Spiritual Bypassing - Toxicity: Chiron's Wound that never healed

You’ve heard it. Maybe you’ve said it. “This isn’t happening to you — it’s happening for you.” It’s one of those phrases that sounds like wisdom until you’re on the receiving end of it at exactly the wrong moment.

In this episode, we’re going back to where a lot of these ideas actually come from, ancient Greece, specifically the myth of Chiron. He was the greatest healer of his age, mentor to heroes like Asclepius and Achilles, and he carried a wound that never healed. Not because he wasn’t wise enough. Not because he hadn’t done his work. That’s just the medicine of Chiron's journey. And somehow, we’ve collectively managed to get it almost completely backwards.

We’ll also dip into the Stoics, who genuinely had something powerful to say about suffering and agency and whose ideas have been quietly running underneath a lot of modern spiritual culture, sometimes helpfully, sometimes not so much.

This is a conversation about the difference between being empowered and bypassing. Between real spiritual depth and the kind of toxic positivity that tells people to transcend their pain before they’ve actually felt it. Between tending a wound honestly and pretending it isn’t there.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

Hello. Thank you for tuning in. My name is Diana and this is The Unwritten. Today I want to talk about something I feel incredibly passionate about. It can get me a little charged up. So you might hear that coming through. You might also hear birds and the fountain and all the fun, fun sounds outside today. I want to I want to really talk about spiritual toxicity. Okay. There's spiritual bypassing. That's a bit more formally used that term. Spiritual toxicity, a bit more of a larger umbrella term. And then there's lots of different experiences we can put under that umbrella, like spiritual bypassing. Oh, sorry, I said that already. Spiritual uh abuse, right? So let's firstly talk about what others, different industries think these terms mean. And then I'll just get into my experiences and most importantly for myself. I'd really like to shed some light on what this looks like within my industry, the realm that I'm in. So alternative medicine healing, whether it's in natural medicine, herbology, supplements, what have you, energy work, intuitive work, and so forth. Okay. So let's talk about the definition here first. And of course, this is the definition is very nuanced. It's malleable for good reason. So I just want anyone that's listening, if they feel, if you feel like you've been affected in this way, that's really valid. It's always valid and very legitimate. And I'd love to hear your thoughts and feelings around this. So please don't hesitate to share. Okay, so let's talk about the landscape of this terminology, spiritual toxicity. Okay, it's not so formally used, it's more a general term when we're not quite sure what's going on, but we don't feel good about it, which is the most important piece here for you. Personally, if it doesn't feel right, it could just be not for you. It's not always that the person or um community delivering those messages or teachings or in the wrong or doing something harmful, but sometimes it is pretty clearly not okay. And again, trust that. So we find for a while now we've seen instead of spiritual toxicity being used regularly, we see spiritual bypassing. And this is more of a personal experience. This was actually a term that was mostly so coined. I think it's hard to say one particular person made something up because typically there's this many of you know the term like green monkey situation where many people have the same light bulb moment around the same time. But as far as we know, as far as what's written, there's a Buddhist teacher and psychotherapist who name is John Wellwood. And in the 1980s he came up with this idea of spiritual bypassing, and he in general defined it as a tendency towards using spiritual ideas, practices, languages to avoid dealing with really facing, you could say, and bringing hard things into the conscious mind and heart. It was technique, spiritual bypassing, you could say, used to uh come up with narratives that usually involve ideologies, philosophies, and practices and have really good language attached to it to give the individual the opportunity uh to negate, sort of steamroll, just deny the need for moving through difficult emotions or experiences. One of the quotes, supposedly, I can't say this for sure, but what the internet says that uh John Wellwood said, he described it as using the goal of awakening or liberation to try and rise above the raw and messy side of humanness before you fully faced and made peace with it. So it does have sort of a formal academic anchor, but spiritual toxicity is definitely a broader, more popular term. And I like it because it's it's dramatic and as it should be, because sometimes very often the impact of this is dramatic, traumatic in our lives. You've probably heard of things like toxic positivity as well, and this is under the umbrella of bypassing, but again, bypassing, I just want to highlight is something that's more often done to ourselves. It could be introduced to us through a particular community, our individual, like the narrative and the mechanism, so to speak. And yes, I just threw out dog poop. Absolutely. That was the sound for those of you that are high sensory input like myself. Um, so toxic positivity definitely can be something a lot like that happens within bypassing, spiritual bypassing. Then we can find anything else, right? We can find spiritual narcissism. Definitely we can have long-term spiritual bypassing that can, oh man, I've seen it. It can be so harmful. And then within spiritual toxicity, we also have this spiritual abuse, manipulation, especially going after vulnerable people. And that's not just too, you know, we're gonna talk about more of the new agey community. This is within any community, religious community included for sure. Someone I want to mention that you might find interest in uh looking at their material on this, one of my favorite people is uh Gabor Mate. And he speaks quite a bit about this. One of my favorite books of his is When the Body Says No. It was one of the early, my earlier exposures in that book, When the Body Says No, to the idea that anger, that difficult emotions are there for really good reason. And when we bypass them, when we ignore them, the end result, especially in the long term, can be quite horrific, actually. It can be very altering. So Gabor Mate has this just incredible perspective on this whole subject, and I'm paraphrasing, I'm sort of summarizing here, so I don't want to spend too much time on this because he he's very accessible. You can read about him and and you read his books and listen to him talk online. But basically, I would say, in a nutshell, there's my, and this is just my interpretation of his work, that there's there's a lot of spiritual bypassing that's seen in to in response to trauma. You know, people will reach out for different spiritual frameworks to escape, we'll say, and this isn't his words, this is my interpretation, to escape pain rather than facing it. Almost we could parallel it to substances, you know, self-medicating, but instead we're using a spiritual framework here where he believes if I were to summarize my interpretation of spiritual work, Gabor Matei. I always see him speaking more about spirituality being about the change we choose, the work we choose to do, the inner reflections and how we relate outwardly on our own unique spiritual path, and that it's conscious, it's deliberate, and it's often very uncomfortable, hard, it's hard work. Healing is hard work, right? And it's a movement towards truth, authenticity, and wholeness. So I would say that we might see this. Let me give you some examples. And these are these are very flexible, mostly so, okay, because there's there's a time and a place for if anyone's ever read a Course in Miracles, although I don't fully align with a lot of the material in there, I learned a lot from it. And the Course of Miracles often reference positive denial when you know that part of our mind and our psychology, it's not all negative, it's not all there for a bad reason. Sometimes not remembering hard things, sometimes choosing actively to put aside something for you know an amount, a very specific amount of time. You know, I got to get through this week. So I'm gonna take this really hard thing and I'm gonna put it here for now. I'm gonna come back to it, or maybe ruminate it, you've done the work. Now you just gotta help your brain get off the off the hamster wheel kind of thing. Okay, so I just want to make that really clear. But let's say spiritual bypassing on a personal level. I know I've done it myself. I've I've I've gone through at a very young age in my early 20s, I really dove into Course the Miracles, and there's a lot of good things there. And I did, and I think we should all use these books and these different philosophies, ideologies as tools for ourselves to see how they work and if they work for ourselves. But I I went over that line a little bit and I really embraced more so the idea that of non-duality and that I took it too far in my own inner realm. And for a short amount of time, I really tried it out, and I'm glad I did, I don't regret it, but I really tried it out. What does it feel look like to think only positively and to never perceive anything as negative? And I'll tell you, for me, it didn't work, got me into quite a bit of trouble. I stayed in a romantic relationship at the time, way longer than I should have. My whole perception was off and shifted for sure. And that's not something I recommend doing. Never never allow a narrative, a philosophy, a person, a teaching to veto your own instincts, your own intuition. Okay, so some things you might hear yourself or others say that could be, could be. It's not black and white here, it could be an indication of spiritual bypassing. Well, we're gonna talk about the saying actually. Oh, this isn't happening to me, it's happening for me. So I personally we're gonna talk about that saying actually in a minute here. So we're gonna get into some mythos storytelling around Chiron, and we're gonna move into ancient Greek philosophy, and then that's gonna take us really smoothly into Carl Jung and wrap it up there. And so this this whole saying that's been going around for a while, this isn't happening to me, it's happening for me, comes from a really beautiful origin, actually. But if you're truly a victim, and although I think ruminating in a victim mindset has a lot of risks, and it's you know, we gotta be really careful with that. I also think completely obliterating the reality of being a victim is oh, just you know, just saying it out loud makes my stomach turn. Bad things do happen in life, and we do become the victim of accidents, of disease, of direct, deliberate harm. Okay, so if we're in a situation where someone has gone out of their way to manipulate, to harm, and we're using narratives like you know, usually grab up, grab a hold of Shakespeare. There's no good or bad, but thinking makes it so you know this isn't happening to me, it's happening for me. Stay in, you know, positive vibration, positive mindset. There's so much good that can come out of that, but it's got to be in balance. I really believe that natural order, balance. Because we don't have to look at it as good or bad, even. We don't have to perceive sadness and anger as bad per se, but as indicators, right? I like to parallel to science and research often and just point out that there's ways to measure harmful, dangerous things to humans, right? There's ways to measure these substances and think of radiation, right? Looking at where is that line where it becomes impactful, and then how do I feel about that? There's many medicine teachings that I've been privileged enough to receive throughout my life around the idea that everything in our life is good or bad medicine, everything we move through will have a cost. Everything we do has a cost. And these aren't negative, they can be interpreted that way for sure. And these things aren't gonna work for everybody, and that's a good thing, it makes good sense. But if they resonate, I'll explain it a little bit here. And it is sort of a step up or step out, or it's a different reference point for sure, so bear with me. But it's this idea that let me use this bad vibe, and this is where I'm gonna put these narratives under spiritual toxicity, okay? Where some people believe that other people have bad vibes. Well, I'm gonna challenge that. How do we qualify? How do we measure the bad vibe? And I'm not even talking necessarily in a scientific manner, although, yeah, I could still pose that question from that model. But how how do we actually know if someone's energy, their their way of being, personality, what have you? But I mean, when we're talking about spiritual toxicity, this is usually used in the manner of vibes, like subtle energy, right? Oh, I don't like to sit beside this person at work, they got bad vibes. I think we can tweak that language just a bit to make it more accurate. I feel uncomfortable when I'm close to this person, and I love this word. I started using this word, I have no idea how long ago it works for me. I think my field experiences inflammation when I'm near this person or when I'm around this person for it could be any length of time or a specific length of time. We might even have family members, but but I maybe think of it a bit more like an allergy. You know, gluten isn't bad for everyone, pollen isn't bad for everyone. What if we can neutralize this language a bit? And it's empowering for ourselves as well. I'm not talking about this in a way to let other people get away with doing harmful things, quite the opposite. I'm suggesting that if we acknowledge the impact that people, things, and situations, environments have on us, we acknowledge the impact. We listen to our own intuition and instincts without the need to come up with complicated narratives to validate it. And that's where we get in trouble. That's that's the point that people start to have bad vibes. Because when we can't really qualify, quantify why we feel so uncomfortable around someone, why we maybe feel tired or sad or what have you or irritated. But what if instead of us projecting it on them, we take some accountability, even if many others agree with us? Let's let's not give our power away when when we really don't need to, and consider the possibility that their field, when in close approximity to our field, is inflammatory to yourself, to me. It's not bad. It's that's just seems to be the result. And maybe when we think about it for a while, we can start to discern what that is, if we so choose, if there's value there for us. Because simply just saying, Oh, they're bad energy for me, they got bad vibes, I'm not sure that's very productive. And I'm not sure we can say that's entirely accurate, even because their vibes for others may be just fine and maybe pleasant, actually. So the very labeling of that may be again, it's not it's not about this, isn't a positivity thing being excessively positive. This is approaching these experiences as truthfully as possible. Okay, so if I am on one end of the spectrum, let's say, in this spiritual bypassing, maybe I'm always the one doing the wrong, and I just need to stay in the positive, and that's gonna be a problem, you know. Language like, oh, I'm so sorry, this is on me, I shouldn't have taken that way. And sometimes we're that's drilled into us by situations and people that I personally wouldn't agree with or support the idea that everything is just our own perception and that there's no reality ever in the harm or hurt that can come from others. Or on the other end of the spectrum, it might always be other people. You might find language to validate those inner stories. Oh, they have bad vibes. That company in general that I used to work for, the whole company is just a heavy, dark entity, and then everyone in it became as such. And again, I'm not denying that there could be some truth to that. Of course, there can be, but I'm not sure those extremes are helpful, and I think the language I would put a lot of that language under spiritual toxicity, because at the end of the day, we're having our own unique experience, as, in my opinion, spiritual being in a human body, and so we have these unique experiences from the reference point of our human body, our human mind, all the hardware, software in that mind, and then our consciousness, our soul, who knows what else. But it is very unique, and it's a reference point from that human vessel, and we know that there's many, many others in this world that are going to perceive a lot or a little differently. I see a lot of this spiritual toxicity in the way of making or stories, narratives building that put pressure on individuals to find some perfect healing, to find some version of themselves that is healed. And I've I've heard many misuse the story of Chiron. That's what we're gonna move into next. So I had the privilege of working on a farm and in a school called Chiron Mystery School, and those that know know what that what and where that is, it really was a privilege and some of the most informative, magical years, expansive years of my life. Gratitude to everyone that came into my sphere at that time. And it was around that time I got really curious about Chiron. I heard a Chiron, I you know, in the back of my head, I'm like, oh, astrology this definitely shows up on my chart somewhere. So I think I think Chiron exists somewhere out in the stars, and I flipped Hercules, I think. But I did I really didn't know much about Chiron. So I'm going to give you a really short little history lesson here because this is really important. Because we have narratives around the wounded healer. Okay. And if you've ever heard of narratives around the wounded healer, there's a very good chance you were given a very, we could say, I don't know if new age is appropriate, but you're given a version that isn't accurate, actually. Because I know I was for a very long time. So when we look at the history of Chiron, it's quite old. It's very, very old. And yes, it has to do with Chiron himself. And yes, Chiron's a god. But here's the most important part. And for some of you, you're gonna hear this and you're gonna go, ah, that makes a lot more sense, okay? And then some of you are going to know this already and hopefully find the rest of this valuable. So Chiron, a god, but an immortal god, all right? So Chiron could not die, he could not cease to exist. Which means that in the story of this, in the story then of Chiron and the wounded healer, what most of us are given is this idea that if if I am a wounded healer, if I am not fully healed or healed enough, I should not be doing healing work. I fundamentally disagree with that. I think that's a super dangerous narrative. I think it's remarkably unfair. And even the context within the wounded healer is fundamentally, in relation to Chiron, incorrect. And let me explain why. Okay, so here's the real quick blurb of the story. So the key details here are this Chiron was accidentally shot by Heracles with an arrow poisoned by Hydra Venom. This is the most important piece, really, because he's immortal. So this doesn't kill Chiron. This wounds him. And it's a wound because of the nature of the hydro venom that will not heal. All right. So he was then, you could say, condemned, if you want to be dramatic about that, to carry an incurable and quite antagonizing, quite painful uh wound indefinitely. So this is where him as a healer comes into play. So he kept teaching, and I believe I'd have to, I'd I'd have to look back, it's been a while. He he was likely a healer beforehand, or involved somehow. But he kept on teaching and healing throughout this suffrage, this very long-term suffrage. And he was teaching and training figures like a skep a skeplis. A-S-C-L-E-P-I-U-S. We're gonna move past that. He became a literal god of medicine. Achilles, Jason, and others. So some of you know the stories. His wisdom, though, you have to understand, his medicine, his wisdom, his lived experience was because of that wound. That was the whole point. And what's what's beautiful is at the end of his story, and correct me if I'm wrong, I believe, and I can't remember how it came about, but he chose to surrender his immortality. He chose to die to free Prometheus, I'm pretty sure. Death was a release for him, which was well earned. And there are some other details that I'm not clear on and that aren't totally pertinent here. But it wasn't about the wound healing, it wasn't about the wounded healer finding a way to be fully healed. It was the teachings, the wisdom, the empathy, everything that came along with his experience with that wound. And there's so many traditions throughout the world that some very intensely believe in that and use trauma in a good way here. But we'll we'll we'll look for in healers in their own traditions. We'll look for pain and suffering, we'll look for some, it could be something as intense as a near-death experience, very serious chronic or near-terminal illness, as a sort of initiation, as a teaching that we have to live through to become a potent healer. I've never come across a tradition that says, oh, you have to go through that to become a healer. It's just in some of them, those experiences manifest very potent healers. There is actually a scholar, if you're curious, um, that I'll put in the notes here, because I feel like I'm just gonna ruin the name and I can I can barely recall it. But it it was, I think there was a there was a book, book on shamanism, something about our archaic techniques. I think there's something have to do with the word ecstasy. It's been a while since I've referenced that book. But in this book, it was interesting because he does write about this as the healers often do experience a quite intense trauma, some critical, whether it was life-threatening or just very, very traumatic experience to body, mind, so forth. And it is seen almost as an initiation. But it's not as it's hard to even speak about that through through Western language and lens. So we'll we'll leave it there for a moment. But what I want to highlight with the end of this story is if you've ever looked into Carl Jung, again, someone that I you know, I like a lot of his work. I'm on the fence about some, and that's okay. I hope, you know, people feel exactly the same about what I have to say. It's it's so it's okay. I would encourage always for us to have those oscillating viewpoints on on others in their work. So when we talk about Carl Jung, he actually used the Chiron myth, we'll say, or story. Who knows, right? We use this, the story, the historical story of Chiron as real teaching point because he himself, as far as I understand, Carl Jung himself went through quite a tumultuous experience and really felt like a lot of his understanding of human psyche, human behavior came, was really birthed or rooted in that at very least. So he talks a lot about, and this is the difference here, he talks a lot about conscious versus unconscious practitioners or healers, whatever label you want to use. And that was the important difference, not whether or not someone has made some formal full healing, because what is that, and how does one even do that? I I would like to talk to them and meet them. How do you how do you even know you've crossed that finish line and that you're healed, right? I almost feel like that's up there with enlightenment. But the difference is is whether, you know, if there's someone out there that's of service to others and they're bypassing, you know, using that spiritual bypassing, they're bypassing a lot, they're projecting a lot of their own previous trauma and suffrage on others in the world, and they're not conscious, they're not bringing that part of themselves into the conscious mind and deliberately moving through it to the best of their ability. But the consciousness is the key part here. I want to highlight that to me is what we should have been talking about. Not this idea that if you're a wounded healer, you shouldn't be helping, but that if you're choosing to not be conscious about it, then it gets tricky and it gets possibly quite quite dangerous, actually. So I think we should we should shift this and really acknowledge that in the Chiron myth, even he was exceptionally conscious and present and meaningful and deliberate. And so that informed it informed his medicine, it strengthened his medicine. And this really goes back to what I was speaking about earlier: the idea of this isn't happening to me, it's happening for me. So I just want to, as I summarize this, I want to quickly touch on that because this is again something, and I put this everything that I'm talking about, I put under this umbrella of spiritual toxicity. You know, it's also just inaccuracies, but I I feel like the inaccuracies are either done very sincerely on purpose, more likely, many, many times more often it's a product of polishing, curating something for a particular response, a delivery method, you know, on social media, let's say, or within some people's own teaching and paradigms to sort of just take some creative license so that it can align better with their own beliefs and teachings, possibly. And that again can get quite tricky. So the saying here this isn't happening to me, it's happening for me. So this one, this saying is quite old. We're gonna we're gonna jump back quite a bit here, and we're gonna jump all the way back firstly to Marcus Aur Aurel Aurelius? Aurelius Auroralis? Aurelius, I'm gonna say it that way, Marcus Aurelius. He comes from the second century AD, and I love some of his work, his philosophy. He had a lot to do with the community or the the realm of stoicism, and he used to argue that these challenging negative experiences were there to strengthen us, to give us an opportunity to see how much we can lift and what we can carry in the technique we have or we build in moving through and carrying such adversities. But this is still different from the idea that it's happening to us, it's for us, it's like this deliberate sort of experience or delivery from the universe because there's some something we've I don't know, asked for. So this isn't a reflection on my opinion on him at all. I think uh he's he's done incredible things, taught wonderful things. But there is a, you know, we have this tendency in the West often to like shorten really complex, rich phrases or or not even phrases with stories and philosophies into these few words or one-liners. And so I think in some ways, Tony Robbins may have diluted it down to this isn't happening to you, it's happening for you. And sometimes we do need an aggressive shift to our perception. So, again, this is where everything is it's not black and white, it's very personalized. But there's a lot of stoics that taught things like the idea that nothing that happens to you is ever inherently against you, but tried to reinforce our own reaction, that we all have this power in how we choose to deal and how we choose to respond and move forward. So, this again, this idea that it is this extreme spectrum, it is black and white, that everything bad and negative that happens in our life should just immediately be shifted into some sort of gift or blessing. I'm I'm not feeling that. And I gave it a good go. And I'm you know, I'm glad I can say that with a lot of honesty, as I was sharing earlier. I gave it a good go. It didn't work for me. I actually found it brought a lot of harm. Those that knew me in my early 20s could probably reflect back on that and go, yeah, there's some really honestly just stupid choices that I made, or choice there's choices that I should have made that I didn't make. And I'm grateful that I can say I've tried to live in that non-duality, that everything is just positive. And I'm not saying that there isn't some really good medicine there, but I just what I what I want to close this with, because I know this is a big topic. I totally get that this is a really big conversation. I want to close this with how important it is, and you're gonna hear me say this. This is this is the arguably one of the absolutely most important pillars of my own work that I do both for myself and what I try to help and hold good space for for others. I want all of you to trust your own intuition, your own instincts, whatever you call it. Just trust yourself, number one. There are so many incredible teachings and models out there. There's gonna be an infinite amount of opinions. We change every day, every moment. We're moving and morphing into a slightly different or dramatically different version of ourselves. And so even the medicine that we need, the teachings that work for us, it's gonna change and shift all the time as it should. So I want everyone, if if you're still listening to my much longer rant here today, it's it's for me, it's not about uh it's not a popularity thing ever on who you know who who's best known for their work in meditation, who's best known for their work in this or that, and who's popular and trending, and I wouldn't even know how to go about figuring all that out, actually. But for myself, I I trust what resonates. And you sometimes I get it wrong, sometimes you're gonna get it wrong. Sometimes I'm gonna think I'm being the conscious healer, you know. I'm or I don't I wouldn't even use that label. Uh, you know, I'm the conscious helper, facilitator. I love that word. But then I learn I'm humbled, right? Oh no, I need to work on that. Yikes, I tripped up there, and I'm so grateful when someone has the courage to point it out to me because it happens, it's gotta happen. We're not perfect, so I don't want ever want anyone beating themselves up one way or the other. Because we we also have to remember those that we're helping, those that we're in relationships with in our life, they're consenting to it. You know, they're they're they're agreeing to be your friend or your partner. There's some special relationships where that setups a bit different, you know, kids and parents and siblings, and yeah, but for the most part, you know, we have free will. We're we're choosing to stick around or not. And so we can't put all the onus on us. That's not how it goes. There's this one author, I can't remember who that was originally a mainstream psychiatrist, and she did that for a number of years and then moved into more work in my realm, intuitive work, some energy healing and whatnot. And she said something so astute, she said, and I'm paraphrasing this here, this is not a quote. She said that she finds the alternative work, the intuitive energy work that she does now, full-time in her practice, more demanding on both her and her client, opposed to her previous, more informed by institutions. You know, there's procedure and protocol embedded in that, where when, and she said it so clearly, when the patient would come to her as a psychiatrist, she was seen through the lens more often than not of the institutions and associations that defined her practice. And that's not bad or good, it's just as it is. And then her in this alternative work as an intuitive energy practitioner, it's so much more nuanced, and there isn't the same containment and framework per se. And so it was really up to her to be transparent and clear, very deeply rooted in her consciousness and ethics and how she practices and how she shows up, and equally on the client. And therefore, the result she found she believes was more profound and more powerful. Now, you can't negate her many years in her previous practice because it's all part and parcel who she is. But I thought there was an interesting perspective. This and I I don't have, I mean, I've only ever been in this realm, so I don't have the contrast, but it made sense to me that it is more demanding in many ways. In many ways it won't be, but it's something to think about. So as you consider spiritual toxicity and it's bypassing, spiritual bypassing, or you know, I'm gonna do another whole podcast on spiritual abuse under the umbrella of spiritual toxicity. For example, I'm gonna talk about my own professional personal experience with practitioners that were self-taught shamans and self-taught indigenous healers, self-taught Reiki practitioners, despite having no cultural, even ancestral lived experience, like no connection to any of those things formally, informally. Blood, nothing, geographic, nothing. You know, I'm gonna talk about some spiritual abuse as well, because this is oh man, this is something I'm seeing way too much of. Now, for this conversation, just be mindful. Be mindful of what you expose yourself to. Really trust when something doesn't feel right, when a narrative, even even if it's me, even if it's right now, it doesn't feel right. Trust that. Trust that. We have to be accountable. We have to be mindful and present with ourselves, and then we have to be accountable for what we choose to expose ourselves to. Again, that doesn't negate the possibility of many of us becoming victim too, but this is a really good place to start becoming accountable. So that when something feels off, when something doesn't feel like good medicine for us, we go no further. You know, Gandalf with the staff or the ring style. You shall not pass. I mean, I often have that visual when I hit those internal moments. No, I'll end it with a oh man, I lost my sweater. How'd I do that? I gotta go back and get it. I'll end it with I lost my sweater and a visual of Gandalf with the staff. Thank you so much for listening. And yeah, hopefully you're enjoying this if you made it to the end.