Blossom, your awesome podcast episode number 77 today on the show. Lauren Whitaker is here with us. Lauren is a healer, mentor and author. She is the founder of heart light wellness and she teaches people how to leave pain behind and move into joy. I am so honored and delighted to have Lauren here with us. Lauren, thank you so much. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. I'm really looking forward to our conversation today. Oh I am so excited to get into this with you. So let's start with a little bit of your background. I know you're an intuitive healer now you're an award winning novelist, you do all sorts of things at the heart light wise women's circle. I want to get into that with you but give us your background and how you got into this line of work. Well it's it's a long journey. I'm in my early 60s now and I've been uh an active healer for less than a decade, I've been a professional.

I brought my, I opened my practice in 2018. So before that it was friends and family. But I started way back when I was um a new mom with my second child and he was so sick and western medicine was not helping us a lot. It was maintaining sort of and I started looking for some alternative um modalities to help because they just wanted to put him on more and more dangerous medicines and he was to you know two years old. Um and I just sort of started looking and my dad actually connected us with a chinese doctor. We were living in Washington D. C. At the time so we had access to some really incredible um resources there. And this was a chinese doctor that was herbalist and acupuncturist was working as a consultant at the National Institutes of Health on their acupuncture study. So real really good qualified person who agreed to work with at that point a 2.5 year old and I was able to see so much change so fast in my son literally in two weeks his immune system turned on and you could see it in the color of his skin, his energy, he was eating better.

He was growing, you could see it in just a couple of weeks. Um And I've always been curious about healing work. I considered medical school a couple of times but I don't have the science chops for that. Um And so I did some research into you know what what the energy medicine is of acupuncture and started learning about that and then ended up having that doctor work on me too because I had terrible allergies at the time and he really helped both of us. So that was sort of where I first started going. There really is something to this energy work the first time I felt energy was on the table with that doctor where I could feel it running up my leg between two needles. Um And it kind of was a little disturbing but also really interesting I get curious very easily so that's kind of where it started but over the years um my my health receded. We moved away from D. C. And so we didn't have the help of that doctor any longer. Um And during menopause I my healing down my health went down a lot and I went back to another acupuncture but he wasn't he didn't live up to dr wu um And um I started finding healers through a friend of mine and um she lived up in the D.

C. Area we're now in Williamsburg Virginia and she said you know Lauren you need to see this woman that I've been going to. She's amazing and I bet she can help with your asthma because my asthma was getting really bad and so I said well I can't come to D. C. She said she can work with you on the phone. So I made an appointment and on the phone in an hour My asthma was gone and this has now got to be at least 10 years ago and it has never come back. But what she taught me was that it wasn't a physical problem, it was an emotional energetic problem. She literally told me my mother was sitting on my chest which made total sense to me. Had a very difficult relationship with my mother. Um And who was going through dementia at the time so even harder. Um So she cleared that energy, she helped me understand it, she she helped teach me how to let it go. Um And and literally in an hour my asthma was gone about 2.5 or three years later my allergies were terrible.

Asthma had not come back and I went to an allergist, I don't know why I didn't go back to the sealer and um to get tested for shots and I went into anaphylaxis during the testing and ended up in the ICU overnight and it freaked me out and I was like I can't I can't go back and do that. My friend was my best friend for many years said uh remember who helped you before? Why don't you go see her? And so I did, I went up and visited and I saw her in person and again in an hour with her, she taught me what the cause of my allergies was which was a universal belief that everything should be feared. And she helped clear that energy. She helped me understand how to clear it if if it comes back because it does from time to time. Um And I was like that's it, I gotta do this, this is so cool, it's so powerful and it's not something that most people have access to and I just I gotta learn how to do it and that's when I started finding people locally who could teach me how to do this stuff, wow, okay, so a series of questions now, so first of all you know, with your dad introducing you to um I believe it was dr wu is it?

Yeah, it was actually through my dad through another person, a friend of his who had just set up a consulting company to connect people like us with people like dr wu so I mean it was it was the universe was working in my favor. I love that. Now, tell me, so what were your parents or your dad, was he always kind of into this sort of stuff like eastern philosophies or medicine? No, no, no. Um My dad was actually an alcoholic, my mom was a narcissist, so I had those energies growing up with. Um But my dad was a curious person and he wanted to help us and I had said to him I'm looking for something alternative, I can't put my kid on this medicine because it had learning disabilities and growth stunting and all this horrible stuff for a two year old, 2.5 year old. Um And so he just he was very affable when he wasn't drunk and he was had been in a a for a number of years at that point and he met somebody at an aa meeting just chatting with them and found out she was starting this new consulting business she had just brought it online and and so he connected us and in about two weeks after I first said we need to find something alternative.

We had an appointment with dr wu so I mean the universe was like just like waiting for me to go okay enough wow that is amazing. So now tell me so you you know receive this healing and then you have your couple of different you know health things come up then you have your son and it's this kind of remarkable like healing that's taking place in front of you. So what then what trajectory was that for you to become an intuitive healer then? Where did you first what was your first modality or how did that really write that down for us? Well I have a very dear friend, the one who put me in touch with the healer. We've been friends for. Gosh over 20 years. Um And she is I call her my instigator. And she was researching a book, she also was an author that's how we met, she was researching a book with a psychic heroin. And so she had connected with a group in up in the D. C. Area that was a collection of those kinds of people.

People had those gifts. And she started saying to me Lauren I bet you could do this. And so so and so in the group did this why don't you try that and I would try it and I could do it and it's just I am so intuitive and open to these things coming through me. Um and so over, she was really my first teacher because she would say here's something that I've seen somebody else do. I bet you could do that too. And I don't think she ever found anything that I couldn't do. There's things I do better than others, but there were things that I can do, I can channel. I have worked with as sort of as a medium. I don't call myself a medium, but I have worked with family who've passed over, I have um I've done healing work and lots of different modalities and of course now I've gone through a lot of classes and gotten trained um and so that that helped give me the language, I needed to talk to my clients about what I'm doing, what I'm finding, how I'm how I'm working with them. Um So, but most of it was stuff I kind of already knew. I just had to be reminded of it, wow.

And do you? And I believe we're all intuitive, it's a muscle that you can develop, right? But is that something you would always kind of sensed about yourself? Like this kind of innate intuitiveness. I don't think I ever identified it that way. I grew up in a family that was very um education oriented. I mean I I went to an ivy league university. So I I fell into that very easily, but that doesn't really in uh inspire you, looking into yourself as an intuitive person. Also growing up as a female in my generation, logic was the way you were supposed to work. That's the way the world is supposed to work. And intuition is often seen, it's not solely a female thing, but it's seen as a feminine attributes and so there wasn't a lot of support for that. Um But looking backwards, I can see where everything I've accomplished in my life that I really put my mind to.

It was done intuitively. Um And it's it's served me really well and I look back and I go, oh my gosh, I've had so many instances like that one with dr wu where I just decided something and then everything lined up just perfectly for me. And I started with schools that I there were schools I wanted to go to and I was like, well we were full for girls or you know, you don't have the S. A. T. S quite high enough for that. No, I was determined. I just put it out there. I knew I was going to make it happen. I didn't know how, but so I think all along, I've very much been guided intuitively. Um But I didn't recognize it as intuition in myself until my forties and fifties. Um I love this because so many people struggle with this, right? Where there's the signs and symbols and we're not tapping into those. Give us some more insight here. Talk to us about this like you know when something comes up for us. I mean how do we lean into that or if there's some kind of nudging, how do we learn to trust and go with that feeling?

Well yeah the trust is a big one, the trust is a big one because even now I sometimes question did I get that right? You know and I look up, I know I know that they can't, your listeners can't see me but I look up because I I'm in communication with my guides all the time now but it took a long time to learn how to do that consciously. Um And it really had to have some tools so I learned how to use a pendulum pretty early in my in my coming online as a healer. Um so that I could ask questions of my guides and get a visual answer and that helped me to trust what my instinct was. Um And I used it enough so I trusted the tool as well. Um So that's good. My friend would validate for me, I would say okay I'm gonna try to do this and she would go well you just did that you know she could she could validate for me that I was so I learned to trust that way. Um Some people just naturally trust their instincts and that's fabulous. Um But so the trust is the is really the linchpin I think of trusting your instinct, trusting your intuition.

We're getting signs and messages constantly. Um, and we don't, we just don't notice them or we don't know that they're important. But I tell um I've taught some classes on how to communicate with your guides. And one of the things that I teach is that if you notice something it's important and you can drive by the same sign on the same street every day on your way to work and really, you know, you kind of don't notice those things after a while and one day it will jump out at you and it's because there's something going on in your head and your guides are trying to give you a clue and there's something about that sign that's connected to what you were thinking of. So I always ask people when you see something, you really notice it stop and, and, and you know, ask what was going on in your head at the time because you were probably mulling something over and there's an answer for you or at least a direction right in front of you. Um, I did, I, one of my test things was um, I asked my guides before, I was really in constant conversation with them and I, I knew that when I was with certain people, I could, I could feel very high vibration, but then I would just go back to my sort of base level, Not terribly happy.

I was very menopausal at the time. Um, but I asked my guides to show me feathers because feathers to me are very magical. You know, they're lighter than air and they, and you can fly with them, those kinds of things. So I asked for feathers. I said, just show me feathers to remind me there's magic in the world and I have vases of feathers now in my house because in a year's time I was getting feathers almost every day. Some of them literal feathers. Some of them would be a feather on a sign or was sitting on a train once. And the woman, young woman about two rows up in front of me on the isle had a sleeveless shirt on and she had this beautiful feather butt tattoo on the back of her arm, you know, but it would make me smile and it would make me go, okay thank you. You know, I just got a lot of gratitude around that. So things that you can do like that, that, that will validate to you, that there are actually spirits working with you. They're listening to you. They want to help you. They want to be in conversation. Um, and for me that was a life changing year.

Getting all these feathers. I still get them. Occasionally I finally went okay feathers, but now I get them, usually their little ones, which are actually even more fun because they're harder to find. But I'll be out walking my dog and I'll just see a little blue bird feather, a little little cardinal feather or something. And I just I go, thank you. Sometimes I pick them up. Sometimes I just go, thank you. Um But yeah, so when you start to talk with your guides regular and you start to trust that process, you become more trustful of your own intuition because you have a way of saying, did I get that right? You know, this is what I'm feeling, is that is, am I feeling the right thing for me? Um And that comes to the body to, it comes to the body because for me, um I remember early on with my husband before we were married, but we were looking for a new apartment together and we were we were in this beautiful apartment. It just everything we needed was a little bit more expensive than we wanted, but it had a pool, we were in new Orleans, that pool was important, but I just had this like knot in my stomach.

It's just like, I don't know what it is, but I just know we can't take this apartment. Now, I know that there was some reason that was not the right place for us. That was my guides through my body saying, you know, my intuition was there, my guides were there helping me to understand. No, this is not. Um I didn't know that at the time. I just knew that I had this incredible knot in my stomach that I couldn't we couldn't do that. So the body is also a communicator to you. Um and that's another place where you can learn to trust it. And for me, look again, this is looking back, I see that knot in my stomach and I go, oh yeah, that was not, I don't know why, but that was not a good place for us. Um you know, maybe there was a bad neighbor, I don't know, I don't know what it was. We found a beautiful house a block and a half away. So yeah, so that's it's building that trust in yourself and and that there there is guidance, that's the big thing, I love that. And now and you know, I think it's so cool, like you say, you went to an ivy league school and now to me this there's this other universe that's so much bigger than what we can see and feel and touch.

But so many people are caught up in this kind of, you know, school and trade school, it's so technical and you know, you it's scientific and practical and logical and if you don't, it can't sense it or you know, feel it. It's yeah, so now what exactly as a healer, is there a particular modality? I mean you're just tapping into your intuition and kind of helping people sense energy and clear blockages and things. Talk to us about that. I've gotten, I've taken to calling myself kind of a jazz music musician of intuitive healing because if you're a musician you have to learn the basics and then you learn how to improvise. And jazz musicians are great at improvising and so I have been trained, I'm a Reiki master, I'm studying esoteric healing, it's a very complex system. So I'm about, I don't know, I don't think I'm even halfway through that yet. Um I am a shamanic journey er so I can do shamanic journeys for people, I do past life work.

Um I work with the chakras, that's always where I start with somebody. Um and If you can see me when I'm talking about, I'm usually holding my hands up because I feel in the palms of my hands, that's where I feel energy when I'm working with somebody, I can literally float my hands over you about usually 3-5" and I can feel the energy fluctuations in your body and I can feel where it feels kind of stuck or where it's feeling really good and and fluid and flowing and um and that guides me to where the work needs to happen in that moment. Then I began to get information. So one of my, my really strong gifts is a knowing, a gifted knowing and so I will tap into that energy by just connecting with it. My hand, the energy in my hand to, to that energy of the person and I begin to get information. I'll get pictures. I often get lyrics to songs that I have, I have no business being in my head right now. Um I will get feelings in my own body. Um sometimes I'll get like I'll get a pain in my elbow, it's like, oh, I need to go look at that elbow and see what's going on there.

And yeah, often there is a past life or a previous previous in this life, memory, trauma, that kind of thing that's stuck in the body somewhere. So it's kind of like I pick up the clues and I find where that is, and then rarely in somebody that I'm working with for the first time, do we get past the chakra system just because I like to make sure the big, excuse me, the big picture is in place or at least understand where the weaknesses are, where the strengths are. Um so usually by about the second, usually the third time I'm working with somebody, we start to get this, this either past life where this life trauma showing up in the body. Pain in the body is always based on emotions and women are particularly good at shoving it into our hips. So I find a lot of stuff in women's hips. Um men, I find more in the shoulders, like you're like, you're shouldering the load, but it can be anywhere. It can be anywhere, but so one of the things that I find brings people to me is pain and it's a very motivating thing.

Um, for me asthma, you know, that was a very motivating thing, um, gets you to the healer in the first place and then you begin to explore what's really the root cause of this and our Western medicine is very important. I mean, if you are, you know, have appendix, it's about to burst. You need Western medicine. You know, if you have covid you need Western medicine, but if you have chronic pain, Western medicine just treats the symptoms, doesn't treat the cause. And often, and I find this particularly true for women and probably even more for women of color, pain is sort of pushed off it, it's all in your head. And the truth is, it may all be in your head because it may be an emotion based pain. It probably is. But saying it's all in your head that's dismissing that as a cause, you know, And so our pain often gets dismissed and medicated, That's not gonna help you, it's not gonna change things. It might mask the pain for a while, but they always have to up the drugs right?

Because your body is saying I'm hurting at an energetic level. And if you don't address that, you know, you may never get rid of that pain. Um, some people I think do sort of on their own or with a, with a traditional therapist, some sometimes you can work through that stuff, but um I think that working with the energy, it happens faster. I don't have any data on that, it's just my personal experience um is that you can shift things a lot faster when you start working with the energy of what's causing it. Um and we're all energetic beings, I mean, our atoms are held together by electricity um and so it makes sense that the body, you have to address the energetic bodies and there's layers to that that we can work with. Um it's not just the physical body, so it's um I mean, I I've worked with people who had surgeries and they weren't having a hard time healing, it was still hurting after the scar was formed, in that nobody had reconnected the energetic pathways through there.

Reconnect the energetic pathways, things heal faster. They heal with less pain. It's, you know, so there's, there's some really interesting things that can work in beautiful confluence with Western medicine, if we can get Western medicine to open the door a little wider And now, do you believe everything energetically can be healed in some way, right? If there's some kind of trauma from 30 years ago that you've just kind of pushed down, there. not dealing with it, I find many times people believe because they don't think about stuff or it happened so long ago and now they're in a relationship or whatever it is, you're okay, but it's kind of idling inside. Right, right, It's festering, you know, it's like it's deep and it's festering and your body will start to maybe take a little bit somewhere or you'll get, you know, that bronchitis that just won't go away or it keeps coming back. Those things are all signs that there is something wrong, not wrong, not flowing with your energetic bodies.

So i it's it's not that it's wrong, it's that it's blocked or sometimes I'll feel it and it feels like it's going over rapids, you know, really healthy energy moves fluidly and beautifully and um I frequently feel it like warm water moving if it's, you know, once we get everything kind of moving fine, um I personally believe that any of that can be healed, here's the thing, the person is responsible for the healing. I'm a facilitator, I can work with the energy, I can find the, the things that are stuck, I can help to bring it up, I call it, bringing it up into the light so we can look at it, we can understand it from a different perspective because all that's in the past most, I don't think I've ever found something that was brand new, you know that somebody was having a problem with it happened in the past. Either our childhood traumas, past life traumas, we've brought a lot of past life stuff in this time to heal the ancestral energy. That's something that's really shown up strong. Um but the person has to be willing to face it and that's where working with somebody like me is really helpful because you don't have to re experience all the pain and the trauma.

We need to, we need to bring the story up that belief up that's wrapped around that event and look at it with fresh eyes and I help by giving the perspective validating that it was a trauma problem, whatever it was. But giving, you know, from this perspective and an example would be, you know, at three years old, There can be some trauma that because somebody says something to us and we don't understand how to process it and it gets stuck as a trauma in the body and at 40 is still in there and now it's causing us, trouble we don't even remember, it. but it comes up in the energy work and then you can look back and go, yeah, yeah, to a three year old, I get, I guess that was traumatic, but from the eyes of an adult, no, that was a mom who was in a hurry, you know, those are super simple to, to let go of, but you gotta you gotta see him, you got to, you know, bring that story of whatever that was that you've been holding onto in your body up and talk about it and this is where talk does come in.

I don't like to talk about things that um over and over again that we're traumas, but but exploring it together in a safe place, was supported place and then letting it go. Having that moment of going, yeah, I don't, I don't feel like I need to hold on to that anymore. It's not serving me. And that's another thing, a lot of things that we've held onto were serving us at the time. I grew up in a house as a super introvert with two Bombastic Extroverts, a narcissist and an alcoholic. Crazy, crazy. The household, I learned to get real quiet, I learned not to ask questions, I learned just to be silent and to be out of sight out of mind as much as possible. Um that served me very well as a child, it has not served me very well as an adult. So part of my healing work has been to let go of those things, those those traumas of my childhood in this lifetime that were protective at the time, but don't serve me anymore.

Those are easy to let go of. Usually by the time they show up as you're ready. And that's that's another thing I can go with another thing is that um usually if somebody comes to me and then something like a past drama shows up and I say show up. I mean I'm I'm showing it in some way we find it in the body, it's ready. You're ready to let it go because they don't they don't bubble to the top until you are in a position where perhaps with a little help you are ready to release that old trauma, that old fear, that old belief system, um whatever it is, that's, that's not, it's not serving you anymore. So it's really a beautiful, it's a beautiful healing modality because there's no force to it at all. Um It's discovery, it's discovering really what you're carrying around inside of you and what can be released what can be shifted because sometimes, okay, that didn't work. That's not working so well now. But maybe there's a new form of that particular protective thing that you still need.

Well let's okay, let's change that we can adjust that. Um there's connections to relationships that you can maintain, but shift how you allow that energy to interact with each other. So it's magical. I love it. It's my favorite thing to do is to do this kind of work. It's so magical. I mean I'm an energy worker as well. I don't do it for, you know, a living. I do it for friends and family, but it's really been so transformative for me and um you know, speaking to what you just said, it's so interesting because I find through people I know and I know a lot of people and then extended, you know, like friends of friends and just the circle, there are so many wounded like 50 and 60 and 70 and you know, in their thirties and forties, but it's I find it more troubling as, you know, people get older like wounded Children running around like with that inner child.

And it's, I mean, can that, you know, two questions here. So one, what is the first step? Because that's scary when you've, you know, put built these layers upon layers and have learned you grow up, but you're still that wounded little kid inside, right? And it's safe now because maybe you're not experiencing that trauma, but that trauma still harming you. Yeah, trapped in your body and it affects your hormone system and affects that fight or flight instinct. It colors how you see the whole world. Yeah, yeah, so, and yeah, and I I think our country at least I think the world right now is running amok with older people who are carrying these wounds around and they're not, they're not dealing with it. And so it's coming out in these violent and explosive and hateful and I don't know, ways that are just not, nobody feels good, not the person who's pushing that stuff out and the people receiving it, nobody feels good in that energy.

So yeah, it's we have a lot of work to do. There's a lot of healers coming on, I call it online in the last decade or so because there's a lot of work to do, right and now, so what is the first step for people who are not necessarily super open to this sort of stuff or tapped in in this way? Right. So what is that first step to start kind of acknowledging and getting ready to do the work, the healing work be open to it release? Is there, are there some first, like some really practical tips for saying, Hey, okay, there's something inside of me and I don't know really, it doesn't feel good. I don't know where to start. I think, I think that's where the pain comes in the physical pain that a lot of people are, that's caused by not dealing with things at an energetic level. It can manifest very much as a physical thing and the doctors can maybe do some of that, but if you don't get the energetic in order, so to speak.

Um, it's not going to be gone. Um, that physical manifestation of stuff that isn't being adequately adequately dealt with by Western medicine is what brings people to me. Most of my clients are women in their 50s, 60s, 70s, um, 40 some as well. Um, and they have had pain, they've been carrying around for years and they're tired of it and they don't want to be on all the medications that they, so that's where they start to look for alternatives. It's like me with my son, you know, just, I hit a breaking point. I'm not going to let the doctors put him on more medications without exploring something different. And, and I think we each come to a point like that where it's like, I don't know what to do next. Nothing has helped, what else is there out there? And once you ask that question, literally, once you ask that, what else is out there for me, things will start to come to you. But you gotta, it's, it's like um to use story form because I love story and novels, obviously, um you gotta get to that and it's an a a thing to you got to get to the dark night of the soul, you got to get to the bottom of the, well, I think before you start opening your mind to maybe there's something else, there's got to be something else, where can I find something else?

And that's when people really start to look outside the box for help. And so asking that where, you know, what else is out there for me brings in all kinds of amazing things. I love that affirmation because um, you know, there are those moments when people just are okay. It seems like you're really, it's so just interesting how we really are, kind of, your hitting rock bottom, right? As you're about to give up, right? It's like that, it is that at the bottom of the, well, when you decide, okay, but I think that affirmation letting people know no matter how bad it gets or how deep you go to keep looking for answers because there's something there. Yeah, just ask what else is out there for me and then pay attention because a book will show up or somebody will miss that. They went to a healer who was amazing and you should try this one crazy person because she's great. You know, I can't tell you how many cool things I have learned by the ads that I get from amazon in my email every day with books and a book will show up.

That's exactly what I needed in that moment. So, I mean, there's all kinds of different ways you can get messages, but yeah, so ask and then just kind of watch for those serendipitous moments of those, those coincidences. Um and you'll be surprised it'll change your life. I love that. And now tell me, you know, some of the work you do with the energy is having people kind of rewrite their story right, telling new story. Are there some practical tips for people who are wanting to kind of start with a mind shift, Tell tell a new story. Is there something just practical they can start doing right now? Well, I'm I am a big fan of journaling long before I was a professional writer, um a published writer I journal from high school on and I do it less often now, but I think that's because I kind of have this constant conversation with my guides going on. But the thing I love about journaling is that you can ask yourself questions and you can just let the answers roll out and if you don't get in the way of that, if you can just let whatever wants to come out on the page, come out on the page, you go back and read it and you will often be amazed at what you know, for yourself already.

So that's a good place I think to start for anybody who's beginning to kind of say, you know, why am I here? Um there's gotta be something different, something new maybe, and it's not even pain, it's just life is blah. And I need something passionate once you find those things that you're passionate about, then you can start journaling about. Okay, so what if favorite writer question, what if that's where all stories start? What if I could be an artist and it didn't, I didn't, you know the best. And this is actually right out of a book called the writers, the writers Way by Julia Cameron, which before I was published, like a bible to me. But one of the exercises she has, you do is to write about what you want to do or what you're passionate about without any limitations on it. Don't put the limitations of, I can't afford it. I don't have the time, I don't have the education, you know, I don't, I don't know the first thing about how to draw none of that. Um just write about it, I did that exercise and I wrote in about 30 minutes maybe.

I had the outline for my first book that got published, which was totally different from the previous book I had tried to write. Um so it's a very freeing thing and I think that is probably the best exercise, the best tool you can use to really explore. What is it doing that I really want to do? What is it that I'm passionate about? What gifts do I have that I don't recognize because they're just part of me. Um and it's it's changed my life. I became that little exercise made me a published author. So um and I use it now with when I'm brainstorming for my business things, I use that same thing. What if I didn't have to know everything about this topic? Yeah. And people show up for me books show up for me, brainstorms happen. Yeah. So I love the journal because you can keep it go back and read it, you know? Um and so that would be why I would say put it in a journal. But that exercise now that I walked my way down to that that one exercise, what would I do if there were no limitations on it if there was no, but but but to it.

Um and it's it's amazing what you can learn about yourself, wow, I love that Lauren that is such a great practical advice now. So in closing, first of all I want to say you have been so amazing and so insightful and I think people are gonna have so many amazing takeaways. Thank you this, you're a good interviewer, thank you so much. I'm just, I'm inquisitive, you know, I've always, I'm a former network journalist, I love people, everyone has a story and I love kind of getting heart of um you know you and the work you're doing so now in closing let me ask you if there were one message, just some words of wisdom, your hope for us all, what's that message that you'd like to leave us with? I think hope is the, is the key word there, there's so much good going on in the world but we're not being shown it and I just literally got this message last night from Lee Harris and his monthly, If you're not familiar with Lee Harris, I highly recommend go to Youtube and find out he's awesome but he does a monthly energy update and he was talking about how hope is alive and well in the world, but we're not being shown it so we need to seek it out and I guess this is what I want to pass along.

I was I was overwhelmed by that, that thought because I see it all the time, I see so much good around me, so much kindness around me, so much opportunity for kindness. Um and we need to take advantage of that Everything we do ripples out to the universe and ripples out everybody around you and everything around you, not just people, animals, plants the earth herself. So keep hope alive if I can borrow from another place. But just know that there's so much good going out there in spite of all the awful things that we see on the news, on tv all the time and read the papers and that kind of thing. If anybody actually reads papers anymore. Um there's so much good and it's rising. It's rising strong. And the image that I like to hold on to for that is the women's march in Washington from 20 Gosh, 2016, that long ago. Um that was a gathering of women who were so joyful about being together.

Being seen, being heard, there was no violence, there was no anger. It was a joyful declaration. We're here. We're strong and we're not going away and that's alive in the world. And I think women are the ones holding a lot of that right now, but we're bringing it out. We're bringing it into the world. And so do your part. Oh my God, I love it. That was such a powerful message. You have been amazing. Warren, Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. This has been a choice