing and an instant healing as possible. I want you to own a qs right just say yes out loud. Yes. I say yes yes yes right. Okay everybody all together 123 yes. And I always forget to say this. And I need to change that right need to remember to say this and what I want not what I don't want. I need to remember to say this. If you're watching the replay. I need to say yes out loud and you'll get the work. So as much as I would love people to be watching us live and for us to have this huge audience and watching us live, whoever catches this replay. You get the work when you say yes out loud. Yes. So, we want to change we're looking at many. And again, this is like a pebble going into a pond and it just reverberates out. And we may look at it from one perspective, but I'm going to tell you, it's going to change on a lot of different ways. So, one, it's going to change those four levels of what we've inherited what we've brought in for past lives what we have in our soul, what we've had created in this slide, but also, we're going to go to the original event that caused it to happen because I know that there's a trauma. There's trauma. We're traumatized folk here right we're traumatized human beings and whatever was happened that we inherited past life in this life that caused that to happen for it to be true for us. That's where we're going as well which is what makes it permanent and quick. Not every theta healer does that. This is how I do it because I want it to be the most effective. So, we're going to look at here a couple of beliefs. So normally if it was one on one or we were in a group I would have you muscle tests we would do the before and after, but we're just doing like a calm to group session where you could you're free to muscle test the before and then stop the recording and and test it or you can just say yes and have it and great. So we want to one forgive ourselves for what we've done around money. How we've handled it. How we felt about it. A lot of people look at money and they feel negatively we want to be again in that spiritual flow of honoring it it's just energy. So we also want to forgive ourselves for dishonoring our energy. We want to forgive ourselves for separating ourselves from what happens here on the physical realm. And we want to forgive ourselves for being in that illusion that we are a victim of what happens. So if you would like those, just say yes out loud. I'll say yes to all. We also want to change what prevents us from being in that flow of money of prosperity of abundance right something happened, we want to change that we have to be poor to be closer to God, that we have to earn money at the expense of ourselves. That we have to work harder, not smarter, because that's going to affect your money flow. Let's go ahead and do those and I think there's probably maybe one or two more after that. So normally you would muscle test those beliefs right first. And can you do can you give the audience a quick way that they can self muscle test. So you want to put your fingers together. And you can just run your finger through it so like I want to hold it tight enough to where I can't go through it. You want to close your eyes make the statement and look up. So you want to say, you know, say yes, say no. And you need to push your finger far enough. You want to make sure like that you're like going like this right so if it doesn't open it won't and if it will it will. Okay, you know what I'm saying. So like we're pushing it so like I'm saying yes and I can't. Okay, and I'm saying no and I'm pushing it and it goes through right. So if I test it I can say my name is Ona. Yes, my name is Jake. Okay. Perfect. And we always want to do like a few little like things like name or whether it's sunny outside it's, you know, overcast outside to, because people have issues with yes and no as well so we just want to make sure that we have a few like a few like no attachment to it I'm, you know, I'm a female I'm a male, you know, that that's something that you relate to. Right. So, you know, those are types of things that you could do so great example and, or you can stand. Right a lot of people do the standing and standing is just getting you know standing up straight. Again, you want to clear your mind what ends up happening is you want to muscle test immediately after making the statement, because again what our brain does is it starts going, when does this happen in my life I wonder if this is true for me I wonder you know like a million things start happening right. So you muscle test as quick as you can, because the deal is with data healing. It doesn't matter what the answer is if it's something that you don't want. But we can change it immediately. That's so it's so painful for people. And a lot of times that people don't go deep within you know to find out things is because it's painful. And then there's no way to change it or it's a long arduous road to change it. And that's not the case here. Right. So we did mention some right that we need to just have you say did we say yes to those owner you got to keep. Yeah, we're talking about also testing so which one can you repeat those. Again, those were trying to work. The idea that you have to work hard to make money. So, you know, and again you can also even say I'm obligated, because an obligation means that there's no choice. Right. Right. When we take an obligation out and usually that's like a path live thing. It means like no choice. So I'm obligated to work, you know, harder or not smarter. I'm obligated, you know, to have no, you know, to be poor to be closer to God. Right. I'm obligated to make money at the expense of myself. Right. Because again, um, whether or not it's an obligation, it'll still test for the obligation because you have that belief. But if you say just the belief without the obligation, it won't change the obligation. Okay, right. Does that mean I was, yeah, okay. So can we change those. Yes. And then let's see. Um, it was funny, I was, I do a weekly co-live and my guest that I had yesterday, I don't think that this is like, but I do like what's called the Theta Healing Power Hour.  And so it was so funny, because this is like a really like chatty talkative woman, and she would just be like, I would do it and I'd be like, and if you'd like those just say yes. And she'd be like, like, after the second one, like she was just like, maybe like, okay, you got a QM though, it should be like, I'm fascinated with what's going on here. Because I'm guessing she could feel it on some level and was going, how is that possible?  So let's, let's, let's change what obligates our brains to be in a poverty loop. Okay. And because again, we have to think differently, not that that's where it comes from again, when we change on a cellular level it does that, but if we have a loop in there.  And not that that's the captain of the ship but it's pretty close it's the first mate right so. Um, okay. And then let's change money is the root of all evil. Okay, so if you would like those just say yes out loud. Yes. So those are good places to start. Those are very good places to start. Thank you so, so much. And I, I'm just going to encourage everybody who has watched this.  I'll put time stamps below so you can see where to, you know, where you can start the healing portion and just start watching for changes in your life rates as, as the weeks, these weeks and months go on. Because these beliefs, you know, if they're ingrained it creates subtle changes in behavior that would make changes in your life. And this is the thing that I always tell people because you get a change on a cellular level. It's as if it's always been. So we don't notice it. We get to enjoy it. That's the cool thing.  You know, all of a sudden we're like, Oh yeah. Oh yeah.  And inevitably she wants to chat with me because she wants her husband to come have a session with me. Yeah, about them. It's always about their husband. And I always say, you know, the world is our mirror. And if you want your husband to be different, you need to be different. So why don't you come have a session with me. And then inevitably they will and pretty soon their husband comes as well because their husband's like, I don't know what this gal did but like my wife she's different and it's easier now. So yeah, I want some of that too. It happens all the time. So you may not be aware of it. And, you know, another thing that I want to say on is that it's such an easy technique to learn. And I really encourage people for the first time in the 20 years that theta healing has been around, we're allowed to teach virtually. And that's like, I've never, ever, ever, ever been able to teach theta healing virtually. And so we can right now because of the pandemic. That's great. And, you know, so I have a class like in at the beginning, like in about a month at the beginning of November I'd have to like what they just changed dates, but I have the class. I'll post a link to that. I'll post a link to your to your website and where where can people find you that if they want to, you know what I would say just I have a scheduling link that will allow people to chat with me so if you want to talk about taking the class or theta healing or what is own alike, I'm happy to answer any of those questions. And it's chat with Brenda be calm. Because I feel like that for most people like if you get that intuitive hit like I want to, you know, take it, then you know, I'm on Facebook, LinkedIn, Brenda be Bailey. You know, right now we're still working on my Instagram, just message me, and we'll get you the link and everything else all of that's getting set up because I've changed. Okay. Yeah, so happy to or I can always give it to you and she can add it here later. But, you know, but I, again, if you want to have a session with me I'd love to have a session with you. I would more because honestly, the certification classes for theta healing, they're not set by me they're set by the Institute. It's one of the least expensive things that you'll get certified in. It's really inexpensive and it's three days and you know there are other prerequisite courses and then you get to take really cool ones like manifesting an abundance and world relations and intuitive anatomy, but the prerequisites have to be done. And the advanced class actually just changes a bunch of stuff for you, like tons of beliefs and trauma. So it's less work because again the clear the healer, the clear the healing. So you want to be more profound in any work that you do as a healer.  Yeah, I did healing on myself for years before I even thought about, you know, doing it for anybody else and so whether or if you ever want to, you know, put out your shingles as a healer, this kind of work is definitely worthwhile. So Brenda, thank you so, so very much for being on here today for your beautiful healing work and it's been a pleasure and I really, really look forward to, you know, just keeping in touch. Yeah, as I say, please contact me. I know that on is also going to put a link for a one minute meditation because it doesn't take long that'll put you into a theta brainwave and allow you. Again, it has to do with intention.  You want it to be like a relationship or health or spirituality whatever you want that to be you can just make that your intention and still use the meditation. And I always tell people it's one minute do it in the a.m. and p.m. and do it for 30 days. It's going to help support the work that you've had here. Awesome. Thank you so much. Absolutely. All right, well, thank you. Thank you. Well, thank you. Thank you and I want to thank everybody who's watching. Love you dearly and thanks so much for joining us.


And welcome to this edition of Authors at Alden. I'm Scott Seaman. I'm Dean of Libraries. And it's a real pleasure to welcome you tonight for this latest event. Tonight, we have a conversation between Doug McCabe and Catherine Ziff about Catherine's book, Asylum on the Hill, History of a Healing Landscape. The book produced in cooperation with the Ohio University Press. Catherine is also a mental health counselor at the Plains Elementary in the Plains near Athens. Asylum on the Hill was published in 2012. So we're just past the one-year anniversary of the publication. And a recent review in the issue of the Library Magazine Choice said that this is a beautifully written, articulately researched historical work that tells the story of the Athens lunatic, Asylum. It also tells the story of the life and times of patient care in Ohio. Choice awarded its highest recommendation. And it's a real privilege for us to have Catherine with us tonight. I will say that the Ohio University has brought a few copies of the book for sale in the corner back there. And I'm told Catherine will be willing to sign. Sure. For those of you joining on the web, I'd encourage you to get a copy of the book at your local bookseller. Or you can just Google Ohio University Press and order it directly from the Press's website. Hosting our conversation tonight is Doug McCabe. Doug is curator of manuscripts in the Mons Center for Archives and Special Collections here in Alden Library. He's our resident expert on the Athens Asylum. Doug has also put together an extraordinary display of rarely seen archival materials that's just off to the side. If you've not had a chance to see that, please, after the conversation, take a look. We also welcome our online audience as we are webcasting this live with the help of our friends at WOUB public media. Thanks as well to everyone at the Ohio University Alumni Association and Office of Events Services for all of their help. Thank you all for coming. And Doug and Catherine, I'll turn it over to you now. OK, well, thank you, Scott. And welcome, Catherine, and welcome, everyone. It's a pleasure to have you all here and for everybody on the web as well. What a thrill. This is the first time the authors at Alden has been done over the web. So we hope that this is an important beginning to webcasting. Wow. My old friend, Doug. Where do we start? Well, why don't we start with where you're from and what led you on up to Athens like you went to school someplace. You were born somewhere, all those fun things. Well, I'm from North Carolina and moved here with my family about 15 years ago. This is our 15th year here. And I have various degrees. I have a doctorate from Ohio University here in Councilor Ed, also one from Wake Forest in Counseling. Before that, a master's degree in public policy and way back sociology from Chapel Hill. And all those strands of education kind of came together with the focus of the book, actually. Well, and then you needed to do a dissertation for your doctorate here. I did. And that's where this all got started. Where in the world? I was thinking on the way in here tonight, I know I'm weird. And that's why I'm really interested in the asylum and all that kind of thing. But I know you're not weird. And I'm not sure why you got going on it. Actually, it was my mother's idea. It was my mother's idea. I was thinking 13 years ago about a dissertation topic. She came up from North Carolina to visit me with my father and couldn't help but notice the asylum up there. And she said, well, why don't you write about that asylum up there on the hill?  In particular, years ago at Virginia Tech, I became interested in the work of sociologist Martin Rine, who spoke of storytelling and narrative as a way to do public policy analysis. So that were some strands that really fit for me in beginning this research, which ultimately became a book. Well, and then you had to figure out where in the world to go looking for stuff. I did. And you asked one or two questions, and all roads lead to you, Doug. And so I began asking about the asylum, which led to Doug, to you, and to Alden's, the Mon Center for Archives and Special Collections, which, if you don't know, is on the fifth floor and is just a fabulous place, very probably of a quiet reputation, but a wonderful living archive. I like to think of it. And Doug, you told me a very important thing. You're very patient. I know you have a lot of people come and ask you about the asylum. You're very patient. But you said, it's a room with 1,000 doors. And I thought, a room with 1,000 doors, meaning by that, there are so many ways to study the place, whether time periods, eras, the treatment methods, the people, the psychiatry, the cemeteries, the Civil War, how are you going to narrow it down? And so I narrowed down to the idea of studying the asylum and its interactions, its connections with the community of Athens. But still, there was over 150 years of history and where do you go to begin to focus? And so what time period? Well, very quickly, I had a dream and sort of being in mental health. I write down my dreams. I take note of them. Little bit of a Jungian strand there. And I dreamt that I was in the attic of the asylum, way up in the attic. Now, I have been in the attic, and it's a very kind of a cramped feeling, low ceilings, it's dark, it's dusty, they're small windows. But in the dream attic, there were, I mean, one very spacious room. There were many rooms, but I was in one room at high ceilings, polished woodwork, painted walls, big windows you could see outside. But it was full of very old artifacts, antique furniture, old kind of Victorian silver candlesticks, mirrors, all kinds of old artifacts. And so that kind of led me to the idea of studying the asylum at the very, it's very beginning years, as it, the six or seven years of construction and formation, and then the 20 years ending in about 1893 of the moral treatment era. So that took me to that. And then you begin to widen again.  You develop this, how do you develop categories to study, because still even within that time period. So it's a process of making long lists of details from history books, asylum, some of the basic information that's available, and coming up with general topics to begin to study, which then became chapters of a book, chapters of your dissertation. So you collapse all these details into several categories, eventually, landscape, architecture, patients and families, business and politics, which kind of go together, and caregivers. So, and from there then, with these categories in hand, you begin to dive in into the archives. And that's when the archivists start opening drawers, bringing out boxes, bringing out photographs. And just a word about archivist Doug, and I want to say also Bill Kimmick, and Janet Carlton, and Judy, and George Bain, who was there earlier, are experts, archivists anywhere, are experts at co-researchers. They're your very best friends in a research project, especially when you're dealing and reading about things where there's no one alive, it's very solitary. So it's really important to have your archivist co-researchers. They're always there. They're always interested in what you're doing. They're always willing to go find a box, bring it out, and also to suggest a resource that you haven't thought of. And they're always happy for you when you make some progress. You find some little snippet that gives you a window into one family's life as related to a patient at the asylum, and it's so exciting because these things are hard to find, and the archivists get excited with you. So very important, the role of not only all the information, but the archivists themselves. Well, I remember back in those days when you were doing your research, and you'd pull up this and go, look at this. You know, it was new information for me too, and that was really exciting and interesting to pick up on that and then be able to pass that along to other people who are coming in and approaching that thousand door room from a different door because it really is that way. You have all these hundreds thousand approaches into that one institution. So yeah, I think one of the important things that you're pointing out, and I think this is very important, is any of us really, whether we're still students or we're students, have gone through that process of narrowing it down and narrowing down and narrowing down, tightening things up so that you can come up with something that makes some sense beyond a third grade book report. With primary research. Well, right. So I wanted to ask you, did you find that you turned to secondary sources? First, general histories of asylums in America and things like that, and did that help guide you towards at least direction of themes, I would guess? Yes, actually there was something on every floor of the library that I used. First floor, you have microforms where all the microfilms, and you can go back and read way back the Athens Messenger, if you can, along you can read those microfilms without getting seasick, you know, back and forth, but there you could read the accounts of the parade that was held when the asylum was, the cornerstone was laid, or you can read about their social gatherings that were held, private parties that were held at the asylum or the Fourth of July celebrations or if a patient had escaped. So you could read in that, which was sort of popular culture in newspapers. And then on the, let's see, second floor, we have the cafe and we have the computer, so there's always things to do there. The third floor, fine arts library, if you wanted to look in some cases, I wanted to look back at some of the books, art books that have, are devoted to art made by patients in asylums across the world. You can go and look at that. Fourth floor, you check out books. Fifth floor is the really heart of all the archives, the Mons Center for Archives and Special Collections, government documents which have very important source of information about the asylum that anyone can access and those are the annual reports where they are long lists of what was purchased, lots of information aggregated about patients, narratives from the superintendents about what was important that year, what they needed from the state, the trustees reports, staff changes, just huge resource there. And then on the sixth and seventh floors, you have the histories, the histories of the Civil War of Ohio, of the nation, as related to the time period, medicine, psychiatry, history of psychiatry, if you wanna understand about post-traumatic stress disorder and what it might have been called during the Civil War, soldier's heart, you could read in the book and get all that kind of general background. And then... So you have all that. You found that you needed, for your research, to get into records that are classified as classified. Because of HIPAA. HIPAA laws still govern very old medical records which asylum commitment documents are and the Iman Center holds thousands up to 1913. Yeah, approximately in 1874 to 1913 and then there are some gaps in there too. Of commitment documents, which would include decision from the probate court, a narrative from a physician and sometimes other things put in. And those, you have to either show that you are a direct relative of a patient or you go through a process of approval from the State Department of Mental Health to show that you're doing research. And then you have access to all those patient records as well as files which contain things like letters that patients wrote but were confiscated and not mailed. Letters that were written to patients. A case book which is in a library in Columbus and things like that. So then you begin to delve into days and days and days of reading narratives of commitment of patients. I read all the ones. You can look up, there's some cross-reference book. You can look up and find out where people were from. I read all the ones for people from Athens and then expanded and read, I don't know, a thousand or more other documents. Yeah, there's loads of them. Well, the way things were for the Athens asylum that covered Southeast Ohio, now that's kind of 18 counties in Southeast Ohio so it could go as far east as Belmont and then as far west as Lawrence County, as far north as, I'll say Fairfield County and then to the Ohio River. But that could change over time. And so some counties would be added and some dropped. And then too, I don't know if you looked at some of these, but there were times when there were transfers of patients from say the Columbus Asylum or the Cleveland Asylum, even as far away as Cleveland. I assume that was from overcrowding up in Cleveland. When the asylum opened, that happened and also patients were taken from poor houses, county homes around the state who had mental illness or redeemed to have that and they were brought here as well, sometimes on the train in straight jackets. Right, so the earliest patients, many of them were brought over from Dayton or Cincinnati where there were already asylums. Columbus already had an asylum, so did Cleveland, Toledo came after the Athens Asylum. But so I think out of 88 counties in the state of Ohio, there's something like, I don't know, 57 counties represented. Now some of these counties would only have maybe a couple of patients who might be sent here, but still. And this was done through probate courts so there had to be an application for a person to be sent to the Athens Asylum, meaning that the asylum had the final decision as to whether to accept any patient or not. And one of the things that I don't know if you looked at these, but we do have some rejected applications. Rejected, and they would say rejected, not insane, or sometimes it was very difficult for the staff to figure out how to best care for people with seizure disorders and they were kind of discouraged and would not accept sometimes people with what they called epilepsy then. So would you agree that in those first years in particular, and I guess maybe through a good bit of that moral treatment time period, we're not seeing professional psychiatrists or psychologists. We're seeing mostly just regular doctors. Oh, as far as the commitment goes, it would be a doctor, a physician, somewhere in a county, absolutely. Psychiatry was just beginning as a profession and the asylum superintendents were part of that, but as far as the physicians would go, it would be a regular general practice kind of a physician, making their best guess.  And what family and friends came and said to you about you to the court as well. Moral treatment, I think most people, and I think myself too for that matter, when I first heard that, so these people are immoral and we're gonna turn them into moral people? I mean, it's probably more than that, isn't it? I mean, that's not really all there was to it. Exactly, it was moral in the sense of humane treatment and it came from a Quaker based small asylum that was built in England in the 1790s, William T. Quaker T. Merchant thought something needed to be done and he built a small asylum and it was to feature regular kind treatment, humane treatment, regular meals, activities were part of the treatment, beautiful views, work and walking outdoors. And this was really a sea change from the earlier assignments when the treatment relied on very punitive kinds of things, shocking things like a trap door, it was called the bath of surprise. There would be a trap door in the floor and a patient, it would be opened when a patient was walking and you'd be plunged into cold water with the idea that you could be shocked out of your mental illness and so this idea of moral treatment was a very big change. Brought to the United States and picked up by a Quaker. Curby had picked up by another Quaker in Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania hospital for the insane Kurt Bride, hence the Kurt Bride architecture. He developed and brought to America a codified how this moral treatment should be done and architecture and landscape were a good part of it. So it's the architecture, it's the landscape and then with the architecture, as you can kind of see with the drawing behind us here, most of those windows indicate private rooms. They're probably about nine feet by 12 feet or something like that. They were built small so that the temptation would not be to double people up. Which was quickly abused, but the idea being that people had private space and private time and then in between, there were day rooms, I guess we might call them now. Parlers. Activity rooms, parlers. And situated to catch the prevailing breeze. The, you know, the mandala shape, the round grill work that's on the windows there was for security, but it was kind of disguised as hopefully something beautiful rather than prison-like bars, though it did serve the same function. Outdoors, walking outdoors was a big airing. In the case any of you are still believing that the flakes out in front were in the shapes of playing card suits, they never were and you can see some maps over here to show that that's the case, I think it's a matter of transference because when you look at the bars on the windows, you can spot within the designs three out of four playing card suits. So, a legend dispelled, right? Okay. Not there. Not there. So earliest treatments included, still, these cold baths and hot baths, right? Right. But they're just no trap door. No trap door. Well, later in the 20th century, there were, you know, the needle showers, the salt wraps, hydrotherapy came into play in the 20th century, electroconvulsive shock therapy, philobotomy years, all the chapters of psychiatry. But in those earliest days, it would been soothing baths. Soothing baths. Taking walks. Exercise. Work too. Work. The superintendents were always saying, we can't make people work, but it really helps them sleep better if they can work. This asylum, the superintendents in the 19th century were leaders in Ohio of the non-restraint movement. So it was very, very, very limited use of physical restraints and chemical strength sedatives as well. So they worked very hard to do that. Some patients had the walk of the grounds, others did not, it just depended. Well, not in the earliest days, I guess, come to think of it, but there were enclosed areas later on, enclosed courtyards, so that more excited patients might be able to still get outside. Move around, so. And one of the things that's interesting to a counselor like myself is that some of these things in the last 20 years have come back into play as a complement to mental health treatment. We know walking outdoors, all kinds of wonderful data coming out now of the benefits of walking outside for depression, for example. The use of art and so forth, some of these moral treatment kinds of things are back with us. Well, an art and indoor plants were very popular at the time as well. Oh, yeah, there was a greenhouse that kept flowers supplied throughout the asylum. Walks outside, out through the grounds. And in Japan now, there's a movement called forest bathing, in which we now know, with quantitative means, that two hours of walking in the forest will lower your levels of depression and elevate your mood, all the things that they were doing then kind of as best practice. Well, and I think you'll be able to see, too, with some of the materials on display, some of the older, a lot of the sepia-toned photographs there were taken in the early 1890s, when it was, they were very proud of the place at that point, because the landscaping had finally matured, and you have, well, we even have a paper about all of the flora and the special plantings that were done all around the asylum, and the special walkways, and you'll see photographs of cascades and falls. This was an extraordinary landscape, and it still is, you know, it still is, they're vestiges of the old landscape. You can see the old stone spring, there's still apple trees up there, it's still the vestiges of those days. Now, I mentioned earlier about no real training for most doctors. What kind of training did attendants have? At the very beginning, none, and as you could see, as the years went on, the superintendent's attendants would write in their annual reports, well, we really need to attend to who we choose to hire to be attendants, how they're trained, and so, eventually, by 1911, 1913, we had a nursing school here that trained nurses specifically to work in asylums. Yeah, we also, again, to plug the display material. Excuse me, but it's also to give you some idea of all of the different kinds of records that we have in the MON Center to help, when you open any one of those thousand doors, we have some employee records, including employment cards, you can leaf through those and see so-and-so lasted one day. Other people, when I said weeks, wow, or years for that matter. And then you can also see their pay scale and their pay rates when they were given raises and that kind of thing. It was a great place to work. It was a huge bonus for the town of Athens to have the asylum with all the money that was spent in the town to buy everything that was needed. And it was people, this was during the period of the long depression, which was multiple years, decade long. Many businesses were failed. It was very hard times. And so to have a job at the asylum was a plumb job if it agreed with you. In a place to stay at the asylum. You lived on-site and you had a job? How many times did you read a patient suffering from financial embarrassment, if I remember that one correctly? Financial embarrassment, yeah. Worry about a financial loss. I was thinking about the, in the book there are several spots that have the letters and very interesting things that happen to be tucked away in those commitment documents, little treasures. And one was a kind of a window into life, into a family in Ohio. How do you care for a family member who was quite ill and an elderly man was brought here actually on the first day of spring in the 1880s and a little note, I found a little handwritten note in pencil from the man's son. And he said, father was insane in the first of his sickness. Father was first doctored by beers for the liver complaint. I think the treatment was a Calamil with other medications. Beers being called away and could not attend. We called Dr. Anderson. He doctored him for the liver, kidney and dropsy. Dr. Leflin said he must die, could not live two weeks. Anderson the same. He still continued to swell till his hips and legs, the skin bursted open and his flesh looked like a cherry red and he got entirely helpless. I boiled corn and lye and let the steam go to his wounds and the swelling began to go down. I gave him spicewood tea, which I believe is also the redbud. It's another name for the redbud. I gave him spicewood tea to drink, used embrication oil and held his wounds and in four weeks he began to walk. Now this gentleman had aerosypolis which is blood poisoning and can lead to hallucinations. So he was weak and he was troubled by hallucinations and the farmer remained ill and they did bring him, making a 150 mile journey by wagon with this ill gentleman to bring him here. But just the measures that families would go to to try to take care of someone and then finally saying we've got to get some more help here. And so many times you find that example of families working so hard for so long to keep that family member home and then finally realizing that it just had become too much. On the other hand, you could find examples of let's get rid of this family member as quick as possible. Troublesome. Troublesome or I have a trophy wife lined up and those kinds of things. So as much as we have such a variety of reasons for people to be put in the asylum, and some of them I think we would both agree were extremely questionable. And others. Oh yeah, how about the coal miner who was trying to start a labor union. There you go. Right, into the asylum, yeah, in Nelsonville. One of my favorite stories. Well there were two reasons. The debate in psychiatry and the history of asylums is, did they come about to provide a social good, to provide humanitarian care, or were they there to provide social control? And the answer is both. We have people who truly had mental illness. We had the coal miner trying to start a labor union. We had a daughter who ran off and joined a brothel in Cincinnati and disgraced the family and was brought to the asylum. So women who were truly ill with postpartum depression, brought to the asylum, given some rest, restored, were able to go back to their family. So it's a mix. And this too, I think is something important to understand and that is that many of these people, both the administration and the staff, as well as the families expected these people who became patients, to not be in the asylum for all that terribly long. That they needed asylum. They needed sanctuary. The true word of asylum, the true meaning. Yeah, sanctuary. Now as it turns out, of course there were a number of people who were there for many years, many decades, became institutionalized, if you will, could not operate or function outside of such a controlled situation. There was a lot of coming and going when you look at the records also. Someone would get better, go home, relapse back to the asylum. Oh, I've seen numerous cases. You can find this in the admissions book. In the same name. Yeah, and a lot of times it'll say RE for re-admitted and some of them are six or seven times. But at the same time then released so that they could go back as released as quickly as possible. So it's not as if bring them in and make them stay. The thing I wanted to ask you about was what was your take on those like civil war soldiers that you would come across? Oh yes, there were, I look specifically for examples of commitment documents that would indicate that someone was hospitalized because of post-traumatic stress and indeed they were there. And there were also family members. For example, there were mothers who were there who were just unredeemably depressed because of the loss of the men and their family from the civil war. So absolutely, we have civil war veterans buried in the cemetery and who were hospitalized some were able to leave, some were not. I don't have any credentials to make this statement really, but my feeling has been for a long time that particularly for those first 20 or so years of the asylum, so the asylum opened in January of 1874. So that's only a few years after, well it's not what nine years after the end of the civil war that almost all of the people who were patients there were really veterans of the civil war, be they male or female or staff or patients. But the women would, I'd classify as veterans as well because of their family members having participated in that war. I read of a boy who was 15 and he joined a regiment, he was at Chickamauga, he was at Shiloh, he was all for years and finally he just gave way under the stress of all that and was hospitalized as soon as the asylum opened. Now in the three cemeteries there are up there, there are at least 89 military veterans. They start with the Mexican War and seemed to go as far as at least the First World War and we're finding then that, well I found in some research I was doing two of them were deserters. So the stress apparently of the war itself was enough to make them desert even before the end of the war. Civil war produced presidents and senators and business leaders and it also, some people just, some broke under the stress, so. And then there's Eli Stevens, did you really, did you look into Eli at all? Red is the confederate. The document, yeah. Yeah, there was a guy who was a confederate soldier and imagine what his, he was in there for what, I think 21 years. He was put in the asylum in 1874. Now at that point everybody else in the asylum are union people and either veterans themselves or family members of veterans. I can't imagine that Eli got much sanctuary. Yeah, at the asylum, yeah, in the attendance. Eli, well he was hospitalized for, it's thought that he was part of a member of Morgan's Raiders but we've not really been able to talk about that directly. Yeah, but he was hospitalized because he burned down a church in, was it MacArthur? It's somewhere in Vinton County, yeah. You'd have to be crazy to burn down a church, right? At least they decided, well the trial said he was guilty and insane. Yeah, and insane, yeah. It followed, yeah. So then, okay, one of the things that I've talked about with people, and I'm sure you're much more qualified to talk about this than me, is that all of these various treatments were, they weren't designed as tortures by any means. I mean there was thought behind them that this is going to help people. You mean like the taking the walks or the? Well, I mean that of course, but then some of the other, like the hydrotherapies, the, Right, electrocobalsis shock, lobotomy years. Lobotomy. Bad chapters. Well, electrocobals, the ECT therapy is back and but it's much more controlled and I guess it's used in instances of depression. Lobotomies were shut down after maybe a decade. And the water treatments, some of them sound pleasant, but the needle showers, things like that, had kind of a punitive ring to them. Yeah. Yeah. So even though their intentions were good, these could turn into unfortunate treatments. Well, yeah, I think medicine is psychiatry through 150 years. There are examples here and there. You think of the Tuskegee experiments and so forth. There's all kinds of examples of science gone wrong. Yeah, I've had to wonder. Many of these people are suffering a traumatic shock, which is what brings about the mental distress. And to me, the wonder is, why would you visit shock on to someone who had shock? Wouldn't you go the opposite direction? Yeah. Yeah. And then we had deinstitutionalization and the asylum around the 70s began to be, people were placed in the community. There was a big effort made, social workers and so forth with all the imperatives, the federal imperatives, to deinstitutionalize. And that coincided with the advent of medications, the Rosine came out and then so on. And we had the Community Mental Health Care Act, which was an unfunded mandate. And so we have done as best as we can, since with combination of small mental hospitals, lots of as much community support as possible, combination of medication and therapy is what we have today. Something back to those early years, those first 20 to 30 years. One things we haven't really talked about in detail and we're running out of the formal time here and we want to give you all a chance to ask questions or make comments is the community actions back and forth with the asylum. This is what churches and all kinds of other organizations here in town that had things going on. Oh, there was lots of interaction with the community in addition to all the financial exchanges, all the farmers bringing things to sell, the contracts for the milk, the meat, the coal, everything, the light, gas that kept everything running. There were the pastors and the churches would go up and conduct Sunday services. There was entertainments on Sunday afternoons that the town would be invited to come and people would go up to the concerts and the picnics and so forth. The grounds themselves were a very permeable boundary between the asylum and the community and right away the grounds were used for outings, family outings, picnics, Sunday strolls and so forth and it was just kind of what you did. You went up and took walks and there were patients there on the ground as well so there was an exchange. I'm very much following that idea of Thomas Kirkbride and the Kirkbride plan. Having that buffer, if you will, that's not really a buffer. It's much more of a way for these two communities to have a chance to interact and we have a photograph over here of people ice skating on the ponds and I know a lot of people in town went, well, in the region really, there for picnics and high university students went there to spark and get to know each other along lover's lane. And Athens continues to be an example of a place where mental health, some cutting edge mental health things are taking place which the 19th century moral treatment was cutting edge for the times but we have the diversion program now, we have the crisis training for first responders and how do you respond to someone who is mentally ill rather than just something, a criminal activity. So those are really, the people here in Athens who have generated those programs have been to Washington gotten awards for them.  Well, now it's called the ridges because it was turned over to Ohio University in 1988.  And every time I'm up there, I see dozens and dozens of people up there walking with their dogs or just by themselves or using the orienteering course or just enjoying the outdoors. All seasons throughout the year. And it really is from mental health. So I got the high. Very restorative. Yeah, very restorative. Yeah, very restorative. I got the high sign. I just got the high sign. So let's turn this over to you all. What kind of questions or comments do you have? Yeah. I'd like to know what period you covered in your patients there or is it entirely up? The dissertation and most of the book is. Let Doug do this for the web people. Repeat that for the web people. So what period were you working with as far as your research? And did you interview any patients there and staff and staff? The book and the dissertation focus on the first 20 years. And so, but in the, and then we have, the book also has an epilogue that goes through the rest of the history. And in that process, I did talk to staff and along the way have met patients as well. And they're cited in the book. Someone on the webcast. But that's a project that needs to be done. It's a lot of oral history that resides, yes. Okay, Doug. Someone on the webcast a little bit earlier asked, were there any noble patients that tried to pass themselves off as doctors and or visitors to escape the grounds, presumably. That you know of. I don't know, but they called them elopements back then. And you would read in the report, we had five patients elope. And they just would leave.  One of them hopped a train and was last heard from working on a plantation off the Mississippi River. But then they would send people out to go try and fetch them back. But I don't know of anyone who, I don't think it was really necessary to go. You could just leave.  And that's another thing too. The place was never completely enclosed with fencing or anything. There was a fence along Richland Avenue. But I think that was just, that's much more decorative. Ornamental. Yeah, ornamental, yeah. So famous people escaping. Was that part of the question? Passing themselves off. I think, oh, okay. Just as doctors. Or as doctors or whatever. Yeah. There are a couple of cases of doctors who were admitted as patients. Come across that. A lot of people. Your hands higher. Yeah. I did encounter. Were there well-known people? I did encounter some minor well-known people. But the terms of my agreement with the state with that there would be not be any names or note of that. But nobody rich and famous. Just a few local and state notables. Of course, in the law. Oh, that was Billy Milligan, I guess. Yeah, I was just going to say that. That was out of my time period. But that was a whole book. The Lives of Billy Milligan, which you can read. And I would suggest. Someone following up on that online also asked, were there criminally insane inmates or clients or patients there? People who had committed a crime and were mentally ill. Well, yes. Yeah, this is certainly, I don't remember when Lima State Hospital was established. But there are certainly, well, Eli Stevens, one of them we just talked about, was criminally insane. And there were certainly others from Southeast Ohio like that as well. And typically they, I think, would have a little special attention, more higher security. Ruffford behays before he was president as a young lawyer in Cincinnati. One of his first cases, he prided himself in defending a young woman who had done a crime. But she was also determined to be mentally ill. And he was very pleased about that. His brother-in-law went on to be superintendent at Longview Asylum. And he visited here several times this asylum. He was very closely aligned with that. Were there African-Americans? Someone online wonders there? Yes, yes. Hundreds. We know that in many asylums and in many locations, African-Americans were segregated in the asylums or separate asylums were built. We don't know, we don't really know geographically within this asylum how that took place, but there were lots. There were lots. I have never seen anything that actually says that they were segregated. So I'm making the assumption, fair it may not be, but making the assumption that they were not segregated. When you look at photographs of staff, there are a few African-Americans, whether they were strictly to care for other African-Americans or not, I don't know. I can tell you this, because I had seen plenty of evidence to this, that there is no segregation in any of the three cemeteries up there. As a matter of fact, this Eli Johnson, the Confederate, is buried up there and right next to him is a union soldier who was in the 21st United States colored infantry. So I think Israel Johnson was buried there specifically to keep an eye on Eli. Keep that in check. For eternity. Maybe. There was a question right here. When and under what circumstances did all these materials come to Ohio University? To the Mont Center? I don't know, for sure. I think most of the materials came between 1988 and the early 1990s. Before I got here, so I did witness some of that, but those committal papers we were talking about, a lot of the old photographs that we have here, some of the superintendent's material, which would be superintendent's correspondence, administrative documents, including like the employee records, the payrolls, all those things, came directly from the asylum. We like to make noise about that, but we also like to keep it quiet because I think Ohio Historical Society thinks that they really own them. And technically, the Ohio Department of Mental Health does own those records. I mean, we don't own them. They are basically on deposit here. And then we've added things off and on over the years or even in some cases created some things specifically to just compliment the collections we have here. There's one in the back and then we'll get to you. Yes, sir? Biggest hope and biggest fear for conservation, preservation of the material? Of the documents or the ridges itself? You wanna go first on that, talk topic? One of the things that I don't hear about much in all the discussion that we suddenly have are the grounds, which are, when you read the descriptions of them, they're kind of a rare example of some of the most beautiful and varied grounds, natural states here in the county. There are old fields, there are meadows, there are old forests, some very, very old trees. And I don't, we don't hear much about what will become of the grounds. And they're enjoyed by many, many people as a restorative place to visit and walk and exercise and socialize. So I, and there were a major part of the history here. Where the farms were, their vestiges of the orchards and so forth. So I would love to see some of the concern about those grounds and preserving them as they are or even enhancing a little bit, tending them take place. Then they're the buildings. If you look at the master plan, it cause for preservation of the Kennedy and one wing out from there, as well as the buildings that have been renovated, which are the old cottages, the cottage style that were built, where the Boynovich Center is now. And then the rest would be converted to parking, a new stair step building that would go down where the, we're building 20 is now. So there does stand a master plan that was approved a few years ago. Someone online asked if any of these records have been digitized or if they've been computerized and cataloged that sort of thing. I'll say one thing. I do know when I was at the State Library of Ohio that they are beginning, some years ago began a process of digitizing all the annual reports of all the asylums. That'll be fabulous when that happens, but it's not done yet. Yeah, man, we won't have to. Yeah. We don't have a whole lot of annual reports anyway, but I think those are really great resources. As far as what we're doing with things, we cannot digitize the committal papers because they are confidential by state law. So why bother digitizing them if nobody can, or very few people can really look at them. I should mention with that though that there is now a process where if people learn that they have an ancestor who was in the asylum and can fill out some paperwork that we will provide for them to fill out, and then we can release to them copies of those committal papers if we have them. So that's become something very helpful to a lot of people who are doing genealogy, but also for people who have concerns about perhaps genetic disorders within their family and unfortunately they're not gonna learn much from these papers because something that says severe melancholia, well, what does that really mean today? I mean, it has a meaning. It just has an updated term for it, but it's not really, so we don't have patient records. We have these committal papers, and frankly a lot of those can be accessed in any of the counties in the state. What has been digitized are the, there are a lot of images. If you go to the digital collections of Alden Library, there are many, many, especially the 1893 set that went to the World's Fair, the photographs of the grounds, those have been digitized and are available online. So we had to also then be careful about digitizing anything else that would have mentioned the patient's name. In that process, if we decided to try to digitize some of those records, you would have to redact all of those names out of there that's very labor-intensive, so therefore very expensive to do. So the chances of us doing a whole lot there in digitizing records is relatively slim. I can say this though, that we are working this year, one of sort of my major focuses is to help put together some websites. One website will very specifically look at the cemeteries. I've spent some years now identifying all of the people buried in all of those cemeteries, even the 1700 plus people who are buried under just numbers. And then we're also talking about a much bigger picture of doing a massive website on the entire complex so that you could zoom in on a certain building and click on it, bring up pictures, bring up whatever other kinds of records we might have about that building. So this is gonna be a long-term project, but I'm really looking forward to it. Yes, Charlie. Well, the only thing I'm gonna say is I had, I was a department head there one of these days. Oh. Yeah. I had a lot of artifacts closed down to us almost immediately. I think there was discussion about what the departmental health, the historical society and so forth were going to, but I couldn't take even bookcases and things like that that I'd had there for years and thought that they preserved that stuff almost immediately, not knowing what they were gonna do with it or anything like that, but they didn't let it walk out of there. Yeah. Or at least not hospital employees. There was some discussion about you employees walking off with the artifacts out of there. Yeah. There was an auction at one point, I think in the 70s maybe of a lot of the things too. So. Yeah. And I'm always, we are always interested in records. Now artifacts, pieces of furniture and so forth, that's a little beyond what we as an archiver are really all about, but records, kinds of things, photographs, all that kind of stuff. So if, I had a lot of stuff. So you need to find out where they are now so we can get ahold of them. I'm probably gonna tell your president something. That could be. Okay. I hope you have. I hope you have. We might. Well, take a look. It's early. One thing I'd like to say to Catherine, I've said this to her over the telephone, but I'd like to publicly thank her. She made a very nice reference in the book about my grandmother, Marcella Harding Creed. She was famous for being such a compassionate woman and she would have birthday parties for the patients. And she was talking about myths to dispel and earlier in her talk. And one thing that I know was true, they used to have an alligator in a fountain in front of the main building and kept it in water, in a circular fountain. And in the wintertime, when it was too cold to have it out for the patients to be entertained by it, it would be put in the basement. And I just wish that Dennis Powell was here tonight. He wrote a rather scathing thing in the Athens news. And believe me, this place needs to be preserved. It's a treasure. And I'm just sorry that the younger people just don't realize what a great place it was. Welcome. I have, there's a picture of the alligator and also a picture of where they kept the alligator in the wintertime, right over here, so. Well. An opinion on the recent demolition of building 26. Well, what's done is done. It's gong. Although it's not gone entirely, I hike up there a lot and learn that all the masonry and tile and concrete have been ground up and spread on the road that leads up to radar hill. So when you go walk up there now, we're walking on those remnants of building 26. Well, the more buildings that are taken down, the more you lose the very unique resource that is here, which is 150 year record of the history of psychiatry through its architecture. You have the moral treatment, you have the cottage style, you have the 50, all the way up to the 1950s and the 1960s.  Very, I don't, hardly anywhere else in the United States is such a complete and taken care of facility. One of these hospitals exist. The Kirkbrot hospitals were built in just about every state of the union, probably close to 100 of them across the United States. Many of these, it is sad to see some buildings torn down. At the same time, think about the challenge that the university or the community has in trying to preserve the buildings and the grounds for that matter. It takes money and it takes lots and lots of money. And it takes purpose too. You have to have some reason to do something with those buildings. The original construction was very hardy. I've been told it will probably last another 150 years, but it's very expensive to renovate. All the load bearing walls so close together. Well, I'll go up here to the Kennedy Museum and look at the depth of the window sills like that. Okay, well, we're gonna need to bring this up to code. So let's drill holes through here to put in new electric. And you have to have a drill bit at least this long and pay it some crew of people. It'll take a month to do all that. Why can't you just, I was part of this sort of renovate a new hospital to be built. And it was really prohibitively expensive for people to talk about renovating that hospital and bringing it in. But that was the first thing that was discussed was to preserve it and to renovate it. And that just... Thinking of all the code standards, it must have been just... Yeah, well, there was asbestos. Asbestos, there's lead. And it just wasn't possible to do that. Now, at the same time, I don't want anybody to think that I'm advocating, knock the whole place down. I think that you really ought to be preserved as much as possible or as best as possible. But until you can have utility for those buildings, what are you gonna do with them? And money, yeah. And the money to do it. Then you just have to muckball them. And that's what the university has been forced to do for, well, for many years with a lot of those buildings. And done a beautiful job with the Kennedy and the Memorial Auditorium and the Boinevich Center buildings. Although I saw a really bug hole in the roof when I was up there last week giving a tour. Did you really? Yeah, it's a big one now. I heard about that. It's like the size of a king-size mattress or something. I mean, it's... So let's all chip in and get some blue tarps. It helps or whatever. Because it really is a treasure. And that's the buildings. But I think your point is very well taken. That's 740 plus acres up there that was turned over to Ohio University. Doubling the size of the university here in Athens. 700 some acres here on the main campus and now out there as well. And while there are things going on out there like the orienteering and the land labs and a lot of other things, there's a lot of other things that could be done and a lot of other projects that could be done. Simple, easy, cheap, buy students, student organizations, student groups and community people as well. It would help at least preserve the ground. Maintain the trails and... Yeah, maintaining trails and all that kind of thing. And I can't emphasize this enough. It is a wonderful place for your own mental health just to go up there and wander around. And I've seen faces I know do that, so... If you go to cemetery one, there's always a well supplied set of brochures that mark the walks, the different walks that are up there. So you can just get a brochure and take a 30 minute or an hour, a two hour walk up there. So you can still go up there and spark. So we have another question from our webcast. Someone is wondering if you give tours, if someone gives tours of the grounds occasionally? Yeah, I'm available for tours. I think... Tom Walker gives tours. You can contact Tom Walker through... George Ebert gives tours. George Ebert is an employee here at Ohio University. Tom Walker is a retired political science professor. Probably the easiest way to contact him would be through the Athens chapter of NAMI, the National Alliance for the Mental Illness. For the mentally ill. For mental illness, yeah. Or for mental illness, okay. And that could be Googled very easily and you can find Tom's name. I've given tours. I'm not sure who else. I'll do one if there's some people. I've done for third graders or middle school kids. You can tailor it to however. Well, we've done the Ohio University Alumni Association sponsors Hayrides at Homecoming. And Catherine and I and George and Tom have been the tour guides for those. You can go through the Historical Society. George will do tours. Oh, okay. Good, good. So yeah, there are tours. The last one I gave was last week and that was two and a half hours. I don't know if you really want me all the time. Although they said they liked it. So let's hope that they did. Any other questions from the audience? Yes. The warrior system of institutions or facilities for mentally retarded citizens whose families could not walk or take care of them.  At that time, no. Well, very soon there was, in Columbus, there was an institution for what was called then the feeble minded. But as far as when I read the records and the case admissions documents, it appeared that this asylum here was also a place where people were admitted, developmental disabilities. And that could include, like you mentioned earlier, epilepsy, the very first female patient. She was? 11-year-old child with epilepsy. Did you hear that? 11-year-old child. Little girl, yeah. Anybody else? Yeah. Very quickly, the asylum leadership decided to start a farm. And it grew and grew and grew. By the 1950s in the annual reports, you would read and say that we have three main purposes to take care of our patients, to give advice to people who are not our patients, and our agricultural enterprise. There was just a really well-developed, robust agricultural enterprise. Vegetables, fruits, the beef cattle, the pigory, poultry, milk, you name it. The dairy operation. The dairy operation, yes. This is the, this is the, this is the, this is the dairy barn, this is the 100th, 100th. It wasn't entirely self-sustaining because you could see that where they were still having to buy some things. And also they would trade if, say, the asylum in Columbus had extra potatoes, and there were more apples here that they would swap back and forth. So there was a really large agricultural enterprise. Patients work there, staff work there. What you see is, like, is there is an evolution with treatments and an evolution with training of people and so forth. There's also an evolution within the asylum as it's, whether it can be self-sustaining or not. It never really was fully self-sustaining. And it would ebb and flow as to how much they could produce on their own. If it was a bad year for tomatoes, well, you'd have to. Right, yeah. And in the very beginning, they didn't really have a power plant, and then they were buying power from here in Athens. They were buying milk and eggs and all that kind of thing. So really, the businesses around town found that to be extremely important, including the local stationery store and all of those kinds of things. So there was quite a back and forth going. Now, up until the early 1960s, that asylum was the largest employer in all of Athens County and was only eclipsed by Ohio University by the mid-1960s. So it was really the most important institution devoted to the mind in this area. This place was of secondary importance for most of the existence of the asylum or most of the existence of this university for that matter. We are going to archive the video for this, and we'll have it on our website within a few days. So you can recommend this to other folks if they're interested, and all of our guests online as well. If you're interested in some of the special collections at Alden Library, we have some brochures on a table over here. And you're more than welcome to have these. Some interesting things here in Athens at Alden Library and the Mons Center. Catherine Ziff, Doug McKay, thank you very much for being with us on Authors at Alden. Thank you.


So I spent a lot of time talking with HP, so you were out in Barcelona, and I think you got to see their pods. Yeah, in fact, we went inside a pod. It was very cool. We went in early in the morning, the morning was supposed to fly out, and so they had to power it up, and it takes, I don't know, five, seven minutes to power it up. And when it powers up, the fans come on in a big way, and we're standing there, and shh. So you're inside this, did you see one? Did they have one there? No, they didn't have one there.  But narrow, it feels narrow, it's probably wider in total, but it feels narrow because there's all servers, and power and cooling in there, and just racked and stacked servers and storage. So yeah, so they were talking about the pod works? Yeah, definitely. So I got to speak with their vice president of converged infrastructure, and it's Doug, I think it's Oat Hote is his last name, and he was talking to me a little bit about pods, and he was also talking to me about kind of a future project that they've got coming called the HP Garage. What's interesting is they just got a $7.3 million grant from the department of energy, and if you think about how the pod is kind of like a whole trailer that you can create a whole data center, the garage is a smaller version of that that you'd be able to plop inside an existing data center. And you think about where we're going with power and cooling, it's going to use water cooling, and it's going to use DC power on the inside, and be able to do about four to eight racks inside a data center self-contained, much better efficiencies on the power and the cooling. And as we know, that's one of the biggest challenges in data centers today is keeping those costs for power and cooling down. Yeah, so the cool thing about the pod that I saw is they, it basically, you order it, they announced this pod works, now they say you can have one in as little as six weeks, but if you and I called up we wouldn't have one in six weeks. It's got to be in their pipeline, and I know they've got a couple that went out to Microsoft, and they probably plan for it, and once they plan for it and it's in the pipeline, and they're going to get all the parts and the equipment, then they can do it in six weeks, or six to twelve weeks let's say. But the cool thing about the pod that I recall was that it has a PUE out of the box of 1.2. The average data center is probably between, a PUE of probably between 2 and 3, and what we mean is that normally data centers, they power the IT equipment, and so for every watt you use to power the IT equipment, you need additional watts to power the power and the cooling. Right. The power distribution and the cooling, and the average data center is probably twice the IT equipment needs, maybe three times, and there's an HP saying it's only 20% additional power over the IT equipment to power these pods, which is very efficient. I had a really interesting discussion talking about really where's the market for these pods, because you've got the giant guys, I mean the Googles out there, the Facebooks that have these just tremendously huge scalable data centers, then you've got the service providers, and that's really where they think the pods are going to be going a lot, as well as they said there's certain companies that are going to be able to use this type of technology, it's what they call almost IT as a weapon, so rather than IT as a service as a weapon. So the companies that say I want to be able to have massively scalable architectures be able to provide these services, and even HP themselves are going to be a cloud provider using these kind of technologies.