 So, I'm again Anne from Stand Out Earth and then we have with us our deputy director at Stand Out Earth, Christy Chester Vance and she is going to be facilitating the webinar today. Thank you very much, Christy. And I will go ahead and close down my webcam and let you introduce Reverend Angel and take us away. Thanks, Anne. Hello, Reverend Angel. Hi, Christy. Hi, to you. Hi, to you. Thank you all for joining us. I'm going to introduce Reverend Angel and then we're going to spend a little time going back and forth and having a conversation. At 11.30, we're going to spend a bit of time doing a short practice together and after that practice, we'll open it back up again for questions until just a few minutes before closing when Reverend Angel might say a thing or two and then we'll let you all go. So, that's the flow for today. And with that, I'll introduce Reverend Angel. So, Reverend Angel's full name is Reverend Angel Teota Williams-Sensei. She's a spiritual teacher, master trainer and the founder of the Center for Transformative Change. She's been designing practices for activists to be more effective in their work to change the world for over 15 years. She's the author of Being Black, Then in the Art of Living with Fearlessness and Grace and leading author of Radical Dharma, Talking Race, Love and Liberation. At Stand.Earth, Reverend Angel is our co-chair of our board on Mindfulness, Equity and Culture. So, she sits on our board of directors and co-chairs that team. We've had the privilege of having Angel on our board for many, many years and I'm really grateful to get to have this conversation with her today. So, thank you. Thank you. There's like a funny little whistling in the background. But I have a parrot who gets very excited about living. So, he's just as excited to be involved in the webinar. So, he's going to get his face in there. So, I may mute in moments when I'm not speaking to encourage, have a little less background. When your parrot's making off-color jokes, you can mute. Exactly. So, Angel's done a few webinars with us previously and he'll play some of you and have the chance to attend those. Today we're talking specifically about resilience, resilience and mindfulness in the face of the tremendous work that many of us face every day as we look at all the injustices that seem to be mounting. I was thinking about, and that's always been the case actually, but obviously for many of us right now, after the election, what we see happening in the world, it can feel like the arc of justice is bending in the wrong direction. And I think that's a story that many people have felt over many times and it's acute. And one of the things that happens for a lot of us is that we feel called to do more and act more and be more vigilant and we see that with huge outpouring of calls to some of our elected leaders and elsewhere in the world, all kinds of outpouring and activism. And a lot of us feel that internally too, though, as anger and exhaustion and overwhelmed and urgency, right? The fierce urgency of now feels very urgent for a lot of us. And I'm curious, Angel, if you could spend some time talking with us about where mindfulness fits into that, fits into facing that wall of injustice that so many of us wake up or sleep with, we think about constantly, you and I were talking yesterday about just taking a nap. And I know I've heard a lot of people saying that they just feel guilty stopping for a moment, enjoying a moment, taking a vacation. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on how we face that. Yeah. Well, I think the first thing that I want to say is that I think it's really important for us to have the appropriate frame on what we experience is happening now. For a lot of people it feels like, in fact, I was reading some copy for a little event that I'm going to be speaking at, and said, this administration is a disruption. And it's not actually a disruption, and I think that one really important beginning is for us to recognize it is urgent, but it's not new. What it is is clarified. And clarified is actually important. Clarified is actually useful. And I'm sure many people have heard the saying in the hashtag that now goes around in the hashtag, it's been in the black community for a very long time, the notion of staying woke. And so you see like hashtag, stay woke, or you'll somebody say, yeah, stay woke. And that's what really this time is calling for. It's calling for a staying woke to the presence of what has always been the underpinning of this country. That's just coming into a point of clarity and a crystallization that I think feels hard for some of us, but the sense that it is somehow new is the wrong frame to have, the idea that we are somehow the arc has suddenly changed, I think is a poor way to actually understand and grasp what is happening. I think actually for any arc in order to find its apex, right, it actually has to go through all of the tabulation that it needs to go through and really kind of find the bottom. And I think what we're doing at this point is we're finding the bottom. We're finding the places in which we ourselves, I'm not talking about other folks, right, on the other side or with the other perspective or whatever, but where we ourselves are getting clear about places where across movements we were asleep, across movements we were still in silos, across movements we still thought we could do things that were not intersectional, that did not navigate the realities of race, of class, of gender into our work. So if, for instance, in the case of Stand, to think that in any way for us, we got clear that in any way that if our work was somehow just about forest and trees, we needed to get clear on that. And I think that that's really what's happening and I think people should relate to this. I actually had an interview, it was called an unprecedented opportunity to relate to this as an unprecedented opportunity to get woke and to stay woke about what our actual work is. That said, the idea that we should now run ourselves ragged would actually feed into all of the systems that are actually the underpinnings of the oppression that we're working against to overwork ourselves, to see ourselves as, to put ourselves out there as martyrs, to think that if we just work harder, if we just do more, if we just stay at the office that much longer then somehow we're going to fix it. Not only is it short-sighted and arrogant, it actually, as I said, plays into a capitalist colonial ideal of human beings as objects that are here to produce things, even if we think the effort is for something that's quote-unquote good. That doesn't mean that we go to sleep, we stay woke, but we do that in a way by, we choose to do that in a way by working towards being clearer about what it is that is ours to do, how we're actually doing that, doing that in a way that is integrated, not siloed, that works across different areas of the intersecting areas of oppression, that actually lets us see ourselves able to work together that we get more effect for less effort. And part of that is actually to be able to figure out what it is that we need to be more effective in what we do, not to actually quote-unquote work more to do more, but what is it that we actually need for ourselves? I don't mean just our movements and just our offices and just our organizations, but what is it that I need in order to be my best self? And Christy named it, we were talking, it was getting towards my nap time because one of the things that I'm really clear about is that I need nap time to be my best self in order to be able to end my days cleanly and clearly and to make the decisions that I need to be able to make and to basically like to hold it together so that I'm not just frazzled and overwhelmed and reactive as opposed to responsive and clear-minded in terms of what I'm up to. And I think that that's exactly what mindfulness and the way that we think of mindfulness and our morphing the use of the term mindfulness for mainstream use and for activist use, that's what it is. It's about being mindful. It's about being clear. It's about getting woke and staying woke about what's true for us and using that truth to advance justice on our behalf first and foremost, right? Like the justice in ourselves, like taking care of me and honoring myself as a human being as someone valuable on the planet and then being able to, from that place, extend that care and compassion and love for myself on behalf of others. Thank you, Reverend Angel. When we talked yesterday, we talked a bit about being activists versus being reactivists and really what it takes to stay in that place of presence and mindfulness so that we can make choices as we've been talking about. And I also, just in preparing to get to talk with you today, you know, heard you talking during your TED Talk, actually, about the disconnects that we also have inside our clubs, not only that we may end up reacting more than acting, but that we may have this idea of being aspiring to be mindful people, people who are devoted to peace or compassion, but we're really freaking angry and there's an other that that is aimed at. And so there's this balance of this rage and this desire to be a peaceful person and you talk about the disconnect, the disrupting this disconnect inside of us of sort of how we are in the world and what we want to be or what we want to change. And I would love to have you talk more about that. Yeah, so first I want to say that activists, rather than reactivists, is what Christy has offered and that should be attributed to her and I think that that's really an appropriate way to think about ourselves and wonder, are we being reactivists rather than activists and the way that I talked in particular about how it is that we become reactivists is that we ourselves have a disconnect in terms of how we're relating to ourselves. And so everything that we're doing is about what's happening out there and we're reacting to that. And we have a pretty solid idea I think across the board in activist communities that we don't have a lot of choice that we have to actually act because this is happening, we have to react because this is happening so we have to react and this is happening. And I'm really of the mind that there's not a lot of movement we're going to make and I mean movement. If we don't act towards a vision rather than react against something, there's a lot of language in terms of people wanting to be in resistance and a lot of energy goes towards reacting to whatever latest thing 45 has said or the administration has said or done. And it's not that we're not going to need to do that at times but I do think that we play out and use up our energy in terms of responding that way instead of finding ways in which we can resource ourselves and be able to articulate first of all and then move towards a vision in the face of what we're facing. And that's true in our own daily lives and in our work spaces as much as it's true out of the world and that's why it's true out of the world because it's in our own lives. So one of the concepts that I really got clear about is in general human beings have a deep desire to belong and belonging is like fundamental to who we are. And at some point for every single one of us in our lives we come to this place in which we realize that in order to belong we have to cut something off. We have to leave some part of ourselves at the door in order to belong to family, to religion, to our homies like the people that we love we may love and choose as a community but there's something that is not in fashion or it's like that's not cool for you to be like that as well so maybe you're a bi and you're part of a gay community or a lesbian community that's what was for me way back in the day it was like bi was way not okay and so I had to leave something of myself at the door and so I couldn't love or be connected to bi people in order to be a part of my beloved community that in other ways were supportive of me and so we have a disconnect for many of us we have many disconnects that we're actually working with and that disconnect that lives inside of ourselves those ways in which we are disconnected from parts of ourselves that either we felt that we had to leave behind in order to belong or we are just not comfortable with in terms of facing ourselves that like the anger that you talked about Christy right like we're all about maybe all about peace, love and happiness and yoga but we have this like deep anger in us and we don't want to acknowledge that and face that and so it's disconnected we suppress it we keep it distanced away from ourselves and it's like bubbling there at the surface if we don't go back and connect that and find those aspects of ourselves that we left out that we left at the door that we're suppressing that we're pretending doesn't exist that we feel that people aren't going to accept it actually creates permission in our body-mind system to disconnect other people to experience other people as outside as not belonging and they become people that we don't have compassion for they become the people we don't care about it's a cycle right that disconnected is actually about ourselves it's actually about how we're relating to ourselves deep down and so I have a strong sense of like we have to actually disrupt that disconnect in order to regain not like oh I want to be down with like 45 the administration and I want to feel all kind of love for the people on the other side we can get there and that's awesome but we need to do that for ourselves we need to do that in order to be whole human beings and we cannot have the kind of love and justice that we want in the world if we can't have that kind of love and justice in ourselves if we're harboring that disconnect in ourselves if we feel that sense of anger, loss, grief you know, resentment about the ways in which we are leaving the truth of who we are at the door that expresses itself in the way that we do our work and we are uncentered and we are unclear and we are reactivists instead of activists thank you Angel we're going to move in a few minutes doing a practice together and then we're going to move to audience questions after that before we do I wanted to ask you you talk a lot about practicing justice practicing change practicing love and I feel I know personally that has a profound impact on me that in the patient to practice because it gives me space to come back to it when I'm making mistakes and as we all become more aware get more clear about the things that have been happening that have become more apparent we make mistakes can you talk about that word practice and why you choose that and you repeat it and what your offering is with that? yeah so we're all practicing something and we're always practicing something and the things that we do unconsciously and repetitively we call them unskillful unwanted habits and they're what we're practicing so we practice going for a smoke when we feel anxious and we don't even notice that that's what's necessarily going on with us so the idea of practice is to make our habits actually conscious things that we're aware of so that we're intentional about the lives that we live and how we want to live our lives and we all know what that's like because we experience a gap between the who we want to be and who we actually experience our souls as or who we want to be and other people experience our souls as I talk about not just practice but embodied practice embodied practice means that we are actually showing up in a way that is tangibly expressing who we want to be in the world and in order to do that we have to like work with the grooves of our habits that are unconscious and bring them into our conscious awareness by practicing other things and so you know a lot of people have talked about like we now realize like quit smoking is kind of like really not working for a lot of people what actually happens is people replace the habit of unconscious grasping and you know dealing with whatever urgency or pull for something and they replace it with a practice of doing something else by finding something more healthy to do whether that's going outside whether that's using a vapor thingy I'm not a smoker so I don't know exactly what the things are but practice is about bringing your habits into conscious awareness and working with the how we show up in the world rather than just thinking oh I would like to be this way and then finding ourselves like hanging out in the gap between our reality and our intention and our reality so I talk about practice because I think that our movements have gotten caught up in the sort of fixation on mental stuff that's very much a part of the corporate world right like if we can think it we can be it but we want to be justice and if we want to be justice we have to actually practice justice we have to show up in ourselves yeah thank you I'm going to turn it over to you for some practice together and I'll turn off my screen so we can see full you I'll pop back on when we're done okay so I'm going to offer this practice and as Christy mentioned I did a fuller version of it it's not really either the full version of a TEDx talk that I did called it's not about love after all you can check that out on on YouTube on Ted's site so I'm going to do a slightly different version of it because I don't have two people to work with but you're going to have to work with me here I'm imagining that for most of us you're not going to have to stretch too far to do the first part of the exercise so the first part of the exercise I just want you to find a situation and pretty much all of us have them that irritates you and we're not going to go way over the top so you're going to just locate that situation that irritates you and on a scale of one to ten with one means like you know you run screaming out of the room pulling your hair out or maybe want to do harm to somebody let's find something that's kind of more in the six or seven range something that like has a lot of juice right a lot of energy for you and you find yourself in that experience repetitively it could be a situation in the office it could be a situation in your personal life it could be an argument that you get in with a sibling but you know and let's actually even turn it towards if that feels workable for you something that shows up in your work maybe it's like as you watch the news or you hear a new executive order come out so as you notice and associate into like feel into that experience notice the ways that you hear the words come to you that invoke that experience of irritation of frustration notice the way that your body maybe contracts in particular places it might be your belly or your shoulders maybe when you're in that situation you notice the clip the clothes you're wearing are you standing are you sitting and you can really like hear that person's voice or the news caster whatever it is that really just kind of like starts to pull on you and you start to feel like a little bit of out of control your mind gets stuck and you start being in the loop of the habit and whatever feelings of fear or anxiety start to come over you if you feel like you have to get up and leave the webinar just kind of tone it down a little bit but I really want you to notice what that feels like and remember what your body feels like when you're in that edge of kind of out of control when irritation when frustration when anger start to get a hold of you and you don't feel like yourself anymore you feel caught up so next what we want to do is just really begin to work ourselves back into a state of presence because this is not who you are it's not fundamentally who you are it's who you get caught up and you may become something different that you then act out of or you react out of so we're going to start bringing ourselves back into presence and the way you want to do that is just to begin by feeling your feet and whether you're standing or sitting feel your feet and then also feel your seat maybe you will your toes you notice the depth of your own body as you feel your buttocks understanding just to take that notice and allow for an out breath as you extend your crown towards the sky really feel the full length of your spine because when we feel that we feel our sense of dignity kind of uprightness that begins to give us a little bit of perspective and then you can feel from like your left shoulder to your right shoulder you can feel the close on your body and feel into your full width and a sense of relationship with the space around you and what it's like to feel the exposure of your own heart when you feel your width and your belly as it softens and speaking of your belly, feel your belly and your front body all the way to the back body and your sense of depth that you are a 3D full on human being that you're not just flat and one dimensional feel your insides, feel the space between your ears and finally whatever it may be you don't have to save the whole world at this particular moment but whatever it is that gets you motivated that gets you out of bed that actually matters to you I want you to just really connect with that and drop that into the center of your belly right, I can't quite see my belly maybe I'll give you a little picture of my belly right down there these are my glasses but right here, right into your belly into your core right underneath your navel feel that and drop that the weight of what matters to you right into your belly and let your center of attention with what matters to you once you can feel that and if you're losing any sense of your length or your width or your depth just use your out breath and extend right, open up and take up more space again and then once again come back to what matters in your belly and once you've done that what I want you to do is like notice that irritating situation that maybe you've even forgotten about by now but if you haven't call it up again and notice how you feel is it as burning do you feel as contracted do you hear the loops of the argument or the situation as loudly for most of us I suspect not and that's the point of an embodied practice and most importantly in this practice what we can see if you can again like feel what is it like can you as readily call up that irritating situation has it moved down on the notch of like from the 6 to 7 to not disappearing not being completely gone but maybe it's only a 3 or 4 and the reality is that the situation hasn't changed like you're still sitting in the same place or standing in the same place you're still in this webinar and so the outside conditions have not changed but you have a choice to shift your inner state and you have that choice and it's available to you as long as you choose to as long as you choose to connect to both your breath and also to actually center yourself in what matters to you and become present in the physical space that you inhabit and also become present to yourself and what is important to you rather than the external conditions what's happening outside and in this way we don't lose ourselves so quickly to the idea that this thing is happening out there and I simply have to react but rather we choose a place of connection to ourselves we choose a place of actually embodying and practicing justice in ourselves by saying actually in order for me to be in relationship to whatever is happening outside I'm going to get clear about what matters to me I'm going to move from what I care about rather than from what the situation is imposing upon me and so that's one of the central practices that I offer I go deeper into them in different ways but I call it centering in presence and it comes from different many many of you may have tried or been in the experience of different somatic type practices or embodiment practices depending and I've kind of blended some of the things because I really feel that we as activists have to make a choice to decide what it is that we feel is important to us and act from that place rather than letting the external conditions cause us to as Christy says to be reactivist rather than activist we need to stay woke not fall asleep but we don't need to pass out from whatever the situation is in front of us so I hope that's useful and Christy I hope you'll come back on and tell us about what your experiences of that since we will be able to hear from everyone that's on the webinar and get their feedback thank you first I'd like to just remind people that you're welcome to submit questions in the question window we have a few already that I'll start with and tell us about you guys I'm going to yeah so I love doing this with you and I always just every time I think I've got it licked and that I'm in my body and not reacting and I do a practice like that I've realized that I am contracted that my shoulders are tight and that I often lose sight of the challenges I have to be what I would like to be I have to say I was thinking about my some challenges I have at work but also one with my little daughter and I don't want to be a reactivist you know I don't want to react to a nine year old because I'm not that's pretty telling I like this and I've done it enough times I can reach to it as a resource when I'm not impressing myself with how I'm engaging with the world I feel it a lot in my gut angel thank you can I just say and so the you know what you shared Kristi is exactly why we then take a practice that like couldn't be just a moment it can be an event it could be like oh I did this thing in this webinar it was awfully cool and I had some kind of like good moment from it but it's why we need to make it a practice because when the shit hits the fan and the world contracts on us the last thing that we are thinking is like oh yeah I'm going to do my out breath and expand myself practice it and make it a practice so that it actually starts to work for us and our spiritual response to being contracted is to actually begin to reach for not in a conscious way we begin to unconsciously reach for like hey this is not me right that's what it is it's really about coming back to who we are and who we truly are at the core of our being some of us may experience or think like no like I'm angry and I'm crunchy and funky and that's not who you are you're a person that wants to change the world so that it is a thriving and sustainable place for all and maybe you're doing that in an angry way right now or maybe you're feeling twisted but I know for sure that if you're doing the kind of work that's about changing the world that's about bringing about a better climate for us all to reduce and roll back climate change if you're working on oil trains environmental justice whatever it is that you're working on it means that fundamentally there is a part of you that yearns for the connection with the world and to love and to be loved and you might be doing it and fueling it out of a place of anger but you deserve to be able to source what you're doing in the world from a place of love and we deserve that from you as well but you deserve it first and foremost from yourself so what that practice does and what choosing to practice does is enable you and empower you and give you permission to be who you are to be the person that yearns for a better world and feels pissed off and over it that somebody is somewhere like jacking it up and making a mess for people that we love and what we care about that's making a mess of the planet but you don't have to go there and be that kind of like angry constricted tightened up person you can still confront that from the best of who you are in order to create the best kind of planet and environment and society that we can possibly have that's what this is about this is not about going around and being like hey dude peace love and happiness let's go like you know meditate and like check out in the world this is about choosing to be the best person that you can be with your kid your nine year old right self or your nine year long director or your nine years on a board and figuring out like how do we get along and move things forward so that we can do the work that we're here to do in the world. Thank you Angel I'm just going to share a question with you from the audience which relates I think quite directly to what you have just spoken about so someone asked how do we disrupt the disconnection of anger that we feel for those who support and excuse 45 and his administration and I think the first place to begin is how's the anger serving you that question like how is the anger serving you because you know there's righteousness and passion and I'm all for for passion and those of you that start to get to know me in any way know that like passion is not something that I'm like sitting inside or putting it on the sidelines but anger is a is a hot emotion that starts to confuse us and I think that in general grief is underneath that and so if we can figure out how anger itself is serving us it starts to like break it up and we get down to what's underneath us and often it's it's hurt right it's like somebody we love somebody that we care about somebody that we believed in is is aligning with something that we know is harmful for so many people and I think getting to the actual emotion which is difficult for us to do is the first step and then we can be step into so that we can be present to like oh yeah I feel really like it feels painful to me that my dad it's not my dad not my dad but right but my dad using that behavior right and one of the most potent things I'm not saying that you're going to lead to this like immediately but one of the most potent things is that when we connect to our pain and our grief that the person is coming from that place we actually might be able to notice what pain and what grief allows them to excuse the behavior and to excuse the policies and excuse what they see whether it's fear whether it's a sense of loss of the world that they once knew whether it is a sense of just I don't know where all these like different people of different colors and religions are coming from I don't know if I'm going to get bombed I keep hearing you know we may then be able to connect and that's where compassion starts from we may be able to connect to where they're coming from and maybe not maybe we would just be more clear seeing people for ourselves and it allows us to be whole and we can let people's way of excusing this behavior and these policies not make us so small that we can't function well in order to work against it and to develop a vision thank you another question for you names is that possible I will ask and if you could let us know who asked that question and I'm now sharing the question and can you see that I can't see anything I mean I see but I don't see anything else I'm going to ask you another question and if you could let us know who these are from that would be great how do you choose an area of action to focus on when you're torn between choices I think you know meditation as a practice allows us to get still enough to kind of quiet the noise that so we tend to try to work with things from our heads when really it's our guts and we know what is true for us we can't do everything and so if you can just take time it doesn't have to be like an hour long just to like be still with yourself to create the conditions for yourself in your home that maybe every day for five minutes you just throw yourself down and the drop down as I said is centering your presence practice to connect to what matters to you and it will become super clear I always think of it as falling in love you could say I fell in love with them because this or this or that but it's a gut feeling that we then use our head to try to make sense of so when you connect to what really is important to you the thing that the action that most feeds that aligns with that connects that feels juicy for you is going to become clear and in terms of the thing that you have to say no to because we have to say a whole lot of no's in order to get to our yes just recognize that that's what it is all of the no's that we give and for some of us no is uncomfortable I can't do that or I can't take that on I can't add that on I can't participate in that march or that this or that that is a yes is a firm and clear yes to the thing that matters to us and nobody that loves you in the world wants anything from you except your most firm clear yes thank you so I do have a question for you from someone named Lou Lou's asking where do people go if they'd like more teaching from you and if they're looking for teachers close to home how could they find them I want to say I'm a slightly different milk I'm not 100% unique but I'm a slightly different milk having grown up both with a firm foot in activism and a firm foot in practice in mind meditation quite early so my activism came first and then my Dharma we call it my practice got mixed up in it very very early and so I grew up quite strongly with feet in both camps many of us grew up firmly in one camp or another so I just want to offer that so that you're not totally surprised and that said sometimes we just get the best that we can from people for what we need and so if you don't find someone close to home that's like that's not like a activist Dharma present centered awareness person that's okay you can work with them to learn the skill that you need in terms of like just reconnecting with yourself so I do a lot of different things and I offer things that are online you can get most of the information from me on my website on AngelKyotoWilliams.com and it's Kyodo with a D rather than a T Kyoto is the city in Japan and my name comes from Japanese but it's Kyodo so AngelKyotoWilliams maybe we can share that online and I think when you signed up they ask if you'd like more information about my work and I'm happy to share I do a fantastic thing called 27 Days of Change it's coming up very soon it is perfect for activists that want to do mindfulness for mindfulness people that want to get active so it's made for everybody that's here on this webinar. Thank you Angel I participated in 27 Days of Change a few years ago and I was laughing thinking about the idea of practice because I remember in the morning meditating and by breakfast being irritated or off my game and thank you wait a minute I was just meditating and that idea of the disconnect and really trying to bridge that in a gentle way had stuck with me from that lessons with you in 27 Days of Change I want to say one quick thing about that because here I want everybody to be really clear this is not about a destination it's about a practice and so I don't say we just center or get centered it's center ring in presence because it's active and it is over and over and over again the onslaught is amazing the incoming is amazing so if you meditated at 9 in the morning or 8 in the morning or 7 in the morning and you made it till 12 awesome! You made it till 12? I mean honestly I started and it's like we would have this practice you know you do your first breath your first out breath and it's called counting the breath and you count that breath and you'd say one and I swore to God my name was just going to be one because every time you got distracted you had to go back to one and so I would say one one and so really folks I say it's a practice not a perfect so get clear about that it's a practice not a perfect it is not about getting clear getting meditated, getting centered and that it stays in place if you can work with it through like 10 seconds awesome! and when you notice you're off just come back that's the most important thing it is not about entering into some kind of state it is about increasing that muscle that when you notice you choose to come back the choice is what is the freedom and that's what activists most especially need to really really be able to connect to and keep in their hearts because we don't need anything else to try to beat ourselves up or have something else that we're trying to follow from some place up above and on high we want to as Christy says few times to be gentle with ourselves about this. Thanks Angel so I just want to check in we have just a few more minutes and I wanted to make sure first of all if you have something you'd like to say before we close Angel if not we can answer one more question well you know the best way for me to be in touch with folks you know what I was saying with the person that asked about a place nearby is I've tried to develop more and more things for activists that want to practice and practitioners that want to become more active precisely because I'm aware that there are not a lot of people that are honing this work particularly to our field I'm an activist that needed to not kill myself in the process and so I have spent the last 20 years developing practices for folks like us so please do stay in touch with me I think that is the thing I'd say most and whatever it is that you do in the world be gentle with yourself you deserve it you deserve to be your full self you deserve to take care of yourself I know that self-care seems selfish it seems like you know the whole world is going in you know to hell in a hand with baskets and how dare I take care of myself but we absolutely need that from you because you make clearer better decisions you show up better you're more tolerable I like you better the people around you like you better we get our work done and if we cannot thrive on the path towards our liberation I don't know what we're working towards liberation for and I don't know that we will be able to survive what we have to survive and we're just walking that path. Wow that's quite a last sentence we can't thrive on the path of liberation what are we working toward thank you so much Reverend Angel we are going to have you again in June on another webinar which I am already ready for and so we'll share that information with all of you who are on this call after this call we'll send a recording with a link or obviously a link to this recording and information on how to stay in touch with Reverend Angel yeah and you know it would be great I cannot promise that I will be able to answer them all of them but I can certainly source the answers to some questions and so I'm going to ask Ann if she'll give me the questions so if you have questions you're like damn I didn't get that answer please do go ahead and submit the question anyway sometimes the people that work with me can answer the questions and a lot of them will be repetitive and so we can just you know turn those back over to people and send that back out to you I'm going to put Ann on the hook I want to tell everybody just thank you so much for taking the time if something in you feels uncertain it makes sense right but the fact that you're here means that you know deep down inside your conscious mind may be resisting and going like yeah I'm not sure and got cranky thoughts in your head but the part of you that showed up and chose to watch this webinar live or to come back and watch the recording is telling you that you're needing something and I want to just say A thank you for responding to it at this particular moment and B you have absolutely 100% permission from me and you need to give yourself that permission to go ahead and follow up and give yourself what you need it's not selfish it's usish is what I like to say it's for us it's on behalf of everything that you're about in the world and if you're here you're about caring for the world and you've got to love yourself in order to do that please disrupt the disconnect in yourself and take care and be good to yourself Thank you Reverend Angel and I wanted to acknowledge Patricia and Ann not the moderator Ann for the questions that I asked you earlier Thanks to everyone for participating