 And I just want to give a little background about Ray Carter, who's our next facilitator. She is a healer, she's a navigator, and she builds culture. She's the co-founder of Empower Transformation and she stewards a healing sanctuary, which is very beautiful, by the way, called Gremler Cherry Sanctuary in Plainfield. She's also a musician and herbalist and she's a badass change maker. So yes, give it up again for Ray Carter. Thank you so much, Jacqueline and Shonda for... Oh, right. Thank you so much, Jacqueline and Shonda, for inviting me here. Thank you for the beautiful introduction and thank you everybody for being here today. I'm feeling really grateful. I'm also feeling really anxious and I am feeling gratitude in my heart, so I'm feeling some movement and fluttering in my heart space. I'm also feeling a lot of gurgling and movement in my tummy, where anxiety is floating around. And then I feel this line, kind of moving up to tightness in my throat because I'm gonna be speaking and I just feel a lot of movement there. And so I'm gonna put my hands on my body and I'm gonna move a little bit and rock and just settle my nervous system a little bit while I'm up here. And I'd like to invite you all into settling and grounding into this space with me, maybe doing a little bit of breathing. So I am going to feel that connection back to the earth again and I'm gonna feel all four corners of my feet on the earth. And I'm gonna trust that she is below this concrete and rug floor and down through the foundation and that she is holding me and she is supporting me. And I invite you to just feel your own energy, just reaching down into the earth, maybe drawing up some of that grounding and supportive energy and inviting that into your body, coming up through your legs, maybe dropping into some breath. So I'm gonna breathe really big into my belly. I invite you to make some noise if you want, if that feels good to release some energy. I'm gonna bring that breath into the back of my belly, into that low back space and just really feel myself being breathed right now. And then I'm gonna bring that breath up into my heart, maybe even into the back of my heart and just feel that support and feel that breath moving from my belly up to my heart. And I invite you to maybe put your hands on anywhere on your body that needs support and maybe extending that breath into any other place in your body that you're feeling a sensation or some gurgling or bubbling or tightness and just breathing into that. Thank you all so much. Breaking the connection between self-worth and income, who is grappling with that kind of topic in their lives. And how about our gifts are not commodities, something that is saleable, something that you sell. So something that served by capitalism, something that serves capitalism. Our gifts are not commodities. This concept has been something that I have been grappling with a lot in the past several years. And I've really come to understand that our gifts are why we're alive. We are not here to serve and work capitalism. That's not why human beings are on the planet. We're here to share our gifts. We're here to share our love. We're here to love. We're here to be loved. We're here to share our beauty. We're here to share our magic and offer our magic and our yumminess and our juiciness as offerings for being alive. And I really began to understand and embody this belief over the past few years, learning from many teachers, one very amazing teacher being Robyn Wall Kimmerer, an Indigenous woman from the Potawatomi Nation. Robyn is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass. If you haven't read Braiding Sweetgrass, I highly recommend it. It's a beautiful, beautiful book into exploring the relationship between our gifts, what are commodities, what are offerings and our relationship with Mama Earth. And I'd like to offer these words and I'm realizing I don't see any screens so I'm gonna like swirl over here. All right, here we go. So these words are at the very end of Braiding Sweetgrass and really give a beautiful kind of calling in for the direction that I feel humanity needs to go and it is certainly the direction of Indigenous beliefs and culture. The moral covenant of reciprocity. Calls us to honor our responsibility for all we have been given, for all that we have taken. It's our turn now long overdue. Let us hold a giveaway for Mother Earth, spread our blankets out for her and pile them high with gifts of our own making. Imagine the books, the paintings, the poems, the clever machines, the compassionate acts, the transcendent ideas, the perfect tools, the fierce defense of all that has been given. Gifts of mind, hands, heart, voice and vision all offered up on behalf of the Earth, whatever our gift we are called to give it and to dance for the renewal of the world in return for the privilege of breath. I'm gonna invite my good friend, Echinacea, into the space. Echinacea is a plant ally that I am in deep relationship with and this picture is of Echinaceas that are growing on the sanctuary that I steward. I have always been an Earth mama and caring for the plants and the land. That's a deep part of who I am. That's part of my story is how that's been squished out of me by capitalism. And I'm in deep relationship with the land that I steward and trying to be in some new form of reciprocity with how I steward the land, how I care for the land and how the land cares for me and offers reciprocal healing. I'm healing the land, the land is healing me and the land is calling me to bring more people to be healed by the land that I steward. So it's this beautiful cycle that I'm deeply engaged with and I work a lot with different plants and I love plant medicines because they have holistic and medicinal properties that are good for your health and then they have spiritual properties and Echinacea really to me represents dancing in our magic, being in our essence and also protection of our boundaries so we can be in our magic. There is a sharp ball at the end, the middle of the Echinacea there that if you touch it has a little poke and that to me feels like a good boundary of while we're dancing in our magic. Echinacea also supports the immune system and immunity. Over the past 12 years, I have experienced three health crises, all interconnected, all contributing to and resulting from downward economic mobility. For the past five years, I've been in a deep unraveling process that has helped me come to understand my experience with trauma, healing and ongoing transformation is teaching me that trying to commodify my gifts into something that can earn income has caused disease in my body. For years, I honed a career in communications, public relations and marketing to fit into the economic machine of survival while squeezing out all of my other gifts until I could barely recognize myself anymore. I became defined by my work which was only such a small fraction of my wholeness and over the years as I assimilated more and more to dominant culture and the professional workplace, I became a shadow of myself and I now understand this to be a spiritual cause of the cancer that invaded my body. I also forgot that I do have some extra hippie-dippy although I don't really work with that term, I work with earth medicine, but I forgot I do have some echinacea flower essence that I was gonna offer out to everybody made on the new moon in Libra. Let's take it in. How many mental health, addiction, chronic pain and long-term illness diagnosis are symptoms of people trying to live and survive in a capitalistic patriarchal system of dominance, oppression, racism, greed and destruction? That is a question to offer into this space and that's a question to speak out to the universe. So what's my story? I'm gonna take a sip. Those are nervous system herbs and entropy. So I'm gonna begin my story back in 2011. So 2011 was the year that my partner and I got married and at this point in our life and with me career-wise I had been running a public relations and grassroots marketing business that had done okay. Like I did pretty good living month to month. I wasn't saving any money and I wasn't putting away anything for the future but I was moving through the months and we were starting to get married and I was in this process of trying to transition out of having so many clients and having my energy go in a lot of different directions to kind of building on the six years that I had run this business and trying to get some more lucrative, longer-term contract consulting work so that I could start to put some more into savings and kind of move my career forward, right? I was also in the process of trying to build up my journalism and writing career because writing is one of my passions and one of my gifts and this whole series of events right around the time of our wedding cascaded us into this tumultuous low-income situation that of course was completely unexpected, right? So the kind of the things that happened right before our wedding, like the week before a family member pulled out of a substantial amount of support for the wedding and then that landed the burden on us. When we came home from the honeymoon, Hurricane Irene was hitting and while she didn't hurt our house, what did happen with Irene was I was on contract, my first lucrative contract with the state of Vermont for the following year and the results of Irene negated me from that whole contract. So I lost the contract because they had to put resources to other things. I also was on contract to write a Vermont travel guidebook and that got pushed because of Irene and then because of the publishing industry and online media and all of the changes, the entire estimated income, which was multiple thousands of dollars ended up being like $500. And so I lost both of my two sources of income for the year starting our marriage. What else was happening? My partner finished getting his master's degree in education, so he could be a teacher in Vermont and he wasn't able to get a high-income teacher salary because he couldn't get a job in a high-income school district, right? So if you're in a low-income school district, you make lots of lots less money, nice and equitable right there. So his anticipated starting salary was much less than we had anticipated and the student loans kicked in at the same time and of course they were astronomical. So all of these things were happening at the same time and the house that we were living in, we were renting a farmhouse in East Charlotte. It was rotting and there was black mold growing on the wall and we knew that we needed to start to figure out how to get out of this house, which was another reason why we were kind of shifting my career to try to bring in more income so that we could buy a home, not really own the land, but so that we could not be in the, depending on landlords and we had put a lot of energy into all of the land that I've ever rented because of being an earth mama. And so it was always my biggest dream to be able to live on land that I would not be kicked off of by a landlord and that I could stew with the earth. And this house was in the process of getting ready to be sold to a million dollar buyer so it could be torn down and a McMansion could be built there. So we were in that energy too, as all of this was happening. We just in a period of two months, our whole life changed and we went into this pretty sharp low income situation. We also were losing a lot of kind of our social circle, just I think that happens around the times of mid 30s and weddings. And when we went into this kind of sharp low income situation, the people who were kind of left in our lives really couldn't handle it. There was a lot of discomfort because it was just, it was so sharp. So we lost pretty much most of our support system and our families were in the shame and blame space that we had done things to that must have manifest like it was our fault. So we had no support. And of course we weren't, we didn't have enough to qualify for anything, right? We were right in that space. We did what we could. We did things like we would walk the back roads of Charlotte and Shelburne and collect bottles for gas money. I would try to do odd jobs on Craigslist because I had closed out my other business so I didn't have anything ready to go. And we shopped ourselves out doing grunt work for wealthy homes in Charlotte and Shelburne. And I remember I had to put on a disguise to do yard work on other people's lands because I was so embarrassed and humiliated that people were gonna recognize me because I had run a pretty prominent business in that area. We also couldn't afford to really eat because that was the money that was, any money that was left had to go to all of the, you know, the bills. And so we had really to change how we lived in the kind of food we ate and we got really sick. And this went on for a couple of years. We both developed pretty bad autoimmune diseases and mine got really bad. I ended up having surgery, didn't have cancer then but it did compromise my immune system kind of a huge amount going forward. That's crisis one, you know, but we live in right the rugged individual stick lifestyle of Vermont and we're gonna pick ourselves up by the bootstraps and we're gonna work our butts off and we're gonna make it happen, right? We're Vermont strong, right? Yeah. So we embodied Vermont strong and, you know, we worked our asses off and I was able to get work in Montpelier super ironically working in economic development and food systems. Yeah, important work because I had just gone through that. So I really wanted to be in a place where I could use my, you know, my communication and marketing skills because that was all that I could earn any income from to serve the state and the work I had done before was serving the state. So we moved to this area. We were able to finally be able to pay the bank some money to get a house and we were so grateful for that, so grateful. And there was a lot of, you know, hard work and privilege that certainly went into us being able to do that. And we had to move away from the little bit of community that we had into an area where we didn't, you know, we didn't know anybody out into central Vermont. So we did that and we finally thought maybe, maybe we can start our lives over or finally start our lives since, you know, we had been, this had been the start of our marriage but our nervous systems never recovered. And we lived the next five years in fight, flight or freeze, just full on. The work that I did with the state was super intense and it was always just so irritating to me that I could get a job doing in a nonprofit and somebody working at the same job with less experience than me at Seventh Gen or Ben and Jerry's or any of these creme de la creme Vermont companies, people were making almost double the salary. So it's like you're penalized if you work in nonprofits or you work in education and you have to take on these burdens because you're working the jobs that are trying to fix the systems that we're living in and then you're rewarded if you're serving capitalism even if they're socially responsible companies, regardless. So that started to really bother me. I started to speak up a lot about inequities that I was seeing in the workplace, especially around toxic work culture, especially around toxic work culture in state government and nonprofits. And what happens when you speak up, especially in an insular state like Vermont, you get shut up, you get shut up. And as I spoke up more, there wasn't anyone to also back me because everyone was too afraid to also speak up, but I speak up and I got penalized more and more for raising my voice and that contributed to burnout and just the fact that I was working in the nonprofit industrial complex overall and the amount of work that you're responsible for doing in these types of jobs. So by 2018, I was fried. I was burnt out, my brain wasn't working right and I was diagnosed with cancer, was already going through this kind of deep burnout place with diagnosed with cancer, was diagnosed with a uterine disease and a whole bunch of other kind of underlying health issues around the immunity, around digestion and all of this other stuff. I was a hot mess. I'm gonna just pause on the mess, catch my breath. Thank you all so much for listening. So 2018, so I'm diagnosed with cancer. I couldn't even focus on my health. I couldn't even focus on the things that was happening to me. I could only focus on how am I gonna keep working in a job that is making me sick. We had never recovered. We still were month to month. There was no way that I could keep working in this job and we didn't have any way for me to not do that. My family again was very unsupportive. There was a lot of blame around even the type of work that I did to if you had worked a different type of job, you would be making more money, right? If I was stirring marketing machines at Ben and Jerry's, I wouldn't be in this issue. So I was overcome by fear of loss of our dream, loss of the house, loss of a place to live. The fear of homelessness was like on my brain all the time. I couldn't even think about cancer. I couldn't even think about the other things that were happening in my body. We ended up running a GoFundMe and another point of privilege, we had a large network. We were able to over time raise the money that we needed so that I could take the time off and so that we could pay for all of the things that insurance doesn't cover. We were very blessed and privileged to have insurance and insurance still doesn't, unless you have big savings accounts, you can't afford to get sick. There are so many other costs and especially with cancer. So really grateful that we were able to do that and big toll and impact of that was that I turned so many people off by the way that I publicly talked about my story, that I way that I was vulnerable, the way that I asked for money and the way that we talked publicly talked about money. I lost the majority of my professional network. People were really, really turned off by me and we started to get a lot of ghosting, a lot of snide comments, a lot of judgments and a lot of just really nasty stuff that I'm not gonna go into and a lot of gaslighting, a whole lot of gaslighting, that that's not really happening. And I knew it was starting to happen because as I started to come out of cancer and so the cancer story is like, it was like one surgery, they still found margins. Another surgery, then there's a pinched nerve. Then I'm immobile and then I'm totally in a mental health hot mess. I'm suicidal, I'm into a mental health facility in Washington County mental health. I finally get a mastectomy. Yes, I have a uni boob now, which I'm showing proudly today. Hot mess, I've written a ton about it and spoken about it and my website does have a lot of different parts of my health story. So I'm not gonna go into any of the details there, but it was a thing. And as I came out of that, it was again about money. It was always about money. How am I gonna make money? How am I gonna earn income coming out of this? And as I started to try to reach out to my network and find ways that I could start to earn income, I started to really experience the cancel culture that I was in the middle of. Because I also spoke up a lot about my story while I was going through cancer and was very public about the toxic work culture that I experienced. And I worked with some really powerful people and really powerful people do what they need to do to keep themselves in power. So there was all sorts of stories floating around about my mental health and that I wasn't fit for work and all sorts of stuff. And I couldn't find work. I could not find work at all. And I started to pull kind of the threads of my story and the threads of transformation and the pieces of equity and kind of all that I was going through and all that I was unraveling with my own healing and ancestral healing and kind of the depth of my healing journey, which is a whole other really story I love to share, but that's not what this is about here, but I've been on a really deep, powerful, powerful, powerful journey. So I started to pull threads from that into, okay, well, I'm gonna pull this together into some kind of business, which is in power. And it was hard to really try to start a business in Vermont when I have been canceled from so much of my original professional network and to kind of start all over again. And the focus was always on building relationships with new people. And then it was 2019 and I was ready to kind of start to launch the business right when COVID hit. And so that kind of scrapped that whole idea and because I hadn't had an established business yet, I wasn't eligible for any of the business support through the stage. I think it just like goes on and on, right? And then kind of most recently, there's just been so much effort in still trying to have a financial and viable business of some sort. And it has brought on another round of burnout and I am just coming off of kind of my third health crisis, I would call it a mini crisis, not like the other two, but I found cancer that found cancer was found again in my body and I just had surgery a couple of weeks ago and I am cancer-free, but I have a lot of things I need to attend to and I'm still in this place of trying to find viability for my work. So my story, and I said to Shonda and Jacqueline, it was like my story isn't, you know, the narrative that the storytelling people and I know all about the storytelling people because I worked in public relations for 20 years, the storytelling people want us to hear, which is like, here was the hard thing that I went through and like, here was the amazing things that I learned about myself and then like, yay, now I know it all and I'm gonna teach you. And I got a witch. And I do have a witch and I am a witch. Oh, rich, no, not rich, which. A little witch wiggle there. So that's not my story, that's not my story. My story is ongoing. It's happening right now in this moment as I am speaking in front of you. And my work, my work around this, it's releasing from victim consciousness. It's so hard. It's releasing from the cycles and the loops and the ruminating of the loss and the ghosting and the grief and the hurt and the trauma and the canceling. It's just, that's the work. It's this releasing from all of what I have experienced and not being in this chokehold of victim consciousness. I'm also really working on my triggers and my trauma responses to people when talking about my story. I have experienced so much rejection that it's deeply impacted my self-worth and I easily get defensive, really easy. I especially struggle when people with more wealth get uncomfortable with my story and lack empathy around my lived experiences and respond to their own discomfort with trying to give advice about income and how I can commodify my gifts when they have never been in a low income or health crisis situation before. I don't know how to not be defensive about that stuff. That stuff drives me bonkers. And it's a part of the work that I do is helping people get into their nervous system so that we are not projecting our fears back onto people because of the things that come up when we hear lived experiences that are something that are so deeply something that we fear them potentially happening to us that we wanna turn into this advice-giving state. So that's some of the work that I do. And my work personally is also it's active and fluid right now. It's this is all a part of my story. And at the same time, I am here today to offer these words as a way to ceremoniously release from my old narrative and continue to cut the cords between connecting my self-worth to my ability to earn income. I am actively trying to shift into a different energetic frequency that moves away from the victim mindset and feeling into what ease and abundance actually feel like in my body. Do a lot of somatic healing work with this. And I know there are many somatic healing work amazing people in the room. This is all a part of my daily practice to try to detach from the energetic chokehold of capitalism. I'm gonna bring another voice into the space. Sherri Mitchell. Sherri Mitchell is another indigenous woman. She is a Penobscot woman. She is the author of Sacred Instructions. I can do this. Highly recommend Sacred Instructions as has anyone read Sacred Instructions? Yeah. Amazing, amazing book. I often think of it as like a follow-up to Braiding Sweetgrass. A Braiding Sweetgrass is a good book to read first. And this is an amazing book at really what are the tools and what are the paths for building new culture from an indigenous perspective. And Sherri has done a beautiful job speaking to that. And this is just a passage in the middle of one of the books that I will read. For thousands of years, our energy flow has been aligned with an evolving capitalistic ideology. Within this flow, we have slowly been conditioned to believe that achieving success for one's self provided the greatest degree of personal security. It was along these lines that the teachings on attraction entered into our global field of consciousness, of awareness. Up to this point, the creative principle illustrated through the laws of attraction has been used in a way that has kept us in perfect alignment with the capitalistic belief that we have been conditioned to accept. The belief that we are little more than consumers. Under this conditioning, we have lost sight of the truth of our personhood, lost sight of our humanity, and connectivity with the rest of creation. My work with Empower is to create cultural conditions of belonging, where everyone can share our gifts and be in our magic. Because we are all needed to co-create the cultural conditions for New Earth. We all have beautiful gifts, talents, tools, ideas, and love to share. And it starts with our personal healing. Healing of our physical bodies and our trauma. Learning how to regulate our nervous system so we can build our capacity to withstand discomfort. Building up our emotional intelligence and cultivating deeper ability to give and receive radical empathy. Healing our relationships with each other and learning to be in relationship with Mama Earth. When more of us engage in new practices and shine them into the world together, we are co-creating the new cultural conditions that we seek. And we need to talk about classism and economic privilege way more. We need to unmask the taboo norms that prohibit conversations about money and it's direct link to health. We need more opportunities for people whose gifts cannot be commodified by capitalism to come together to build our strength and collective power to change the systems through the emergence of new cultural norms and practices like what we are experiencing here today. I am constantly navigating healing my relationship with myself and putting energy into cultivating relationships with people so we can build heart-centered community and I'm really grateful for the friendships and support I now have in my life, which makes healing my relationship with money feel more possible and it helps me trust that we do have all beautiful gifts to offer in the building of New Earth. I'm gonna bring one last voice in. This is Adrienne Marie Brown. I guess I have to move again. Adrienne is the author of Emergent Strategy, another incredible guidebook on the work that we do. I use a lot of her information and how I facilitate and how I engage with Mama Earth in and bring that into my workspace and it's kind of another book beyond sacred instructions on really guidance for how we facilitate, how we hold spaces differently, how we have conversations differently, how we emerge into new culture. Adrienne offers beautiful poems in her book and online and on her social platforms and she offers. I am not afraid of what I came here to do. I'm made of stardust. We are not afraid of what we're called now to do. We're all made of God. I am not afraid of what I came here to do. I'm made of stardust. We are not afraid of what we're called now to do. We're all made of God. One more. I am not afraid. We intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for. We are all worthy. We are all worthy important players in building new culture. And the blessing that I offered in the program, I offer it and speak to you here. May you be blessed with faith, trust, and belief in yourself and the gifts you have to shine into the world. May they be received with love and reciprocity. And may you feel the energetic frequency of abundance in your body and soul. I hope each of you find something of value here today that you can ripple into other spaces. I invite you to move. Move that out a little bit. And maybe take a pause and just, is there a nugget? Is there a piece of clarity? Is there something that came up in any of the words that I shared that you want to hold on to? Take a moment to hold on to that. Maybe even place it into your heart. Place it into your womb space. Just keep that nugget, that piece of clarity. Hold on to that. And then let go of the rest, right? There might be things that triggered you. There might be things that you don't agree with. All these other things. Send them back to the earth. You don't have to hold on to them. Just let them go, release them out, get rid of those. And I'm wondering if you all would be interested in closing with a song. All right, so remember that clarity. Hold that piece. Some of you know the song, I'm sure Willow does. This is a song that has been taught to me by many people and I've sung with many people over the past several years, do this now together. I'll do a call and response and then we'll sing it through a couple of times. I gotta find a low note or I'll scratch, screech my voice like an owl. Stepping into clarity, standing in my power. Stepping into clarity. I dance the magic in my heart every day and every hour. I'm choosing to be using the gifts I've got to make the world sublime. Cause I am one unique expression of the great divine. I am. Thank you so, so, so very much everybody. Empower offers retreats and events. I do support sessions and I offer facilitation and consulting. We have an emerging community that we're slowly building and finding ways that people can tap in. The website is EmpowerTransformation.com or Empower-Transformation. It's all being revised so a lot of the information is gonna be changing but if you go to it, there's a place to sign up for the newsletter. There's also a sign up on the table out there. There's some old brochures that are also like super outdated but they're out there anyway. And lots of, I'm on social, all the different social medias and we have a new Patreon that is gonna be a place where we can kind of gather community and that's brand new. So, best way is signing up for the newsletter and then kind of seeing what's coming down the road. Oh, it's right there right now. Thank you, Olivia. Thank you all so much. Yeah, so this is, oh, do. I also wanted to say that we are accepting donations today for Empower-Transformation and for the Vermont Kindness Project. Also for Public Banking Vermont, if that's something that's interesting to you, if you'd like to be a part of that, going forward, you can sign up for newsletters and also with the Public Banking Vermont, we do have a weekly Zoom that we meet on Friday evenings to talk about making change here in the state of Vermont, which Ricky is gonna be talking to you about later. But before we break off into the groups that Ray's gonna help facilitate, I do wanna just put out there, there was some other information about Capstone, which I just wanted to mention that I thought of briefly. If you're interested in financial coaching, if you feel like, hey, I'm going through a financial week spot in my life, I'm prepping for bankruptcy, I mean, I've heard it all. These two fabulous ladies in the back, Rosie Manning and Lorie Kosar, you can set appointments with them to get your financial house in order and it's free. So just wanna throw that out there if you know friends, please take their information, take their cards. And there's also another program called Smart Mileage. Mileage Smart, yes. That helps people to transition off of fossil fuels to get those electric vehicles. So Capstone, I just wanna give it up for Capstone, they're doing an awesome job trying to put us into the future. So ask about those programs, Capstone is an awesome resource, so I wanna put that out there. All right, thanks. Get into some chatting. So the invitation is to get into groups of three because that will just allow for just more rich dialogue than larger groups. And again, I guess I have to move this, so I can see what I wrote here. Okay, so the prompts are here. So the idea here is that we're doing equitable dialogue circles. And what that means is that everybody has the same amount of time to answer the prompts. And so it's not one person answering the prompt and then people building off of that person because then it centers that first person who answers the prompt, it's answering it for your own things. So you're not trying to build a conversation off of what the person said before you, because your answers are gonna be different. You're not trying to find likeliness, like, oh yeah, that resonated for me and here's my thing, right? You're trying to be in your own autonomy and power and answer the question. So the prompts, what emotions are or were activated in your body during the session that I was sharing? Name the emotion, not the story, right? So this is, we're not trying to go into narrative, we're naming like, you saw some of what I did, like I felt it here, I felt it there. Right, and where do you feel the sensations in your body? What energetic frequency or vibration do you most often have about money? What is your money vibe? And what is something you are taking away from your experience today so far? And so three rounds of sharing, so you can probably give like two minutes per person for each answer if you're in groups of three. Do have someone, you know, self-regulate and like make note of that and kind of cut yourselves off or somebody do a timer so that you don't get through just one round because somebody talked for 10 minutes, right? So just do some self-regulating. And yeah, I think that's it. So we're just gonna kind of break into groups in here and we'll move into lunch or have kind of a lunch announcement after that just to get us talking and sharing with the prompts. I think it's like two, like if you're in groups of three, I think you've got kind of like two, two, two. I mean, you can kind of, we're doing this until what, like 10 of? To five of, okay, so we have like, yeah, we have like 20 minutes. The math might be totally wrong, so like figure that out kind of in your spaces but just so that everybody has the same amount of time to share, right? Three, two. Why did you say that? Many people do that. That's a big part of kind of ultimately white dominant culture is just this fear of not being able to, you don't wanna say the thing that causes discomfort or something else than someone else and you just, it's something that happens in Vermont a lot where like one person says something and people are just like, oh yeah, that sounds good. Let's just go forward. And so it's good to have a practice even in just a small mini space like this of being able to each answer a prompt and each be heard in answering the prompt and not trying to have it be about building upon what somebody else said. You may have a similar answer. There's nothing wrong with having a similar answer. It's just trying to focus on hearing the question and answering it from your energy standpoint rather than hearing the question, hearing the first person go and then just kind of piggybacking off of them. Does that help clarify? Yeah, and you're not responding to each other either. So like you're not giving validation like, oh, I feel that way too or this is what I do and definitely no advice. Like it's you're just each answering the question and then you go to the next prompt so that you're in the energy of sharing your truth and hearing other people's truths without gibber jabber advice, giving, validating and you know, anything. And you can smile and like support each other, right? But yeah, twinkles are great. All right.