 There's another piece around wisdom, and this is one of my favorite parts of the book, which is around our stories. So each of us are storytellers. That's what we do as humans. Our brain makes up stories and we're really good at it. And you can make up a story that frees you and you can make the story that changes you. We have stories from our past that bring us more energy or stories from our past that drain our energy. So when we recognize that we are responsible for our stories, how we tell ourselves our stories, we take our power back. I'm going to explore more about this, but one of the things I've noticed about stories is that there's what I call ripe stories and unripe stories. And this is a big piece because I've seen a lot of us create a tremendous amount of suffering around our unripe stories and also hang out with our ripe stories and ignore them. So what is ripe and unripe? I had a story when I was living in Davis and people would say, where'd you grow up? And my story was this. I grew up in Southeast Asia. We moved every two years, which meant that we moved someplace. I would be the awkward, gawky kid. I wouldn't know anybody. I'd be super shy. And then about a year in, I'd start settling in. I'd make friends. I'd start opening up. I'd get excited about where we were living, and then we'd move. And so the cycle would start over again. So the time I came to college, I felt really disconnected. I was scared to make friends because they were leaving or I was leaving. And I had just a wee bit of issues around it. So how does that story feel? Sad, yeah. It broke down, yeah. And that's what I realized one day. I'm telling my story, and I'm like, I am so bored of this story. Every time I tell it, it doesn't feel good anymore. It doesn't feel good in my body. It doesn't impress anyone anymore. And so I thought, okay, I've been studying with Miguel for a couple of years, so let's just change and see what happens. So the next time somebody else asked me, I said I was racing Southeast Asia. We moved every two years. So by the time I was 15, I'd been to Egypt, and Austria, and Germany, and India, and to the states all over the place. I had been to so many different cultures. So by the time that I moved to the United States, I was incredibly open-minded, very, very compassionate, and had a deep passion for intimacy. I knew how to connect with different people. How does that one feel? Better. Okay, which one's true? Both. Both. And neither. It's a story. So when we get that, that's cute. When we get that they're not true because they're not happening now, it's fluid. You get to be a storyteller, and choose how you want to tell your story. What will serve you the best? Now, this is not about going, I hate that story. I don't like it. I'm going to just put a better story on top of it. That doesn't work. Because what that's like is taking a beach ball and pushing it under the water, which takes a tremendous amount of energy, and then trying to put something else here while you're bouncing, you can put a beach ball under the water. What's going to happen? It's going to pop up. Because you haven't really rewritten the story, you've just tried to bury it. So we don't want to do that. We want to be able to bring the story up, and when it's right, and how do you know it's right? Because you're kind of bored of it. Or you're just like, this is just ready. You just feel it in your body. I think I can shift my perspective a little bit. It could be just a tiny shift, and it will shift everything. Shift how you feel about yourself, and how you see the story. So that's a right story. But then there are unright stories. And an unright story is a story that has a lot of energy in it. Still, that you're attached to. It's one you're not ready to connect with. And those are the ones usually we're like, I'm done with that story. I just wanted to go away. But if you really feel into it, it's not right yet. We want to be really gentle with ourselves around this idea of is it right or is it unright? And to love them equally. Because the truth is, some of us, I think most of us, are going to go through our life with a lot of unright stories. And can we love ourselves through the places we're not right? Is that okay? The answer is, and if you love those unright stories, I am probably going to go to my death bed, hoping that everyone on the planet loves me. I'm a liberator. But that's one of my core things. Have I done a ton of work on it? Yes. Am I much better? Yes. That's part of the default. So maybe you'll write me one day. But I just learned to just go, oh sweetie, there's that unright story. You're okay, you're safe. Instead of, I'm a warrior goddess, I shouldn't have that story. Which is so not loving to ourselves. So with fruit, now we talk about fruit for a minute. Are you ready? How do you write the fruit? Put it in a brown paper bag. So one way is you take the fruit, you stick it in a brown paper bag. What's happening when you put it in the brown paper bag? It's so cool. What happens is it's in its own little environment and so it's off-gassing. And what its own off-gasses then help it to write it faster. So sometimes in order to write the story, you need to go away. You need to isolate yourself. You need to sit with your own story. You need to be with the discomfort. You need to go to a brown paper bag, you close it and be with the story. And you'll find your way through to write the fruit. Another way to write the fruit. Put it next to another fruit, exactly. This is one of my favorites. Find people that are right in the area you want to write in. So it doesn't mean that person has to be perfect in all angles and so you can stand next to them. It means if you are dealing with relationship and you're trying to ripen something around relationship, you find people that are like rocking on their relationship and you go stand next to them. You don't even have to talk to them necessarily. Take in some of their audio. But it's not. Because they've got it. They've worked that keeps. We can really help each other in this way. And so what if the finances are a mess? You're not worried about that, right? Because they don't have to like, I'm not standing next to them because they haven't dealt with everything. If they're ripen that area that you want to write, ripen? So reading books, physically being around people. When I figured this out, I was like, oh no wonder I spent years like literally following Miguel around. Like I was always right close to him. And I was like, right, I was ripening. I was just hanging out in his energy field. And there's something really powerful with that. So the books he read, the people that you hang out with, again, doesn't mean, please don't get this thing like, I must only hang out with right people. It's not going to serve you either. You actually want people that are going to also push your buttons in a good way. Diverge for a second and then come back. There was this amazing experience called the Biosphere experience that they did in Arizona many years ago where they created a totally enclosed environment and they put people into it, I think, for three years. And what happened in that environment is they planted a bunch of trees. They were far and there's everything. They had a bunch of trees and for the first two years the trees grew really fast. And they were like, rock on, look how cool this experiment is. And then the third year old trees fell over. All the trees fell over. And when they opened up the environment and they figured out what happened, what they recognized is trees need wind to get their center. They have to have wind to get solid. So really, the more what we told people called petty tyrants that you have in your life that make your life miserable, better. Why? Because you were going to get so strong, you're going to find your center. Yeah. Some of us are super strong, right? So you don't want to avoid, we don't want to live our lives going, I'm going to avoid all the uncomfortable things in my life because you're not going to get that strength. This is where the water comes in. So another way to write it is to put it in the sun. Take fruit and put it in the sun. And what that does is it, I see is that we take our stories and we bring them out, we share them with other people and they can just sit and go, yeah, that's your story. I'm here, I'm missing it. So there's a way that when we as women open up and share our stories, we feel seen, we feel heard, we realize it's not just our story. I've been listening to and reading about women that were part of the first wave, second, whatever you want to call it, of feminism in the 70s, late 60s, early 70s. And what they talked about was so like, oh, they never talked to each other and then they started sitting down and talking and realizing they all had the same issues and how radical that was that women had met. We're not talking to each other at all. And so we need to keep doing the same thing of sharing or bringing it into the light, bringing it into the light, bringing it into the light so that it can get unraveled. And here's the thing I've seen. You know, or I know, I'll say this about myself, I know when I'm ready to heal a story when it's starting to write in by who I call. I have friends that I can call and tell a story and they'll be like, oh my God, I can't believe the bastard. You should definitely be really pissed. I'll be like, I know, can you believe it? And then I have other friends that I can call who are in this room that I'll be like, and they'll be like, mm-hmm, has it made you feel? How's that working for you? Great. And I call those people when I'm actually ready, I'm ripe enough that I'm ready to unpack it. So just notice that, don't judge yourself for it, because I still call some of my friends and be like, should you believe this happened? And they'll be like, I can't believe it. I feel so good. But I know at some point I'm going to have to unwrap it because it feels good in the short run. It doesn't feel good in the long run. So that's that exploration around stories. Unripe, ripe, love them bold. Love them bold.