Exploring Mayan Rainforest Remedies, Abdominal Massage, and Ancient Healing Wisdom with Herbalist Rosita Arvigo

Get ready for an enlightening journey with the globally acclaimed herbalist, napropathic doctor, and prolific author, Rosita Arvigo. Prepare to be entranced by her rich experiences and profound wisdom as we navigate the power of Mayan rainforest remedies and the ancient practice of abdominal massage that has proven to be a game changer in restoring hormonal and digestive balance and emotional healing. Sit back as we delve into Rosita's intriguing tales of 13 years of study with a Mayan shaman and 10 years with a Belizean midwife, her encounters with possession and healing, and her profound understanding of human-plant communication.

No journey with Rosita would be complete without touching upon her colossal impact on education and the preservation of traditional healing knowledge, especially in Belize. Stoke your curiosity as we discuss her innovative Children's Summer Bush Medicine Camp, her groundbreaking primary school teacher program, and her tireless efforts to ensure traditional healing wisdom is safeguarded from being extinguished.

What makes this conversation with Rosita absolutely fascinating is her extraordinary life journey, from her early adventures in Mexico and Belize to her deep appreciation for nature's healing power stemming from her Italian-Iranian heritage. Her vast knowledge is truly a treasure trove for anyone interested in holistic health, herbal medicine, and the preservation of ancient healing wisdom. So, join us on this remarkable journey with Rosita Arvigo and prepare to be amazed!

Websites:
https://www.rositaarvigo.com
https://www.abdominalterapycollective.com
https://www.nybg.org/science-project/belize-ethnobotany-project/
https://belize.com/ixchel/
https://landfoodlife.com

Books:
Sastun: My Apprenticeship with a Mayan Healer
Rainforest Remedies: 100 Healing Herbs of Belize

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:02

Welcome to the Land Food Life Podcast. I'm your host, kara Kroger. In each episode, I'm dedicated to enlightening you with invaluable insights on how we can heal the land, our ecosystems and improve our overall health and well-being. My goal is to raise your awareness about caring for nature as a whole and the life-giving breathing soil beneath your feet, help you understand the origins and medicinal value of your food and embrace the interconnectedness of everything that surrounds you. With 25 years of combined experience, studying and coaching in regenerative agriculture, natural medicine, nutrition, cooking, mindfulness and cultivating abundance, I am thrilled to share the life-changing tools I've learned. By implementing these practices, you'll experience a regulated nervous system, a nourished body, ready to pursue your dreams with energy and vigor, the ability to collaborate with nature and a renewed sense of hope and purpose. I am so grateful to have you here today. If you like what you hear, please rate, review and help me spread this information to as many people as possible. Let's get started. Hola, amigos, welcome.

Speaker 1: 1:20

I am here with Rosita Arvigo, a world-renowned herbalist and napropathic doctor, as well as an accomplished author of 11 books, and she is an inspiring teacher to so many healers and patients across the world, myself included. In fact, it was Rosita's inspiration that set me on the path to becoming an herbalist and nutritionist. And this occurred because I went to Belize at the young age of 18 to celebrate graduating from high school, and I encountered two of her books, sat Stoon and 101 Rainforest Remedies, which set me on the path to learning more about herbalism and nutrition and really changed the course of my life. It inspired me to return to Central America and study with a number of different native plant healers there, and I did that numerous times, as well as studying herbalism in the US. And I really feel super lucky that I encountered her early on in life, because her work is profoundly deep and it really gave me permission to think and feel deeply about health and healing and, specifically, to think beyond the realms that allopathic medicine focuses on in our Western civilization. So Rosita really embodies a truly holistic approach to healing and it takes into consideration the physical body, the social dynamics, the environment of place, as well as internal environment of the body and, most importantly, spiritual components.

Speaker 1: 3:03

And so today, rosita and I are going to be discussing her lifelong journey of coming to know and understand the power of traditional Mayan rainforest remedies and abdominal Mayan massage. Additionally, really early on Rosita realized the need to preserve this knowledge of the different healers that she was learning with, and so she made it her mission to work with different organizations in order to do this, and if you're interested in learning more about this work, you can go to her website, rositaarvigocom, to learn about the work that she did with the Institute of Economic Botany of the New York Botanical Garden, as well as the National Cancer Institute, the Belize Ethnobotany Project and the Excal Tropical Research Foundation, and at her website, you can also learn more about studying or working with her as well. I really couldn't be more excited to have this interview. I really have been so inspired by Rosita, and I think you will be too, so let's go ahead and hear from the woman herself.

Speaker 1: 4:16

All right, rosita? Well, let's go ahead and get started today. I'd like to start out by just kind of going back to the beginning and learning a little bit more about what were some of the influences in your childhood or upbringing that were indicative of the life you went on to lead in Belize and Mexico and beyond.

Speaker 2: 4:38

Well, I think you hear a lot of career herbalists talk about family members. I'm a daughter of immigrants. My mother came from Iran, my father came from Italy and I remember my father's mother, my Italian grandmother, taking me on a streetcar to the end of the line where we would get off and find some country road and then go collect dandelion greens and burdock stems and different wild plants. Some of the docks she also liked to cook with yellow dock burdock and then the dandelion. I had a basket. She had a basket, and I think I was only about five years old and my Assyrian grandmother from Iran only used household remedies.

Speaker 2: 5:32

I wouldn't say that she was a herbalist per se, but she used a lot of her kitchen spices, a lot of salt and water to heal wounds. So that was always an integral part of my childhood because of being a child of immigrants. I think that's where it all started, and my mother said that from the age of four I was always looking for plants with aromas or with taste Like can I eat this, can I eat that? And she said that my very first game that she remembers was lining up my dollies in hospital beds and then making peppermint pills with mud and a patch of wild peppermint left over from Native Americans in our backyard in Chicago. I made these peppermint mud pills and stuffed them into my dollies mouth in my hospital ward under the oak tree. Yeah, it goes way back, as many career herbalists tell the same story, and that's mine.

Speaker 1: 6:39

Yeah, I have a very similar story. I would go out into the front yard and I'd collect leaves and then I'd go inside and I'd mix them with baking powder and make a haltus and then heal the trees where the trees had wounds. It comes up very young, in age, right, there's indicators Beautiful. Additionally. You kind of left the United States and went to Mexico. How old were you when you left the US?

Speaker 2: 7:07

I think I was about 40, because it was the Vietnam War. My boyfriend at the time was a draft resistor and one day he said if we don't get out of this country, I'll be dead or in jail. In two years we actually left from a San Francisco commune. We were members of the famous and infamous Black Bear Ranch up in Saskia County of California, and so I was a member of that commune for a couple of years or I was the school teacher and then we went to San Francisco and from San Francisco we took a bus to Mexico and we didn't get off the bus until we got to Guerrero. That's where I lived and learned Spanish and began my career working with traditional healers and herbalists from local communities in and around Guerrero.

Speaker 1: 8:04

Okay, yeah, actually these earrings that I have on are from near there. Oh yes, the Weecho from the Weecho Tribe, yeah, Beautiful, Okay. And from there you had some very pivotal experiences that really moved you in the direction of wanting to learn more. So I know on your website you tell a story of helping one of the women in your village deliver a baby and that was one of the very first kind of big experiences that you had that turned you on to wanting to learn more. You want to share a little bit about that experience.

Speaker 2: 8:39

Yeah, sure, I mean. That occurred over a weekend when there was a big festival in town. Now we at the time where we were living in Mexico, it was a 14-hour walk to a small town. That was an 18-hour bus ride from the highway. So we used to say you couldn't possibly get any further away. If you were trying to get any further away from civilization, you'd have to be going back in. So I didn't feel like going to this festival, I didn't feel like walking 14 hours, so I stayed home.

Speaker 2: 9:17

This was a village of 50 people and the only other person was Don Yorita, who was in her 80s and quite infirm, and then Margarita, who was about 40 weeks pregnant. So in the middle of the night Don Yorita comes banging on my door to come and help her deliver Margarita's baby. Now Don Yorita was arthritic, so she was not even able to stand in the middle of the night when it's cold and damp up in the mountains of Guerrero, she came on her hands and knees to get me across the road. I followed her and I was reluctant and I said Don Yorita, I can't. I've never done this. I don't know what to do. You'll have two patients. I might faint at the sight of blood and if you've been to Mexico, so you know the look that Mexican women give you, and that look is where have you been all your life? Did you learn nothing from your mother? Didn't your aunties teach you anything? She said, rosita, get up, get dressed and move Order. With those orders, I was mobilized and I followed behind her and there was Margarita lying on a bed. That was an old door and the mattress was a big bag of rags.

Speaker 2: 10:38

And within five hours, rita and I delivered her fifth baby, a little boy. Her husband and the other four children had all gone to town for the fiesta and then I'm holding this little baby and I think, oh, this was so easy. What was I afraid of? This is beautiful. I wanted to be a midwife. And then Don your Rita said put that baby down, we've got trouble here, there's too much bleeding. Give me that baby. Go outside with this pitch, a torch, a piece of pine from these heart of a pine tree. You light it on the stove and that's your flashlight. Go outside and bring me nine roses, red roses and six inches of the stem and leaves and thorns. All together, nine of those gave me a little hand woven sack.

Speaker 2: 11:31

I went outside to collect the roses and in the meantime she had put on one liter of water to boil over the open hearse clay stove. She dumped all the roses, all the leaves and stems into that leader boiled for about five minutes and in the meantime she had tied Margarita's ankles around with an old piece of cloth and tied them to the rafter so that her legs were at about a pretty sharp angle so that her body was up. The blood would not be running down so easily. She told me to take the rose tea and I had to put it into two gourd bowls, stand in the doorway of the kitchen where the night breeze was blowing and cool the tea. And this was really key and it shows us the incredible intuitive intelligence and wisdom of unschooled traditional healers. Don Yurita said the rose tea had to be cool, it would not work hot. And so we spoon that tea into Margarita's mouth and I watched with the little clock on the bedstead and it was eight minutes to when that dripping Now this was not hemorrhaging, this was excessive bleeding and in eight minutes that dripping stopped and we brought her legs down and she had a normal flow, not an excessively troublesome flow.

Speaker 2: 13:05

I'd spent 10 years trying to figure out. I was beyond fascinated, I was enthralled and I knew this was going to be my life's work of healing with plants. But why did the roses have to be chilled? And what was it in the roses that saved the woman's life that night? But it took 10 years. I had to study anatomy, physiology, chemistry, biochemistry and herbology to find out that roses contain tannic acid and gallotanic acid. When the tea is cooled, it is contracting. If it's hot, it's expanding, as is a physical law of the universe. I utterly fascinated that night and that was again one of the major experiences of my life and why I decided to work with herbal remedies, specifically with women. My focus has always been women and children. I treat men occasionally, of course, but my primary professional focus has been on women and children, and especially women during the reproductive years.

Speaker 1: 14:14

I know that you also did an apprenticeship which I didn't really mention in your bio with a woman named Hortense Robinson. Is that?

Speaker 2: 14:24

correct, that's correct, ms Hortense. I studied with her for about 10 years. She was a herbal midwife and, just like Don Eligio, never went to school, could not read or write. Yet she and he were both intuitive geniuses. They know things nobody could teach them and things that they really can't teach another person, just because they are unschooled geniuses. And when the genius sets his or her mind on one single aspect of life, like healing, well, wondrous things happen, and those of us who are lucky enough to be able to learn from them gain a great deal of this intuitive wisdom by osmosis. Studying with Hortense and Don Eligio was kind of like trying to catch feathers blowing in the wind yes, chasing after them, and because they were never rigid, often they would give you two different stories about the same experience or different ways to prepare the same tea for the same ailment. That's why it was like feathers in the wind. 13 years with Don Eligio, 10 years with Ms Hortense. I certainly gleaned a lot, I bet.

Speaker 1: 15:48

I can only imagine you said that you have focused mostly on women and children. Now, when you were apprenticing with Don Elijo, did you also have that focus, or was that a little bit more broad and then you brought it into treating women and children more as you developed your own methods after apprenticeship?

Speaker 2: 16:10

Don Elijo was a family practitioner. We saw men, women and children. I saw men, women and children when I was with him as his apprentice. My own practice I started before I met Don Elijo, but after I met Don Elijo and Hortense and they taught me that abdominal therapy that is so specific for digestion and reproduction and when I realized how much it could help women with chronic menstrual disorders, painful periods, irregular periods and fertility challenges, it was just kind of a natural step and I was in practice with my husband in Central America. Women prefer to be treated by women because it's very intimate when you're doing body work on a person, and men prefer to be treated by men. Also, most of our clientele were German menonites from a local community nearby and I found that the German farmers were much heavier than my hands could manipulate. It was just a natural progression that I took care of women and children. He took care of men and sometimes boys.

Speaker 1: 17:24

That makes sense.

Speaker 2: 17:25

But primarily also because I was so incredibly impressed with how women's health in general improved from that Maya abdominal therapy. It's really been the cornerstone of my career.

Speaker 1: 17:38

Yes, and can you tell us a little bit more about what exactly that entails, so that people who are not familiar can get an idea?

Speaker 2: 17:46

Well, I think one of the most astounding developments of what Don Elicio and Hortense taught me is that watching their gnarled, scarred hands massage the abdomen from above and then from below, and then making circles all around, I realized we should be able to do this for ourselves. And for instance, look at a situation of women's uterus. It is held in the pelvic bowl by 14 different ligaments. All ligaments can become overstretched or too tight, just like any other ligament in your body. And when women work hard at manual labor like, for instance, lifting boxes onto shelves, working in grocery stores, people who do horseback riding, acrobats, ballerinas where there is a potential of high impact or when women have several or even one bad fall, those uterine ligaments become damaged and the uterus has the potential of sinking into the vagina. Or it goes backward against the bowel, or it could go left or right. Many of those malpositions creates pathology. So primarily, that's what the lower part of the abdominal therapy addresses, also helps men with prostate issues, but my focus was on returning the uterus to maximum position. Therefore, it's getting the absolute 100% of its arterial supply venous drainage, lymph going in, lymph coming out, and then the nerve supply, which is key, of course, and then the cheek. All of that is restored and the body is restored to normalcy because we have a system called homeostasis, a balance within. But balance within relies on hemodynamics, or the unobstructed free flow of fluid, especially blood, within the body. Using that and realizing that this 5,000 year old simple massage technique could address those situations where hemodynamics is not in proper state of flow.

Speaker 2: 20:10

And then for digestion, there is nothing like a good abdominal massage for chronic digestive problems. People who say I eat a little bit and I am full. Everything I eat upsets my stomach. I go from diarrhea to constipation. All of those common chronic digestive issues are greatly helped by the abdominal massage, and emotional issues as well, because it's the solar plexus and the ground chakra, the root chakra, where we work, and in the solar plexus, just under the sternum, everybody stores their unresolved negative emotions, even babies. It's all stored there in the solar plexus. So we find sometimes that it's really tight and dense tissue and that of course, is then also putting a squeeze on the arterial flow, giving life force to all the abdominal organs and tissues and muscles. That's kind of it in a nutshell. Absolutely.

Speaker 1: 21:16

And that really makes me think of when we're dealing with all the things that are in our diet in this day and age. Unfortunately, it's very difficult to eat very clean foods, no matter how hard we try. We're taking in different chemicals and even if it's just pesticides and herbicides used on a food. Without that flow, we can't detox as easily as well. While you might have these structural things going on, it's also a matter of being able to cleanse from the foods that you're eating in the moment.

Speaker 2: 21:48

So the body is set up to do that Absolutely, and the liver is overwhelmed. So if we're able to, in the abdominal massage we massage over the liver, the spleen, the pancreas, all the small intestine, large intestine, all of the abdominal organs. We all know the benefits of massage, externally and internally as well, the benefits are maximum.

Speaker 1: 22:13

Absolutely, and there's so few practitioners who do abdominal massage not even the traditional Mayan way, but just abdominal massage in general is kind of rare when you go to a massage therapist. So you said that it is a 5,000-year-old tradition. It's something that was new to me when I was studying in Belize, and I haven't even heard that many other traditions talk about it. Can you tell me a little bit about what you know about its inception and how it got passed on? How was it taught to you?

Speaker 2: 22:51

Well, I can't really tell you about its inception. It was 5,000 years ago. I mean, I know simply that people figured it out thousands of years ago. How they figured it out? They're intuitive geniuses and one person in one generation in one village is dedicated to healing. They will find these things out and spirit helps. The lady who has the desire in their hearts to heal and to help other people have a spirit guide. That spirit guide will guide you and it will bring dream visions, like in Don Adliccio's life and Miss Hortense's life. A lot of their training came in dream visions. For Don Adliccio they would say you know, old man, that lady who came and you're treating her for a cough. You're not doing it correctly. It's not a cough, it's an infection and these are the herbs that she needs to take. So I think a great deal of it came from the over. So, if you will, of the Maya people. For them it would be the nine benevolent Maya spirits.

Speaker 2: 24:01

I believe that they had a great deal to do with the inception of the healing techniques of the ancients and of course it was passed on through families, and not always mother to daughter, father to son, auntie to niece or nephew. So it was passed on within the family. And when I first went to Central America in 1970, I know that in a village perhaps not in a city, but in a village every household had a traditional healer, not just the village, every single household had an auntie, an uncle or a grandparent who had been trained by their predecessors to help with common household ailments. That would be the granny healer, what they're called. Then there would be the village healer, who knew more, had more experience, might be older or perhaps simply settled on a single path in life that taught her through experience a lot more than the granny healer knows.

Speaker 2: 25:07

And then, of course, above that, then with that you would have a midwife, you would have a massage therapist, you would have a snake doctor and then you would have the shaman, which was Donna Lichio's position, so handed on orally from generation to generation. And by the time I met Donna Lichio I know he was 90, and he had been practicing for 60 years and he learned the technique from Guatemala and midwives. I mean, it's very difficult to pinpoint right. Donna Lichio had two primary teachers in his life. One was a Caribbean and one was a Afro-Caribbean and one was a Yucatec, mexican man. I think also that his traditions have always been sort of a combination of that and what the blessing spirit brought to him in his dream visions.

Speaker 1: 26:03

Yeah, I'd like to know a little bit more about how your apprenticeship with Donna Lichio started. I've read about it in Satz Dun and you can read that book. I highly recommend it to any listener. It's a very fascinating book. But just to hear from your perspective now, how did that begin and what progression did it take? Obviously there is the physical understanding of plant medicine and how to harvest it, how to use it, et cetera, and then there's the spiritual components of my in healing. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about how that progression went and then not to put too many questions on your plate, but I am very curious. At once we can come back to it. But I am very curious also as you were making that progression of learning. There can be some really unbelievable things that occur in traditional Mayan and Kudin-Derezmo and all of these different practices that are so far away from what we're used to in our Western society. If you could also talk a little bit about how learning those things and incorporating these really different techniques went for you.

Speaker 2: 27:12

I have a very complicated mind. I'm impressed. When I got to Tuba-Liz, as I said, I was already a practicing physician and I needed to learn the medicinal plants. I asked around who could teach me, who is a traditional healer, who is a herbalist. And I met three before I met Don and Lixio and it never just didn't click for me or for them. And then somebody said to me well, you need to go see the old man in San Antonio. He's the best, he's number one, numero uno, he's the very, very one.

Speaker 2: 27:54

And I was trying to figure out how to get to San Antonio. We had just got to Belize. We had 32 acres of high jungle bush that we were converting into a homestead and I had a clinical practice and a trial to take care of. So it's not like I had a lot of free time. So while I'm trying to figure out how to get to San Antonio, he came to visit me in San Ignacio. He had heard that there was an American herbalist in town and he came to see if I had any linden flower tea. He knew it as floor de tilo.

Speaker 2: 28:30

Now Lindentlauer is one of my favorite medicinal plants. As a nerve-in, it's wonderful to help the elderly sleep. It's wonderful for children, because it tastes fabulous. He was looking for it because he was widowed three years before I met him. Because he was widowed and had been accustomed to living and sleeping with a loving woman for 65 years, he was now suffering from loneliness and insomnia. The insomnia was related to sleeping alone at nighttime. Yes, I had the Lindentlauer tea and I gave him a nice bag which I thought he was quite impressed about. Then he looked at my massage table and he went oh my neck. I said get on the table, I'll give you a treatment. I gave him his first napropacic treatment and he was very, very happy with that. I asked him if I could come visit him in his village and he said yes, come, come there. I will be neither more nor less than you see in front of you.

Speaker 2: 29:36

The next week I walked five miles from my farm to his little village. He didn't remember me and I just kind of hung out for the day. I swept the floor and did little jobs. I brought some wood for the kitchen and I cleared out his hearth and sabbatical it Right. I went the next week. He didn't remember me, so it was probably six weekly visits before he remanded it. Oh yes, you're Rosita, you're the herbalist from town. Yes, I remember you gave me that Lindentlauer tea, oh yes. And those massages oh yes, the massages are wonderful. After that, then he was more welcoming and I continued for one whole year to go one day of every week.

Speaker 2: 30:22

One year goes by September to September, almost to the very day and I arrive on his doorstep earlier than usual. Ordinarily I would have arrived around nine or 10 and he wouldn't be back from collecting medicine in the forest outside of his village till 1130 or noon. This day I got a very early ride and I arrived on his doorstep at dawn. Usually I walked, so I got an early ride and I jumped in the car and they dropped me off at his house. So, standing at his doorstep and the door opens and he's there with his pick and his machete and he's got a basket my style banded from his forehead and the basket is about three feet high down his back and he gave me a look that was very disconcerting. The look was like oh my God, she's here again. And when I saw that look in his eyes I said that's it, I'm done. I'm not here to annoy this old guy. I love him. He's a fascinating person, the funniest person I ever met in my life. I love to make people laugh, but I don't want to be a disturbance, so I decided I'm never coming back. He said I don't have time for you today. I have to harvest my corn. I've had so many patients this week, I haven't had time. And I said well, come on, I'll help you harvest your corn. This is the last thing I'll do for him.

Speaker 2: 31:53

So off we go, and it's a 90 minute walk to harvest his corn. And so we get there and I don't see any field, I don't see any corn. And he says, well, we're here. I said, well, where's the corn? And he said, well, we have to crawl through this piece of bush. So we're crawling on our bellies through about 40 feet of high bush, crawling, crawling. Why do you do that? To hide the corn, so that nobody would find it and they couldn't go in and steal corn.

Speaker 2: 32:24

We get there and when I come out from crawling under the bush, I look up and there's Don Alicio's Hill. It's a hillside of corn which he had cleared, planted, cultivated several times and now was willing to harvest, bag, sack by sack, basket by basket, on his back, carrying it back to the village to feed his grandson's family of nine children and himself. We begin harvesting the corn and I'm throwing the corn into my basket, dumping it on the floor, throwing it into the basket, and then, about 11 o'clock in the morning, we meet. He's coming this way on the row and I'm coming this way and he looks at me all perspiring, and he looks at my pile of corn. I could see he was impressed and he said are you married? I said yes, yes, don Alicio, I married and I have three children. He goes oh, oh, oh, oh. Another hour or so goes by. Now we're at the top of the hill and it's time for a little break. I have an orange with me, I share the orange with him and he's sitting there. He stood up and when he stood up, the sun was coming up right behind the hillside, beyond Medallion of golden light, and he said to me in Spanish ¿Qué es que tú quieres? What is it that you want? And I said, don Alicio, if you take me as a student, if you teach me about medicinal plants, I promise to be a good student. I promise to work hard and take care of you along the way as well. That was the day. And then that's the one he said do you promise to take care of my people when I'm gone? Gulp, yes, I promise. And then on the way home from the cornfield, he began a 13-year process of teaching me about the medicinal plants of Belize. So I go back the next week and here's the answer to your second question I go back the next week. It's my first day as the Shaman's apprentice and I'm going to be there now for three nights and four days.

Speaker 2: 34:40

The very, very first client, the first patient who walks in the door, a car pulls up outside of his little house, and his little house was a wooden house, a thatch house and a brick house, like the three little pigs. One house made of straw, one made of wood and one made of bricks. Each one is one room, so three one room little houses. So there's a roadside, a long one. We're sitting in the cement house and I hear four car doors slam and Don Elicio kind of perks up and he says SOS, algo. This is something.

Speaker 2: 35:17

Around the corner, from his house come two big, big, burly men and they each have a woman under an arm and they're kind of dragging her along and she looks dirty, be draggled, frantic and also hysterical, and her hair is all messed up and her clothing is torn and stained. And they bring her into Don Elicio's little room, which is a clinic that is literally six feet by 10 feet. That was the size of his little clinic space. They set her down, they told the story of how in their village her daughter wanted to marry a boy in the village that she thought was unworthy of her family, and she said that and that word got around. So the boy's mother took revenge on her by putting some enchanted powder into her, sent her a plate of food as a gift, and she thought it was because there was this exchange with their children. So she ate the food and later she told us there was something strange and bitter tasting in it, but I just didn't pay any attention and I ate the whole plate. So she's sitting on a stool and she is actually drooling and growling and she cannot focus her eyes and literally there's just drooling all the way down her chin. Her eyes are all over the place and she's growling and growling. And Don Elicio says this woman is possessed by the devil, this woman is carrying the Prince of Darkness, and so it really really, really frightened me to the point where I thought I didn't sign up for this. The Prince of Darkness, the devil himself.

Speaker 2: 37:22

Plants all I care about is plants. I just want to learn about the medicinal plants. Now the devil is in here, and so he told me now go over there, go to the other little hut where the hearth is, start a fire and boil up this tea. And he gave me a handful of strong smelling roots that smell like a skunk and he said it's skunk root. Paché and maya, boil this up and bring it back.

Speaker 2: 37:49

So in the meantime, while I'm shaking in there at the hearth, I'm really scared, to be honest with you and I start the fire and I get the tea going and I can see he is sprinkling her with water and saying prayers and then burning, passing copal around her. So I go back into the room, I have the tea and I hand her a gourd bowl of tea and she takes a couple of sips and then she goes, plop, plop, plop, takes it all down and then, for the very first time, she looked me in the eye. And when she looked me in the eye, two long tears came rolling down her face and then I felt a wave of fear. Leave me with those tears. My compassionate heart opened for her. It was basically no matter what, we have to help her. And he said now go outside with her. She's going to throw up, take care of her. We're standing at a tree outside of his house and she starts to throw up and, I'm telling you, a big ball of hair came out.

Speaker 2: 39:01

So, yeah, some incredible, unbelievable things happened and she finished with her vomiting and then Don Adlijo sent her home with some Morzor Riyoti she's from Guatemala, morzor Riyoti, mor Copao and then said she has to come back in nine days. Nine days go by and she came back looking quite normal, and then they told a long story of how it was a process of day by day, but it didn't happen overnight. Yeah, that was the very, very first client possessed by the devil. Anyway, I do remember when I stood at the tree with her and I saw that ball of hair come out of her stomach, I literally felt like something grabbed me by the back of the neck to pull me towards the road to get out of here. But I didn't, I stayed.

Speaker 2: 39:58

And later Don Adlijo explained that the ball of hair was a clear sign that she had eaten some spiritually contaminated food with something that he called an enchantment, and that the person who did it was working with the malevolent Maya spirits. So when they came back, she came back with her two sons, and then the son said what do we owe you for our mother's life? And Don Adlijo said I don't charge, you can pay me whatever you want to pay me whatever you can afford. They gave him 100 believes dollars, which was a very good amount for his usual income. Then one of the sons says now, don Adlijo, we want you to do to her what she did to our mother. And Don Adlijo blesses heart, put his hands up in the air as if literally warding off evil, and he said never, never, never, not in this house. And he was such a brilliant person he could express himself so clearly. He said look, I'll tell you, never, ever was there anyone who walked in that door and then had to be carried out. Many were those who were carried in and walked out, but nobody ever walked in and had to be carried out. We don't hurt people. We don't harm people in this house. I don't do that work. Go somewhere else. It was actually quite upset that they even suggested that he would play in that arena. So yeah, over the 13 years.

Speaker 2: 41:39

One of the most amazing aspects of living in the home of a shaman is that his house is inhabited by earth spirits all the time. There are gnomes and fairies. They're always there. They're called Chaneques in Central America. They're always in the house, they're always playing with when you're trying to sleep. They put a furry hand on your face, they pull your blanket, they shake the hammock. And also very informative guiding dreams occur as well Dreams of plants to use, and then also the Sastun.

Speaker 2: 42:17

If you read Sastun, you remember that the dream of the it was actually after that woman. As a matter of fact, that night I went to sleep in the hammock and I'm thinking what? This is not for me. I don't want to mess around with any devil, any prince of darkness. And so, in the middle of the night, because Don Elicio was a insomniac and a inveterate talker, he insists on going to bed at seven o'clock in the evening, but he doesn't go to sleep until two or three o'clock because talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. So for 13 years I listened to Don Elicio's insomniac ramblings, which is why, when I sat down to write Sastun, it was just like a recording. So I heard every story multiple times and I never wanted to tell him oh, I heard that story before Like no go ahead, because every time there was another little gem that didn't come through the last time.

Speaker 2: 43:16

So in that house, many, many dream visions occurred. And on the night of that very first lady, who he said was possessed by the devil, I had a dream vision in which I see myself lying in the hammock and I'm worried. I'm really, really scared. I can see the look of worry, the crinkles on my forehead, and I can't sleep. I'm tossing and turning in the hammock and then suddenly the hammock starts to shake back and forth and back and forth and I think I'm going to fall out. That's the sign that a dream vision is about to occur. So I try to calm myself down and again I don't really know what's happening. This is all so strange.

Speaker 2: 43:58

So when the dream vision starts, I see myself surrounded by four angels, and on one side is the angel that I know is the angel of Koppau, like the spirit of Koppau, and these angels are all like 12 feet tall, with the wingspan of about 15 feet of light, pure, pure golden, shimmering light on the right, on the left hand side is a sort of a green shining angel, and I think that was the spirit of Rue, which was part of the remedy that he gave her. And then behind me is St Michael. St Michael is like the Zorio and he is like a protective knight with a sword and a shield. And then in front of me is a pure white angel. One of the healing modalities he used was a little stone from a sacred mountain in Guatemala that went into a little remedy that he gave her before she left. So there was the angel of Rue, the angel of Koppau, the angel of Zorio, which I recognized as St Michael, and then that stone of Eskipulas.

Speaker 2: 45:16

And now not a word was said, simply a presence. And I got such a clear, clear message that we got this You're covered, you're surrounded with angelic healing beings. Don't be scared, don't be worried, it's going to be okay. And it was. I came back the next week and every week there was. Never again was anybody as bad as that one. Never did I ever see anyone as negatively affected by somebody's anger or jealousy.

Speaker 1: 45:50

Yeah, very interesting. In a sense, it was almost like it was in a test, right.

Speaker 2: 45:55

It was most definitely not almost. It was a test. And to do this, this is what is involved, and do you have the courage, do you have the stamina and you know, can you take this. And now, can you also handle these visions? At nighttime I felt like my world was upside down, but at the same time, donalichio Panti was the most charming character you could ever possibly meet. He was kind, gentle and funny. Not just funny, he was hilarious. He always said most people think too much. Get them to laugh and half their trouble and sickness will go away and the blessed herbs will do the rest.

Speaker 1: 46:37

That's awesome, yeah, and I just want to take a second to kind of give a little perspective. When you're in Central America and you're in these environments right, you're in these communities, this is 100% just a part of their life, right? When we're thinking about Earth spirits and fairies and that type of thing, like it is so ingrained in the culture there, there's nothing strange about it. There's nothing weird about it. It is not like a question that it exists. When you are in it, you feel it, you have the moments, and it's not the kinds of things that happen in our Western society. It's just, it's so different and it's so accepted.

Speaker 1: 47:29

I know a lot of people sometimes think oh well, you know, that's just happening there and I wouldn't have those experiences if I was there. Like the thing is, though, is that you do it happens, and you cannot escape it, and one of the things that struck me when I was learning about my in healing and you know the philosophies of susto and Pesad and Tristeza, which are, all you know, these kind of spiritual illnesses I was always very much. Nobody else's energy can affect me, right? Like I am the controller of my own energy. I'm not going to allow somebody else's jealousy to be projected onto me right, like that was just the way that I was taught in my pretty esoteric Western upbringing.

Speaker 1: 48:21

But I was taught that we can heal ourselves and that we are the in control of our own healing, and I still very much do believe that. But I also had a number of experiences where you have these thoughts put upon you and when you're in that environment, there's no escaping it. There really is no escaping it, and I'm wondering if you have anything to share about that or your experience with it. And what were your thoughts before you went into this type of society and these philosophies? You know, how do you think about them now and do you have those beliefs that we are in control of our own healing and how do you put those two philosophies together?

Speaker 2: 49:04

I believe we're in control of our own healing. But nobody is in a perfect state of mind Physically, not everybody is always in the perfect emotional state and we become a weekend. Our auric feels become much more penetratable. Just one little simple thing could happen Death in the family brings you down, and there's somebody who lives next to you, has always been jealous of you, and while you're in that grieving state kind of your, I guess you could say your reflective aura is not as strong as it might always be, and you then now you can be affected by that person's jealousy and you can lose sleep, you can lose your appetite, you can feel nervous disorder that you don't know where it came from or what it's about. So, yeah, I think that's true. But also, nobody is in the perfect state of being at any given moment. It could happen to everybody and so we always need healers, we always need outside help. That's why, you know, the Lord of the universe or the lady of the universe put all these herbal remedies on the planet for us, because it's not always possible to heal yourself Ideally, but not always. That's why we go to others.

Speaker 2: 50:25

And then remember this Hippocrates said in 500 BC he who treats herself as a fool for a physician and a greater fool for a patient. Do we know that when you try to take care of yourself, you can overreact out of anxiety, underreact out of fear? And that also extends to family members, like taking care of people who are close to you is really not a good decision. It's best that you listen to them, figure out the best referral, because you cannot be unbiased, you cannot act independently, you're overconcerned for them and you're afraid if you make a mistake, you're going to lose their respect. And who wants to lose your mother's respect? Right, that's already an issue when you get started, right? So, yes, yes.

Speaker 1: 51:23

So, with all those givens, still yeah just to kind of continue this conversation about plant communication. I'm wondering, as you've done all your work to try to save the bush in Belize and to understand and document the medicinal benefits of the plants of the rainforest, I'm curious what kind of experiences you've had with human plant communication and plants communicating with humans for our co evolution and vice versa. You know one of the things that I read in Michael Pollan's book the Botany of Desire. He talks about how plants elicit us. You know they come and they're. They use us as much as we use them, and I'm wondering if you have any experiences to share with regard to that desire to co evolve together.

Speaker 2: 52:19

I have a lot of experience with that. I really believe that plants, like us, are spiritual beings in physical bodies and that their Dharma is our karma. Their Dharma is to work with the healing of the people, whatever it be emotional, physical or spiritual. They are powerful spiritual healers. We know beyond the doubt through chemistry, that they are strong physical healers and just to be with plants in the garden is emotionally healing. So we talk often about plant allies. Every herbalist I know has specific plants that he or she considers to be, you could say, my favorites, the ones I rely on the most, the ones that have helped me the most. Their allies, mine, are basil, rue and marigold. Those are my three plant allies. I've had many different experiences with them that were spiritual, for instance, the rue. I had a experience of walking. I had a class and that day before this dream came with the rue, I had been talking about plant allies and this was in the very, very early years, in the early like 90s, because I've been teaching about 40 years now. And in this dream vision I see myself in my nursery. The nursery has like a shade cloth over it. It's about 20 feet long and about four feet wide beds, and I'm going through the nursery, checking all the plants, touching them, admiring them, and I get to the rue plant which is in real life it's about three feet high and in the dream vision it's about three feet high and the rue flower is about the size of your little pinky, little fingernail on your pinky, and in the dream it's the size of a sunflower. And I look at this giant rue flower and like, oh, what happened to you? How did you get such a big, never seen such a big flower on a rue plant? And then the plant reaches out and all of its petals cover my face and it goes, it kisses me all over my face and it says I'm so glad I am the one in charge of looking after you. From then I have always carried a rue in my amulet bag. The last thing I do before I leave my house, on any journey anywhere, is tuck a little piece of rue in my pouch that I always have it with me. I consider it a great protective and then remember also she was in that very first dream as one of the protective angels.

Speaker 2: 55:09

And then, on something on a more practical basis, through having my company, rainforest Remedies, which was started because of the destruction of the rainforest all around Donalichiel's village. We had gone out to collect plants and on the way there to the field, he said on the way home, remind me, we have to collect the leaves off this tree because it's the last tree of that type standing and those are the leaves that I use for people who are about to go insane. So it must be a powerful nerving. And so, on the way back, we're about to stop and collect the leaves and the whole field is in flames. And the tree is in flames, no doubt because it was rich in the central oils, and it looks like a flaming torch. And Donalichiel sat down and cried, literally cried, and he said had we only known he was going to do that. The fool is burning up his own medicine. We could have collected the leaves, taken some cuttings of the trees and tried to propagate them, but now it's too late. So I thought, wow, if we could just get people to tell us when they're going to clear 100 acres, we could go in and take all the medicine you would need for a lifetime from a 100 acre, and that's true. 100 acres of land, say, for one or two plants that might be there. That's all you would need for a lifetime running a company. So that's how I started Rainforest Remedies based on medicinal plants that are about to be bulldozed, burned up or destroyed.

Speaker 2: 56:51

Through the company I have a lot of tourists coming to my detrail, the old Rainforest Medicine Trail, which I no longer run. A lot of tourists came with sunburns from being out on the ocean. They just come from Minnesota in the middle of January. Now they're in 90 degree heat and blaring sunshine. Sunburn and sun blisters was a real problem in the tourism industry.

Speaker 2: 57:17

So I decided I had to make a sunburn ointment, a herbal one, and I'm really not sure how to go about it. So I think and think, and literally you know the thinker sitting around with my head on my hand, thinking, and then I guess the spirit just got tired of listening to me. So I had a dream vision and in the dream vision I see myself walking along the edge of the forest, right along the medicine trail. But it's not in the forest, it's on the edge, which turns out to be important. And in the dream I hear a detached voice say Rosita is trying to make a really good sunburn ointment and these are the three plants she needs.

Speaker 2: 58:00

So there were two plants from the rainforest One was the dog's tongue, One was the red anow and one was the aloe vera. So I gathered those up the next day and put it into a sunburn ointment which works beautifully. It numbs the pain and heals the skin underneath. So it's a fabulous remedy. And that's just another small example of that helping each other through the realms, through dream visions. Because when you're dreaming and you're asleep you're actually in the astral plane and it's immensely easier for a spirit to contact you in the astral plane while you're asleep than it is while you're awake, because sometimes messages come through in the daytime that are very profound, but a vision kind of requires that you're asleep.

Speaker 1: 58:51

If I couldn't figure something out with the person I was working with. I would ask for a dream A lot of times. What would come? No matter if you looked in the books or whatnot, it wasn't what that plant was used for. It's often times just something totally different and you go with it and it works, it does the trick.

Speaker 1: 59:11

So, it's a blessing. It is, it's a blessing. It's a real blessing. So tell me a little bit about what's happening right now with the XCEL Research Center and with your work in educating younger Belizeans about the traditional Mayan medicine and healing.

Speaker 2: 59:28

Right, that's. The primary focus is education and scholarships. So we provide medical scholarships to people who want to study to be medical doctors, to be nurses, to be bush doctors or technicians within the medical profession in Belize. And then our primary focus then was, for 24 years, the children's summer bush medicine camp.

Speaker 2: 59:57

Because on the very day that Don Alicio passed away he passed away at 6.05 in the morning. At 6.10 in the morning I had this dream in which Don Alicio came to the room where my husband and I were sleeping. We had just brought him home from the hospital the day before and we put him in his bed. We left him there to be with his family and the villagers that will come back in the morning. Well, he passed away at 6.05 and at 6.10, this dream vision occurred in which Don Alicio came into the room. He was lying down on the bed in front of me, dying right on the floor, just dying, taking his last breath. He died. Then he gets up, a young man. He's got black hair, beautiful unwrinkled copper skin, bright black eyes, and he sits down next to me, put his arm around me and he said I love you, rosita. And I said I love you, don Alicio. Then with his hand he sort of motioned to the corner of the room, and in the corner of the room is a wooden stool and on the wooden stool sits a young boy I know as Gonzalo, and then his face changes to Juanito. Juanito's face changes to Maria. Maria's face changes to Luisa Children, boys and girls. And Don Alicio said Rosita, take the children as though they were your own, train them and teach them to help each other.

Speaker 2: 1:01:35

So my husband and I spent two years trying to figure out how we could fulfill that statement of Don Adishio. And I remember growing up in the inner city of Chicago and at the most meaningful thing in my summer times was the Boys Club summer camps in Michigan and Wisconsin. I changed my life. Never had I ever been canoeing on a lake, never had I been in a tent in the middle of a forest. I fell in love with nature in those summer camps and so I thought maybe that's what I should do. I should start a summer camp for children and have it be based on traditional healing and medicinal plants. So Michael Ballack was able to help us to secure an annual grant from the Gilday Family Foundation for the 24 years. They granted us enough money to run one summer camp every year for two weeks for 24 years, and that was 24 children. So almost 500 children in Belize have been able to come to summer bush medicine camp.

Speaker 2: 1:02:49

Covid, of course, intervened. Now we have it only for primary school teachers. We'll figure we can reach the children so many more than 24 a year. We can do 240 a year. If we put the information and the love of healing, the respect of healing and the love of medicinal plants, if we can transfer that heart to heart to a school teacher, she is going to be able to reach many more children than we could. So now this year in July we're having our 27th summer bush medicine camp, but now it is for primary school teachers. Covid sort of put a stop to it and then when we started up again, we thought maybe this is a good opportunity to change our focus. Maybe teachers might be. So we did so. Now we do it strictly for teachers and it's working out really, really well. The teachers are thrilled. They have such a good time, they love it and they get their continuing education credits as well. That's great, yes.

Speaker 1: 1:03:57

Yeah, well, I just want to read one of the things that was written in the rainforest remedies book that it just puts a vision in the mind, and I think it's a good, useful thing to think about, not just for the people of Belize, but also for us in this country, because we are even further ahead in terms of having lost all our traditional healing wisdom, right? So, anyway, this is something that was written. It said the fires of traditional healing are now down to a mere bed of embers and faintly glowing coals. If we do not place fresh fuel on this bed of embers and continue to blow on the coals from generation to generation, the fire may become extinguished. And it's very true. We are like a mere bed of coals, like almost out, almost out Barely little sparks.

Speaker 2: 1:04:48

And that was true of Central America by the 1980s and when I arrived in the 70s remember 15 years earlier every household had a traditional healer. Because I'm sorry to say that the allopathic medical profession has discredited traditional killers. They tell people they're dirty, they're uneducated, don't go there, they'll hurt you, they might even poison you. You need medicine, you need drugs, you need surgery, not that old fashioned stuff that never worked anyway. Well, of course we know it did work. That's the unfortunate thing that's happening in Central America, which happened in North America back in the 1900s. The College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists only opened in 1980. And in 1920, it became against the law to deliver a baby at home.

Speaker 1: 1:05:47

It's a really sad situation, and I just want to make note of one other thing. This is something that I think about a lot. Right now, psychedelic medicine for healing has become a very big thing, and, while I think that it can be a useful tool, one of the things that I think we should think about a little bit more as a society is if we were using plant medicine every day and it was a part of our lives and we were communicating. And, yes, we use plants as food, right, but we're not all using medicinal plants. Whether we're just sitting with them in the forest, whether we're gardening them, whether we're using them as medicine what not? If we were having more interactions with plants on a regular basis, I don't think we would be needing to use psychedelic medicine at the level that we are now. So, while I do think psychedelic medicine is a very beneficial thing to use and, yes, it can take you places very quickly I just wonder you know, how much could we be healing with just the regular everyday use of plants, right?

Speaker 2: 1:06:52

I think if we did that, we wouldn't have this pit of emptiness. Yes, we are trying to fill with something now. Just one jump up right whatever from marijuana or whatever else. People take one jump up now to the psychedelic ground because it's the most exciting thing, it's the latest on the market now. But I feel that if we're trying to fill a pit of emptiness, nature can fill that. If we spend more time gardening, we spend more time in the forest, more time collecting plants, learning about plants, just being involved with the plant in the kingdom, I think we wouldn't have that deep, deep sense of we need something else right, just satisfaction and loneliness is really where it all goes back to isolation, alienation, loneliness.

Speaker 1: 1:07:50

Yeah, yeah, and you know we open up to different types of communication in the psychedelic realm and I think people are very attracted to that, but I have had so many mind blowing communicative events occur with plants, not in that psychedelic realm. That is just beautiful and amazing. I'd like to know you know where you're headed into the future and how you're hoping your legacy will remain.

Speaker 2: 1:08:17

I think my legacy will remain through the bush medicine camp, the books. The books now are all over the world. They've been extremely useful for local beletions, rainforest remedies is at a price that's accessible to everyone. Every year I give away 50 or 60 of those books to people I think should have them in the household but maybe can't afford it. So I think the books have been important.

Speaker 2: 1:08:46

Bush medicine camp is important and then for the abdominal therapy, that really right now is mostly my focus training people to train others, training practitioners to use it in a clinical practice and training people to do their self care. They have a very big focus of self care on abdominal therapy. I do online consultations of people in Brazil and Israel and Europe and never see them face to face, but I can teach them to do the abdominal therapy for themselves and we get wonderful results that way. So that's where I'm focused and I just want to keep on keeping on. I'm 82 as of next week. Yeah, I'm very happy with what I have accomplished. I feel like my life has made a difference and I would just like to continue helping, healing and making a difference.

Speaker 1: 1:09:42

Great. Yes, you have done a lot of wonderful work and I'm very thankful for it and I know many others are as well. And happy birthday, happy early birthday, thank you. Thank you very much. Are you spending a lot of time in Belize now or you know, kind of how are you splitting your time? And I know that you do allow for people to come down to Belize and study with you Some is that still taking place and how can people find you and what do you offer? And just want to give you the space to talk about that a little bit.

Speaker 2: 1:10:14

Yes, I still teach. I teach in Belize during the winter months November, december, january, february, march and April. I leave Belize to come to Illinois to help my daughter with her children. I come to spend time with my grandchildren, so that's four or five months and I spend one month in San Miguel de Allende and Guanajuato, mexico, where I do a lot of grotesque curbs classes and I wrote a book for them on their medicinal plants. That also was sponsored by the same family that sponsors our Bush Medicine Camp the Gilday family that in Belize.

Speaker 2: 1:10:55

And I teach in the States and I teach in Belize. So people should go to wwwabdominaltherapycollectivecom. I only work with the Abdominal Therapy Collective. There is an Arvigo Institute but I'm no longer involved with them. The focus of my focus is trying to spread this word and this very useful, simple, noninvasive therapy around the world. I always love teaching about medicinal plants, but my primary focus right now is the Abdominal Therapy because it helps so many women with fertility challenges, menstrual problems, and I just abhor the thought of women spending a lifetime with menstrual disorders when it is so, so, so correctable.

Speaker 1: 1:11:47

Yeah, absolutely. I do have one last question that was spurred by what you just said. With the Abdominal Massage for Fertility, do you also give dietary recommendations to those folks as well? I've done quite a bit of nutrition work, helping people clean up their diets to improve fertility and nourish themselves a little more deeply. Have you found that the Abdominal Massage just kind of does the trick, or do you have to incorporate the nutrition piece and sometimes the herbal piece as well?

Speaker 2: 1:12:21

I think, yes, it's always important. I have to incorporate the herbal piece, the yoni steams, castor oil packs and dietary simplification, I find is the simplest way to approach dietary changes. Just keep it simple and clean. Simple and clean has always been my message and, yes, I help people with three meals a day. This is my suggestion. And then the herbal remedies yes, we have a wonderful remedy called female tonic, which helps the uterus to decongest itself. You might think of it as cleansing or eliminating and then the yoni steam really is very essential in our stream of care that we do, the approach that we take with women. So the abdominal therapy, the yoni steam, the castor oil packs and the herbal remedies and sometimes dietary changes specifically, yes, Wonderful, well, thank you, thank you.

Speaker 1: 1:13:23

Thank you again for sharing all of these beautiful stories. I feel like I've been taken back to Central America, which is a place I just absolutely love and hope to live in again at some point in my life down the line. I hope so too. Yes, yes, awesome, well, thank you, rosita. Thanks for joining us, and maybe we can have you back on to talk more, because I know that there's so many other things to share.

Speaker 2: 1:13:48

I'd love to thank you. I enjoyed your questions very much. I think you also did a fabulous job of conducting this interview, so thank you. Oh, you're welcome Great.

Speaker 1: 1:13:58

Thank you. My oh my. This has been such a fun interview for me. I hope that you found the content as fascinating as I do. Thank you for listening.

Speaker 1: 1:14:09

If you would like to learn more about Rosita, don't hesitate to go to her website, rositaarvigocom. You can learn more about her there, as well as potentially working with her or learning from her. And if you're interested in holistic health coaching, please know that I'm available for that, and you can find more information on my website, landfoodlifecom. I look forward to sharing this space with you again in two weeks. Take care Well, my friends. There you have it.

Speaker 1: 1:14:38

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Land Food Life podcast. I hope you enjoyed the show and gained some true gems of insight that will enhance your quality of life. If you're looking for personalized guidance on holistic health, nutrition or running a regenerative agriculture business, visit landfoodlifecom to explore my virtual and in-person coaching programs. You can also join my mailing list at landfoodlifecom to receive exclusive perks and discounts for email subscribers only. I appreciate your valuable time spent here with me, and if you're digging this content and you're finding it helpful, please share it with your friends and others in your network. You can post a screenshot of the podcast thumbnail. Tag it on social media and rate the show on your preferred podcast platform. I am very much looking forward to our next chat in two weeks. Same time, same place. Bye for now.