Episodes

  • Resilience and Triumph: Overcoming Life-Altering Challenges with Kijuan Amey

    Resilience and Triumph: Overcoming Life-Altering Challenges with Kijuan Amey
    Jun 3 2025
    When life suddenly changes, it can feel like everything is falling apart. You might wonder, Where do I find the strength to keep going? Resilience is about finding that courage inside yourself to face the hardest moments and keep moving forward no matter what. In this episode of Actions Antidotes, we are joined by Kijuan Amey, founder of Amey Motivation—a U.S. Air Force veteran, speaker, author, and resilience coach who shares his powerful story of resilience following a life-changing motorcycle accident. Kijuan recounts his background in the Air Force, his transition to civilian life, and the fateful day in May 2017 that altered his life's trajectory. He discusses the immediate aftermath of his accident, the extensive medical procedures and recovery process, and how he overcame the physical and emotional challenges to regain his sense of self-worth and purpose. Kijuan’s journey from being in a medically induced coma to becoming a motivational speaker and author of Don't Focus on Why Me offers valuable lessons on resilience, the importance of a supportive mindset, and finding direction after a dramatic life event. If you’ve ever faced a major setback or want to build your ability to bounce back from life’s ups and downs, this episode is for you. --- Listen to the podcast here: Resilience and Triumph: Overcoming Life-Altering Challenges with Kijuan Amey Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you all about resilience, and resilience can mean a lot of different things, but if you go about your life long enough, eventually, you’ll have some sort of event, some sort of event happen to you, whether it be something like losing a job, losing a key family member, losing a good friend, and, in this particular case, an accident that can happen anytime you’re going about your day to day life that can really change your life’s trajectory. My guest today is Kijuan Amey and he has a story about an accident as well and his resilience around it. He is an Air Force veteran and a motivational speaker. --- Kijuan, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for having me here, Stephen. I truly appreciate you having me on to speak about my story on your platform. Well, thank you for your willingness to share your story with my audience. I know we’re all trying to be better people in one way or another or trying to achieve something, and it is a real big deal when something specific happens to you, so tell us a little bit about where your story begins. This was May 5, 2017. I was, at the time, in the United States Air Force Reserve. I did four years active and I said, “I’m done with this.” I wanted to get away from that lifestyle, shall I say. And I think I made the best choice for me, personally. Other people, they love the active duty world, but I made the best decision for my life, and then not only just to be a reservist but to also go to school full time so I was pursuing my bachelor’s degree because I also wanted to become a pilot ultimately, and the job that I was doing in the Air Force was in-flight refueling and that’s where you refuel planes in midair. Amazing. To me, hands down, I think the best enlisted job I’ve ever heard. I don’t care what anybody says. So just amazing to see another plane fly up to you, right behind you as you’re flying in the air and you can refuel them, and I just call it a flying gas station, basically. So, quickly, how did that work? Because I’m trying to picture it in my head now, the idea that one plane is flying and another one is kind of coming up. Does someone have to actually jump out of the airplane and connect it the way we fill up our cars at the gas station? Yeah, no, if we had army guys on the plane, we would make them do that. But, no, we don’t do that. Okay. Yeah, no, so we have this thing we call the boom and what you do is you lower it,
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    Less than 1 minute
  • Innovative Solutions That Are Changing Homelessness with Ashley Garcia

    Innovative Solutions That Are Changing Homelessness with Ashley Garcia
    May 28 2025
    Homelessness is a complex crisis—one that can't be solved by temporary fixes alone. It takes compassion, innovation, and the courage to rethink how we support those in need. What if we could build communities that restore dignity, stability, and hope? In this episode, I’m joined by Ashley Garcia, founder and executive director of Tiny Villages Inc. We dive into the deeper issues behind homelessness and explore bold, community-centered solutions. Ashley shares how her team is building small, self-contained homes and community spaces that give people not just a place to live, but the support they need to move forward. It’s a reminder that even small ideas can lead to big change. --- Listen to the podcast here: Innovative Solutions That Are Changing Homelessness with Ashley Garcia Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you a little bit about addressing some of these major societal issues. Now, we all have our different reasons for why we’re taking on the initiatives we have, but some of us are really moved by things that we see in the world, some major issues, and, sometimes, it could be pretty daunting to think about something that has been an issue for sometimes decades, centuries, even millennia, and really dig in and take it on. My guest today is Ashley Garcia and she is the founder and executive director of a Colorado nonprofit called Tiny Villages, the address is tinyvillages.org. --- Ashley is taking on a major societal issue and, Ashley, welcome to the program. Thank you, Stephen, for having me today. I’m excited to talk a little bit more about Tiny Villages Inc. Let’s start out by, first of all, describing your story about the issue that you were moved to address and what made you decide that you have the capacity, have the talent, everything else to dive into it. So, Tiny Villages Inc. is a 501(c)(3) Colorado nonprofit corporation where we’re providing permanent housing solutions to citizens in the United States, and this includes safe housing with high quality of life and we’re folding that into three different parts so there’s housing, agriculture, and innovation. And with that, there’s going to be things like solar panels being used, there’s going to be over 110 acres on each of the tiny villages where we will provide agriculture that will give food to the villagers when they move in. And, with that, right now, we’re focusing on the unhoused population. The reason being is, back in 2021, one of my businesses is real estate investing, and so with that company, myself and several of my business partners went and traveled the United States because we’re looking for property so that we could have landing strips and have resorts and have gated communities, 24-hour security so that all the elitist in the United States could come, or actually in the world, could come and mastermind and just figure out and collaborate how to solve big world problems. And, the reality is, when we went and did this trip, we found out that there’s a lot of land, and every single state that we went to, there was the unhoused population. So that’s when I flipped all of this around and started Tiny Villages Inc. So you noticed a lot of land, and another part of your mission is related to agriculture so did you notice a lot of land not only, and I’m specifically thinking about some places I’ve been to or used to live in like Illinois and Iowa where there’s a lot of land but I just imagine a lot of it being corn fields, soy fields, and stuff like that, but I’m guessing you observed a lot of land that wasn’t also already being used for agriculture? That is correct. There’s a lot of undeveloped land or there’s a lot of like little towns and cities that have folded up because the people have actually left and went to the major cities where jobs are and so it was just eye opening to even see that.
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    Less than 1 minute
  • Mastering Sales and Mindset with Christopher Filipiak

    Mastering Sales and Mindset with Christopher Filipiak
    May 22 2025
    Sales can be intimidating—especially when you're chasing a passion that doesn't come with a natural knack for selling. For many, mindset is the missing piece, not just in business but in life. But what happens when you combine strategy with psychology to unlock real growth? In this episode, I have Christopher Philippi, a seasoned sales consultant and coach for CEOs. He helps people overcome the fear of selling and client acquisition by blending both coaching and consulting to support real growth. In our conversation, Christopher shares how mindset shapes our actions, why clarity and consistency matter, and how to shift your thoughts to get better results in business and life. Tune in to learn how the right strategy and mindset can change everything. --- Listen to the podcast here: Mastering Sales and Mindset with Christopher Filipiak Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. A lot of us have ideas, a lot of us have passions, and a lot of us have the impact that we want to make onto the world and maybe you’re listening and you’re thinking about it a little bit, thinking, okay, should I get serious about this? It’s springtime, there’s a new energy going on, maybe it’s time to actually get serious. But we have a series of things that oftentimes trip us up, make us a little bit intimidated, make us kind of question whether or not we want to hit that proverbial Start button. And one of the things that can really intimidate a lot of people is sales or kind of building a client base/audience, how do you actually connect your product to the market that you’re trying to connect it to, i.e., how do you actually sell the thing? Is someone going to ever pay me for this? Today, to talk about that subject, I would like to bring on my guest, Christopher Filipiak, who is a sales consultant and a coach for CEOs. --- Christopher, welcome to the program. Hey, Stephen. It’s so good to be here today. Thanks for having me on the show. Yeah, thank you for popping on. So not kind of a normal combination, sales consultant and coach for CEOs. What does that mean in tandem? Yeah, sure. It’s a good question because consulting is its own unique thing and coaching is its own unique thing so when I think of consulting, you kind of think of three buckets, strategy, planning, and implementation of something, and a consultant is really someone who provides expert advice and a proven process, meaning, know how to get something done and they’re there to be an expert and go, “Hey, this is how you do that.” A coach is more there to help you create clarity on what you want and help you discover your own truths. So a coach isn’t there to tell you how to do it, a coach is really there to help you figure out how you want to do it and provide you some support and some challenge and a container for you to do that. So, when it comes to sales, I think both things are important, because my clients need someone who can help them set up a sales system, a sales process, the skills around the strategy and tactics of building a business that’s competent and making sales, and so much of sales deals with what’s going on in your own head and your own confidence and your own leadership and your own material around money and strangers that having coaching is also really supportive so that’s why I do both. And are your clients often the same for both the coaching and the consulting or is it usually separate endeavors based on what someone at a certain time? Yeah, that’s a really good question. So, they tend to be the same. When I work with my clients, what happens is we’ll have calls that are focused on building skill sets or implementation work around the strategies and tactics around sales and then we’ll have separate calls that are coaching-only calls. And so most of my engagements with my clients, I do both things,
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    44 mins
  • What It Means to Carry Legacy Forward with Lesle Lane

    What It Means to Carry Legacy Forward with Lesle Lane
    May 15 2025
    Family legacy means different things to different people. For some, it’s a big part of who they are, with strong traditions and high expectations. For others, it’s something they’re still trying to figure out. But how do you build something new while honoring where you came from? In this episode, I have Leslie Lane, the founder and lead photographer of Studio 13. Photography runs in her family, and she’s been able to take that legacy and shape it into something of her own. In our conversation, Leslie shares what it was like growing up in a photography family, how she found her own style, and what it means to her to carry that legacy forward while doing things her way. Tune in and learn more! --- Listen to the podcast here: What It Means to Carry Legacy Forward with Lesle Lane Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you all about a topic that we’ve yet to really cover in this particular podcast, and that is the idea of a family legacy. I know some people have a stronger family legacy than others. For some people, it really looms large and there’s a lot of expectations, and, for others, it’s maybe even lacking direction too much. But my guest today, Lesle Lane, is the founder and lead photographer of Studio 13 but she comes from a family that has a legacy of photography and she’s been able to take their business and kind of move it in a direction that puts her own mark on it. --- Lesle, welcome to the program. Thank you so much for having me. It’s such a pleasure. Definitely. So, tell us first about how photography is part of your family legacy. I sure will. So, my grandfather actually started the business. He came into the photographic industry because when he was an eighth grader, his father tried to kill him with a garden hoe and so he ran away from home. You’ve got the shocked look on your face. It’s true. He ran away from home and they didn’t have Child Protective Services and so he ended up getting in with traveling salespeople, nomadic people, that’s what they did, and one of the things that they did was teach him how to be a photographer. And so he would go from town to town taking pictures and then going back several weeks later to deliver the pictures and, finally, came upon my grandmother, who he ended up marrying, though he was hired to shoot her engagement portrait so that was quite scandalous. And then they settled, started their portrait photography business in Columbus, Georgia. And then my mother and father divorced where we moved to Indiana together, she married my stepfather and then I took over his version of the photography studio, which was corporate and commercial work. It’s just shocking to hear someone trying to kill their own son with a garden hoe because people will oftentimes joke about it and they’re like, funny, like, “Oh, I could kill you,” or something like that, but like this was a literal attempt to end his own son’s life. Yes, and, actually, I misspoke, it was a stepfather, but still, the man that was married to his mother, and it was during the Depression times, things were not good, there was no work, there was no money. It doesn’t excuse it at all but he had no choice. And so my grandfather, he survived and ended up running a very successful business and dying a multimillionaire. He made something amazing of himself after leaving home in the eighth grade. That is a legacy. That is something you can grab on to. Great father, great grandfather, and I’m blessed to have known him. One of the things that I’ve done personally and I know a lot of other people have talked about recently and it gets a little bit spiritual sometimes is this idea of multigenerational patterns and how they affect anyone’s life going forward. And so you have this family legacy of photography, which I definitely want to talk about as well as that’s your business,
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    48 mins
  • Starting and Scaling up a Business with Claire Ansell

    Starting and Scaling up a Business with Claire Ansell
    May 7 2025
    Starting a business is a big decision, and people do it for different reasons. Maybe you have a passion you really care about, or you just want more freedom in how you spend your time. For some, it's about doing something different from the usual 9-to-5 job and having control over their own path. But what does it really take to start a business—and is passion enough to keep you going? In this episode, I have Clara Ansel, CEO and Founder of Business Powerhouse. Clara shares valuable insights into managing business growth sustainably without burning out. The conversation delves into the importance of having a clear destination or 'Point B,' the role of mindset in business success, and practical steps to avoid chaos and inefficiency. Clara also discusses the significance of decluttering one's mind and surroundings, actionable advice for aspiring entrepreneurs, and her personal journey from corporate consultancy to empowering small business owners. Tune in to learn more! --- Listen to the podcast here: Starting and Scaling up a Business with Claire Ansell Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidotes to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you all about starting and scaling up businesses. Now, perhaps you have your reasons for wanting to start a business and, usually, it's about passion that you have or just the desire to have a life where you have a little bit more autonomy over what you do and when you do it, something other than the corporate life, but maybe you're looking at these processes of starting a business and seeing how daunting the process is, how much it really goes on, especially if you do end up with an investor that expects you to scale or if you personally have the desire to scale because whatever mission you're serving, you're kind of wanting to bring to more or more people. My guest today is Claire Ansell, and she is the CEO and founder of Business Powerhouse and she has some good thoughts about how we could go about managing this whole process without kind of burning out, without kind of ending up doing too much in a more sustainable fashion. --- Claire, welcome to the program. Hey, Stephen. How are you? I'm doing pretty well today. It's actually a nice 70 degrees here. Nice. That's good. Summer is coming. It always feels nice at this time of year. How are you today? I'm pretty good. It’s been an exciting day with doing lots of –– actually like in the same realm as what you're talking about. We launched a new kind of series in our hub called Awaken, which is all about mindset so it's pretty exciting to be jumping on here with you today and kind of continuing the conversation. Yeah, and that's a good place to start. We can talk a little bit about mindset because I'm assuming you work with a lot of people who are either starting businesses or have a business and they're just starting to become overwhelmed as their web traffic, their client base, something kind of picks up. Yeah, and I think it doesn't really matter what phase of business you're in, whether you're a startup or a ten-million-dollar business, the reality –– or a hundred-million-dollar business. I mean, I've seen it right up to 600 million. I mean, at some point, a business owner is overwhelmed in chaos and facing that burnout. It's just the reality of the way in which we structure and grow our businesses. Now, given your role in your business, is there any way to prevent that burnout? Is there any way someone that's starting a business now can adopt either a mindset or a set of operational practical you want to start a business but you don't want to burn yourself out? Yeah, 100 percent, and I think one of the biggest pieces the business owners really miss is they don't understand what their point B is. We talk about point A is where you are today and point B is where are you going in the future and that could be at ...
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    46 mins
  • Understanding HRV and Managing Stress with Matt Bennett

    Understanding HRV and Managing Stress with Matt Bennett
    Apr 30 2025
    Stress is part of life, but learning how to handle it well can make a big difference for your health and well-being. When we don’t have the right tools, even small problems can start to feel overwhelming. The good news is, there are easy ways to bounce back and stay on track. But what if there was a way to actually measure how well you're handling stress? In this episode, I talk with Matt Bennett, founder of Optimal HRV. We dive into heart rate variability (HRV) and how it relates to your body’s ability to recover from stress. Matt shares how HRV tracking can give you early signs of health issues before symptoms even show up. He also talks about affordable tools and breathing techniques that can help anyone improve their stress response and build resilience. --- Listen to the podcast here: Understanding HRV and Managing Stress with Matt Bennett Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about stress and, in some aspect, our response to stress, because that’s one of the things that can really get in the way of us following our passions, and you can easily ruin a good reputation you built with one terrible stress response and that’s something that is really sad to see because we all are human and we all have the times where we don’t quite respond the right way but it can be a little bit difficult. So, one of the tools that a lot of people are using to manage their stress as well as their overall health is HRV which, my guest today, Matt Bennett, the owner and founder of Optimal HRV, is going to talk to us more about. --- HRV is the heart rate variability and, Matt, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me. Big fan of the show so it’s an honor to be on. Thank you so much for coming on and I want to start off with explaining to the audience to make sure we’re all oriented, I know some people are probably pretty familiar with what HRV is, others maybe not as much, but I think most people probably aren’t familiar with it and its significance on the level that you are. Really, when you get down to what is heart rate variability, it’s your body and mind’s ability to handle or recover from stress. And, as you said in your intro, the stress response is so fundamental to everything we do. Now, stress can be an illness. Stress can be a very, very difficult workout. Stress is often you talk about on your show, can be, I’ve got five, six hours of screen time today and we know that can add stress to the system as well. So, your ability to handle or recover from stress is the best foundational definition for heart rate variability that I have seen. Now, we’re doing that by measuring millisecond variations in your heartbeat, and I’m happy to explore the science behind that, but that gives us, I think, a good working definition to start out our conversation with. So you’re talking about like millisecond variance in heart rate and some people might be thinking why there should be variance at all because one of the key aspects of it that might be good to orient people to is that is there a too low, a too high number, or is it just a matter of keeping it at or above a certain level? Right. So, we’re in a time where consistency is usually leading to a good outcome. You and I want to turn our computers on and, for the most part, we want it to do the same thing it did yesterday and the day before. You don’t want to sit in your car and have it operate totally different than it did the last time you drove it. In this high tech environment, mechanized environment that we modern humans live in, consistency is usually equated with good quality. We are biological systems so this variation is actually a positive thing. Now, you could have variation in your heartbeats to an extent where you have a medical issue, arrhythmias and other things are obviously not what we’re talking about here and those need t...
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    50 mins
  • Healing Emotional Trauma and Understanding Energy with Regard Tang

    Healing Emotional Trauma and Understanding Energy with Regard Tang
    Apr 22 2025
    We can’t remove emotion from our lives — it’s always been there since the beginning. Sometimes, when we’re making big life decisions, we have to face and work through past trauma. That trauma can show up in different ways. So how do we start to heal? In this episode, I talk with Regard Tang, an energy healer and channeler who focuses on emotional and social trauma. We chat about how our childhood and our parents’ influence shape our emotional habits as we grow up. Regard shares why it’s important to deal with emotional and generational trauma so we can live healthier lives. She also explains how energy healing works, including how she connects with a person’s ancestors and spirit guides to help uncover and release deep emotional pain. --- Listen to the podcast here: Healing Emotional Trauma and Understanding Energy with Regard Tang Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. When we are preparing for whatever our next move is, oftentimes that will be starting a business, starting a new initiative, or starting a new chapter in our lives, we need to do various things to, whether it be purge the old chapters or just kind of heal, reset ourselves, oftentimes, that will involve kind of overcoming or processing some trauma from previous areas of our lives, and that can take on many different forms, but it is a very important thing that I think a lot of people don’t necessarily think of of why am I in this mentality where I don’t seem to ever be able to get a move on what I’m doing or make a decision or really kind of go for what I’m going for. And so I want to present with you various different forms in which we can heal the trauma, because there’s many different ways that we can process our energy. Today, my guest is Regard Tang, and she is an energy healer and a channeler. --- Regard, welcome to the program. Thank you for having me, Stephen. Thank you so much. And I want to start this podcast with a quick explanation, because I’m bringing on a concept that may be new to a lot of people about the two things that you do, which are energy healing and channeling. By energy healing, what does that mean? What does that really entail? So, energy healing, we all carry different kind of energy. Some people, they carry a little bit like a heavier energy and I’m sure that when you walk into the room, you can just stand –– the room is carrying those very heavy energy versus when you’re seeing some people that they’re very bubbly and they’re just like lighter, they light you up. So energy healing, what I do? I do channeling. So energy healing, you can go to sound healing, you can go to reiki. There’s a lot of different methods, but for me, I specialize in channeling. What does channeling mean? It means that I can talk to my client’s ancestors, I can talk to my client’s spirit guides, which is spirit team, and I can also talk to my client’s inner self, means that, because I specialize in emotional trauma and social trauma, so I’m able to tell are their emotion aligned? Means that they’re like, “Well, I experienced X, Y and Z,” but I’m able to tap into their emotion, it’s like, actually, it’s not exactly what you feel on their surface. I can feel very, very deep emotions that they literally put it in the box and put it away when they were younger. And, of course, in a minute, we’ll explain a little bit more, but that is what I do. Okay. And so I want to start the beginning of the story, which is these emotions that are pushed away and the energy that people all kind of come out in the room, because it sounds like this is something that could be really limiting some people from living their best lives and really presenting themselves in a way. So, what does it look like for someone whose energy is not aligned because of an emotional baggage from the past? What does it feel like when you walk into a room and you encounter that person and...
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    Less than 1 minute
  • How to Effectively Communicate Your Vision with Alice and Ed

    How to Effectively Communicate Your Vision with Alice and Ed
    Apr 8 2025
    Having a big idea or vision is great—but at some point, you’ve got to share it. Whether you're talking to future customers, hiring a team, or just explaining what you do, people need to get it. And it’s not just about what you say out loud or post online. A big part of it starts with knowing yourself—what you believe in, what you offer, and why it matters. So how do you figure all that out and actually get your message across? In this episode, I talk with Alice Marie Brink, and Ed Moehlenkamp about how to communicate your vision in a way that actually connects. We chat about the impact of social media, communication and leadership. Tune in, to learn more! --- Listen to the podcast here: How to Effectively Communicate Your Vision with Alice and Ed Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Any vision that you have, you’re going to need to communicate that vision outward somehow. There is just no getting around it. At some point, someone needs to know what you’re doing, whether it is people you hire to enact your vision and do the communication or the communication that you do directly yourself for your vision. And when it comes to communicating your vision outward, there’s actually an internal and an external component of it. The external component is what we often see because those are the words you say or the words you type or the images you put out there. However, there is some also internal work that you need to do in order to understand what you’re communicating, understand who you are, and understanding, in many cases, what your value proposition is, which is important for anyone to understand why they should be doing business with you regardless of what your idea is. To talk about both the internal and external components of this concept of communicating your vision outward, I would like to introduce to you Alice Brink and Ed Moehlenkamp with their Energy Interplay Initiative. --- Alice, Ed, welcome to the program. Thank you. Thank you. Nice to see you. Great to see you as well. And so just to orient us a little bit, we’ll start with you, Alice, as the internal component, which is the first component, and you work with mindset, energy, and mindfulness. That’s right. No matter where we go and what we do, we’re carrying this internal environment with us and so my work helps people get in touch with that, become aware of it, and then learn how to drive that energy, because, after all, it’s all energy. And so, through exercises and then practical application, I love the energy, I’ve been in energy work for almost three decades now, and so that’s shown me a lot of different outpicturings of that. And so one of those, now that I’m with Ed, we’re applying it to our presentation skills offering. So it’s all about what you’re bringing to this presentation internally that drives the energy and the connection of your presentation.Share on X Now, when it comes to energy work, how much of it is kind of overall what energy you bring to every single day interaction, whether you’re attending a networking event, meeting with one of your employees, or even just hanging out with your friends, versus the energy reset that you do in advance of the actual presentation that you’re about to give? This is funny you bring this up. So, in almost every one of my workshops and in my coaching interactions, we get to a point where I share this favorite quote of mine, and it is, “Don’t let the weeds grow on the path to the dear friend’s home.” And I believe it’s an old Chinese proverb of some kind, but the dear friend is you, and so getting familiar with that path that leads you inward and tamping down the weeds, if you will, through repeated trips there allows that connection to be more readily available and to be more authentic to you and more in alignment. So, especially now,
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    47 mins
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