The Path of Resilience and Growth: Cindy Biggs Discusses Life's Unexpected Turns and Spiritual Healing

Have you ever wondered how life and spiritual journeys intertwine, leading us down unexpected paths? Join me as I chat with my mom, Cindy Biggs, a retired senior foreign service officer and international journalist, about her incredible adventures and the wisdom she's gained along the way. From learning Spanish and living in rural Venezuela, Mexico, and Brazil, to witnessing the rise of Hugo Chavez, we dive into the power of the human spirit and the importance of being open to new experiences.

In this insightful conversation, Cindy shares her experiences with trauma and therapy, and how she discovered the healing potential of family constellations. We also explore the power of plant-based medicine, the complexities of religion, and the potential of ayahuasca for spiritual healing. As we discuss the current Ukrainian crisis, we emphasize the importance of understanding the power of narratives, trauma, and the human capacity for both good and evil.

Don't miss out on this powerful and insightful conversation with my mom, Cindy Biggs. We touch upon the challenges of navigating life decisions, tragedy, and the invaluable lessons she's learned along her journey. This episode will inspire you to reflect on your own path, the connections you've made, and how your experiences shape who you are today. Join us on this thought-provoking and heartwarming exploration of life, love, and the pursuit of wisdom.

Chapters

• 0:01 A Journey of Connection and Adventure
• 16:28 Journalist's Experience in Venezuela's Telecommunications Sector
• 25:56 Corruption and Trauma in Venezuela's Politics
• 43:48 Life Decisions and Tragedy
• 51:29 Trauma, Therapy, and Family Constellations
• 1:01:51 Loyalty and Constellation Therapy
• 1:14:40 Navigating Trauma and Shifting Consciousness
• 1:26:02 Healing Trauma and Exploring Plant-Based Medicine
• 1:32:45 Ayahuasca and Spiritual Healing
• 1:40:23 Exploring Spirituality, Religion, and Responsibility
• 1:49:49 Responding to the Ukrainian Crisis
• 1:59:58 The Power of Narratives and Trauma

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Today on the podcast we have a very special guest. She's a retired senior foreign service officer and international journalist, my mom Cindy Biggs. Wow Geez, that was powerful, so powerful, yeah. So what came up on that one?

Speaker 2: 0:30

Oh, man, just so much love and gratitude that I'm not alone. You know on this journey, that I have all these people that were before me, that are rooting for me, that love me, that want the best for me, and that I can tap into that resource all the time. And I don't do it enough. I, you know I try to. I have tried to white-knuckle it in the past and just thought that I had to be superwoman just out here, conquering the world all by myself, and man to know that that resource is there, it's always been there. It's just such an incredible gift. So, thank you.

Speaker 1: 1:24

You're welcome. For those people I don't know, we usually start the podcast with a meditation that connects with the ancestors. You can connect first with your parents and then with many generations behind, so I think that's an emotional movement. Yeah, oh geez. So what comes up when you do that? I mean, is it just, is it like? is it connection? Is it some pain? Is it just pure connection?

Speaker 2: 2:07

Pure connection And I also saw because my mother was a deeply religious, deeply spiritual person. she really set the example for me about the need to continue the spiritual quest And I vividly remember her waking up every single when I would get up. She would get up or she would already have been up for a couple of hours And she just poured her soul into the Bible. She was on a spiritual quest my entire life And it really taught me such an important lesson that we just continue to seek And so, as she was coming up then I also saw the series of really important spiritual mentors and therapists in my life that have just kept me on track and kept me going and a couple of occasions literally helped me save my life.

Speaker 1: 3:12

Oh yeah, what? so? obviously for people listening to the podcast, or my mom, just to create that context from the beginning, and you were the person that was first introduced to family constellations Can you tell me a little bit about how that happened?

Speaker 2: 3:35

So, yes, indeed, i am the mother of John.

Speaker 1: 3:40

Not a little bit, a lot of bit.

Speaker 2: 3:43

And his sister Alicia. And so all I ever really wanted to do when I was growing up, in addition to becoming I wanted to be a spy, i wanted to become famous, i wanted to be an actress, and then I wanted to become a spy. But I really, really wanted to become a mom And I had kind of a path laid out for my life, the way that I thought my life was supposed to go. My parents met in college. They got married between their junior and senior years because my father was a very, very insistent person. He liked to get things done, and so, and I just kind of thought that's what would happen for me. I would meet my husband at college, probably Become a famous actress.

Speaker 1: 4:34

Become a famous actress. Become a spy.

Speaker 2: 4:35

Become a spy on the side, just moonlighting as a spy, my cover would be the Hollywood kick. And I mean keep in mind, this was the 70s. I graduated from college in 1979.

Speaker 1: 4:49

So was it like a funky spy, kind of Like Bell Bottoms and like International Woman of Mystery type of situation? That was the kind of spy that it was. That was the kind of spy.

Speaker 2: 5:03

So I went up to college and I fell in love with a wonderful man from Detroit, michigan, and we were on the track to be married. And, lo and behold, i had this class called Non-Western World. This was in Michigan and everybody was required to take this class And it was the springtime And so I was a little bit more laid back And a man walked into the room who I thought was British because he always carried an umbrella, and I can't even explain this instant zap that I felt. And so, fast forward, to make a long story short, i ended my relationship with the other man and your father and I began dating And I always said I really like this guy, but I am never leaving the United States. I was a television broadcast major and I was going to move to Chicago. One of my closest friends was moving to Chicago and my life was all set up and part of my plan no part of my plan included leaving my country.

Speaker 1: 6:26

Wow, it didn't. Oh, my gosh.

Speaker 2: 6:31

It also never included me learning to speak Spanish.

Speaker 1: 6:36

My mother, four languages.

Speaker 2: 6:38

My mother was a Spanish major. In college. She and my father had a Spanish class together, and Guillermo, and she wanted all three of her daughters not only to go to the same college that we went to, or that they want to, but she also wanted all of us to learn Spanish, and I was so much smarter than my mother. I would put my hands on my hips and look at her and say, really, mother, I'm never going to use Spanish.

Speaker 1: 7:09

Oh, wow.

Speaker 2: 7:11

Boy, it could have helped me a lot.

Speaker 1: 7:12

Yeah, really That first year.

Speaker 2: 7:19

So we had a fascinating, wonderful life, two wonderful, incredible human beings along the way. We lived, started out in rural Venezuela, moved to Mexico, moved to Brazil We are pursuing my husband's career with a multinational company And we finally got back to or we finally got to headquarters, which happened to be a little town or city that was close to my little hometown in Michigan, and we kind of looked around and said, okay, we've got 2.2 kids, we've got, you know, a Dalmatian, you know the one every Sunday, right, you play on the Sapa League. This is really not what we signed up for and things went sideways for him, unfortunately, with the company he was working for, and so we moved back to Venezuela where we lived for nine years. I went back to working for ABC News I'd worked for them in college And what was that like?

Speaker 2: 8:30

Working for them in college.

Speaker 1: 8:32

No, working for them and working for them in Venezuela.

Speaker 2: 8:35

It was amazing, it was fascinating. I still can't believe they hired me. They hired me. My colleagues at the television station encouraged me to interview with ABC of New York, and so we set up an interview in the Miami airport as we were moving back to Venezuela. Are you serious? Yeah, it was fascinating, are you serious? Yeah, and I had some audition tapes. So they hired me to.

Speaker 1: 9:04

I just imagine a guy with a recorder and you running down the airport and just interviewing like I got to go to Venezuela.

Speaker 2: 9:15

So they didn't have budget to hire a correspondent, of course. So the arrangement was that anything that ABC did there, whether it was for Primetime Live, good Morning America, abc Radio, nightly News, i would be able to help facilitate that Segment being filmed. Or I would do all sorts of things like help them set up a satellite feed for a president who was flying in from a neighboring country, because, again, technology was completely different back then.

Speaker 1: 9:50

So Were you like the forward team, almost Like the.

Speaker 2: 9:55

Yeah, oh yeah.

Speaker 1: 9:58

Like you, were the point of contact to make everything happen.

Speaker 2: 10:01

Yes, and that is called a handler until.

Speaker 1: 10:05

That sounds very professional.

Speaker 2: 10:08

Doesn't it all fear? in the industry you're like the low man on the top. You have to pick the producers up at the airport. You know like, yeah, set up all the pre-interviews and until President Hugo Chavez is attempted political coup. And I got a phone call.

Speaker 1: 10:28

In 1992?.

Speaker 2: 10:31

We can fact check that. I can't quite remember.

Speaker 1: 10:33

Let's pull it up. Let's have the producer pull it up.

Speaker 2: 10:37

Where's your 10-year-old son?

Speaker 1: 10:38

doing Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2: 10:41

So it was 10 minutes to 12 at night and my phone rang and I got a call from this guy who was the foreign news editor in New York and he said, hey, are you available, Can you cover the coup for us? And I'm like sure, And I'm like poking your dad. And they said, yeah, you're going to go national. So I am jumping up and down on the couch, you know.

Speaker 2: 11:09

I want to get dressed and jumping up and down the couch. I'm going national. I'm going national And I look over at my husband, my Venezuelan husband, and he's like shaking his head, you know, just like my country, my country. I'm like, oh, that's right, there's a coup underway Yikes. Yeah, what a conflicting thing.

Speaker 2: 11:31

Oh, that was yeah, but I had some incredibly interesting projects. One of the segments was for 2020, they devoted to the Miss Venezuela pageant, the phenomena that Venezuela had had more beauty queens than any other country in the world, which was absolutely fat. I mean it sounds very superficial, but the history behind it and the cultural identification that the Venezuelans had with this beauty. With beauty, i mean Venezuelan people are beautiful people And I'm not just saying that because you're half.

Speaker 2: 12:08

Venezuelan, so is your sister, but there was a huge influx of immigrants before and after the war, and so they mixed with the Venezuelan people, the indigenous people and the Africans who were brought to Venezuela, and it just made for these stunningly beautiful people. Your grandfather used to say that all Venezuelans are a mixture of coffee and milk. Some have more coffee, some have more milk, and the result is just a stunningly natural beauty that may or may not have been tweaked just a little bit by the organization behind And the aftermarket scene.

Speaker 1: 12:58

No, there's this theory of colonization that says that Latin America because Catholic priests went in that there was a lot more mixing of races generationally, so over generations and generations there wasn't this huge segmentation that happened in the US. So there was a lot, just like this population. That is what you can have in the same family of people that are different skin tones. So it's like really interesting to, and then you produced incredibly good looking people.

Speaker 2: 13:30

And I think back then, obviously, the political situation. Venezuela had the strongest democracy in 40 years. They had the highest per capita consumption of Johnny Walker Black and the highest number of private planes per capita. I mean, it was just a. There was definitely corruption, don't get me wrong, but they had elected a president who had served previously, carlos Andres Perez. He was known to be corrupt, but I think that the feeling was that he's so rich that what you know okay, maybe this time it'll be about power, not about wealth, and he'll focus on doing good things for the country, and he in fact did. The middle class of Venezuela was growing. I mean, this predates the Chavez attempted coup, but it was a fascinating process to watch unfold.

Speaker 1: 14:26

A lot of people don't understand this about Venezuela. It's like you know, you hear it in the news a lot now. They're like Venezuela, socialist and also Venezuela, so it's like it's more. It's deeper and more complex than that. Venezuela has always been center left Always.

Speaker 2: 14:41

Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 1: 14:42

Universities were free. There was private universities, but also very strong public universities that you cannot become a doctor and men as well by paying money, right? So doctors have this. I was talking about this and dad's podcast, like how Doris, my stepmom, has such a social like debt, because you know they have not a social debt but like a social responsibility in some capacity. That you know because in their education is completely free and she spent time in the Amazon tending to you know, local tribes and giving them medical care And you know you can't like the scholarship that dad got to study in the United States was government sponsored. You know the school system was completely free. There was a healthcare system that was completely free.

Speaker 1: 15:34

The largest oil company in the world at that time was a public company And so there was like everybody talks about. You know not to say that that socialism is good, but there is a version of strong social programs that work and worked for many years. So tell me a little bit about you know you were there during a very critical time and you saw, you were at the ground level of some and met some really important people in the Venezuelan government, um, and you saw transformations. Tell me a little bit about that, because it's not. It's always been socialist, right, it's been a little bit socialist, but something shifted.

Speaker 2: 16:14

Something shifted, um so. So My marriage got a little crowded. I'm a former diplomat after all. That's how I worded. Actually, my husband and his best friend suggested that I get a job at the US Embassy, because at that point I did become a contributing correspondent for ABC. During the coup, because other news organizations were calling me up and ABC wanted exclusivity, i said, well, because I just wanted the byline. I didn't care about money or benefits or anything. If you make me a contributing correspondent, then I will cover this exclusively, which I did, and some other fascinating stories. I knew the writing was on the wall that I was going to have to find a job that provided benefits and a stable salary, especially because there was concerns about currency exchanges being put in place and we had a mortgage in US dollars back in the States.

Speaker 1: 17:19

This is 1999?

Speaker 2: 17:21

Yes, Yeah, exactly. I applied for a job at the US Embassy as a contracted employee and I did that for four years. I covered the telecommunications sector and at that point Hugo Chavez had gone on to win with votes what he couldn't achieve with bullets. Oh that's a Thank you.

Speaker 1: 17:45

Wow, thanks, man, you are a journalist.

Speaker 2: 17:49

So we were working closely with Hugo Chavez administration. Let me backtrack a little bit. People wonder how in the world he got into power. And what happened was there was a US election software and hardware company that had been working with the Venezuelan government to sell them their equipment. It was an ethical company and, in our position with the embassy, we facilitated the interconnection between that US exporter and their partners on the ground, which in this case was the Venezuelan government. Because that's what we did. We didn't make decisions, we didn't do deals, we simply put partnerships together.

Speaker 2: 18:37

So that election, when President Chavez won, i believe the voter turnout was 35% of the population. Even though voting in 35% And it's mandatory by law It's not all countries require that you vote. It's not mandatory, but in Venezuela it is If you don't get a little sticker on your national ID card and so you can't avail yourself of a number of services if you didn't vote. But it had been a 40-year strong democracy And even though Hugo Chavez never made any, there were no illusions that he was anything other than who he said he was, which he was proclaiming to be a socialist. Then some of the things he said were resonating with people because they were so tired of corruption and they were so tired of just a very small percentage of the population controlling all the wealth. When the country has everything. I mean absolutely everything. You throw seeds down in the soil in Venezuela and outsprouts any kind of crop. It's got oil resources, it's got natural gas, it's got hydroelectric power. It's got everything you could possibly imagine.

Speaker 2: 19:55

In the countries besides Texas In the country And it's physically the most beautiful country I've ever The Amazon jungle, the flatlands, the Andes, mountains I mean the islands It's just stunningly beautiful. So the company sold the hardware and the software to the Venezuelan government, so that part was clean. 35% of the population turned out to vote And he came into power and almost immediately the change started. We were trying everything that we could to support this democratically elected president, because he was, and the area that I intersected with them on was in telecommunications, so they wanted to because, again, internet was a new thing.

Speaker 1: 20:52

What an interesting place to be at what an interesting time. Because it's like the like really proliferation of the internet and this political movement that divides, So they kind of leverage this technology to expand their voice.

Speaker 2: 21:12

So there are some programs that the US government offers to developing countries which is what Venezuela was considered, obviously And one of them was that, if they were, they were building out a sector. We would organize what's called an orientation visit to go to the United States so that the government officials could meet with their counterparts. The Venezuelan government officials could meet with the US counterparts to figure out how you structure, for example, a telecommunications system, Because we were really start, they were starting from ground zero.

Speaker 1: 21:48

Like infrastructure, like yeah Yeah.

Speaker 2: 21:51

And I don't know if you remember, but we lived, so we lived in, i mentioned, we lived in rural Venezuela, which we lived in a city called Maracay, which is an hour and a half west of Caracas, and we were there for four years and we didn't have a landline And there were no cell phones back then And the waiting list to get a landline was 13 years 13 years, 13 years, oh my God.

Speaker 2: 22:14

So if I wanted to call my parents back in Michigan, we would drive to Caracas and I would go in your grandfather's office and I would start dialing until I got an operator And everybody knew I would be in there all day. And so I would just dial and dial, and dial until I got an operator, and then the operator would patch me through and then I would be able to talk to my parents. So the telecommunications industry was just in shambles.

Speaker 1: 22:42

I didn't know that All day, all day. All day long That must have been like torture.

Speaker 2: 22:48

And then sometimes they wouldn't be home. Oh God, then things got a little bit better.

Speaker 1: 22:53

That's like living on the moon. Yeah, it's like living on the moon, like you're like. Hey, i'm going to send a message.

Speaker 2: 23:00

Things got a little bit better. There was a public phone on our street, so you would just load up with tons of coins and then go stand in this horrendously long line to be able to call. That would sometimes work. Yeah, that, coupled with the fact that, again, keep in mind there was no internet. But we didn't. We had no one. This was 1984. Yeah, i mean. We moved to Venezuela in December of 1980. So from 80, for the next four years we were living in Madagascar. There was no mail service. There was absolutely no mail service. It just didn't work. You couldn't get a letter, you couldn't send one out, you couldn't get one back in. When my grandfather died, my neighbor across the hall had a phone And somehow I had given that number to my parents and they called my neighbor and my neighbor came over and knocked on the door and told me that my grandfather had died. Oh, wow. Anyway, all this backstory to say that the telecommunications network was a disaster. So Hugo Chavez put in it was the equivalent of the federal trade communications He started putting.

Speaker 1: 24:16

Which is.

Speaker 2: 24:17

Conatell right, conatell, exactly. He started putting some of his very, very trusted leaders into that instant, into that organization, because for Chavez, the most important thing was loyalty. It was absolutely loyalty. So two of his most trusted advisors were put in charge of Conatell, and Chavez had heard about the importance or maybe Conatell had, and I'm not going to name any names. They had heard about the importance of interconnectivity, and so the grand scheme was to put an internet kiosk on every corner so that people would have access to information. This was before they realized that information is power, and it was really interesting, once that happened, how they tried to dial that back really quickly.

Speaker 1: 25:14

So they were. The first thing was So it seemed like they went in with the right intentions.

Speaker 2: 25:20

Absolutely they did. They were like. That's my belief.

Speaker 1: 25:23

Yeah, it could be. Whether it's true or not, i mean, it could be, it could be taken either way, but they did have the initial inclination or spark to say we're going to connect every Venezuelan in some way with this new technology that's emerging so they can have power, like knowledge at least. Not necessarily power, but at least have knowledge. How did that transition? What did that look like when they were scaling it back?

Speaker 2: 25:51

So let me talk first about how they were scaling it up. So we would set up this orientation visit and we even got permission to put a telecommunications expert into Conitel and she worked there for one year and she had total access to everything.

Speaker 1: 26:10

An American.

Speaker 2: 26:11

An American telecommunications expert who was helping build out. And yeah, we did a lot to help them build out their telecommunications. It really is. I wish I could tell you the whole story.

Speaker 2: 26:24

Well, yeah, i know, i know, i know there's much of the story that cannot be told, but yes, So I really believe, and not just because I'm an optimist, because I very much my father's daughter, who was the most optimistic person I've ever met in my entire life.

Speaker 2: 26:40

I really believe, and many people really believed, that the intention was good at the onset And I'll give you a very vivid example.

Speaker 2: 26:50

On the first orientation visit, which was the first time these telecommunications officials had been to the United States, we set up I can't remember It was a week or 10 days but not only were there meetings with their counterparts, but they were invited into the home of an American where we sat at this table and talked about the importance of giving people the tools that they need to become empowered and how that helps grow a nation. They'd never been in the home of an American in the United States, obviously, and much less having this absolutely fascinating conversation about what their position was going to allow them to do to grow their country, to continue on this path of having a strong democracy. So we did a couple of these, and I can't remember if it was two or three, but I distinctly remember looking over at this person that I was accompanying and the Louis Vuitton extremely expensive leather suitcases suddenly showed up and watches and because power corrupts and money corrupts, and it was.

Speaker 1: 28:05

Do you think it's the power and the money or do you think it's the layers of trauma and unresolved stuff that opens the gates to being corruptible? Yes, or the us versus them, victim perpetrator dynamics.

Speaker 2: 28:22

Yes.

Speaker 1: 28:23

Yeah, right, because if you were presented with the option and had all the best intentions in the world and you saw what it could be and you chose to do it differently, to go down the path of retraumatization, right, because it's not like they didn't know what it could be like, what a solid infrastructure looks like, because they had been to the United States, you know what the future could look like. It's not like they didn't know, but because of the rhetoric and the victimization and the stuff, we're able to justify another path.

Speaker 2: 29:04

Yeah, Well, and just going back for a moment about the milk and cream analogy that your grandfather used in Venezuela, because of this mixture of races, you didn't ever really distinguish who was what race because it was just all a blend, and I remember being so struck by the fact that racism seemingly didn't exist. I mean, it had to at some level. But I was talking to a colleague and it dawned on me He had blue eyes, dark skin, and it dawned on me oh wow, in the US you would be considered black, and never even occurred to me that he was black before Never, And Venezuelans were always so shocked, as are many countries throughout the world, at the problems that we're still struggling with internally regarding racism.

Speaker 2: 30:15

That was really interesting. And after Chavez was elected, all of a sudden there seemed to be this divide that just kept growing and growing. And I remember once in the grocery store, the woman who was, because you had to get your cheese sliced at the deli. You couldn't just pick up sliced cheese, You had to ask for it, which was kind of wonderful because you would connect with a person and they would say oh you know, hi, little Mrs Do you want the same white cheese.

Speaker 1: 30:45

Yeah, give me a half kilo.

Speaker 2: 30:51

All of a sudden, there was this divide and she was saying things to people on the other side of the counter like I don't have to give you, you know, and it was like whoa where is? this coming from, but I think you're bringing up this trauma that had always been there, that was underlying these people who lived in the poor sections of Venezuela, like the resentment they must have felt, and while we're on the other side thinking there's no racism here.

Speaker 1: 31:27

Well, i think in Venezuela it's more classism than racism, like that's the prevailing narrative, seems to be a class conversation. But you know, i talked to this about the people. a lot is like. you know, there used to be upward mobility in Venezuela because the infrastructure was there And it wasn't. you know, obviously Venezuela would be a completely different country if the upward mobility was at scale.

Speaker 1: 31:52

But you would hear stories of people that were from, you know, the interior of the country, a small, small, rural town, studied, went to Caracas to the capital, went to university, became an engineer and then worked for you know large company. And then you know, because there was so much opportunity in Venezuela that you would be like I brought I don't know zippers from the United States and you would sell all the zippers in the world and you'd become extraordinarily wealthy. So there was like these, these chaotic shoots of success that wasn't like systemic success, it was like individuals having success and that further exacerbates the divide, right, and if you don't invest in the infrastructure to make more people have like a stable growth, then you have this, this divide or internal resentment that can be capitalized on by somebody of that nature. You know people say that. you know people are so interested in Trump And, like, chavez and Trump are very similar. They're they're divisive, they're very charismatic. You know they're very funny. Like you can't.

Speaker 1: 32:58

Chavez was hilarious. You would talk for hours and he would be hilarious. obviously, you know divisive and petty and all those things, but you would just see like this victim perpetrator narrative come up. So how was, once you identified that, what were the biggest changes that you saw in the society? Like you're, like these people are becoming resentful, or everybody's kind of becoming resentful. What did you? what did you see?

Speaker 2: 33:30

If I can go back just a little bit to something, that your grandfather always talked about, And that was that Venezuela prior to the discovery of oil was a completely different country. And that is. You know, you stick a a spigot in the ground in Venezuela and out pops oil. It's such an oil rich country And I really think that was the biggest blessing and the biggest curse, because it changed the mentality of the Venezuelans. Venezuelans were just really hardworking people and they were all middle, everybody was middle class. There wasn't this huge divide. And then along comes the discovery of oil and it literally changes Venezuela overnight And it becomes that land of opportunity where you can sell zippers to everybody and and they invested heavily in education. With that A grand plan, They might A grand mariscal day, yeah.

Speaker 2: 34:25

Exactly, thank you. So just so many interesting dynamics in in a pretty young country taking place. So the, the administration, chavez administration, gets into power. The money is there. I think all these people who have never had money before, have never had access to wealth and power coupled with their trauma, they get into these positions and it just takes a few bad apples to start changing the mentality and your look, you're. you know, you're the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the head of a, of a, a administration of. you know, you're in the ministry of transportation and, oh man, so the minister over there is getting real rich. Look at the car that they just drove up and the you know. and it just pretty quickly changed the face of the country.

Speaker 2: 35:24

And then Venezuela started identifying with other countries who also, their people, had experienced trauma. So they were doing trauma bonding with these countries that were being led by people who had a kind of ideology where at some point maybe they did want to change the country for the good. Their intention was good, but they got into those positions and there's something to be said about wisdom and experience. And you don't, you don't know, you don't parachute into the position of being president of a country without having any prior experience about how governments work. It's really important And I'm not saying that it's the only requisite. I'm just saying there's a learning curve there And in the beginning of that learning curve, if you see all these problems and all this money and you're being contacted by these other colleagues of yours in other countries and they're saying this is how we do it and you and your influences, your ideology was maybe tilting. you know, the relationship between Cuba and Venezuela has always been really strong.

Speaker 1: 36:37

But yeah, so you know what's happened. So the KGB was recruiting out of la Universidad Central de Venezuela, which is the central University of Venezuela, since the 60s, since the 50s, you know, carlos de Jaco, you know all those guys were, you know there was, there was deep seeded already those seeds, deep seeded seeds That's not the right, the right phrase, but like they're already planted, those seeds of that ideology or that. I just, i just think it's a victim perpetrator dynamic. You know, it's like the that if you don't have something, somebody else has taken it away from you. And it's not. You know, it's the systemic divide of power and those that are power, the oppressed, the oligarchs, like you started hearing that language and those seeds were planted, the professors of those guys that went to military universities and were people that were indoctrinated in some way by Marxist ideology. And it's like it's really interesting to see when it exploded, which really exploded in the 2000s.

Speaker 2: 37:51

So just kind of a very visual example of that changes. There's a big park in Caracas and we were training for a marathon And so we would have to go. We would always go to this park and run, and run, and run And all of a sudden, after Chavez was elected, you would see groups of young people sitting on the grass and these guys wearing white shirts, white t-shirts and red bandana or red berets, which was the symbol of Chavez, of being a chavista. That was the uniform that you wore. They were indoctrinating these young people And every week there would be more and more of these small groups. And in the backdrop is a private. it was a private airport called La Cardulota.

Speaker 2: 38:41

It's a private military airport You would see planes landing and the planes were full of Cubans coming in, and so when the unrest started I think it probably was difficult to convince the Venezuelans to carry out these intimidation techniques that there was a campaign of intimidation. One of your sister's friends, their younger brother, was out playing basketball and just in the building and he was picked up and taken away and thrown into the back of a truck with a whole bunch of other young people Just to threaten me. He was returned or released or whatever, but they were just campaigning. It was a technique of planting the seeds of. This is what happens if you speak out.

Speaker 2: 39:37

And then, to come full circle, chavez realized, oh gosh, information is freedom. And he brought in a speaker from Cuba to go to the Simón Bolívar University And the speaker was talking about one of his Chavez campaign tactics I can't remember or one of his promises And he was booed out of the stadium And then very, very quickly, access to internet started getting shut down Because they realized, oops, this is going to work against us.

Speaker 1: 40:19

It's so interesting to see that we have a blueprint that's culturally similar to how this works. There's such a red herring around Venezuela. You're hearing on Fox News where I was like Venezuela, blah, blah, blah. In those three or five second sound bites they're like Venezuela, this crap, we're all going to end up like Venezuela. Venezuela is a case study for understanding what unresolved trauma does and how that can be leveraged for power to destroy a country that was once a really great path.

Speaker 2: 40:56

And it's also a case study for the importance of taking care of your democracy, because if you don't turn out and vote, you get what you get, and even though it was 40 years strong, it can turn overnight. So that's a very, very long-winded answer to your question.

Speaker 1: 41:23

I mean, this is the tension of how this works.

Speaker 2: 41:28

So things were not looking good in Venezuela, to say the least, and things were not looking good for the future of my marriage. So I took the test to become a foreign commercial service officer and I passed. And my son, you, my daughter and I left Venezuela to go to my first assignment in Monterrey, mexico, reserved at the consulate.

Speaker 1: 41:55

Shout out to Monterrey Mexico.

Speaker 2: 41:57

Shout out to Monterrey. It kind of changed the trajectory of your life because that's where you discovered that you were going to make a very profound decision to join the US Air Force. Am I allowed to ask you questions?

Speaker 1: 42:12

Can you tell me about? I mean, this is kind of. This is an open format, there's no rules. Yeah, of course, you can ask me questions.

Speaker 2: 42:19

So tell me about how that decision felt to you when you were making it and how, now that you look back, how it helped shape your life.

Speaker 1: 42:35

I took an aptitude test when I was in high school the rare times that I was there And it said I should have joined the military. Yeah, and I always thought the Coast Guard, like I was like I'm going to join the Coast Guard, i don't know why It seemed cool, seemed more technical, you know, the Coast Guard seemed very technical, like they were doing technical water operations kind of thing, and I was like I'm going to. You know, that was a thing. But then I moved to Monterrey and my best friend was going to school at UF and he was like dude, come to UF. And I was like, deep down inside, i was partying so much in Mexico and just doing God knows what And if I know, if I would have gone to UF, i would have lost the plot, you know. So, deep down is my cousin had just joined the Navy And we literally went to McAllen, texas, and walked into the recruiting office for the Navy and it was full and the Air Force was empty And the Air Force, the Air Force office, was completely empty And I was like, i don't know, i'm just joined the Air Force. So it was. I knew deep down inside that it was part of my, it was going to be part of my story.

Speaker 1: 43:48

But the decision wasn't a decision that was made.

Speaker 1: 43:51

It was made more out of curiosity, which is how I make most of my decisions, just kind of like, oh you know, kind of bumping into things And I'm like, oh, this was cool. And then took the test and joined And you know, i knew, looking back on, it was the best decision that I could ever made. They gave me a ton of responsibility at a really young age and gave me the kind of the parental structure that I needed that I didn't have, you know, because of the chaos of growing up. And you know, i got a ton of responsibility and made great friends And it was the best, you know, the best decision I could have made. And leaving the military also was the one of the best decision I ever made. It was really tough, but eight years, you know, was a great run And I'm, you know, very proud to be a veteran. So yeah, looking back on, it is one of the best decisions I ever made And it gave me some infrastructure and some tools that I'll use for the rest of my life.

Speaker 2: 44:48

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 44:49

I agree. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 44:51

Monterey was an important place for all of us.

Speaker 1: 44:53

Monterey was an important place for a lot of us. I remember and I'll probably get emotional about this, but I just remember how welcoming Mexicans were for me. You know They were just great people. You know I still have lifelong friends that are there. So, yeah, it was, it was a tumultuous time for me but it was a very formative time for me. Like I got accepted into this group of friends that were just incredible people And they're still they're still friends of mine today And they're still very close knit And it's very rare for that, that group or that society in Mexico to accept foreigners. You know, and I was just, i felt very honored to be part of that, to that group in some capacity.

Speaker 2: 45:35

So, yeah, And I wonder to what extent the fact that you had lived there, in your form I mean, you lived there, we moved there in 1984, 85, and you lived there for a couple of years I wonder if everything felt from, even though the culture in Monterey is quite distinct from where we lived in Cadejo.

Speaker 1: 45:56

And I remember flying into Monterey and everything so sandy. You remember that it was like so arid because we were in Caracas and Caracas is one of the greatest cities in the world, beautiful, tropical, you know forest City of eternal spring. Yeah, exactly. And then we were flying into Monterey. I was like, wow, this is so different. I remember being, i remember it being so bright. Yeah, i remember it being so bright And that was interesting. Yeah, okay, so Monterey.

Speaker 2: 46:27

So from Monterey I was assigned to Bucharest, romania. Sorry, i was sorry. From Monterey. I, in Monterey, i started dating this guy online And he was just had the most beautiful heart of anybody I'd ever met in my life. He was just a person that you never walked away from him without feeling better, just better, about life. He was just. He was the pastor's son, not the first pastor's son I've dated. I dated a few actually. He was just an incredible human being And we had dated. You know it was an online I mean a long distance relationship, but he had been to Monterey. So I was sent to Washington DC to study Romanian because that was my assignment And he lived in Baltimore And so our relationship just got deeper and deeper. And then, when I moved to Romania, your sister came with us, came with me and you were back in and at that point you were in.

Speaker 1: 47:38

England. I was stationed in England, yeah.

Speaker 2: 47:40

Which was great, because we're all going to be in.

Speaker 1: 47:42

Europe, yeah, yeah, it was wonderful.

Speaker 2: 47:45

We've done that really well And I was profoundly in love with this man, profoundly. And you know, things were a little messy with his former life and he was cleaning that up And we had kind of talked about our future. I was convinced that we were going to be married. And so he came to visit me in November and progressed and this was 18 years ago. And this was 18 years ago, yes, yeah, and I was going to be for Christmas that year. I was going to be by myself, and what was great about him visiting me was that he met everybody that I worked with and everybody just fell in love with him And he saw where I lived and we just had a magical time. I remember it was very emotional during that when he was there. I was just very, very emotional and I couldn't quite understand what was going on. But he said goodbye and flew back And then that Christmas I was going to be by myself for the first time since your dad and I had gotten divorced. And I was kind of scared And my parents, lo and behold, saw that And even though my father had Parkinson's at that time, with early stages of Alzheimer's, they showed up, they upped his meds and my father was on track. It was the most beautiful Christmas gift I could have ever gotten in my life. We just had such an amazing time And on December 27th I went to work.

Speaker 2: 49:30

My parents were still at home and I went to work and I got a phone call from my boyfriend And he was in a country in Africa where he had gone to visit his daughter who was working as a volunteer. She's an incredible human being. He has four kids and they're all incredible human beings who are making the world a better place. And he his crown had fallen off, and I kept saying the prince needed a new crown. So he was in the capital city of this African country and called me and hey, i'm here with my daughter, my crown fell off and we're going to head off to this refugee camp where she worked as a volunteer. And so I said, as I always did okay, great, i remember telling him how wonderful he was. It was just like and I had done it before because I just couldn't get over the fact how wonderful he was And I was just saying, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then at the end of the conversation I said I love you. And he missed a beat because his daughter was sitting right there and he was always very respectful of that And he said I love you too. And he hung up And I went home and 90 minutes later I got a phone call from his mom and she said we just got a phone call from the country he was visiting and they think he's dead. And I said oh yeah, i just talked to him 90 minutes ago. Don't worry, there's some confusion. She said there was a body with laying next to the car that he the Jeep he had rented, and like, don't worry about it. I got this. I'm going to make some phone calls to my counterparts in that country. He's not dead. And lo and behold, he was.

Speaker 2: 51:29

And it sent me into a tailspin, my divorce, because it was the end of a dream and something that was unacceptable. In my family You don't get divorced, no matter what You stick it out. That was really really, really, really hard. This was pain on a different level than I never felt, because I never lost anybody before and certainly not lost anybody suddenly, and there's all sorts of different kinds of grief, and the loss, the sudden loss, of someone is a completely different level. I remember I was pacing the floor in the living room and my father and then I finally just kind of collapsed on the couch And I was holding my head in my hands and I'm going no, no, no, no. And my father was standing over me and he's saying sin, don't worry.

Speaker 2: 52:27

It's not him. It's not him, it's. This is somebody. This is a and my mother, who had lost her only brother in a sudden car accident same type of head injury. They also believed that he was okay, which is what happened to my boyfriend at the time. They thought he was okay And he waved his daughter on because she had broken her leg and he said don't worry, you go ahead. And then he died. The exact same thing had happened to my mother's younger brother, had a head injury, went to the hospital, the hospital sent my grandparents home and he died Ding ding, ding.

Speaker 1: 53:06

Yeah, right Geez.

Speaker 2: 53:08

Yeah, so I remember my mom in the background pacing back and forth, and she knew, she absolutely knew. I didn't know what to do, so I went to bed everything on me hurt, my hair hurt. I did not know what I was in My body physically, was in so much pain, which I think is the embedded trauma. I was reliving everything that my mother had relived because I had inherited that trauma in my genes, in my DNA, and this is going to sound strange, but I'm going to say it anyway, because this is who I am.

Speaker 2: 53:45

I remember all of a sudden it was like a gold-spun blanket came up from the foot of the bed and slowly covered my entire body until it got up to my neck And I sat out loud, tom Wow, and I went to sleep and I slept deeply. Your sister had sort of been in denial about the divorce and you had been a bit more vocal in your pain and she hadn't, which is sort of true to your characters. She's since learned tools to utilize. So we were in Bucharest, i was a hot mess and she was walking down the street in front of me and she stopped and she turned around. She had big crocodile tears running down her face and I said are you ready? And she said yes, she was ready for therapy. I'm like okay, clearly I need it.

Speaker 2: 55:06

So I had started with a therapist before this. My boyfriend died and she was in therapy. I was in therapy and as soon as my boyfriend died and I hadn't been in that many sessions with this therapist of mine and I called him up and he said I said this happened and he said how soon can you get here? And I said I can't, i can't even move. And he said how soon can you get here? Come now. And I got in the car and I drove there, i don't know how, and he said that's when I knew you were going to be okay because you came. So he said to me there's this kind of therapy that we're going to be doing in the mountains, the Carpathian Mountains this summer, and it lasts 10 days and I think it's going to help you. And I was in such a bad state that if he had said to me light your hair on fire and run down the street naked, anything, i would have done literally anything to feel better, because I didn't know what to do with this massive grief that I felt. And so that summer I went and I really I hadn't done any research on this and what I was going to be doing, I just showed up. And so he died in December and this was in July.

Speaker 2: 56:31

So I show up and there are 33, there are 33 Romanians. I was the only American. They had brought in a facilitator from Spain who I walked in this very large room and I saw him at the back of the room and I remember looking up through this haze of pain that I was in, and I saw him and there was just instant recognition. There was just an instant. He saw me, i saw him and that was it. It was just a fleeting moment, and then he proceeded to teach this group of people how to become facilitators in the kind of therapy that he was going to be instructing on and the therapy, that which ultimately truly saved my life And of the group, i believe there were 33 of us and three of us were not therapists.

Speaker 2: 57:46

So if you believe in a knowing field of consciousness, if you believe in energy, if you believe in quantum physics, if you believe in what you put out, you get back. The level of consciousness in that room, as well as the level of trauma, was just incredible, because quite often therapists in their past are trying to heal themselves and they're drawn to that kind of a career because they want the answers. My mother would have been an incredible psychologist. She would have been an incredible architect. She would have been an incredible CEO. She was a very, very gifted, very, very smart woman.

Speaker 2: 58:33

So those 10 days it was as if we lived in this bubble and I became aware of how intertwined my trauma was with my mother's. So we did a constellation when it was my turn to do a constellation. The facilitator invited me to come and sit next to him in the hot seat And at the beginning, you know, i'm looking at this process and I'm thinking they're all actors And I couldn't, you know, i just I didn't, i didn't believe that there was any way that I could have somehow mysteriously transmitted my truth to these people. And until the facilitator invited me to represent someone who was in the hot seat and I felt this strange energy and not very many words were spoken. But, as the facilitator instructed me, if you cannot resist the urge to go right, to walk to your right within the confines of the circle and all the other people present are sitting around you, if you cannot resist that urge, go right.

Speaker 1: 1:00:00

So can I set the stage a little bit? So it's a ballroom, yes, right, and it's basically an open floor space and there's 33 people sitting in a very, very large circle, sitting next to each other, and at the, you know, at one end is the facilitator with an open chair and you're sitting in that chair, in this circle, and that circle is called the knowing field, and some and some like that's the terminology that they use is that this is the knowing field.

Speaker 2: 1:00:33

Yes, thank you.

Speaker 2: 1:00:35

No, just some people don't know what family constellations are in. So when it was my turn to have my constellation done, the number of representatives that had to be pulled in to the knowing field, to the circle, was incredible. I think almost every single person in the room was part of my constellation. It was just a huge, huge, huge circle of people that were there supporting me and the information that I was transmitting to them, with very, very few words And the reason and I don't know how much you've gone into this in past interviews you've done but we are so loyal to our systems that we literally can't see patterns and we can't see loyalties that are deeply embedded in our subconscious mind that drive us to make choices and to act out things that aren't necessarily in correlation with our values or who we are.

Speaker 2: 1:01:51

You know, sometimes you look at families and the same parents raise three children and one child is completely opposite from another child and you think they were raised in the same environment. How can that happen? And quite often the explanation are these loyalties They're adopting something which doesn't belong to them. So I had adopted many things that didn't belong to me and in subsequent constellations that I've participated in, i've come to know the truth, and that is, our loyalties are so deep we will violate ourselves at any cost. We will die. some people die out of loyalty to those systems that we're not even conscious of, and so what a constellation does is, when it's your turn to do the constellation done for you. you select people in that group to represent you or to represent, usually, your family of origin. you always come in thinking, oh, i'm going to do a constellation about my boyfriend or my problem at work.

Speaker 2: 1:03:14

It usually always starts with your family of origin, but you could never act out as your mother. You could never represent your mother or your father or even you in that circumstance because of these loyalties. But the people who are representing your family or you, they don't know anything about you.

Speaker 1: 1:03:39

It's like the same. It's like you lose the forest for the trees.

Speaker 2: 1:03:42

Yeah, you can't see the forest for the trees Yeah, you can't see the forest for the trees.

Speaker 1: 1:03:46

Or it's like when somebody that's really close to you says something, like your spouse says something to you, you're crazy. And then a friend that's outside of the system says something you're like absolutely, i've been doing that. It's like a similar energy to that right.

Speaker 2: 1:04:00

Yes, yeah, absolutely, and it's something that needs to be experienced.

Speaker 1: 1:04:05

Oh yeah, yeah, it's so she.

Speaker 2: 1:04:09

It needs to be experienced because, as I'm sitting here talking about it, it just sounds like weirdo, voodoo, craziness, right. And that's what I thought When I first saw these people laying on the floor in front of me and I see the facilitator in the background 18 years ago, and I'm like what the heck is this? Until I'm in that seat and I'm seeing all of these things coming together. Oh, oh so, oh, i okay, okay.

Speaker 2: 1:04:45

So the person representing my mother is looking down at a person who's representing her brother on the ground. The person representing my mother doesn't know what happened to my mother. The person on the ground doesn't know what happened to her brother, and the person on the ground representing her brother says to the facilitator I feel like I'm two people. He was representing my mother's only brother and he was representing my boyfriend who had been killed in an accident of a head injury. So I'm happy to say I've done many, many, many constellations throughout the years and with different facilitators, and I'm happy to report now, 18 years later, there's a lot less people in that circle representing my ancestors.

Speaker 1: 1:05:50

But it never stops.

Speaker 2: 1:05:52

And I just did a constellation this past summer I mean not this fall in Chicago, and so that facilitator has everyone who is present put their name in a hat If they want. No, even if they don't want to participate, if they're there, their name is going into a hat. And then the people who are going to do a constellation a paper is selected and your name is read and you're going to do a constellation And I've said in the past, i'm not going to do one, i'm just here to support the others. And the facilitator is like no, if you're here, your name is going in the hat, because if you're supposed to do a constellation, you need to have your name in the hat. And it's going to be drawn And lo and behold, i was convinced and I'm like I don't really have anything to work on.

Speaker 1: 1:06:47

And now I'm quote unquote healed. We're all so healed.

Speaker 2: 1:06:52

Chokes on me because that constellation turned out to be the beginning of something so incredibly profound, a theme in our family dynamic that was so incredibly profound that it needed to be brought out to the light. And it was. And for me, it started me on a path to healing and wholeness that I literally didn't know existed. I didn't know I had, i had suppressed this, this part of me, so deeply out of loyalty that I couldn't see it.

Speaker 1: 1:07:32

Yeah, and there's, there's a book called even if it cost me, even if it cost me my life, that worse that the force of loyalty. I truly believe that the force of loyalty is the strongest force in human connection. But so, with what that said, you know this isn't the only type of therapy that you've done. You've done many modalities of therapy. Can you go through kind of the ones that you have done and yeah, so I actually started.

Speaker 2: 1:07:59

I was, i wanted to major in psychology And I think my father wasn't the first time told me, no, you will not. I wanted to major in social work. No, you will not. I also wanted to go to quit college and go to Hollywood because, again, i wanted to be an actor and he said, no, you will not.

Speaker 2: 1:08:17

So when I was in college I took some psychology class. I was just intrigued with the topic and I would volunteer for any time. They needed people to come to. The psych department needed people to come in Sometimes.

Speaker 2: 1:08:30

I remember one time I had to go into a booth with a camera, with a camera, point it at my eyes and then talk about a subject that was heavy on my heart and it I think it was my relationship with my father, and they would just record my eyes. So I that's really the first time I started delving into psychology and then a little bit of therapy around our divorce, but not very much. And, to be honest, the only reason I asked your father to go to this therapist with me was because I knew the therapist was going to convince him that he was in love with me and that he could never leave me. I knew it And then I did. I fast forward. I didn't do therapy for a while until, actually, until my boyfriend died and then I got into it in a deep way.

Speaker 2: 1:09:35

I did therapy when I was in Calgary, canada, my youngest sister, who was 18 months younger than I am, died a very quick death. It was a long, slow, four months from diagnosis to death. Four months transpired And I literally felt like someone had removed a third of my body. And I remember thinking I can't do this, there's no way, because, really, if you had asked me, tell me the worst thing that could happen to you, that there's no way you could survive.

Speaker 2: 1:10:22

There's three things, and not this order, but one of them would have been the death of one of my sisters because, as my sister has famously said, my older sister, sue, we were like a three-legged stool And, wow, you ripped, literally ripped, one of those legs off and both of us wobbled for years, for years. So this therapist, who is just an amazing human being, she really, really saved me. She absolutely saved me from what I thought was going to be the end of me. I didn't ever think, i didn't think, i knew I would never take my own life. I always knew that because I would never do that, because you two are the most important things that always happen in my life, but I just didn't know how I was going to live.

Speaker 1: 1:11:20

But we all know that there's other ways of doing that. Yes, you know there's other ways of doing that, and that's the tough part is that you might not physically do it, but there might be a disease that happens or something that happens, and then, within, a short period of time you're gone, yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:11:37

Yeah, and then I got therapy. When I was in Washington DC. I found a therapist because Polish is a really, really, really hard language to learn And I started learning it in person. I was assigned to work at the embassy in Warsaw, poland. A lot of people don't like to go to that post because language is so hard And language learning, i've discovered, does not get easier with age. So I and it was my full-time job.

Speaker 2: 1:12:11

So the US government does an amazing job of training its foreign service officers to be able to engage in the language of their host nation. It's one of the things we're known for and it makes so much sense And it puts us in a very different position when we're engaging with host governments, because it's not just that you can converse with them. They you know, let's be honest, most government officials speak English, certainly in the developed markets, where the federal agency that I worked for are in, but the fact that you took the time and the government provided resources for you to understand their language, is it just you walk in, even if you just say a few words, and it also helps you understand the culture? Yeah, how you know, how can you live, thrive and strengthen ties in my case, commercial ties between the United States and the country I'm serving in, if I don't even speak the language.

Speaker 1: 1:13:16

Even if you don't have cultural context, it'll be impossible to connect.

Speaker 2: 1:13:19

Yeah, Yeah, Lots of lots of US companies blunder big time Just because of that. They don't understand the culture of the country that they're doing business. They're trying to do business in. So I was. COVID broke out and I was relegated to a very, very small apartment in Arlington Virginia and doing online courses And very challenging teacher.

Speaker 2: 1:13:50

Yeah, the world shut down and I was by myself in this very small apartment And remember when COVID first started and you would go to the grocery store, you know, mask up, get gloves, swab the shopping cart down, and they had arrows on the ground so that you wouldn't, you know, come face to face with another shopper. And when you would turn the corner and they're a shopper would be, you know, like you know, like the invisible terror, exactly.

Speaker 2: 1:14:23

You would rush home and wipe your groceries down, and I mean it was. It was terrifying because we didn't know, nobody knew. We'd never lived through this before, and to say that that was challenging for me would be an understatement. I am a total extrovert. I live off connecting with people and I was desperately, desperately lonely. My partner slash boyfriend. We would talk on the phone a few times a day, but he was living in another country and I couldn't see him. I couldn't see you and your sister. I couldn't see my sister. I couldn't see anybody. There's just no chance for interacting with people, and I was.

Speaker 2: 1:15:12

I was and it's interesting because I have all these two. I really do have knowledge of a lot of tools. So I was doing everything that I knew I needed to do. I was getting a lot of sleep, i was eating really healthy, i went to the grocery store every single day, i was meditating and I either walk, walked or ran every single day along the river. I got outside every single day And even with all of that, i was struggling.

Speaker 2: 1:15:41

I was really struggling. I felt lonelier than I've ever felt in my entire life, and so I found a therapist and we did online until things started opening up a little bit more and we could, at the end, start meeting in person, and that was that was extremely helpful. And I guess I'm I'm underscoring the importance of what I went through during COVID, because I think part of what we're seeing play out now on the streets, with the increased violence which just it feels sometimes like the world is on fire, and I think that if people went into COVID kind of teetering, and they didn't have the tools that they needed, covid sent a lot of people over there, people's people. People died, so many people died. They lost their loved ones and they couldn't say goodbye to them in their final moments.

Speaker 1: 1:16:45

Yeah, it's like the, it's like a forced sadness, it's like a forced tragedy, it's, it's so yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:16:52

I mean, we've lived through some of the most honoring, respectful, beautiful experiences in saying goodbye to our loved ones that you could have. I simply can't fathom if my sister had died during COVID and we couldn't usher her out of the world in the way that we did. I don't. I can't imagine the level of pain that I would have right now. So and lost jobs, lost incomes, people lost their homes.

Speaker 1: 1:17:27

You know businesses.

Speaker 2: 1:17:29

I mean, it changed the world. It was a huge paradigm shift. There are many gifts in it. There are many, many gifts in COVID, but we're not addressing the trauma that that cause. it's just like, okay, we're back and we're back to the office and, oh, you don't have childcare. Okay, we'll figure it out.

Speaker 1: 1:17:49

And just get back to the office.

Speaker 2: 1:17:51

It's not the Department of Commerce. Our Secretary of Commerce is addressing that the importance of having on-site childcare.

Speaker 1: 1:18:01

So you know what was what's really interesting that they talk? so Gabor Monti talks about this, talks about not everybody, so not every soldier that goes to war comes back with PTSD. So there's a percentage of soldiers that come back with PTSD and they usually have unresolved childhood trauma. And so what I think with adverse events that are later in your life are retraumatization events that happen. So if you're, you know, if you're in that place, and there's so many people out there that have unresolved trauma that gets exacerbated during adverse events, and that's like such a thing that we don't talk about. Everybody says it's like it's COVID's fault. It's like that's not really COVID's fault. Life's going to happen, you're going to have something that unexpectedly happens And if it's, if that core childhood you know the ACE thing, you know the adverse childhood experience gets re-triggered, you're going to be in a really bad place. And so it's like kind of understanding those dynamics and understand, like, and understanding that at scale, that we really have to have a national conversation about that.

Speaker 2: 1:19:12

Absolutely Yeah, And I'm kind of a case study or the poster child for that, because I was seemingly, you know this person, you know I functioned and pretty high functioning and I made it through life until.

Speaker 2: 1:19:29

I had a divorce and it was I spiraled down. I lost this man that I with whom I was deeply in love, and I spiraled down. I lost my sister and I spiraled down. And those are like the big three that I can think of. But I've had lots of other stuff. And if I didn't have access to the tools that I do, if these people because I really am, i'm a deep believer in God and I deeply believe that God doesn't cause bad things to happen, but God will use those things to help you become who you are meant to be and to help you heal. And I would never say, gosh, i wish I that was so great. I got divorced.

Speaker 1: 1:20:17

I'm so glad my boyfriend died.

Speaker 2: 1:20:19

So glad my younger sister died, but oh my gosh, i'm so incredibly grateful that I got to have those experiences, with the help of people who were placed in my path, who would show me this is the lesson that you can learn from this. We all have adversity, everybody has adversity, and it's just what we do with it. Some people, something tragic can happen to them and it ends them. Other people will look at that tragedy and say, oh my gosh, god, this was a horrible thing that happened. But what's the one grain that I can take? Can I learn anything from this? And I think one of the good things that came about as a result of COVID is people are talking about the fact that they need help, they are reaching out. I know people who have steadfastly refused to get help their entire lives who are suddenly saying out loud yeah. My therapist said wow, that's so awesome.

Speaker 1: 1:21:28

That's so awesome. And what I think happened with COVID, too, is there was an opening of the system In the consolation world. When people are going through healing, sometimes they get really sick. Right after a big movement, you get really sick And I keep going back to this thought that that's what COVID was, because there is a shifting in consciousness.

Speaker 1: 1:21:57

But you know, what tells me more that there's a shifting in consciousness Is that there's this other, there's this movement globally. That is like you're going to own nothing and you're going to like it. And so there's this opposite force, kind of muddying the water of what the true shifting consciousness is, which is that we're systemically connected as this one consciousness rather than being individuals, just kind of living our lives and going about it without any understanding of our relationship to each other, understanding that there is some intelligence that's inside the system. And so there's this opposing force that's saying, like you know, you're going to like this Carl Schwab, or what not? Is it Carl Schwab, the guy from there's this Darth Vader dude that's out in Europe? that's like you know, speaking about this new world, you know reimagining of how the world's going to be, and it's like this, it's like the opposite of what is actually seems like, what is actually happening, that there's this conscious awakening, because you see it in culture.

Speaker 1: 1:23:06

Everybody's starting to talk about unresolved trauma. Everybody's starting to talk about collective consciousness. Everybody's starting to talk about these things that you know the hippies and the crystals and they've been talking about that for years, but it's starting to become part of our language. Let's get this fundamental shift, which is really interesting.

Speaker 2: 1:23:23

Yeah, and the merger of spirituality and science.

Speaker 1: 1:23:27

Yeah, so exciting.

Speaker 2: 1:23:30

And you know, i, as I said, i'm, i'm, i'm, generally speaking, an optimistic person. I've learned to recognize the importance of of acknowledging dark, because it's there.

Speaker 1: 1:23:42

Yeah, And it's, you know, it's part of it's part of life.

Speaker 2: 1:23:45

The world is created in perfect balance and like couldn't exist if there wasn't dark. But what I find so fascinating now, with each one of these experiences and and this, this healing journey that I'm on it, the coincidences or God incidences become more and more frequent And it I would never become nonchalant to that happening, but I can recognize it now. So when I get on a plane and I sit down and start talking to the, the person next to me and her husband is a psychologist and we're both we're all three of us are flying out to California and she's the mother of three girls and one of her daughters is a psychologist And the, the husband, is flying out to California to win an award for this trauma center He set up. He's a psychiatrist, sorry. He doesn't believe in medication, doesn't believe in giving people medication. We're traumatized.

Speaker 2: 1:24:44

He believes in working on the root cause And I'm like, of course, like that's so cool. It's so cool. I never talked to the person sitting next to me because I don't want to bother them. Yeah, They kind of test the waters and if they put their headphones on, I'm like.

Speaker 1: 1:24:56

I get it, i'm a chatty person.

Speaker 2: 1:24:57

I like to talk to people. Not everybody does, especially on a plane, but it it just absolutely. it makes me feel humbled when that happens because it's like a hey, pay attention, pay attention, plug in and pay attention.

Speaker 1: 1:25:15

So there's, um, there's, there's a really interesting. So I've, you know, you've heard of the secret, right, the the secret. I think that that, in its current interpretation, is bullshit. Right, it's like I don't think that you can be like, think your way to success, you know, like, and then you'll manifest, you'll like change the material of the world and Like, change the world in front of you. Right, that you can't like be like I want a Ferrari, i want a Ferrari, and then, like, somebody just pulls up with Ferrari. You know, i don't think that that's the case.

Speaker 1: 1:25:48

But what I do think is this is that the world, the reality, is in a superposition, like in quantum physics. Right, anything can, is possible in that moment, right in front of you. And what trauma does It? doesn't allow you to see the world of possibilities and connect to your intuition. So you could have been on that flight And if you would have been in a different place in your life, you would have not talked to them or not seen the potential paths that could have happened or the potential realities that could have unfolded. Right, and Every single moment where we have these micro decisions that change the course of the ship and And suddenly, 20 years later, the ship is in a completely different place and a completely different reality. That is that reality that you manifested, rather than being down the you know trauma path, right? So I think that in some capacity you can think your future, but it's like you think your future in these micro moments That changed the course of your life to that place. Does that make sense? You put that beautifully.

Speaker 2: 1:26:55

Yep, absolutely. And I think the importance of saying yes, thanks mom, the importance of saying yes, it can never, never be underestimated. You know that the the whole notion of feel the fear and do it anyway. It's working, working on your stuff. It's hard work, oh it sucks. But the alternative is so much worse and people don't realize. And you know I've talked to people and They're mired in so much pain and I just want to say work on your shit.

Speaker 1: 1:27:33

Work on your shit. Work on your shit.

Speaker 2: 1:27:39

Because what lies on the other side is peace and healing, and you can heal balance and balance, and you can heal it so that For future generations that's not part of your legacy. Yeah, their legacy is gonna. Your legacy is gonna be something different. It's not gonna be perfect what you pass on, but it's going to look quite different than what you inherited.

Speaker 1: 1:28:01

But there's so many people that say that this is such a like prevalent thought. They're like, well, i had to go through it. It's like, yeah, you're, you're being loyal to your system, like there it can be different, it can be completely different. They can go. Your kids can have their own path without, without all the traumatic, you know, or like the karmatic load that you're bringing in from all the trauma of your family system. So you don't have to, they don't have to necessarily go through that. They can like having an easy life Not an easy life, but a life that's in flow, that you can choose to do hard things Because you're in that state of flow is a great place to be.

Speaker 2: 1:28:37

Yeah, you know and and to do it naturally. Yeah without with ease. And without necessarily being medicated. You know, that that you know off the coast of Florida, right here, if you test the water, guess what you're gonna find.

Speaker 2: 1:28:54

Yeah, i mean anti-depressants and ocean and I'm not saying that Pharmacetical solutions don't have a place, because they absolutely do, but I think that it's it. It. I think that big pharma and insurance are doing a huge injustice To our system. We're so focused on treating people instead of preventing Illnesses, including preventing mental illnesses, because there's a lot of tools that you can utilize That will help Minimize the impact of whatever you're going through, so that you don't reach a state where you're catatonic Because you've gone through trauma.

Speaker 1: 1:29:35

So some of these like something you know. Some of the anti anxiety medications are great for Somebody that's going through a very intense phase.

Speaker 1: 1:29:42

Yeah, short, but it's short term and they're very effective to get somebody off the ledge and they can get into. You know traditional therapy or do some. You know new modality. They're very effective for that. But it's turned into like the short term is turned into a long term. It's like you're supposed to use some of these medications for like four weeks and some people have been on them for ten years.

Speaker 1: 1:30:02

Just turning that part off of their body, like turning part, that part off of their senses. They're just shutting, they're dimming the light on such an important aspect of who they are. That is really an alarm system, like anxiety is is. You know, being grateful to anxiety shows you where to heal. Being grateful to depression says there's some stuff that you have to look at here That's on. That's hidden under all this crap that will make your life better. On the other side, where's like, oh, i'm gonna turn that off. You know, take this pill and let's turn that thing off. Not to say that taking the pill to To temporarily get you out of really dark places are extremely effective and important tool. But man, long term He's like you gotta look at this really ugly stuff. I.

Speaker 2: 1:30:51

Think what's happening in the field of plant-based medicine is just so incredibly Exciting, and I think that's the future.

Speaker 1: 1:31:00

That's why it's so important to protect the Amazon. Yeah, yeah, it's really exciting, and you mean like ayahuasca.

Speaker 2: 1:31:07

Yes, i was good Yeah.

Speaker 1: 1:31:10

Yeah, i mean, how do you, how do you square that? How do you square that like, how do you come to terms with that? Because constellations is already like people are right, like what. I thought you guys were in a cult. When you guys first Talked to talk to me about constellations, i was like, oh, my mom and my sister in the cult now. So they're crazy people and they're gonna go to drink the Kool-Aid and you know new Guinea or whatever. And You know like then I saw constellations. I'm like, wow, this is a thing. Then I had to technically answer the question, which I did. See Rupert Sheldrake, see, you know Morphic residency, quantum entanglement, see all those things. That's kind of like the technical side of it. But, um, how do you like? so Constellations is a step far like way out of people's comfort zones. How do you get to the place of like Doing ayahuasca, like how does that? how do you get to that place?

Speaker 2: 1:32:15

So the way that I look at constellations in ayahuasca, constellation helps Put in alignment the hardware Okay, and ayahuasca helps put in alignment the software Wow. So you marry the two and it's, it's the perfect combination for a whole and healed person.

Speaker 1: 1:32:42

That's a very good way of putting it.

Speaker 2: 1:32:45

The reason that I was attracted to ayahuasca was because you and your sister, i you brought it to me and I Saw changes taking place. I saw a piece, an insight that I Was attracted to and I wanted to learn more about it. Um, ayahuasca, i don't know. If you want to explain. Yeah a little bit, i don't know. I mean, i know that the Indians in Peru have been for a thousand years Mixing the bark of the tree with something else and diluting it down, diluting it down.

Speaker 1: 1:33:22

Um, there's a whole theory. First There's theory I Can't I think it's like Dennis McKenna This stone-daked theory that says that how lower primates like how monkeys and stuff Became, their brains grew to humans was through psychedelic experiences. There's a whole theory. And then there's another theory. There's a guy named Graham Hancock That was saying that I'm not, i'm paraphrasing this and I'm just kind of loosely basing it, so don't take it to the bank. But um, there's this other theory that says that potentially all religious experiences are experiences that come from psychedelics. That you know, the interpretation of the burning bush, the interpretation of the, you know, like the of the, many of the stories of the bible, are these profound insights that come from the realm of. You know psychedelics. So it's like And after going through those experiences, you're like oh well, that makes sense. You know like, that's a, that's a thing, so. But you know, people have been taking this medicine for many, many years and it is medicine. It's not a fun thing to do It's a therapeutic process.

Speaker 1: 1:34:32

It's not a, you know. It's not a like oh, i'm gonna go party and do this like I would prefer to do a millionth. I prefer to get a root canal than to do that.

Speaker 2: 1:34:44

There's zero chance you're gonna become an addict.

Speaker 1: 1:34:46

Yeah exactly It's like if you're addicted to that like man, you're a gland for punishment, but it's it's extraordinarily useful and Kind of uncovering, like a, like a shock to the system kind of, or like a restructuring of the system that really brings out a completely different perspective. If consolation does that for the here and now, which is the kind of the, the known realm, it does it for the unknown realm, which is really interesting to see. It's like people lose fear of death and you know they lose fear of and they get to know An entity of some people call god. They get to know, go to the kind of um, you know vast unknown of the universe or consciousness, and it's Really powerful. Use correctly, you know some people won't, you know, kind of Make it cool and that's not the way to.

Speaker 2: 1:35:43

To me That's that doesn't seem like a good use of the tool, but if used appropriately it's, it's very powerful so for me, the example that I go back to is I knew through constellation work the importance of honoring my mother and my father And through traditional therapy. I've done a lot of work around my relationship with both of my parents and I thought that I was at peace with my mother Until I did an ayahuasca ceremony. I've done a few now. My last ayahuasca ceremony I just had this opportunity to see my mother in all of her glory, the, the magnificent woman that she was, and to honor her And I just and I like I have this connection ever since that ceremony. I have this I'm profoundly In love with my mother To the point where now, every morning when I get up, there's a picture of her I have on my area where I do prayers and meditations and I light a candle And I feel in honor of my mother. It's just and now you know when you were, you were going back full circle to the meditation We started with at the beginning feeling her over my shoulder, i just feel love.

Speaker 2: 1:37:09

I feel love and connection to her where in the past, my mom Loved me. She loved all three of us, but she learned when she was nine years old and her brother died instantly in a car crash, that you can only extend love to people outside of your immediate circle because they'll be taken from you. I knew that intellectually, but I never. I I felt loved. Psychologists once told me it doesn't matter where you get your feeling of love from, as long as you feel it from one person, you're gonna survive. I was loved by my sister Sue. She my Unconditional love my entire life from my sister Sue and my sister Belinda. Those were the people that loved me. I knew my parents loved me because you know they kind of had to because I was their kid.

Speaker 1: 1:38:04

But now legally required to.

Speaker 2: 1:38:06

I feel a deep and profound love from my mother And I don't think that if I had done, not done ayahuasca, i don't think that I would Feel that peace and, most importantly, that support. It makes me be A better human. It makes me be a more present mother. Oh, yeah, yeah then if I didn't have that.

Speaker 1: 1:38:32

So there's this. I've been kind of wrestling around with this concept. You know it's like the there's, there's, i think there's two of us There's a physical us and then there's like a spiritual us And or, you know, some people call it like the meta. You know, like the meta mother right, so it's like your mother in and, and I feel this, you know, and, and some, some people have the blessing to have both that are aligned, like the spiritual side and the physical side are aligned, but some people don't.

Speaker 1: 1:39:03

And I think that You know when we do that meditation, the meditation, you know, for people that that haven't listened to the meditation, the meditation is like you close your eyes, take these deep breaths And you imagine your mother behind your left shoulder and your father behind your right shoulder, and then your grandparents behind them and their great grandparents behind them, and so on, until You know all.

Speaker 1: 1:39:23

You see all your ancestors And what. What you're really connecting to is like the meta mother right, the meta father, the spiritual Of those people, the spiritual representations in your ancestry of who those people are, and those people are perfect and whole and complete, and not The embodied pain that they are in this realm, and so like, if you, if you're able to align those two people I think that's what healing is is that you align the spiritual and the physical. To say The physical, these things happened or weren't available or whatever that looks like But the spiritual is whole and I'm connect, deeply connected with that. Even if you didn't know the person, even if they, even if they were abusive, if they're you know, if there was sexual abuse, if there was anything, even any of those things, you can still connect with the meta Spirit of that. Does that make sense? makes perfect sense, yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:40:19

Yeah, so profound And it's so exciting. It's so exciting that there's a path. There's a way forward that we don't just, we're not just born into the world and then we consume a bunch of stuff and we suffer a lot and then we die.

Speaker 1: 1:40:35

Oh my gosh, oh my gosh, wow, yeah, and even people that were adopted you can go to. Everybody has a mother and father, biological, like everybody has two people.

Speaker 2: 1:40:46

You're on birth through something, something, and that could have been.

Speaker 1: 1:40:50

It could have been the worst scenarios, but you're still here for something and you can honor that connection at least. And like one thing that's happened to me, a lot is like like I'm starting to look at religion from like tradition, not from, you know, not with all the judgment, you know, like there's a lot of judgment in religion. People look at religion like you know. So Bert Hellinger, the guy that, the gentleman that started family constellations, somebody was saying at a workshop they were saying are you, are you, are you religious? And she said no, i'm spiritual. And he said, oh, worse, because there's this implicit judgment in religion. Right, it's like it's so, it's like you're, you're judging tradition.

Speaker 1: 1:41:34

And I think religion, for whatever, for whatever reason, is a, is just a momentum of stories and truths that we've had over a long period of time.

Speaker 1: 1:41:47

And that story and those truths have stuff in it, right, that's, that may be accurate and there's influence and all those things, right, but it does have these profound truths in it.

Speaker 1: 1:41:58

So you take the religious piece, you take the consolation piece, you take the ayahuasca piece, you take the spiritual, psychedelic piece, you take all these things together And they all have like a, like a connecting narrative about honoring your ancestry, about connecting with your, with your lineage, about, you know, being at peace and in balance, about right sizing things, about discovering the trauma, about sacrifice and and going through.

Speaker 1: 1:42:25

You know, the story of Christ is a story of sacrifice. It's like you know, father, why have you forsaken me? is this, you know, trauma, load right, it's like you have. You can see it from that narrative And like there's these the story of Cain and Abel is the story of the victim and the perpetrator, and that story of, and that narrative of the victim and the perpetrator is a narrative that we have in all of our society and we all have that battle within. So it's like how can you deny the incredible insight that religion has And some people judge it from that perspective? So I think there's like this grand connecting conversation that is really interesting that we're like just now starting to to explore.

Speaker 2: 1:43:07

Yeah, and I personally am thrilled to hear that you've included the religion piece, because that's you, you, you.

Speaker 1: 1:43:13

You came full circle on that, Yeah, yeah that was, that was tough.

Speaker 2: 1:43:17

But I honored the fact that you didn't just blindly accept. It means so much more to you because you went down that path of exploration And I I really respect that.

Speaker 1: 1:43:28

Yeah, that was tough, that was. it's been full circle And you know, i know people have a lot of issue with them, but I do Jordan Peters and really helped me with that. Like I know some people like but I don't like. I think there's profound insight in what he says.

Speaker 2: 1:43:42

Take what works and leave the rest. Yeah, exactly, nobody's perfect.

Speaker 1: 1:43:45

Nobody's perfect right, but I think there's there's some really profound things that that talks about everybody's. All the above. You know everybody's. You know D all the above. You're even the worst people in history. Were all the above Right? Yeah, and there's. Everybody has some good, you know, and some people have profound pain and they create, you know, catastrophic scenarios.

Speaker 1: 1:44:12

But you know, if we judge others, it's how judge, how harshly we judge ourselves. I read that in the Bible. Yeah, right, i mean, exactly Like you talk about. You know people talk about. I was having this conversation. So I was at the beach and I do these. You know I do the guided meditations on the beach And these guys came up to me and we were talking about religion And he was like you know, it says in the Bible we can judge other Christians.

Speaker 1: 1:44:37

I'm like that wasn't saying like a good idea. Man, judgment is between God and that person. We're no one to judge. We're no one to judge because judge entangles, entangles us. To the person, right, we can say you know like, and even in society, i think our legal system there's a big, bold statement, but I think our legal system is, is incorrect in that capacity that we have judges that that you know, castigate people.

Speaker 1: 1:45:06

I think it should be. You know, like I'm almost thinking that there should be arbiters that are saying like more referees that are saying, hey, you know, i've been assigned to, this is what the agreements of our society is And you broke in that agreement And if you break that agreement there's consequences, right? Because I think judgment has such a like, like a moral implication to it that we, the arbiter, might be a better, better structure, saying you've, we all agreed as a society that you have to drive 55 miles an hour and you were going 75, you've broken that agreement And we've all agreed that if somebody breaks that agreement, that these are the consequences that you do, you take your license away, whatever. That is right. I think just judgment has so much entanglement. And then forgiveness has the same thing.

Speaker 1: 1:45:54

People talk about forgiveness like we're no one to forgive. Forgiveness is between the person and their creator or aliens, or you know the, the, the virtual reality, or you know the, the simulation, or whatever. That is because forgiveness also entangles us to people, because first we have to judge. You said you've wronged me And then I have the power to absolve you of that wrongdoing. There's so many in our, in our language, in our culture. There's so many just in like structures that are very old, that entangle us to everything.

Speaker 2: 1:46:27

And I think people confuse having an opinion and judging, and it's you absolutely have to have an opinion. It's what keeps us safe. You know, I I think that this man is dangerous is my opinion And I'm going to stay away from this man. It becomes judgment when I say I think this man is dangerous and I think I'm better than he is. Yeah, Yeah, And I think that's something that people confuse. It absolutely is critical to have opinions. You don't always have to share them with people?

Speaker 1: 1:47:04

Yeah, But opinions have flexibility. You know, in the perfect world and a perfect world, opinions have flexibility. Judgments are rigid and entangle you to the person. I think that's such a profound.

Speaker 1: 1:47:15

That is perfect, but that was Alberto, alberto saying that. right, that was the first facilitator that we came across And I was so blown away by that statement. There's been two statements in the constellation mode that have blown my mind that, like we cannot, we're no one to forgive, first we're no one to forgive, and the other one is assumption of responsibility. What does it mean to assume responsibility? Like, really think of a assumption of responsibility. And I've gone, i've been accused of being going overboard with assumption of responsibility. I think everything's my fault, you know, like in some way It's like, but something to look into, oh yeah, shit. But like I think the right sizing of that is important for me. But like, and I think responsibility for me has shifted a little bit from and Michelle talks about this another dear friend and facilitator is like, responsibility is the ability to respond, because trauma keeps you frozen in the pattern. It's good, right, yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:48:25

Well, and with children. You know, boy, i think the very definition of maturity is when people and people maybe a 60 year old people when they learn to assume responsibility for the choices that they've made Yeah. Like, your life is an accumulation of the choices you've made. Yeah, period, that's that defines maturity.

Speaker 1: 1:48:48

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:48:49

I mean, stuff happens to us, of course, that we have no control over, but how do we choose to respond to what's happened to us?

Speaker 1: 1:48:56

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:48:57

That's what we have control over.

Speaker 1: 1:48:59

Yeah, so there's a big thing that I want to talk to you about. Tell me about the last leg of your career as a diplomat. What was that like? So, as I mentioned, I was talking about victims and perpetrators.

Speaker 2: 1:49:13

Yes, I was assigned to a Warsaw Poland I. This was I. You have mandatory retirement when you turn 65 and I turned 65. I was supposed to have left Warsaw in March of 2022. And they extended me administratively, so I ended up. My last date in Warsaw was July 30th And on February 24th, and I had my plan. I had all the places in Poland that we hadn't yet visited that we were going to visit, and I was going to. You know, just really enjoy this last chapter.

Speaker 1: 1:49:58

So were you thinking like oh you know, i'm at the last leg, i'm, you know, short on retirement, i'm just going to coast and this thing?

Speaker 2: 1:50:05

No, i never thought that, not for a minute Have you met me? But I knew what it was going to look like. I knew in my mind what it was going to look like. And then February 24th happened, and I remember sitting on the couch in my living room and I was crying because I never thought that I would see a war next door in my lifetime never And saying to God because I was tired. I was tired. I'm a really hard worker and I was tired and I worked really, really hard in Poland And I was ready to pull up roots and come back and reconnect with my family, my grandkids, my friends. And so February 24th takes place. I'm on the couch realizing what's happening, and I start crying.

Speaker 1: 1:51:00

So for people that don't have full context, what happened February 24th?

Speaker 2: 1:51:05

The invasion, russia invaded Ukraine once again, and so I'm crying and I'm talking to God and I'm saying I, god, i don't think that I can do this, because I knew once it started. I knew because I've been through traumatic scenarios happening before in Venezuela with flooding. I've lived, i was in Mexico when there was a massive earthquake. I know what happens in these scenarios And I've been in the embassy structure for 24 years, so I knew immediately what was going to happen within what's called the country team of the embassy, which is the ambassador at the helm. The ambassador is the direct connection to the president of the United States. He speaks for the president of the United States.

Speaker 2: 1:51:58

I knew that everyone on that country team was going to have their responsibility. So the military attache pretty obvious, what they're going to be doing, the public affairs people, pretty obviously, what they're going to be doing with messaging and the US position. So we all knew what was going to take place And I knew what our agency, the small team that I led, we were going to be responsible for connecting companies and people who wanted to make donations of humanitarian aid, whether it was to the refugees coming into Poland or directly to Ukraine. I knew instantly that that was going to be our role. What even ever gone into the embassy for our first big sit down? you guys are going to be doing this. I'll do this. I knew it.

Speaker 1: 1:52:47

So just in context, why is Poland positionally? what is Poland in that strategic kind of play, in that theater? What is Poland?

Speaker 2: 1:52:59

So if you look at a map and I highly encourage you all to do that look at the map and look at where Poland sits geographically. Poland is a member of the NATO. They are one of our strongest allies in the world, and this was true even before Russia invaded Ukraine. So I'll get into that in a little bit. But so I'm sitting on the couch with the realization of what is about to take place And I'm crying and I'm talking to God And I'm saying God, i don't think I can do this. And God's response was it wasn't a question.

Speaker 2: 1:53:50

Everything in my life led me to be in that position in time to be doing exactly what I was doing. And I'm not saying that I was irreplaceable. I'm not saying that all of this incredible stuff would have happened if I hadn't been in that position, but I knew that I was going to be facilitating some things, and I needed to put on my big girl pants and step into that leadership role and get my team to refocus everything that they've been doing some of them for 30 years, 30 plus years and learn how to ensure that the much needed supplies and donations got to their intended destination. And we did that every single day for weeks on end.

Speaker 1: 1:54:57

So the first wave was holy crap, this just happened. And the whole world's response is how can we help? And there wasn't infrastructure, there wasn't country team, there wasn't the military, there wasn't the UN, there was no one.

Speaker 2: 1:55:16

So there were certainly yes, parts of that are true. There were certain military, certainly military. The military infrastructure was incredible.

Speaker 1: 1:55:25

But at the beginning it was like who do we call?

Speaker 2: 1:55:28

I thought, when there was natural disaster or war broke out, i thought that there was just going to be this huge team of people that showed up from all these international relief organizations, But certainly there were some people on the ground that played absolutely critical rules that saved many, many, many, many lives.

Speaker 2: 1:55:54

But it takes time to mobilize the Red Cross at the United States, All of these organizations, global organizations. It takes time. What resource you don't want to just have thousands of people show up with. And I'll tell you that there was one instance early on of a medical donation that a company sent just an incredible, incredible, generous gift of $3 million of much needed medicine. There was no label on it, It was put on a plane that arrived.

Speaker 2: 1:56:38

It went away. It needed to be refrigerated, it went away. So that was new information to me, because the team we're like everybody's looking around going well, who's going to do this? And the Ukrainian embassy in Poland was a skeletal staff. I mean, they had no idea. So it was the honor of a lifetime to be in that role And I could talk about this for a long time, but I won't To see.

Speaker 2: 1:57:16

I think the thing that touched me the most out of all the things that I saw was the way that the Polish people opened their doors, their hearts, their homes to 4 million Ukrainian women and children, because 95% of the women streaming across the border, of the people streaming across the border, were women and children, because from 16 to 60, men weren't allowed because they needed them to fight the war. And if you're interested, poland's history is just absolutely fascinating The history between Ukraine and Poland. There was bad blood And it disappeared Overnight. It disappeared And certainly relief shelters were set up, but what Poles did was invite people into their home, strangers, for weeks on end. I didn't know anybody that wasn't in some way helping the Ukrainian refugees. I didn't know a single person, whether they had them living with them, whether they were sponsoring them to live in a hotel down the street, whether they were doing food drives or clothing whatever. People just changed overnight And Warsaw, the city that I lived in, you, within days, all of a sudden, you would see these people who kind of look like Poles, but they were Ukrainian women and children and they would be carrying their suitcases behind them And you could see from the time they first arrived until they had started becoming assimilated into the culture.

Speaker 2: 1:58:56

You would see these people, these women and the children, who were just shell-shocked because what they saw and, as the war grew on, what they lived was just undescribable. It was just undescribable in this day and age that this is taking place And it's taking place right next to Poland. And in the early stages it would read the news and there would be some oh this isn't really, and why is the? you and I'm like you have no idea what you're talking about. Read other news sources, because the news that you're reading could not.

Speaker 2: 1:59:35

I've seen it with my own eyes. This is the truth, and I was so. I mean, the outpouring of generosity from companies all over the world was incredible, but the outpouring from US companies and US individuals was just it leaves me speechless. What people were willing to do, it's just. I saw the face of evil. I was once at a conference in Romania and I saw the president of Russia walk down the hall and now I know what oozed from him is trauma. What I thought at the time it was evil. I now know it was trauma And I've also seen the goodness of people. I believe that people are good. They are inherently good. Some of them have had a lot of trauma layered on top of that goodness. But God created us and we are good. We are inherently good people.

Speaker 1: 2:00:38

Isn't there a story that I don't know if it's true, obviously you know he's an agent of, you know of, of he's a product of his environment, obviously. But you and I talked about this during this time that you know there's a story that he tells that the president tells that his you know that he was walking, that his father was on leave or something from the war the World War II, then Russia got, was just through 25 million Russians at the Nazis, basically And that he saw a pair of shoes and then he pulls his mother you know, it was a bear up, it was a pile of bodies. And he sees this pair of shoes that he recognizes and pulls his mother's body from a pile of bodies. Then she's still alive. He realizes that she's still alive And he nurses her back to life And then that's from what I don't know if he'd already been born or he had not been born. But and some people say it's not true- right.

Speaker 2: 2:01:45

Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 1: 2:01:46

Some people say it's not true and that's okay, you know, it's okay, whatever, like that's fine, right, but the narrative exists And I think in that story there's a profound truth and there's profound insight in that story is that, out of the rubble of pile of bodies, that, if you translate that and I'm not trying to, you know, psychologically, you know, cross examine this guy, but if you look at that story and if that story resonates and that if that's a narrative, maybe that's a narrative and his in his orbit, it really talks about the trauma of disaster, of what that was, really puts things into context and saying, if you're willing to nurse out of the rubbles of destruction your mother, the motherland, your country, whatever that is, you're willing to do whatever it takes, including becoming a perpetrator in somebody else's story.

Speaker 1: 2:02:46

So it's like I think there's these narratives that really put into context who we are and can really provide insight into the power of what stories and patterns are in our family or in our systems and our larger systems, and how we may be the victim in our story but then the perpetrator in somebody else's.

Speaker 2: 2:03:09

Wow, Yeah, isn't that a profound truth that's difficult for many people to accept? We are both.

Speaker 1: 2:03:17

We are both. Yeah. Well, I think we're going to leave it right there.

Speaker 2: 2:03:28

I can I just have to take a moment I'm going to try really hard not to cry Just tell you how incredibly proud I am of you And, wow, to see the healing that has taken place in you and your sister and your spouses and your families and your orbit, the people who, so many people that surround you. It is profoundly moving And just as I knew when I was sitting at that couch that everything in my life had brought me professionally speaking, had brought me to that place in time, everything in my life, personally speaking, has brought me to this place in time to be your mother and see the work that you and your sister have done, the profound ways that you are healing yourself and healing the world. I couldn't be more proud of you, thank you too,