 na, mehi, aroha, kia, tatao, katoa. I'll talk about that, what that means later. So we're talking about education, and as we heard earlier, I think education starts the minute you're born. And so the first teachers and leaders that we meet are our parents. So I want to tell you a little bit about the educational soup that I grew up in, because my parents, my sister was the last person to talk. So my parents were very intentional and conscious in the way they raised us. So I want to share some of the values that they raised us with, which I think would be important to include in the education of the future. The first thing I grew up with was a very strong sense of dignity and equality as a child, two grown-ups. So I never felt like I was a second-class citizen. I always felt like my ideas and my thoughts were included and welcomed in adult conversation. And even just sitting at the dinner table, we were always given grown-up forks. And whenever friends came over, we were invited to bring our opinions to the situation. So I always felt like what I had to say was fascinating and interesting to my parents, which made me think I'm inherently fascinating and interesting, which has good and bad points. Another thing I learned when I was growing up was that my parents kept telling me, you know, whatever you read in school and the books, they may be true. Like, it's the latest state of the art, what we think is true. But what you think in your mind might actually be more true. So it was really interesting growing up when I would go to school and read books. And if I had a thought or an idea that was different than what was in the book, I would trust that, you know, maybe I had a better idea, which gave me a strong independent sense of valuing my own opinion and my ideas and my thoughts to being just as valuable as the grown-ups or the authority figures that wrote the books. Another thing I grew up with a constant cultivation of was curiosity and imagination. So in our house, my father and my family worshiped curiosity. It was kind of, I grew up sensing that my curiosity was my link to the divine. It was how God spoke for me. And so any questions that were brought into space were how it was like this sort of sacred opportunity for information to be exchanged. And in my entire life, my curiosity has seemed to taken me into all the places that I've most loved and enjoyed. And so just making sure we honor the curiosity of the child, which a lot of us already do, but institutionalizing that in the education system, I think, would be really important. Now, imagination. My father was quite theatrical and loved high energy situations. So he really encouraged our imagination in very specific ways. I'll give you a couple. I grew up in a house where you were welcomed to and encouraged to draw on the walls with crayon, with marker, with whatever you had. Why? Because you could always paint the walls, but you couldn't get back that window of learning that the child would have as they expressed their creativity and imagination. And so that extended to all other parts of our life, but just an example of writing on the walls was valued instead of discouraged. And another way imagination was really encouraged in our house was just like in road trips. Now I'm one of four kids. So I'm the eldest of four kids. And so in a road trip, there'd be like six of us in the car. And a typical activity in our family would be my dad would open his mouth and start making some strange sound, like wah-ha, wah-ha. And then he would say, this is the sound of this particular animal, which he would invent from scratch. And everyone in the car would have to make a sound that didn't exist in the world and then create a species that went with it. So that's just like constant opportunities to do improv and theater and user imagination and creativity. I think cultivated in us a sense of imagination as sort of the power source and the unifying force that connects us to other people. It's when you connect with someone else in their imagination space, I feel like you build a deep bond that lasts a long time. The last thing I'm gonna talk about about my early childhood was in my home, I didn't grow up with any religion. There was no monotheistic narrative. There was no sense of a God or a higher power. So my ideas of what was good and what was bad didn't seem to be connected to that. So the way they dealt with morality was they taught us to be very in tuned emotionally to other people and to really cultivate our sense of empathy. And so the way I ascertained whether an act or a statement would be good or bad was determining how beautiful I felt when I did it and how beautiful it left the world, the impact it made. So there is a strange aesthetic filter through which I passed all my behaviors to decide, is this the right thing? Is this the best thing to do or say? I mean, I'm not suggesting that we raise our kids without religion, but raising them with a sense of tuning into what they value and where they breach their own values so that their morality is not externally based but internally based, I think is an interesting shift. That was where I had a very powerful influence on me. Because I had this sense of my value being contingent on how aligned I was in my behavior with what I thought was important, it gave me this strong sense of esteem and constant assessment of whether I was being beautiful, whether I was acting in such a way that I admired myself. And ultimately, this is how I learned about love. I learned about love in terms of what did I do that made me love myself more? And then love didn't have to do with how someone else treated me or talked to me or affected me. It was how good I felt about how I was acting and being in the world. And so I think the education of the future is going to have to prioritize what I think is the most important soft skill we have, which is love. And if I'm honest, I think in order to save the world, we have to fall in love. We have to become masters at loving, first ourselves and our lives, then those around us and then the world at large. And in that order, because I really think to the extent to which you can, to the extent to which there's parts of yourselves that are unloved, that are marginalized and unintegrated and are left in the shameful dark shadows of our psyche, the extent that you don't love yourself is to the extent that you can love the rest of the world out there. So it really starts here, the education. I think the root of education is teaching a child an ongoing system for them to fall more in love with their selves and their life. And so as a relationship coach, what I've been studying for my entire life really is this very interesting space between two human beings. This ephemeral, fragile and sacred space in which I think everything that matters happens and learning to map that space. Okay, so if love is, learning to fall in love is the only way you're gonna save the world. How do you create relationships based on you having a life and a self that you love? That's what I really wanna share a little bit about. How do you fall in love with yourself and your life? I know a lot of us are here already really good at this, so I'm just gonna offer you some tips that I think refine the game and that I've systematized in myself and that just seem to work when you make it a practice. All right, the first thing is you start with noticing where in your life you're already lovable. So instead of having to go do these things to earn love or to achieve love, you just look around your life where it currently is and start becoming a detective with a magnifying glass and almost like an archeologist excavating from your everyday life tiny to big moments where you are acting in a way that you admire, where you're acting with beauty, with courage, with valor and the more microscopic the observations, the better. So it could be as simple as noticing that you got out of the way of someone as they were trying to move across a room or that you left the door open behind you for the person coming in behind you. It could be walking down a country road at night and noticing the moon when no one was looking. It could be delighting in a dragonfly or enjoying the breeze on your neck. All those are moments of you noticing where you feel like you're being the person that you'd wanna be. I have a metaphor that I use to help keep me in this state of mind. So I'm constantly thinking about myself on a movie screen and there's a camera following me around and I'm on this movie screen and I imagine there's a whole bunch of people in the audience at all times watching me. And in the audience are everybody that I've ever loved and admired and all my future selves. And what I'm asking myself in any moment of time about to act or speak is is this thing I'm about to do gonna have everyone in the audience clapping? Are they gonna be clapping for this thing I'm about to do? And if the answer is no, then not to do it. And if the answer is yes, then triumphantly do it. And it's just a really good trick that I use to run all of my possible thoughts, actions and behaviors through before I manifest them in the world. I don't always get it right, but when it works it's an excellent way to ascertain whether you're breaching your own values or creating yourself into the kind of person that you would clap for and eventually continually fall in love with. So are you clapping for the person on the movie screen in that moment? All right, now I read recently that life is a scavenger hunt for beauty. And so I really like that because I think the more you can excavate and explore the parts of you that you're beautiful, where you're being beautiful in real time, the more you'll be able to see in the external world and the more reverence you'll be able to bring to your efforts in saving the world. Okay, so the second thing that I think is useful for creating a life and a self that you love is being really conscious and intentional and creating a life that you are proud of. For 10 years I was an IT consultant. I lived in Europe, I was working with software. I secretly considered myself a corporate prostitute and I was deeply ashamed of my work. Not because what I was doing wasn't valuable but it didn't make me feel proud. So it wasn't until about 10 years ago I realized, oh, I'm out of integrity with my values in my work, even though it makes great money. And so I quit and I moved to New York and I started becoming a relationship coach which to me was way more aligned and ever since then I felt really proud to say what I am and it's not just your work that you do. It's the people, places and circumstances that you surround yourself in your life. The trick I use to discern whether something that makes me fall in love with myself and my life more is noticing whether it expands or contracts me. So when I walk into a room, I tune into my body, am I expanded or I contracted? Do I feel more relaxed or more tense? When I meet a person and I start talking to them, do I feel expanded or contracted? More relaxed or tense? And I literally choose when I'm on my A game, I literally choose how I move through my life based on people, places, circumstances and things that expand me or contract me and it's really simple digital kind of reading and I noticed I have a two year old daughter and when I put food in her mouth she literally either swallows it or spits it out. She knows right away, this works for me, this doesn't and somehow along the way we get tuned out of that instinct of knowing which is in our body. This is either working for me, it's I'm a yes to it or I'm a no to it and building your radar for tuning into your body when you interact with people, places, things, ideas and situations and choosing only the ones that expand you and moving away from the ones that contract you that's consistently iterated over layers and layers creates a life that you're in love with, that you're proud of and that you continually wanna come home to. The last thing I wanna talk about is, this is like a really pet favorite idea for me so I'm gonna spend some time on it, is the idea of taking radical responsibility for feeling loved. We have this idea that if I don't feel loved around you, then it's somehow your fault. You're supposed to do something to make me feel loved and I wanna turn this on its head, not because it's true but because it's more powerful. What if your responsibility when you're in a space or with another human is to use your wit, your intelligence and your imagination and all you're aware with all to notice and observe how you are loved right now and you can start with just inside your body. Well, let's just start with, we live in a world where we're held at all times by the ground, by the spaces that we're in, by the shelter, by the food that we're eating. There's ways that reality is holding us and loving us that you could just notice but I'm, and I'll go back inside our body. In our body we have like millions of cells that in any giving moment are doing miracles and metabolism, how many times a second and each one of those cells are doing their little thing to say, I love you, I want you to be alive Annie and at any moment in time if I just tune into that like symphony of I love you's that are propelling me forward into my life, I am aware that I am loved, that's just on the inside and every thought, every feeling, every piece of imagination that comes forward is a part of reality helping me navigate through my life. So there's a million I love you's coming from the inside. Then your job, especially around people and this is where it gets harder is to notice where they are loving you instead of noticing where they're not which is kind of like a compulsion we have as humans in a relationship is to notice where the person we love is not loving us. So I would invite you to try on that at any moment in time around any human being they are loving you and your job is not to find out if they're loving you but where they're loving you. So there is an answer and your job is to find it and any moment where you're not able to see it try on that it's a myopia and it's a moment in which you're squinting at large swaths of reality that are trying to inform you about how lovable you actually are and your lovability is in proportion to your observation and your imagination and your intelligence to discern the information coming at you telling you that at any moment in time. So everybody likes to say I love you and it's a beautiful term and I say it myself but one of the things I'm trying to do is shift the language around love and if you notice how it feels in your body when you say I love you or you hear I love you there's a certain delight in it. But I think especially the people in this room I think a lot of our life we're sending messages of I love you to other people and we're never sure if they're landing. So just like a FedEx package that you send and you get sign off for like it got delivered it's very infrequently that we hear from another person oh I feel that you love me I can feel it over there. And so I'd like to suggest a new mantra that we add to the to the canon and in addition to I love you I'd love to repopularize you love me. So noticing when someone you care about has just gone another way for you done something special for you or you notice a love rush coming through your body instead of saying I love you in that moment acknowledging that you feel their love for you you love me. I don't even think I say I love you to my husband that much anymore. I just notice the moments where he's indisputably loving me subtle or grandiose and I comment not in a kind of vein braggish oh you love me kind of way but like you love me I see you you love me and it feels palpably very different in your body to say it and for the other person especially with parents by the way as a parent the idea of having my child acknowledge that my love has landed over there is exquisite magic and so for all those who have parents telling our parents and I love you mom I love you dad but you love me mom. I saw how you did this for me I saw you went out of your way for me I see that you love me I think that's just a new phrase that I'd like to add into our space so you love me and the themes that have been emerging over the last week with the talks that have been all the beautiful presentations and the ideas that have been in the space I see a motif running through them it's really about relationships developing deeper relationships and raising consciousness whether it's consciousness about how we use our land or interact with other people or how we relate to our food and I see relationships plus consciousness equals love so when you have a relationship and you bring consciousness to it you get love and one of the things I'm just observing about the space that we're in and this valley that's been created this enterprise this magnificent forum is that it seems to be that it's primary purpose is to deepen and strengthen and cultivate more extraordinary relationships and bring more intention, awareness and consciousness to those relationships and so appropriately this valley is called a Roja Valley and so I just wanna point out that this is the space where love happens this is the space where love is happening this is the space of love and I wanna close with what I said at the beginning which was na mehi roha kia tatao katoa which I learned yesterday from my friend over here means I love you I love all of you it also means that you love me and I wish English had a phrase that encompassed both but I just want you to feel into the truth of I'm here speaking because in some way in some truth I love you and you're here listening because in some way in some truth you love me and if we could just keep our hearts open and tuned into that dual frequency well I think that's what would that's what characterizes the intention of this valley of love thank you I don't really get to talk about anything to do with relationships specific or anything like that but so if there's any questions on that space I'm happy to answer them or about love in general thank you so much for that and it actually tests so much with a lot of what we're talking about in education I know there was a parenting component to that but also in classrooms, in communities and in organizations so much of the habits that we learn and develop good and the bad are from those environments where we go into the open space in an open mind and we're influenced by many others and I go to school and learn things subjects and whatever but so much of what I'm sort of that's rubbing off from the teachers and the friends are some of the softest skills and ways of relating to one another relating to oneself and you remember those teachers that you felt loved from you learned best from those teachers I can name those ones and you remember those who you didn't as well yeah who didn't you didn't feel loved with yeah and who also impacts in a negative way yeah so it's such an important thing for us to talk about yeah thank you for that thanks questions or reflections thank you so I think what both you and your sister said before makes a lot of sense and hopefully to all of us in here and resonates with everyone so why is it that it seems to be so hard for us in our daily lives to express this love to have this connection with children and to feel good about ourselves and not have issues with self-esteem and so on well feeling good about yourself comes from acting in a way that you would be clapping for so I think it takes so how to build your self-esteem as a parent or as just a human being so okay so as a parent honestly every time you don't attune to your child and you skip over the honoring and valuing of their experience in that moment some part of you quivers with shame some part of you knows and that registers whether it's conscious or not that registers on your being and shows up later in the form of guilt and guilt is a burden and a constriction on your life force so you may not make the connection but your ability to create and perform and show up in the world to love others or your children better is in direct relationship to all those moments where you acted in ways that were inconsistent with who you would admire now it's no problem if you make a mistake children are very malleable but what parents don't often do is go back and correct the mistake and show the child hey I'm human I'm fallible I make mistakes I screwed up and here's where I went wrong and here's what I would do differently next time and how did it make you feel you know I was really lucky to have a father who was really good at this I would get in a little grumble with him and I'd go up to my room and two five minutes later I'd get under my door like a one page letter apology about where he thought he could have done better it took him a while to get there but I just grew up knowing that there was always a repair and I've read somewhere that I read in a very specific book that when children are around conflict between the parents where the conflict is resolved in front of the kids so that they see oh they get in fights mommy and daddy get in fights there's a way to resolve conflict and they're in love again after it's way more powerful than first of all if the parents never have conflict which just leaves this child with this void of like okay you're not supposed to have conflict or where parents have conflict they don't resolve it in front of the child and the child just feels this palpable tension in the space and doesn't understand why so it's okay to screw up or to have a fight or to have a conflict but then how you repair that and your intentionality it's you can actually do a better job at parenting by fucking up and repairing it than doing it right the first time so in terms of building a steam I think a lot of our steam is weighed down by shame and guilt that's hidden in the background and that shame and guilt comes from doing things that are inconsistent with who we want to be on that movie screen and what would have our current future selves clapping so I don't know if I can be more specific if you give me a situation but self-esteem is about thinking that you can cope with future situations that you're put in front of and the way you cultivate that is by noticing where you're fucking amazing currently that self-esteem starts with noticing where you're amazing currently and then and paying attention to that you start becoming more amazing and being the kind of person that you would admire why do we struggle with it I think because we don't give we don't repair with ourselves so I just screwed up even if I never got a chance to talk to that person again they got on a plane and they left am I beating myself up inside or am I getting down to that little kid inside me onto their eyes level and saying hey were you scared were you upset what happened just now that made you say that kind of mean thing to that other person so there's an inner child in all of us that we have to continually reparent and to the extent that that child's needs feel met and nourish just the extent that we can then meet our actual physical real world child's needs and it has to go in that order this child and you evolved first before your baby and so that child has seniority and priority so really a lot of you know Dan Siegel's work and what Rio was talking about this regulation of your nervous system is you getting grounded breathing into a safety place and then finding what your inner child needs like literally I go inside and I ask her what do you need to feel safe right now and if I listen she tells me and I do my best to fulfill that need and make her feel safe and loved before I try to help anyone else in the world and doing that repeatedly and successfully makes you build your esteem. Thank you I just want to echo and strongly validate one of your last sentences I'm fascinated how things begin and I've been observing and experiencing myself how initiatives begin and one day I thought I would write a book about it but maybe it's really simple and it's not about things and about an idea and about finding money and finding a venue it's actually one sentence it's just about relationships. Thank you. Yeah I mean I go so far as to say that I'm a collection of relationships internally and externally you know you draw the dots and then the lines between the dots on the chart well I just go around and erase all the dots and that just gives you a powerful way to look at yourself then you know I heard once when you tug on something in reality the whole universe quivers and if you see yourself as a collection of relationships nothing you do doesn't have an impact and I think if we're raised with that awareness which I think a lot of native people have that in their blood is there is no you unto yourself and just understanding the impact ripples is part of your education as a human being. Last question. So I'm hoping you can help me formulate this even but something you were sharing earlier about living from this place of is this person situation thing expanding me or contracting me and making a choice based on that I could have said the same thing that's how I live as well. Now I've also recognized that if I'm starting out somewhat contracted not even realizing it or I'm in a pattern of mine or I'm somehow activated in my fear something that actually is good for me I might have a momentary contraction so it's deciphering between those two because we can't always trust that initial impulse necessary. And sometimes I like to use the guiding principle of pleasure in our community if something feels good it's probably good but then you can get into this place where a lot of things that feel good are negative for you like what I call counterfeit pleasure and the way you determine the counterfeit pleasure which is a similar idea to this to discern like when is the impulse wrong. Real pleasure feels good now and if you imagine yourself on a timeline with you here you next week, next month, next year, or 10 years and you look at all those versions of you in the future and you're about to eat the entire tub of ice cream and you check with them and they all lean over their shoulder and if they're thumbs upping what you're about to do right now it's genuine pleasure. If they're not and usually you can determine but there's a layer of shame that indicates it's counterfeit pleasure. And so similarly I think if you feel contracted towards something that might be actually good for you I would try looking into your future timeline and asking would my future selves, my higher selves would they encourage me to push into hair even though I feel contracted? There's a way to get out of your moment to moment frame or you could ask someone I admire what would they do here? What would Jesus do? What would Buddha do? But I like asking all my future selves because I feel like time is a function of consciousness and they're all here with me and you know, in here and so this is my definitive intuition is you're already successful future self leaning back whispering to you what to do next. Thank you very much Annie, really appreciate that. Thank you.