 Welcome, welcome to New Frontiers Digital, and this is a workshop organized by the Edmond Hillary Fellowship as part of the New Frontiers offering, an event that we host every year. And we are looking at hosting this year, depending on the conditions. And at the moment, we have this offering free for everybody with the aim to put our fellows and the EHF community closer to our audience and to discuss different topics and leading and showcase the leading thinking from the community. So here we are, I'm so excited that Alina is the host because she's amazing and I will pass it to you Ali, but before that I just wanted to mention that EHF has applications open at the moment and it's the last opportunity to access the Global Impact Visa, because they're open to the first of June this year and it's something that you want to take opportunity and we'll share more information later on as well and follow up with the EHF team. But head to our website and learn more about EHF. Alina, over to you. Kia ora. Thank you Paula. So wonderful to be here this evening. This is a topic that is very dear to my heart. How do we not go back to the old normal and redefine new ones? I'm going to hand over to Sonia very soon. But in the meantime, I would like to briefly offer up a poem to set the scene for us this evening. A few of you might have heard this poem before at New Frontiers a couple of years ago, but it seems the one that is called this evening. So I hope you enjoy it. It's called Big World Small Planet of the Rings and it was based on a book by Johann Rockström. 75,000 years ago on a high plateau in what will one day become Ethiopia, a woman scans the barren ground for seeds and berries, Titans fursbinding baby to her breast, oblivious that she holds in her hands the future of the human race. On the brink of extinction, humanity's population has dwindled to a mere handful, perhaps just a few thousand of us remain on the face of the earth. Just a blip in human history, merely a moment in time. It is the story we never hear about how we almost disappeared. Some 10,000 years ago upon the alluvial plains of Mesopotamia, an aging farmer gazes out across a golden field of barley. The ancient ones speak of a time when food was foraged from the wild, but he has planted with intent. Master of his own destiny, he is blissfully unaware that this very moment in time marks the inception of humanity's ascent. The following millennia will see us at our best and worst from witch trials, conquests and slaves to renaissance art, mathematics, medicine and the discoveries of space. In 1804 on a filthy wooden floor of a London slum, a young mother unwittingly gives birth to the brilliant living member of the human race. 40 years later, her son mobs his sodden brow, shoveling coal into the insatiable fiery mouth of a shining new steam engine. Soot black eyed and bone broke weary, he is building the future of industry. He is progressing the human race. A 1950s housewife rides shotgun in a 57 Chevrolet Bel-Air. Sits proudly beside her husband who represents the one-sixth of working age American adults to be employed by the automobile industry at the time. Oblivious to unintended consequences, they are paving freeways across the future. In 2008, from the elevated porch of a long house in Borneo, an elder surveys the thick dark smoke blanketing a land where forest fires are foreign. The rainforest slash and burn makes way for monocultural palm oil. The fires burn so vast that the collective smoke would account for 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions that year. It is 2020 and we are no longer unaware, no longer averting our eyes from the caged canary that has been lying unmoving for quite some time now. It is 2020 and the earth is submitting her invoices for the streets we have paved with gold for every monumental blip in human progress and payment needs to be underwritten by an equally monumental mind shift. It is time for us to step up and respect the boundaries of just how far we can push this planet, become stewards of our collective futures, realize just how much our livelihoods depend on it. We live in a globalized community, a big world on a small planet where every flutter of a butterfly wing can either surf to strengthen the hurricane or fuel the winds of change. And like it or not these days we make our homes in each other's backyards. The Nazarian farmer whose dreams wash away with the soils after every season's floods, the rain no longer soaking the earth, that man is your neighbor. The machete-wielding clearcutter lives in the Amazon basin next door, look into the eyes of the Congolese youth risking life and limb in civil conflict to mine the minerals for our mobile phones and you will find a brother. This is not about sacrifice, but about embracing our full potential. Not about saying no but about embracing a resounding yes. This is about building the house of humanity with hard hats and steel-toed boots, traveling the mountain roads of our destiny with guardrails to mark out the cliffs. This is about humanity growing up, moving out of mama's home, learning how to do our own laundry. 100 billion moments of human progress have bought us to this point. 100 billion blips. In late 2017 in Wellington, New Zealand, a woman enters a fertility clinic with bated breath. And nine months later, scanning the future for some seeds of hope and some berries of change, tightening the sling-binding baby to my breast, I hold one tiny contribution to the future of the human race. In every blink, my daughter's eyes blip in history with every blip, a reminder of a global citizen in the making, already taking notes. Kia ora, thank you. Thank you. I'm going to now hand over to Sonja Renee Taylor, who is another incredible spoken word artist herself, also a author, speaker and activist and founder of The Body is Not an Apology movement and also a couple of books now. So, yeah, Sonja is an amazing human being who I've known the pleasure to know for a few years now and I'm going to hand it over to her to talk about not going back to normal. Thank you so much, Alina, that home was gorgeous and it's such a perfect introduction to this conversation today. It feels so ripe and ripe for the moment that we're in and hopefully for what this conversation is going to emerge for us. As Alina said, for those who don't know me, my name is Sonja Renee Taylor. I am the founder and radical executive officer of The Body is Not an Apology. We are a digital media and education company committed to radical self-love as the foundational tool for personal transformation and global change. And yeah, I want to have this conversation with us about where we are right now and in this particular moment in time and how we might move forward through it. And so I think I first want to begin by offering us a chance to share a deep collective cleansing breath together. So I'm just going to invite us to when you feel ready to inhale and then to exhale and we'll do that one more time to just really allow yourself to bring in all of the energy that is in your space and in our collective space on an inhale and then releasing all of the stress of today on an exhale. And it's in this breath that I'm reminded of our connectedness, both in that this breath is what tethers each of us to this particular realm, to this plane that we live in, but also the fact that it is the matter of this breath, the particulates of that breath that live in the reason why we have to put so much distance between us right now, right, in order to be well. And for me, there's just something to reflect on in that how harm and connection are actually the same sorts, that the binary of good and bad us and them is really just an illusion, a thing that never really existed to begin with and that we hold the whole of existence inside of us. The entirety of possibility lives inside of us, both the curse and the cure. We've never been one or the other. We've always been all, each of us is all of us and all of us is each of us. And that feels important to me for us to remember. And it's also the long-winded way for me to say that I really just want to go to brunch real bad, like that I want my damn brunch. And I'm mad about the fact that currently I have not had brunch in many, many months and I want bacon and I want coffee and I want a cute dress and I want mimosas and I want them in a busy restaurant in an overcrowded city with my attractive friends sitting around me. And I want to complain about how absurdly expensive the bill is. And I want to rage about twenty two dollars for Brioche French toast. How absurd. That's what I want right now. And I don't know how many of you often relate to that feeling. But that certainly is what is present for me. And I say all of that to say that I want to go back to normal, right? I want to go back to normal, or at least I thought I did. I thought I wanted to go back to normal. About a month ago, I shared a post on my Instagram account and it went pretty viral and somehow in its virility, it got misattributed to Brene Brown so much so that they like took a picture of her face and then they put my words over her face and just shared it everywhere. And I was like, wow, that's fascinating. Thanks for folks who've been correcting the misattributed meme. Brene was very gracious and correcting on her social media accounts and platforms and letting folks know that that was not the accurate attribution. And when she did that, it sent the post back into viral rotation. So now all of a sudden it's back on like Viola Davis' page and Robert Wright and all sorts of interesting people. And it's made my page pretty popular in the last few weeks, which is cool. But I say all of that to say that the post was mostly about my own reflection about this desire to return to normal. And then the post I shared, we will not go back to normal. Normal never was. Our pre-corona existence was not normal other than we normalized greed, inequity, exhaustion, depletion, distraction, confusion, disconnection, rage, hoarding, hate, and lack. We should not long to return to that, my friends. We are being given the opportunity to stitch a new garment, one that fits all of humanity and nature. And it was in that reflection that it became clear that it wasn't, as much as I miss my expensive brioche French toast and my pretty dresses and busy restaurants, that it was never really about that and that there was always a cost a cost that I wasn't considering for that opportunity and for that life. And when I allowed myself to really reflect on what it meant to go back to normal, I could see so clearly how normal is what got us here, how normal is how we ended up in this particular moment right now that normal was the source of our separation. Normal is what puts hundreds of thousands of us on planes every single day, leaving Sasquatch-sized carbon footprints with each cross-country and cross-continental jaunt flying a small novel virus around the whole world in a matter of a few weeks. Normal was squabbling over $15 minimum wage for whether or not we would pay a $15 minimum wage to the people that we would soon consider essential, the people that we would ultimately find that we needed the most of all when all of life was forced to shut down. Normal was systemic racism, the kind that saw the most disproportionate rates of COVID-related deaths happening to Black and brown people. And upon that realization, then rushing to reopen commerce because the folks dying were the ones that we cared the least about anyway. Normal was thinking we were separate until we were actually forced to be separate and then desperately missing one another. When left to truly reflect on normal, I was clear it was a state I was not longing to return to and no amount of French toasts or mimosas was worth what we had already lost. Long before we lost our ability to hug one another. So in this conversation that I've been calling forging our future, creating a radical love as our new normal, I used the term forging to describe the process of creating this new normal because it's a process that is birthed in a time of fire, literal and metaphorical. It is both the time of literal great fires, much like the ones that Alina spoke about in her poem, the sort that burned the Amazon for profit or leveled towns called Paradise, all pushing species out of their natural habitats and then to closer cohabitation with humans, like bats, near pigs that go to slaughter and become mills, to become new viruses, setting fires to rage in our own bodies. But it's also what happens in the crucible of the unknown, the fire that is not knowing if your company will go under as a result of this pandemic or if the virus is what will kill your immune compromised mother. It's also the burning off of old definitions of worth and value that we created through the narrative of capitalism and productivity. It's the question of, are we good enough if we're not working harder, if we're not doing something meaningful with this time? I don't know how many of you all are like, I'm going to write a book, I'm going to start this new course. We have big plans for this isolation until our bodies told us that we were actually in deep fear, that we were actually in trauma, that we were actually being called to the most intense tender and frightening parts of ourselves and that those really aren't the best conditions for writing the next novel perhaps. And maybe they are for some of us, but it's okay if they're not, right? And the fire is the question of if are we good enough, whether we're doing something or not doing something and who are we without what we do? These are the flames that are being forged right now. Two days before New Zealand began a level four lockdown of the entire country, my furry life companion, my 12-year-old Yorkshire terrier Anastasia Duchess was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer. One day before the level four complete lockdown and isolation in New Zealand, my relationship with my cohabitating partner ended and I was then here in a very large house alone. Healing a broken heart, preparing to deal with another and I was forced into this profound level of grief and solitude like nothing I'd ever known before. It's interesting, my house where I live is called Blackwood Manor. It's literally a little metal sign on the front door of this sprawling and romantic rambler that we moved into in Brookby, New Zealand, just outside of Auckland. And it's telling that it is also the name of what is left after the fire, Blackwood. It's the ash from whence the phoenix can rise but only if it's willing to ask itself some really key questions while it's in the middle of the flames. One of those questions is what in me has been strong enough to withstand these flames? And the second one is after the flames are extinguished what will be the most precious for having survived? It's in these questions that we can actually begin to consider what will come next. It is those questions that are forging what is possible for us after this moment. And it's only in our real truth to allow and reflect in that that we'll get there. So I'll give you the two questions again. The first one is what in me has been strong enough to withstand these flames? The flames of this present moment, the flames of those fears of trauma and uncertainty, the flames of who am I if I am not my job, if I am not my former definition of myself? Who am I without all of those things? What remains? So it's those questions that I offer to us as a place to begin this question about forging a new future. How do we get to some place to a moment that is beyond where we were but lives in the liberatory imagination of what is possible? The other thing, the other way that I phrase the disc is co-creating radical love as our new normal. And I'm very clear that what is also necessary for this making of the new normal is that it has to be co-created. That what we build alone will never be strong enough to withstand the heat of this moment. Whatever individual thing you think you can do all by yourself will not be sustainable in the context of the world that we're living in right now. It simply cannot be made strong enough. But together we each get to bring a unique gift and ingredient for the elixir of survival that will ultimately sustain us. And in order to co-create this new normal we have to be thinking beyond our individual experience and be willing to consider the collective experience. The one that it is likely that we were not considering before this moment happened. Our lack of consideration for the collective is reflected in our current circumstance. It is it is reflective in all of the things it takes, like I said, for me to have my $22 front brioche french toast and mimosa in a busy restaurant in a crowded city. It is interesting in this moment I was having a conversation the other day and I told my friend if you ever wanted to know if God was a woman I think that this moment has definitively answered that question. In my cosmology God is indeed a tired black mother who is just sick of us being mean to our siblings and tearing up her damn house and she has promptly directed us to get in the damn house and sit our asses down. And each of us has been sent to our proverbial rooms to think about what we did how we've contributed to the disharmony of this shared home. But to think about it not from a place of guilt or shame right we haven't been we haven't been brought to this moment to be in that place of guilt or shame which is a very debilitating and siphoning place to be. It doesn't actually help us do that forging forward that it we're being called to do right now. But we're being summoned to a juncture of collective reflection and accountability. What is the real cost of my convenience? Who suffers for my ease? Whose life have I simply never considered and how has this lack of consideration created harm? The answers to these questions will tell us what it is time to leave behind. It's in those reflections that we can see what wasn't working. What what our unique and individual contribution has been to the normal that we do not desire to go back to. These inquiries are how we will identify what we should allow to be consumed in the fire of this global crisis. And that it's in that reflection that we also get to ask what can we call forward that serves more than just ourselves. What have my higher angels directed me toward in this season? Outside of fear. Outside of fear. Where are my opportunity opportunities to be more generous and expansive? Because we have that we see that actually every single day when we move beyond all of the you know the the fear and the uncertainty and the chaos that those things create we see what our higher angels call forth in these moments. We see that those offerings are vast and beautiful. That we make masks and we donate money. That we drop off groceries and we tend to jump. That we sing songs and make videos and support of those who are taking care of us. That we call seniors and see how they're doing. That we reach beyond our own needs and actually begin to consider the needs of others. That we humble ourselves and we seek guidance from those who know more than we do. It's in this moment of these raging flames of uncertainty that we are made small and are not knowing. But that we do not see that as a failure. But that we allow ourselves to be led by those who have seen what we cannot. That is how we co-create in this moment. In this dance of giving and receiving. Of being the bearer of knowledge and the earnest student. And by making no hierarchy of any of these roles or our places in them. That is how we begin to co-create what it is that we would like to move toward. And the last part of this sort of conversation about this moving toward a new normal is the idea of how we learn to make love normal. Because love is at its core no matter how it gets manifested in your answers. Those answers are love. When I ask myself what is the most precious for having survived. It doesn't matter if it's my connection with my family members. Or the tender way in which I now wave to my neighbors from two meters apart. Or whatever it is it's love. Whatever it is that you deem that most precious thing that has managed to make its way out of those flames and still be intact. It is a manifestation of love. And so in this process of making love normal. It's really about learning how to hear and trust when love is speaking to and through us. And it's actually the easy part. Because once we've done the process of foraging. Once we've said what don't I need. What was I clinging to. That was of no use to me before. What was I holding on to from ego fear guilt obligation denial. You know a sense a sense of better than this all whatever that was. That we are willing to release to the to the flames of this particular season. That burns off leaving us with what it is that we really deeply want. Which is love. So it's through this process of forging and co-creating that we release those things that are not love from the flames of this season. We simply stop holding on to them and we allow this moment to consume them. And I don't want to say that like it's no big deal. I want to say that like yeah you can give it over to the flames no big deal. No it is a terrifying prospect. It is terrifying. And it's terrifying because it asks us to hold that which we cannot see or know yet. And there is something about the vastness of possibility that can be utterly terrifying. But the assignment is to simply let ourselves be with the fear until it relieves itself and becomes what lives on the other side which is love. I have in the last two weeks been having wild sleeping patterns that don't make any sense to me as a person who has solidly known herself as an eight hour girl for the entirety of my life. Like I go to sleep and eight hours later I wake up alarm or no alarm. And but now I go to sleep and pretty much around 2 a.m. I'm summoned to wake and then at 4 a.m. I'm summoned to wake and then right before sunrise every day I'm summoned to wake. And the other night I was directed and I don't I don't even argue with who's given the directions at this point and I just kind of listen. And I was directed to get up at 2 o'clock in the morning and to drive to Piha beach. And if you all don't know Piha is on the west coast of Auckland and it is wild seas just wild aggressive roiling crashing waves and giant black rocks and black sand expanse. And it is yes beautiful and wild is the perfect way to describe it. Except if you're there at 3 o'clock in the morning in which case it's just fucking terrifying pure unadulterated terror. And I was being told to submit to this terror to go to the beach and to walk out into the vast and unfathomable darkness and to be with what was present there. And I described it to myself. I said it was like staring in the face of God. The enormity the expansiveness the the intensity and and I just wept. But what also lived on the other side of that once the terror burned off was this profound sense of connection to all that is. That whatever it is that saw fit to create that ocean to create each granule of black sand to create those mountainous rocks that I stood between also saw fit to create a me. And that just as all of those elements and that terrifying and awesome beauty were necessary for this world to continue it is necessary for me as well. And that is what is on the other side of that fear. It's our clear and uncompromised certainty that we are a necessary and essential part of the tapestry of the fullness of this planet. And that our assignment is to be in right relationship with it to be in right relationship with our responsibility and with the responsibility that we have to all of the other elements of that tapestry. And so it's an invitation to let the fear be present until it gives way to the love. Because once we're connected to that inherent sense of love then we actually can begin the process of allowing it to direct and guide us toward the next right action. And for me that's what I call our personal GPS your guidance purpose and source. What is the knowing that is in you outside of our conditioning outside of the conditioning that created the world that we were in pre-corona. There is a knowing that we have about how to be in right relationship with ourselves and in right relationship with each other from a place of love that exists. It exists inherently in us and it is seeking every single day to guide us. And this moment this collective moment of fire is giving us the opportunity to burn away all of the other illusions so that what is left is that clear and present space of guidance purpose and source that clear and present space of love. And I want to offer I think that one of the ways oftentimes people ask me well how is it that I can even hear that how do I know what that is talking to me. How do I listen to it. And I think that there are lots of different ways I certainly you know many people call it intuition we call it all kinds of things but one of the things that I've been playing with in the last few weeks is the idea that I don't know how many of you all are familiar with the like five love languages thing it's a whole book it's like a romance like love and relationship thing but it talks about the ways in which you give and receive love. And I certainly think that our experience of giving and receiving love is much much larger than just those five love languages but I think that there is a tip inside of there that there is an opportunity inside of that conversation because if what we're saying is that after fear burns off what is left is love then however it is that we see here and no love is how we will recognize our own GPS. So if you see and hear experience love through the giving and sharing of time then what you get offered in that moment is how do I give myself time as a way to tune in to love. If you experience it through words of affirmation right or words language then how do I give myself language as the way to bring forth what that love might be that might be journaling for you it might be it might be writing a book it might be creating poetry but whatever that is it will begin to lift for you what that resonance is of love and begin to give you clear guidance about what to do with that so tap into those places that you experience love and then turn that toward yourself how do I give myself that and as you give yourself that that clear inner guidance will become louder and louder it'll become less faint and much more assertive in you and then the final thing that to me feels like the necessary way forward in terms of creating love as the new normal is once we know how to hear our own GPS our next assignment is to tune into the GPS of others it is to figure out how we tap into you know what we often call collective consciousness sometimes right and I think sometimes it doesn't have to be as woo woo as we think collective consciousness might be just think back to a time when you've worked in an office and one day you all went in and somehow everybody had on red shirts but it's not like you have a there's not a uniform there right you just happen to all show up to work that day in red shirts that's not accidental that is energetic that is the fact that energetically we are all tuned into one another the problem is that we've been historically tuned into one another through the channels of fear through the channels of discord and disconnection through the channels of competition and comparison the things that actually separate us from being able to mesh with one another's GPS but again once we've asked these questions in the forging portion of this work and once we've decided that we are going to tune into co-creating then what becomes much easier is also being able to say what in me harmonizes with what is in you what in us harmonizes with those that we cannot see or know how do we continue each time to expand that circle of of of resonance so that we are all operating on a collective tune that moves us forward that moves us again in right relationship with ourselves and right relationship with one another and in right relationship with the planet that we live on i don't think that this is impossible work if i thought it was impossible i wouldn't even be talking to y'all right now i'd be trying to get my sleep before i get awakened at two o'clock what i am certain is that we are being given an opportunity we are being given an opportunity to think about what it is that we did no longer serves us and to step into that great expanse that is terrifyingly beautiful and that on the other side inevitably can only lead us if we should so choose to a greater experience of love thank you all so much um for yeah for sharing and letting me share these ideas with you all i am going to turn it over to alina who's going to facilitate a bit of a q and a for us during this time yeah absolutely um that was just fantastic sonja beautiful corridor there and some really really great metaphors i love the one of us h being sent to our rooms to think about what we've done that is that is brilliant i've seen quite a few questions coming through on the chat window and also the q and a box so um well mohammed has a question um what do you think are the key moves that can be done now to support the the few billion people who are struggling beyond belief so i think the the question there is um those those who are perhaps in a much less comfortable situation than some of us are yeah um i think that that's who we need to connect with right like you know that's the places where we direct our energy that if and i think that's one of the things that sometimes we do that is because it's comfortable because it's easy right like the way we we go to our neighbor because our neighbor we can see we can touch we can feel um and it feels harder to reach to the further parts um but i think we're being asked in this moment to try to reach to the furthest parts to to the places where there is real struggle and to reach out and say how can i support and to be guided and i think again this is this opportunity where we've been all sort of made um you know collective strangers in some way right and so it's the opportunity to bridge the thing that's like i don't know that person so i just mind my business right and like that we get to be each other's business um uh gundaline brook says that we are each other's magnitude and bond and so there is an opportunity to say who who who is the stranger that i could totally reach out to right now and say how can i be of support to you and then to imagine the kind of extended bridge that we create of all of us did that one action to reach out to a complete and total stranger and say how can i support you right now yeah wonderful okay i'm just gonna look through the questions and reminder you can throw in some questions into the chat window if you'd like to ask something of sonia um phoebe says how do we create new narratives around what normal is and how normal was broken who should be in those conversations and how do we just not replicate the same people with power telling the story yeah um again this all feels to me like an opportunity to go to the places we haven't gone and to again in this part of the conversation where i was like to go to the places we haven't gone and be the student right because the problem is that oftentimes particularly with power and privilege we go to the places we haven't gone as the teacher we go to the places we haven't gone so that we can impart all of this amazing knowledge that we have about things um and that's not the assignment is to go to the places that we haven't gone and to be the student um and to to recognize you know i think it's it's important to also not you know to to also be with the invitation right to be um to extend the question how can i better learn what it is that i need to to the best serve you right that's that spirit of a servant's heart um and and to to receive that it's possible that somebody might be like nothing i really don't want to be bothered with you that that needs to be okay right but the problem is that we get that response and then we decide okay well never mind i'm never doing that again my ego got hurt right and so now my ego's hurt so now i'm just back to my old pattern again on the other that's that's that's the old normal the new normal says invulnerability and risk i go and say how can i be the student until someone says i'm happy to tell you yeah hmm fantastic um there's a question come through here um where are we um from mohammed do you think the world is learning anything from the current crisis um and looking specifically at the new signs of discrimination in the so-called large democracies of the united states in india yeah um i think i think there is an opportunity to learn i think we're in a process where we'll see um and you know i think that's why conversations like this are important um and it's important that this conversation continues to get more and more expanded to you know like i said to other places um but it's also important i think for us again i'm a firm believer that it is in our in that it it is our individual that creates our collective the collective is not some amorphous blob of you know unknown beings it's you plus you plus you plus you plus you plus you until we make up the eight billion folks that are on this planet and so every time we take different action we create the possibility of collective shift and so yes we can learn if we as individuals are actually willing to come to this with um beginners eyes to not be like oh i got this master i already know the you know the massive you know i certainly thought i went into this time you know let's say four days before the lockdown four days before the lockdown i was like oh this is i got it good and you know i'm locked down in this comfy giant sprawling house i got a bazillion dollars worth of groceries this is going to be a cakewalk and then the universe was like hold my beer and so each of us is being given an opportunity to really explore what it is we thought we knew that we don't know and and then to share that here's what i thought i knew that i didn't know because it's in our sharing that we spread the idea that it's okay to look at that and then someone else is like oh let me let me look at what i thought i knew that i didn't actually know and then that's the contagious part that's how we shift to consciousness okay um quite a question from shrillata here is it enough to prepare embrace adapt reflect equip and survive will we be able to co-create a new normal that can fit us all i believe that we can do whatever it is we decide we can do um and that that's really you know that that the that the boundaries of what is possible are the boundaries of what we believe is possible and will there be people who don't believe it's possible absolutely we see them they're with guns on state house steps you know like protesting for the right to die from a virus right like that's literally that's literally what's happening right but also that's also because their entire sense of identity and self-worth is created in the context of of the old normal right and what's what's uncomfortable is that they've been sitting at home wondering who am i if this is what word if this is the new normal then what what will happen to me you know and so the whole response is like oh hell no i'm gonna get my gun and y'all gonna let me go back to my old sense of self because that at least i know right um and so we have the opportunity to to simply choose a different pathway and to continue to bring others along who would like to come along and you know and to and to again get curious it's an interesting place but it's one of those places too where there is um i it's so clear to me with those folks that there is such a deep and a deep sense of of terror right and the place where um that fear is just congealed and holding on and there is something about being willing to be curious about someone's fear that starts to soften it until it opens up a little bit and so that's not everybody's ministry but you might have you know you some of us got cousins that were on those courthouse steps we got people in our lives that are those people we can see them right and so it's the place to bring some loving curiosity to to those folks um some of them will soften and take the journey i'd love to jump to a question now actually that was submitted by somebody when they registered for the webinar um the we've we've been social distancing many of us for for quite some time now so what what do you think might be the impacts of this this physical social distancing on the quality of our independent relationships after this all blows over um i mean i would you know i'm again speaking from what i'm what i'm hoping to to to bring into being right um because there we're out of crossroads and i think we're not like this is not a short crossroads i know some of y'all think we can go back to work and life's gonna be picked back up and then you can i'm a better build gates money and we will be right back in this in this particular moment again not in the far future um which is what happens when you don't learn your lesson you just have to with each lesson right and so um so i think we're in a protracted period of time where we're getting the opportunity to to figure this thing out and so i think so i think there'll be a moment where we just go back to taking it for granted and we see those people and it's just like hey glad to see you again and then we'll find ourselves back in the sweep again but when i was first allowed when we dropped to level three and i could expand my bubble and i went and i hugged a friend for the first time and i i wept my eyes just welled up with tears and it was not just like oh my god you haven't touched a human it was there was something so much more clearly precious about human connection that only having it be um blocked could could bring in that level of awareness about how tender and precious that is and so i think that whether we get that right now or we get it a little a little later we're all being taught how deeply precious our connections to one another are yeah fantastic i've got a somewhat of a challenging question here which i think is interesting though um yeah it's mohammad says don't you think there's a social media algorithms create prime ministers and presidents collective mindsets and new normals for instance instead of love haters becoming the new normal so what what we're talking about here is is unreal or challenging so how would you respond to that um i mean yes like absolutely and this isn't this interesting moment of time also we are right like these social media platforms are also how people are actually staying connected in this non-connected way right and so but again what i think we are at an opportunity is is that we're also recognizing how not enough it is right we're recognizing that that illusion of connection that that that sort of facsimile of closeness still leaves us to deeply deeply deeply hungry for real vulnerability and connection um and so i think that there's also again this moment of recognizing how these platforms have flattened um flattened our real relationships with one another flattened our actual experience of life and coming out of this i mean it'll be interesting to see coming out of this people might be like i'm not getting on the internet at all i'm zoomed out for life if i can't see you in person i think we might be done with texting i think there's i'm going to be a hunker for real connection um and it's going to illuminate how these other versions have not ever gotten us where we thought they were and they're going to start to matter less and i think we're going to start to maybe build the other things more i think there's about to be a lot of rocky stuff in between so don't let me sound like polyana like it's all going to be bows and flows of angel air it's going to be trash for a bit of time it's going to be as terrifying as that ocean was to walk out into in the dark until the shift happens and then it becomes something incredibly beautiful you have to walk through the fire first right walk through the fire first okay we're one minute from the top of the hour so maybe i'll i'll fire out one last very quick question um timothy asks um globalization allowed me to travel around the world um in high paying jobs significantly enhancing quality of life and for his employees um pandemics occurred long before air travel specifically what aspects of the old normal do you think we should try to restrict moving into the future and what should we race to get back to that's a meaty one um yeah well i mean so i think there's nothing we should race to get back to um i think the racing is part of the problem that there isn't enough reflection about um one of the questions one of the uh one of the e h f fellows boyd um whose last name i'm not going to remember or his cohort i think he's cohort five um yes cohort three cohort three um and boyd once said um you know when i create and he's a tech geek like i think he made sega genesis or something but he said when i create i try to think about what is the impact of my impacts impact like what is the thing that i am making now what is it what is its impact in 25 years right what is its impact in 100 years to try to be um indigenous wisdom says that when we heal we heal seven generations in front of us and seven generations behind right and so if that is the impact that we have in our own individual lives then racing is not what gets us clear about what heals seven generations forward and seven generations back and so there are again like i said what is the cost of my ease what is the cost of my convenience what is the cost of my i too traveled around the world on planes and met people and had amazing experiences and the question is at what expense and that is the what we have to sit with and so when we're when we're racing we skip that part we skip the what at what expense and so i really think it's an opportunity right now for us to get really slow and intentional that that there is an opportunity we are obviously incredibly brilliant beings like massive brilliant beings which means that we have the ability to create things that do less harm and still give us amazing benefits it's the time to start innovating in that way right now and yeah so many amazing nuggets of of thought and and probing questions i think for us to think about there i think we'll wrap it up here as we we have gone a slightly over time but yes thank you thank you all for joining us this evening is there anything else you wanted to add paula i see you've put a a survey form in the chat window that we'd love for people to fill out will you email that out as well yes thank you so much sonia and ali and i will follow up with the recording of the session we'll be uploading that on our youtube playlist but it's also available on facebook because we were live we are live and applications record her eight clothes on the first of june less opportunity to access the global impact visa you don't want to miss out a head to our website to learn more and i will be sending the feedback form it's already in the chat window but we'll be sending it over email thank you so much for joining us today sonia you are amazing alina you are incredible i'm so happy to be surrounded by you powerful wahine amazing woman and thank you so much everyone for joining ali over to you sonia yeah thank you all so much i so deeply appreciate you being here and letting me share my ideas and um i look forward to if you want to connect with me online i'm on instagram sonia and a taylor um and you can also check out the body is not an apology if the body is not an apology dot com or in all the platforms uh alina how can folks find you and your work um yeah thank you sonia um you can find me at my name dot com so alina dot com and i am a yeah storyteller and narrative strategist as well as being a poet so this is all up my jam right now how do we make the new normal thank you all so much um wonderful to have you all here and enjoy your day go well thank you thank you