S5 E8 Insights Into Authentic Weddings

Episode Summary

Weddings are more than just a celebration. They are markers of a profound life transition that affects not only the couple but also their families and community. Today we reflect on the full range of emotions that can accompany this pivotal rite of passage and learn how our guests made room for them in the wedding time.

Episode Resources

→ Authentic Weddings Episode Archive: https://ever-changing.net/authentic-weddings

→ The Conscious Bride: https://conscious-transitions.com/books/

→ Share Your Story: https://ever-changing.net/contact

Episodes by Topic

→ Episodes on Rites of Passage: https://ever-changing.net/rites-of-passage 

→ Episodes on Authentic Weddings: https://ever-changing.net/authentic-weddings 

→ Episodes on Grief & Loss: https://ever-changing.net/grief-loss 

→ Episodes on Challenging Times: https://ever-changing.net/challenging-times 

 

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About the Show

Shame Piñata is hosted by Ritual Artist Colleen Thomas, a Certified Meditation and Mindfulness teacher who helps people make sense of life through ceremony. Music by Terry Hughes.

 

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Full Transcript

Weddings are more than just a celebration. They are markers of a profound life transition that affects not only the couple but also their families and community. Today we reflect on the full range of emotions that can accompany this pivotal rite of passage and learn how our guests made room for them in the wedding time. 

This is Shame Piñata. I’m Colleen Thomas. Welcome to Shame Piñata, where we talk about creating rites of passage for real-life transitions. I’m happy you are here to join us for the second episode in a 4-part series in which we pause to reflect on the insights we’ve gained from our guests over our first five seasons. Last month we looked at Rites of Passage and today we focus on Authentic Weddings. 

There are so many ways a wedding can be authentic. It might defy familial tradition if the traditions don’t feel right for the couple. It might be an elopement instead of ceremony. It might be not inviting the extended family even though they invited you to their weddings. And it might be finding a way to throw a wedding within a reasonable budget even if that means having a cake and punch wedding on a Wednesday night (not that we know about that). The very act of dedicating time to sit down together and thoroughly figure out what is perfect for us, US, can be revolutionary. This event will create the container for the sacred ceremony in which you move from being single people to married or committed people, so let it be special. Let it be unique. Let it be truly you. Today we will hear stories of people creating authentic weddings by acknowledging the real feelings and transitions that come with a marriage. But first, let’s think about how to uncover what those might be. 

A great way of doing this is by being curious and asking questions, both individually and as a couple. And since you may still be figuring out who you will be as a team, what the essence of your committed partnership may look like, it’s worth taking some time to really sit with it and ask the tough, deep questions like: What do you really want out of the wedding day? And break it down: What do you want out of that day on a body level? What will your body need to be calm, to be regulated, to be invigorated, to feel strong, to feel pleasure. What do you want out of that day on the heart level? What will your heart need to be able to be fully open to this transition, to be fully open to connecting as deeply as you feel ready to with this other person? What aspects of the ceremony can you design to maximize a feeling of safety and intimacy with your partner? What do you want out of the day on a spiritual level? What markers or supports might your spiritual self be seeking during such an important moment of change? These are questions for both you and your partner (if they’re open to it) to consider separately, and then you might talk through them together and see where you overlap and where you don’t. And in this way you might begin to sketch out what each of you needs in order to build the ceremony of your dreams, a ceremony that fully welcomes both of you in an authentic way. 

Be warned though, that bringing in your partner to your dream event may not go as smoothly as you wish, because they are a separate person with their own needs and dreams, so there will be negotiating, and that’s not always easy, but it’s kind of where we’re headed in making a commitment to a new relationship, right? Speaking of commitment and partnership, I’d like to welcome my husband Rodrigo to join us for a few minutes. 

Thomas: Hey there, sweetie, how's it going? 

Torres: Good.

Thomas: I'm glad you're here. 

Torres: Me too.

Thomas: So I was wanting to ask you, I'd love to know what the biggest thing you got out of our wedding planning time was, and how that made the day more authentic for you. 

Torres: Thanks, that's a good question. Weddings were on my mind because we were having all the conversations and I just happened to be listening to a radio talk show. And a woman got asked what was the best advice that she had gotten for her wedding, and she said that it was to not manage anything on her wedding day, and that it had been really profound for her, because she had been able to just be present and experience it in a way that she wouldn't have if she she had been in charge of things. And so I thought that was a great idea. I also thought it'd be a hard idea for me, because I'm such a control freak around events and make wanting to make sure that they go perfectly. But I remember I brought it up to you and we both agreed to just letting go. And I also remember that we committed to it and then at the wedding, there was a sound system problem that happened and I wanted to just go fix it, basically. And I was like, "Okay, no, I committed to not do that", and it turned out fine. So I thought it was a really good decision that we made to just not be in charge, after making sure that our team was really prepared and they knew all the instructions, but we just were gonna, "Okay. We're gonna let go, and if something happens, it's just it's gonna happen. It'll be what it is, and we'll be present for it." So I was really happy about that. 

Thomas: I'm really glad that that you did that too. That really helps me to release and relax on the day and trust, which is so important. 

Torres: Yeah, that's great. And is there anything that you remember about our wedding planning conversations? 

Thomas: Well, I think mostly I'm really glad we took our time and we let things come together organically. I remember feeling frustrated at first because nothing was clicking. The ideas I liked didn't work for you and the ones you had didn't work for me. And I thought because we got along so well and we love each other, it would be easy to get on the same page about what we wanted for our wedding, but because it was such an important event, neither one of us wanted to just agree to whatever. We didn't want to compromise. We wanted to feel 100% right about it. So it took some time, and we were stuck for a long time, but then one night, the magic happened. And we randomly attended a community event we used to both love and we realized that was what we wanted for our wedding. 

[MUSIC]

Thomas: After the break, we’ll hear from several Shame Piñata guests who created authentic weddings by acknowledging the real feelings and transitions that come with a marriage.

Season one of Shame Piñata focused on creating authentic weddings. Writer Tria Wen was one of our earliest guests. When we met her, she was preparing for her second wedding. As a former wedding planner, she had a lot of ideas to draw from as well as some things from her first wedding she wanted to let go of. She spent a great deal of intentional time with her fiancé feeling into how they could best create the event that felt truly right for them. 

Wen: So I had the advantage of expertise and of seeing many different kinds of weddings and in thinking about what really mattered. And I talk to my fiancé about it and luckily for me he’s really interested in exploring those things as well and questioning why do we do certain things and do we need to do those things. So for example, walking down the aisle is kind of a given. And having your father, as a bride, give you away it’s kind of a given for most people. The default is to have the groom already there at the end of the aisle waiting for you and then to have your father walk you down the aisle and essentially give you away, give responsibility to your husband of you. At this point in my life and 35. I’ve lived across the country for my father for over a dozen years now. So the symbolism doesn’t quite make sense of him giving me away to someone else. And for my partner and I, it was also important for us to realize that this is a phase of our life that we’re going on together. It’s not him standing there waiting for me to join him and get on his journey. It’s really going on something together. So, one, we don’t have an aisle, we’re not getting married in a church, but we plan to just show up to our guests together at the same time.

Thomas: That’s, that’s a nice example of how you’re reclaiming the tradition and make it your own.

Chang: Yeah, and there are so many things that we do so automatically I think, without questioning or wondering about them and it was important for us to really pair down things and think, you know, do we even need this or that? Or, can we do this in a different way? How can we do something that has meaning in every step of it for us? 

Wedding Therapist Landis Bejar also joined in season 1. She reminded us that amidst the many wedding details, the event is essentially a life transition. 

Bejar: With any sort of marker of time or what I call in my work, life transition, all kinds of stress comes up because as we mark time, and as we move from one life state to another through a life transition, we ostensibly are grieving the previous state in order to make space for the new state. And that can be challenging both for the person who's moving through it and the people surrounding that person. So if we remove ourselves from the wedding example, we have like a mom sending her five-year-old to kindergarten, a mom might cry. And it's not because she doesn't she's not happy that her child is ready for the next step in their life that she might be grieving those toddler years or those years where she spent more time with the child and now is kind of watching them gain their independence and moving into this next state. And same reason why we cry at graduations, you know, and you know all of those things, so that comes up during weddings as well. And the other thing that I would say is that like, there's a lot of pressure for this to be the happiest day of your life. And so when you have all of these other sort of variables coming up that would naturally challenge our emotions and psychological states and family dynamics, the first sign of distress feels really upsetting and maybe extra upsetting because of the pressure that we're all supposed to be so happy. And I think that that kind of creates a little bit of a pressure cooker for some of these things to come out in really aggressive ways that we're not expecting.

This is something that Tria experienced as well. 

Wen: …There  is a lot going on in the wedding day, and that you're supposed to pack all of these things in, and you're supposed to be thrilled about it the whole time. [LAUGHS] And everyone is really supposed to be on their best behavior, and it doesn't usually turn out that way.

Thomas: Right. And we've had quite a few conversations about the other feelings, the feelings that are harder maybe, the feelings that don't fit in the pretty package, the feelings that we're not allowed to have at a wedding, they get discouraged, and maybe the even the unconscious losses that folks aren't even aware that they're feeling. What tensions have you seen come up at weddings?

Wen: Yeah, there have been a lot of tensions that come up, I think the most common one I've seen is usually between the couple and their parents. So sometimes there are mothers of the bride who are feeling protective, or like they don't really want to let go. So they start trying to control small things like the way the bride is getting her makeup done, or trying to change menu items last minute.  It can really come out in ways that seem unrelated, but are just things that catch their attention and show them a way of having more control in that moment.I also had a client who…  they were a slightly older couple and so they didn't have their parents involved in the planning at all. And when the mother of the groom showed up to the ceremony site, which was an art gallery, she was furious. She just hated the venue. She thought it was so ugly and she told me, “These pictures on the wall, they're awful. They have to go. There aren't enough flowers!” And, you know, in an art gallery you can't change the display. It's off limits. We did end up moving some flowers around for her. And she didn't like the concrete floor which was part of the modernist look. But I talked to the bride and groom and told them I think it would really help her if she could have some say. And so they were comfortable with us putting down an aisle runner, so at least having something cloth for them to walk down - for whatever reason that became important to her in that moment.

It’s so common for these kinds of unconscious feelings to make an appearance around the time of the ceremony because the transition doesn’t only affect the couple in question. As humans we have attachments, relationships, and connections that are affected as we change. So if you’re my best friend, or my sister, or my mom, and I get married, it will have some effect on you. Because we’re connected energetically, you’re involved in my change at some level. And this change might bring up feelings for you. You might be scared you won’t see me as much. You might not like my new partner. You might feel I’m abandoning you in some way. And this is where the confusing part comes in. Because all of this has a good chance of being unconscious. Especially since we’re told that weddings are good things and we should focus on the couple in question and make it all about them. So you might have no idea why you feel totally wedding avoidant, or suddenly really busy, or any number of other feelings you can’t explain, like that mother in the art gallery.

Authentic weddings begin with understanding there is nothing wrong with what we are feeling. Everything we are feeling, even the hard parts, is “normal and necessary,” in the words of our next guest Sheryl Paul. Sheryl was also a season 1 guest as well. She is the author of “The Conscious Bride”, a book recommended to me during my wedding planning time and now one that I highly recommend to others (link in the show notes). I love “The Conscious Bride” because it gave me permission as a bride-to-be to feel all the things, especially as I considered my relationship to my future self, who I would be as a married person, what that would feel like.

Paul: When you are in transition, you are in a death experience, you are in a liminal zone, you are between identities, you are letting go, you are grieving. And we only expect people to feel joyful. It creates a lot of anxiety and it creates even more chaos than there naturally would be around an event like this. Because I'm feeling sad, because I have a sense of loss, because I feel like a part of me is dying, because I'm not over-the-moon ecstatic... something must be wrong with me, or with my partner, or with the decision to get married - something's wrong. And it's an incredibly deep sigh of relief to the soul to know that nothing is wrong. In fact, the more you let those difficult feelings in, the more you will open to the joy; that the pain and the grief and the discomfort and vulnerability are the doorways into the joy, into what we are expected to see all and into what we hope to feel. And what I started to say earlier was that that the wedding more than any other transition, I think, has (probably being pregnant or becoming a mother comes close) carries a very strong cultural expectation of unilateral joy and it is supported in a big way by the wedding industry that sells perfection and sells joy. So it's a it's very big money behind selling us the bill of goods by selling us this message that you are supposed to be joyful and the way to do that is to create a perfect event.

Thomas: How do you work with someone if they're just starting to realize that they don't have to only feel joyful?

Paul: So, I tell them to read my book. And, you know, it's really the first part it's about re-educating people to understand all of the normal and necessary feelings that accompany this transition. And once they understand that everything they're feeling is normal and necessary, they can start to let it in and and feel it, feel the grief, feel the loss, feel the vulnerability, feel the loneliness. These are all normal feelings that accompany transitions. So once we give ourselves permission to feel without that overlay of "because I'm feeling this it means there's something wrong" everything changes from there. We don't then have to misassign meaning to the feelings and to think, "Because I'm feeling sad, it means I'm making mistake." No, it has nothing to do with that. You're feeling sad because you are in a rite of passage. You're feeling sad because you are in the death experience, letting go of this identity, this primary identity as a single person, as daughter, and shifting into an entirely new stage of life, a new identity. And there is no way to go through that without feeling grief.

So how do we go about having some of these spiritual conversations ahead of time? How can we acknowledge the changes that will be happening with ourselves and our family and friends? One option is to feel our feelings. 

Paul: If the bride is very close to her father, that's one set of emotions and experiences where there is tends to be a lot of grief, a lot of crying, really good, medicinal, necessary crying to make that separation process... and to make it more effective to make it more complete to make it more conscious. Again, in the naming, to say, I am separating from my dad, I am no longer going to be... Yes, I'm his daughter, but not in the same way, not as my primary identity. That my new partner is going to be number one and I'm transferring allegiance. 

Another option is to create a ritual. Not the ritual of the wedding, but a separate, earlier ritual. A special time with another person. It doesn’t have to be involved or complicated, or even take a lot of planning. Just some thought about the changes that are happening and how we want to observe them.  Spiritual director Jeanne and her son Astro have a lovely story of leaning in and co-creating a simple but powerful ritual to address some of the feelings that were bubbling up.

Astro: We live on this beautiful lake, and this is, this is already kind of a ceremonial place for us, like it's very spiritual and profound place for our family. Yeah. It’s a really special place. So we knew this would be the ritual spot, the lake, and it was like a beautiful summer time and we just hopped in a small fishing boat and we went out to the middle lake. 

Jeanne: And Patrick had been a tennis player, so he had a lot of trophies, and I was trying to figure out where to put these trophies. So when he talked about it'd be nice if we had some object or something to release, and I thought, HA-HA [LAUGHS]

Astro: That's so funny, because I feel like I also… I had the same idea at the same time!

Jeanne: They are something that was part of my watching him and his being in that sport. And so we decided, I'm not sure how many? Probably at least three, I think probably four… we took out with us in the boat, and then we decided, well, we're in the boat. How, how would we work this? Well, how about we pick one up, and then we talk about starting with early on in life…

Astro: I think you it's pretty much you doing it like you just kind of took it and you held it and you were present with it, and just sort of spoke to like…  my like, your journey, like a baby and a toddler, and what that was like for you. And I remember, like, some lot of tears, like there was emotion, you know..

Jeanne: It was a sacred moment, and it's like 600 feet deep at that point. There's a lot of stuff in this, like people you know, buried with their ashes. Yeah, we've had friends who put their their ashes, and we've had a ceremony of ritual with them in the boat. 

Thomas: And yet, this was a different kind of letting go. This is letting go of a past life, quote unquote, of somebody who's still alive, who's transitioning and letting go of the past relationship. It was kind of a rebirthing of your relationship.

Astro: Totally, totally. And I think that's kind of what it felt like to me, is she's announcing that…  she's like, to me, it's like she's saying this trophy is Patrick as a toddler, and letting it go. It's like, kind of like a death and the same thing with, like, whatever the next trophy represented, sort of like the adolescence and letting go of that, and when all that was let go, it was definitely a rebirth. 

In addition to developing a new relationship to our future self, and to the folks that make up our community, as we approach the wedding or commitment ceremony, we will also be preparing to develop a new relationship with our partner. Nick Venegoni and his husband Thom shared a story from their own ceremony where the officiant created a memorable moment that, like Sheryl Paul said “embodies what's happening”, that acknowledges the transition the wedding couple will be experiencing in their new life. Here’s the story.  

Thom: Right after we had our hands fasted, the priestess of ceremonies, Jenya, she had found like four plants in the group that she went to beforehand and was like, "Okay, there's a part of the ritual when this happens, I'm going to you and you need to do this." So they were going to call to us, and we had to then... but they were calling to us from like four different parts of the circle at one time. So obviously, if we're tied together, we can't just tear off willy-nilly. We have to figure out: What are we doing? What's our priority? Who... what direction are we going to go together? And it was like a challenge for us, like a spiritual challenge in the midst of the ceremony that was like an energetic template for what it's like to be married, you know, where it's like, "Oh, if we're going to... we're tied together, we have to kind of figure out like, when do we go in your direction? And when do we go my direction when there's not agreement" you know? So it was this funny moment. We were both like, like... a cartoonish moment where we just sort of took off, like, like... "I'm going this way," "I'm going that way," like, "Oh, wait, we're like, tied together. What are you going to do, tear my arm off?" You know, like, like a rubber band kind of thing where we sort of like popped away from each other and then sort of snapped back and kind of bonked heads. And you know... And then we had to sit and have a conversation in front of everybody... a quiet... they couldn't really hear what we were saying. We're like, "What do we... what do we do? Which way do we go?

Venegoni: "Where do you wanna go? Where do I wanna go?"

Thom: And so then we just made a decision and walked towards somebody. And everybody was like, "Yay, they figured out their first challenge as a married couple!" Because we've been together for like, 12 years already, you know? 

Venegoni: No, it was… nine years. 

Thom: Nine years. So that was like, another way that the... our community was witnessing us behaving as a married couple and we were like normalizing. Like, yes. See, we're married. And this is what married people do. We're just… it's just like every other marriage where you have to figure it out. And this is not any different. And we just got, like, 200 people in one moment to go, "That's a marriage!"

[MUSIC] 

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We’ve established that the day of the wedding marks a big transition, and as such, it can be an extra challenging day to face when someone we love won’t be there with us. Acute losses like death can be particularly challenging to weave into wedding planning and at the same time, acutely wonderful and necessary to weave in. Here’s Tria Wen again:

Wen: With acute losses, or grief in general, that can be a really difficult thing to handle at a wedding because, as we talked about, a wedding is supposed to be all joy and it feels scary to invite something in that will bring you grief and sadness. But sometimes people are important to us and when they're not there, to kind of brush it under the rug, it doesn't really feel real. So I think, in some ways, it could be interesting to expand what happens at a wedding to include some of the things that happen at a memorial or a grief ritual. So we can look to other cultures, for example, like the Day of the Dead. You know, they have these beautiful altars and flowers and favorite foods of that loved one, and they really presence them. 

At my little wedding ceremony, we are having our... instead of place cards with people's names, we're writing cards to everyone with our heartfelt sentiments to them and we're writing them on watercolor painted envelopes and cards. And my mom was a watercolor artist and a lot of weekends, we would spend painting big sheets of watercolor together and then cutting out envelopes. And in those days, people used to mail each other letters often. So we would use those envelopes. So I had my fiancé make these envelopes with me and I really felt her there with me. And he's never met my mom so it was a great way for me to introduce her to him and show him this is how I would spend my weekends with my mom. And I know that having those envelopes there on the day, it's small, it's not going to be very distracting for people who didn't know her. But I will make a mention of the meaning that they have to me. And I think I'll feel her there more in that way.

As I’m sure you’ve gathered by now, I don’t think a wedding needs to be traditional. And I would go a step further to  say that we can transmute the power of a wedding ritual and have a wedding-like ritual that isn’t exactly a wedding.

This was the case with our guest Betsy and her partner Brandon. When Betsy learned that her 

mother had six months to live, she was spurred to create a ceremony that celebrated both of the loves in her life: her mother and her partner, with a beautiful gathering called a Celebration of Love and Family.

Weiss: When I was in college actually, my mom had gotten sick. She had stage one breast cancer but had gotten better. And then a couple years later, it came back a stage four breast cancer and she had really good results through chemo, but in a moment when she was actually doing a lot better, I was in the car with Brandon, we were on the way to see his family. And I was sitting there and thinking, I want to have a ceremony with you. I want to do something with my mom, before she dies, like if something were to happen. And at the time, we're thinking she had 10-20 years. We thought, you know, she was recovering really well. But I just said, like, I want to do this. I want to recognize our relationship with my mom. And he said, yeah, okay.

So we did need to figure out sort of what the day would look like. And we decided that we wanted to have sort of this simple ceremony in a park close to my house

We hired a photographer, which is something I'm so grateful for it because now as I look back, and remember my mother, I have these really wonderful pictures from our celebration. 

You can hear Betsy and Brandon’s full story on the season 1 episode called, “I Want to Have a Ceremony with You”. It’s one of my favorite episodes and I highly recommend it to anyone planning a wedding or a non-wedding. 

One of the more unusual ways but wonderful ways to get committed to someone is to get committed to yourself. This is something you can do instead of committing to someone else, in addition to committing to someone else. Self-commitment, or self-marriage, can feel lots of different ways and be done for lots of different reasons, but I tend to think of it as a way to come home to yourself. To say, “I’ve got my own back. Regardless of what happens in life, I’m on my side.” You might be wondering what would lead someone to decide to marry themself. Here’s a great story from ritualist Betty Ray.

Ray: On New Year's Eve 1999, I had bought this ring that had the drama faces on it, you know, the tragedy and the comedy. And I had this idea to go up to the top of Bernal Hill with my ring... and I brought my checkbook and a candle. So I got up to the top of Bernal Hill and I wrote myself a check to myself and I wrote a check to him. And I lit the candle and I burned the check to him, and "I'm not going to spend any more time on you, dude." And the check to myself, I folded and I put it like near my heart... I guess I was wearing... I put it in my bra, frankly. And then I took the ring and I made a statement. I made a statement as San Francisco was my witness as I was up on the top of Bernal Hill and it's kind of this cloudy, foggy you know gross San Francisco winter day at the winding down of this millennia, you know, and so I had this sort of weight, this gravitas of the sense of this millennia is ending and I'm committing to myself for the new millennia to not get into drama with men anymore. And I said that I will now... I now am committed to myself and I'm marrying my own drama so that I don't need to marry it externally. I don't need to bring my drama... I don't need to create it externally and I certainly don't want to be engaged in a relationship with it anymore. I don't want to do that. That's done, adios. 

Betty used this wonderful and spontaneous ceremony to redefine herself in response to the breakup and also to forward her own desire to change her pattern around men. I had a totally different kind of self-commitment ceremony, and I chose to have mine right before I married Rodrigo. My intention was to release the idea in my head that a man could save me and instead to remind myself that I am my own strongest partner. You might wonder how self-marriage mixes with being married or committed to another person. Here’s how Betty described it. 

Ray: Being married and committed to myself makes me a way better committed partner in reality because being committed to myself, in the way in which I'm committed to myself, means I'm more authentically myself and I'm not... I don't hand over core parts of myself for my need for approval, or my need for someone to tell me what to do, or my need to be in control, whatever those needs are, like I'm a much more whole partner as a result. So it actually made me a much better partner. 

And I think we all want to be that better partner and show up with as much love and integrity as we can in our relationship. 

So this is the moment when I say: No matter where you are on the wedding planning journey, you’re in the right place. You are doing great. Everything will be okay. Trust yourself. Listen deeply to yourself and to your partner. 

And I would also say: See what you can do to move into a deeper, more authentic mode of wedding planning. And pay special attention to the things that will be most likely to support you on the day itself. You might assign someone to be with/support/manage your parents on the event day. You might dedicate a set amount of time to be one on one with your partner right before or right after the ceremony and make sure nothing gets in the way of that happening. You know you and you know your stresses and you know what you need. So think big. Ask for what you want. And be true to yourself. 

We look forward to sharing more stories of authentic weddings with you in upcoming episodes. We might even be able to feature your story if you have one to tell. If you do, you can reach us through shamepinata dot com. You can hear more from each of the guests you heard from today in our archive. Check the show notes for a link to our collection of episodes on Authentic Weddings. And join us for the two remaining episodes in this series where we reflect on the wisdom we have learned from our guests around Grief and Loss and also Challenging Times. Those episodes will be out when we return in February for Season 6. 

Our music is by Terry Hughes. Find us on YouTube, IG and X at shamepinata. Reach us through our website, shamepinata dot com. And subscribe to the show on your favorite player. Also be sure to check out “Everyday Magic for Ukraine”, our ongoing series of 10-minute meditations that support you as you support Ukraine. I’m Colleen Thomas. Thanks for listening.

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