Episode #36

Episode #36: Grandmother Jyoti Psychedelic Leadership Podcast.

Duration: 01:56:45

Laura Dawn: My name is Laura Dawn, and you’re listening to episode number 36 of the Psychedelic Leadership Podcast, featuring a very special conversation with renowned spiritual teacher and vision keeper, Grandmother Jyoti, sharing her powerful wisdom for these times of

change.

Grandmother Jyoti: All the spiritual leaders that I’ve walked with through the years are saying this is a time when we are going into a birthing process. So, it’s going to move to the feminine, to take that leadership of life as it flows into its new form. And so, we’re in a moment where the masculine and the feminine are finding a different alignment with one another, where the masculine is learning not to defend, but to protect life makers. And that there is a balance and a harmony now that will come between the masculine and the feminine as we move into these new times. We’re in a moment of truth and this truth is in our face. It’s the truth of ourselves looking at us. It’s the truth of our family systems looking at us. It’s the truth of our cultural systems looking at us. It’s the truth of our world system. looking at us. The instruction is you can’t go around the truth, you can’t go through the truth or try to manipulate or negotiate the truth, you must feel the truth, must let yourself feel this truth. And as that happens, it will then push you into your spiritual maturity, which is really, we’re in our moment of maturing ourselves and not imposing my truth. You see, that’s the challenge right now is “I got the truth, and I’m going to tell you the truth. I’m going to impose the truth. I’m going to fight for the truth.” You know, I’ve never understood why people fight for peace. It’s like, be peace.

You know, one of my elders told me a long time ago because I’m an activist still in just different forms, but you know, “What you fight is what you become,” she said to me. When I let go of the outer world instruction and started to let the inner world instruction be the driving engine, then all of the circumstances and all of the synchronicities and those magical moments when I met just this right person that would then wake me up to the next part of what would be the cultivation of consciousness and awareness in me, that’s how the life flowed. So, I always say don’t get ahead of your medicine. You are your medicine, so follow that which knows itself. And it’s about trusting that which lives within you. The Great Ones know what we need in order to fully awaken to our authenticity, and that’s the call right now. And we really must stay in that moment and call in our full authenticity to make it through the keyhole, if you will.

And Native American Church was one of the first places I learned how to pray. I learned how to sit on my knees all night long. I learned what protocol meant because protocol is not like rules. Protocol is literally Earth’s law coming through that accentuates life. And it helps us keep the power of that prayer that got started and handed those protocols from the original time you prayed. So, when you keep those protocols unbroken, when you sit down and open that prayer like the earth asked you to do, then that full line of all those prayers before comes in with you. And our prayer was unity and peace amongst all nations. That was the prayer we were carrying. And so first She said, “Wake up,” you know, “work on yourself to wake yourself, then come together and help others wake up. And then live together in community with that intention being at the basis of it all.”

Laura Dawn: According to the Kogi prophecy, we are collectively moving through 13 years they call the great cleanse. The Kogis say that the great ending will fall into the beginning in 2026. In this episode, Grandmother Jyoti shares remarkable stories that help us understand the wisdom within these prophecies and the power of walking in prayer, and points to the necessity of stepping into alignment with our authenticity, as this is a time of reckoning with our personal truth. Now, I know the word prayer doesn’t resonate with everyone. I mean, in all honesty, it didn’t resonate with me for a very, very long time, until I sat with Ayahuasca, and I learned what it meant to pray. And I actually invited Jyoti to come on to this show because I specifically wanted to talk to her about the power of prayer. And you might recognize her name and voice from the Wisdom Keepers panel that I featured as episode number 30 on this podcast, and I just wanted to spend more time with her and soak up her wisdom. And similarly, Jyoti shares that she also really learned what it meant to pray when she arrived at the Native American Church and sat with elders in teepee, communing with peyote cactus.

Now, Jyoti Ma takes prayerful living, truly integrating what it means to walk in prayer to an entirely new level. And that’s why I just love being in her presence because it’s just so palpable. So, if the P-word, the prayer word doesn’t resonate with you, or has too much religious connotation, or just too much baggage associated to it, swap it out for another word. Use the word intention or whatever other word works for you. Don’t get hung up on it, just tune in and feel the frequency that Jyoti transmits through this conversation. And I know this is a long episode, but it’s definitely one of my favorite conversations so far. And it’s worth listening to all of it, because honestly, it starts strong, and it ends just as strong. I’ve listened to it a few times already, and I’m sure I’ll be listening to it again. And so, I also broke up the conversation with an interlude that Jyoti wanted to share. It’s this beautiful recording of her offering a prayer. And you can also listen to this on YouTube as well. It’s called “Walk On”, and I’ll include this link in the show notes. And on that note, I’ll leave this episode off with something a little different this time. It’s not a song, but it’s another beautiful recording called “Prayer for Peace”, by Elah & AuSierra, and it’s from their album called La Medicina, which I highly recommend listening to. It’s super beautiful, they have lots of other beautiful medicine songs on there. And I’ll also include their link in the show notes as well, where you’ll also find a link to my “For Medicine” music playlists for psychedelic journeys and beyond.

For those of you who don’t know who Grandmother Jyoti is and just what a powerhouse this elder is, I mean, she is truly a remarkable woman. She was one of the founders of the Center for Sacred Studies and was also the founding member and convener of the Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers that you might have heard of. And I didn’t know this, but she shared at the end of this conversation that the initial circle of Thirteen Grandmothers has really spawned a whole movement. And there’s now over something like 70 councils of Thirteen Grandmothers convening all over the world. And so, Jyoti considers herself to be a Vision Keeper and a seed keeper, which she talks more about. And she shares that after the Council of Thirteen Grandmothers took on a life of its own, she received new guidance, a new vision, a new seed that has led her to launching a project called The Fountain, which I highly recommend checking out at thefountain.earth. And their mission is to restore an economic model that is based on reciprocity and collaboration, guided by nature and the sacred.

Now, before we dive in, I want to invite you to reflect on the prayer, the vision you are holding and cultivating for your life and for humanity. Are you walking in alignment with your prayer every day? Prayer can take on a million forms. We can write our prayers, sing and dance our prayers. This is how we weave ceremony into the fabric of our everyday lives. And if you feel like sharing your prayer with me in person, I invite you to join me alongside other speakers like Aubrey Marcus and Duncan Trussell in Las Vegas in November for a psychedelic conference called Meet Delict, where I’ll be offering a talk on exploring the intersection between creative problem solving and psychedelics for the leaders of our time. And you can get a discount on your ticket and that link is in the show notes as well. All right, I just can’t begin to express how much of an honor it is to be able to sit down with someone like Grandmother Jyoti, whom I respect so much, and be on the receiving end of her enormous amount of wisdom. Some of you know the journey that I’ve been on with this podcast and how much effort and dedication it’s required. And honestly, every single moment of challenge and struggle on this learning curve has been so worth it for moments that I’ve been able to share with Grandmother Jyoti. Moments like this make it all worth it. And I am so thrilled that I’m able to share this potent conversation with you as well. Without any further ado, here is my conversation with the one and only very, very special Grandmother Jyoti.

Grandmother Jyoti: How are you doing?

Laura Dawn: I’m doing good, you know, navigating so many waves of change, just like the rest of humanity.

Grandmother Jyoti: Yeah. As the Kogi say, we’re in the ending times. So–

Laura Dawn: It feels like the grand upheaval right now is what it feels like. And the training is learning how to stay present in the middle of the whirlwind is really what it feels like. How are you doing?

Grandmother Jyoti: Well, the Kogi told us the ending would fall into the beginning in 2026. And when they gave us this prophecy in 2013, you know, we were entering into 13 years of the great cleanse. And so, we are deep in it now. And they said it’s important to watch the ending as it falls down, so you stay informed, but to stay focused on that which is breaking through. And that which is breaking through will be carried by those individuals and organizations and movements that are based on original principles of heart, reciprocity, collaboration, unity, and all life is sacred. And so that’s where I’m putting my focus right now. The further instruction from spirit was to stay in the present moment, just like you said, that’s the instruction. Because if we are in the moment that we’re in, this present moment we’re in, and our mind runs ahead to see what’s going to happen or tries to negotiate or manipulate it, then it might meet fear, and bring that into the present moment. Or if it looks behind itself, it might bring regret into the present moment. But if we stay fully present in the present moment, and receive what the divine brings to that moment, and embrace it, sometimes that’s the aha moment. Sometimes that’s a challenging moment. Sometimes it’s joy, abundance, overflowing, everything can come to that moment, but the Great Ones know what we need in order to fully awaken to our authenticity, and that’s the call right now. And we really must stay in that moment and call in our full authenticity to make it through the keyhole, if you will. And the clock is ticking. And yes, things are getting stronger and stronger and stronger to shake us all awake and make us take a moment to stand in that present moment and make a choice so we’re conscious as we choose, huh?

Laura Dawn: It’s interesting, and I love that you invoked this word authenticity. And I think it gets thrown around a lot these days. And so, I’m kind of curious, how do you conceptualize this notion of really living in authentic alignment with our core truth?

Grandmother Jyoti: Well, I think it’s an individual soul work. And if you stay in that present moment, and you receive what’s brought to you and you fully are committed to your own full awakening into who you really are at the core of yourself, that’s what I mean by authenticity. And that’s work. It’s life work. It can be a lifetime’s work, to move through the karmic entanglements and the lessons that karma brings us so that we can get to the space of where our dharma is starting to present itself. And right now, globally, the world’s soul is in that kind of choice moment, you know? Will we step out of a world that has to be right and wrong and divided and opposing itself and harming itself and gone to sleep in itself? Or will we choose to be in that moment where we’re ready to do the work? We came here to do the work so we can leave a different kind of legacy. And all of us knew what kind of time we were going to jump into. So, we chose to come here, there’s no victim story anymore. But what she says is, it’s time for all the light walkers, the light-bringers to fully activate themselves. What does that mean?

Well, you know, in my world I can only report from my walk because that’s my experience, you know, and what’s been touched by that experience. And I know that from early on in my life, I was an activist of one sort or another. I’m 73 now so, you know, you can imagine back in those days when I started this as a young girl in the south, where girls were seen and not heard, where a lot of that kind of law and things that opposed us and suppressed us in our authentic being of self. So, we had to wake up from that space. We had to wake up and realize, “Whoa, I am living in a world where I was being abused, so why am I choosing to do that?”, and really start to embrace what I needed to do to heal things inside of myself that needed attention. And that it wasn’t just for me, but it was actually, it’s for generations. There’s a generational line that runs through every single one of us. And so right now, we’re in the middle of clearing a generational history, a generational wound, a generation that wasn’t as evolved as we’re stepping into, we’re going through an evolutionary process with the earth. As She evolves, so do we.

You know, it’s been told to me where this is her sixth extinction. So, she’s done this five times before. And when I was in India, and going in my pilgrimage there, I would go to sacred sites and temples and they would have a clock on the wall, and the clock would be from 12 to one would be 2500 years and from one to two would be another 2500 years, until it went around for the 26,000-year cycle. And at the very end, there’s this little sliver, they call the Kali Yuga, the end of a cycle, the end of everything cages down on itself, so it can arise out of itself to start the next 26,000-year cycle. So that’s what we’re in right now. We’re in that ending time. You know, if we can step back from it, and realize it’s not because something went wrong, we don’t have to judge it, or guilt anybody about it, or try to fix it, you know. We don’t need to rescue the earth. We need to honor where She is in Her cycle. And we’re in it with Her.

So, as we come to this ending cycle, if we can be aware of that, then we will realign with the Mother Earth herself, who can give us instruction and has been giving us instructions since the original time. And She gave those instructions to Her original people. And She shared with them how to care for this creation so that that reciprocity of life could flow naturally and all abundance that’s in this creation could be shared by all. And that worked. And then we got to the place where a bad seed was planted and we started getting off and we started separating ourselves from nature, thinking it was out there, and it was there, and we were here. Thinking we could control nature, thinking we could, you know, put things in a box and economize them somehow another. And that’s when we started going to sleep. We started losing our souls’ path as a people here, as a race here, as a species here. Because we are nature itself with legs on walking around, we are part of this. And ever since the pandemic struck, you know, it’s really clear if we can take a moment and step into that kind of perception and look at Earth, Mother Earth and see where She’s not well and start to attend to what She says she needs in order to bring that health back, restore that nature itself, then our bodies with heal, our minds will heal, and we’ll step into a different attunement for ourselves, if you will.

Lately, some of what the elders are having us look at is how we got put in this box by this oppressive thought that we put in motion so many years ago, through time, because we went into the Gregorian calendar, which is false time. 13 Moon calendar goes with the cycles of this earth, and they say if we can come back to living with those 13 moons, that it will naturally put us into right alignment with ourselves all the way through, then we’ll be in harmony internally, you know. So, the prophecies have prepared us and now the prophecies are instructing us if we’ll just listen. We’re graced by that.

Laura Dawn: I want to ask you more about what some of these original instructions are for people listening. And before we get there, I’m kind of curious, what does the prophecy say about what 2026 looks like into the transition into 2027 and the beginning of the next cycle and beyond? Does the prophecy speak to that very moment in time?

Grandmother Jyoti: Well, I’ve been walking with prophecy for a large part of my life, and I came into it, not even realizing I was walking with it myself and my community. And we’ve been in service to and grown by the Eagle Condor prophecy, where some of the Kogi are speaking about. Prophecy, in my world, she shows you where you are, and what’s needed. She doesn’t give me the instruction of what that will be about next, you know. I mean, there are certainly amongst our original people, some of the very old lines that carry some of that story in much more detail, but it’s something they hold very private and sacred because we’re all making choices, and this is a system of the reality of free will. And so, there are many different layers of consciousness residing here right now.

And, you know, we’ve all been working for the last 30 or 50 years for sure, with the realization that if enough of us walk into that higher consciousness, it’ll be a tipping point and pull us through. So, we’re at a critical moment right now and I think the most important thing to know is, wake ourselves up because consciousness is contagious. You know, you can’t make somebody conscious. You can’t. It doesn’t work that way, any more than you could go out and make the rosebush bloom quicker than its own DNA will bring it to the blooming process, you know. We’ve got to understand that about nature. So, we have to sit down with nature, be a bit more humble in our approach to all of this and really go and access deep, deep listening, which is some– I know, you wrote me and said we’re going to talk about prayer this morning. And for me, that is a process of deep, deep listening.

Laura Dawn: Yeah, it seems to me like you’re dedicating your life through the projects that you support, through your Center of Sacred Studies, and also with the Thirteen Grandmothers to really help spread the message of these instructions for how people can essentially wake up. And so yeah, I’d love to talk about prayer. And if there’s anything else that you’d love to share around how people can deepen on this path and listen, and what does that look like for us to be able to receive these instructions from our elders? And what instructions are we receiving to be in deeper, harmonious alignment with ourselves, with each other, and with this earth? I mean, it seems like prayer is a really big aspect of that. And are there other instructions that are specific that are being given right now that you’d love to share?

Grandmother Jyoti: Well, I think I want to enter that discussion with it’s really about coming in with our curiosity, not our need. No, no, that’s a Western thing. If we brush that off and come down to the curiosity that can be the seed of that, then we start to enter this discussion with a different attitude. And so, when I look back at my life, for instance, and when we started this walk and intentionalized our prayer with the divine and with the Divine Mother, because we’re instruments of what She calls forth, and She calls herself She of Many Faces, and She’s been that way with us. And so, if I look back at that, we didn’t know where we were going, we didn’t know what we were being called for, all we knew is that there was something very strong that was calling us all together, to sit down in a spiritual community with that kind of intention to step out of the box of throw away reality, that we wanted to declare our sovereignty through longevity, that we were committing ourselves to waking up together. And we knew waking up was sometimes messy, so we wanted to do it with kindness. We wanted to allow ourselves to bring our children into this world through that kind of understanding with a way of life that would bring more harmony and balance. And they would receive that understanding by just living it with us.

The throwaway society we were stepping out of was about you know, I get a car and when it wears out, I get another car. Same thing with the washing machine, maybe relations, I mean, you know, it goes on and on because when we have an attitude of a throwaway society, we enter it in a very different way. We enter relation with everything in a very different way. So, with that said, if I look back at my life, what she said, as she started putting– I realized a few years ago, she was making a statement through us as we walked our prayer. And our prayer was unity and peace amongst all nations. That was the prayer we were carrying. And so first She said, “Wake up,” you know, “work on yourself to wake yourself, then come together and help others wake. And then live together in community with that intention being at the basis of it all.”

And then, we were there, and we got our land up in the Sierra Foothills here in California, in 1995 and really intentionalized that prayer and a walk as a community. And we didn’t know how we were going to do that either, you know. We took one step and stayed in that present moment, and She sent what we needed. And then we just followed the practical side of that and the logistical sides of that, the legal sides that we had to put in motion to create a community and then grow a business and an educational system that would carry some of these teachings in the far reaches that it has.

And then in 1998, that was in 1995, and in 1998, and during ceremony, she came, and She said, “I’m going to give you one of my most precious baskets. And in this basket are some of my most treasured jewels. Those jewels represent lines of prayer that go back to the original time. Do not mix them, do not change them, protect and keep them safe and walk them through the doorway of the millennia, and hand them back to me, I have something we’re going to do. Now, we did not understand this instruction, but up our 14-mile lager road to our place where we lived on the top of this mountain in the Sierra Foothills came the elders that would help to initiate us in those lines of prayer, show us the protocols of Earth that were given by those plants, by the earth herself as protocol for how to live life in a sacred manner. How to maintain the diversity of these different lines of prayer as well because that diversity, once embraced is truly all of creation activated. Yeah?

So, for almost a decade, that training went on with all of us. It was not easy. We had to really– They put us through many, many, many ceremonial rituals and works and fasts and pilgrimages and all kinds of things that would awaken this understanding of the protocol of life inside of ourselves so we could live in that original way and have that way of life be a way of life again. And shortly after that, then we had 9/11 occur. And 9/11, we had set up all these ways to really protect this basket, and when 9/11 happened, it fell down. And so, we created a church, the Center for Sacred Studies, so we could really care for these Earth-based ways of prayer in the right way. And then, we really started getting the information, and it’s a much longer story, that it was time. Many of us were receiving messages to gather up a council of Grandmothers. And so, we went.

I was on my way to Gabon, Africa when this came up and the grandmother there said, “Yes, I’m getting a similar vision and it’s time to do it now.” And I was on my way to the Amazon, where we had a home that was part of our community for 22 years, and took many of our community into the jungle, so the jungle herself could really indoctrinate us and help us wake to ourselves. And so, I showed it to some of the women that I’ve been working with there and they had recently signed a letter down in the Jurua region of the Brazilian Amazon that said, “It was time–“. Well, I’ll back up for a minute because really, when Bernadette, when we were in Gabon, had showed us the letter that she had just signed with the Ayahuasca curanderos in Peru, that said, “It was time to declare all indigenous peoples to declare their sovereignty. And it was time to call the people, to call them into play in regards to how it was not okay anymore for people to go into their pharmacies, into their jungles and take their medicines without understanding them, and without permission. And it was time to declare that at this moment in time, and it was time now.” And then when I went to the Amazon, they had signed a similar letter with six tribes in the Judua region there and so that was the validation. Because as you walk it, then it shows you things and then there’s a validation, there’s synchronicities. There are things that show up that give you the feedback that you’re listening correctly. And there are elders along the way that you can bring this to and say, “Am I hearing this? Am I hearing this correctly?” So that way you stay humble in your march.

So, we convene the grandmothers, the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers in upper state New York in 2004. That’s when we handed her back the basket and it took us on a march around the planet. It was quite a remarkable time in 2004 when I remember Rita Blumenstein who’s Yup’ik from up in the coal country of Alaska, who just passed a little over a month ago now. She was a bright light in this world. And she sat down at that gathering and she said when she was nine years old, her grandmother came and sat her down and said, “When you are old and gray like me, you’re going to be called to sit on a council of 13 Grandmothers. And I have prepared 13 bundles with sacred stones and white eagle feathers. You must care for these until that time, and when the time comes, pass a bundle the each of the grandmothers and take one for yourself and sit down and know I’m standing behind you and the times we’ve been talking about have arrived.” And so, we didn’t know at the time that there was prophecy held by many, many of our indigenous people around the planet that said there would come a time when the 13 grandmothers would come to shake the world awake.

And so, for almost a decade, we walked with the Grandmothers Council. We helped to organize, to raise the funding, to listen to what they were needing, and tried to organize and carry that out and be in service to that prayer. And then it was time for them to fly on. And a couple of years prior to that, I received the next seed, she calls it Her sacred seeds, and it was called The Fountain. And it had a mission which was to restore an economic model that was based on reciprocity and collaboration and guided by nature and the sacred. And so, I caught this vision and I went down to meet with the four original people in Colombia. You may know the Kogis, they’re one of the four. We’ve worked very closely with the Kogi, the Wiwa, and the Arhuaco of those four. And I shared with them the vision we were getting, and I shared with them a symbol that I’d caught for kind of the original template of The Fountain. And one of the Kogi elders said to me, “Where did you get that?” And I said, “Well, in my meditation line.” He said, “Because that’s one of our oldest symbols and that’s exactly where The Fountain should sit, and we should sit there too.” And so, of these three that I’ve just mentioned, there has been a representative guiding us.

Now, I don’t know if you know of the Mamos and the Sagas of the four original people, for those that maybe are listening and don’t. These are the spiritual leaders of these four original peoples and the Mamos, they say they’re either seen right before the birth, and then the mom and dad go through rituals to prepare for this higher consciousness that’s coming, or they’re seen in utero and recognized through ceremony, or they’re caught when they’re birthed. They’re given then into the hands of the elders into the caves, and they live there, do not see the light of day until they’re nine years old. And when they’re nine years old, they come out and they undergo some kind of evaluation to see if that consciousness is fully open. And if it hasn’t, they go back in the caves until they’re 18. And I’ve worked with some that have been in the caves for 28 years. So, you can imagine the consciousness of these people.

So, when we went down to meet with them, they went into consultation, and they did work. And when they go into consultation, sometimes it’s a shorter time, sometimes it’s several days, three, five, seven days or longer. But when they’re in full consultation, they’re in the source of it all, receiving this direction, and they don’t, eat sleep, or drink water during this time. And so, they have been giving us– they’ve gone into consultation ever since we met with them that first time when we first received the vision with The Fountain, they’ve given us the direction, we’ve walked out the direction, we’ve held ceremony to celebrate and have called gratitude for what we’ve learned in those steps, we get the next consultation. This is how it’s been for nine years going on 10 years now to bring The Fountain to the world stage where we can really be an instrument for the Mother Earth in this critical moment of choice.

So, when I look at how this prayer unfolded, you see, it grew us. It centered us, it cleansed us, it awakened and opened us. And now it’s at a place where when She gave this to me, she said, “This will be the dot at the end of your sentence.” I thought, “Well, what does that mean?” So, I went to some of my elders, and one of them just threw her head back and said, “Well, then She’ll give you another sentence,” you know. I don’t know but I can see now that this statement that the mother herself is trying to bring into the world is coming through this many years, 35 years of walk in this prayer, and not knowing where it was going, embracing the unknown, and it all. “You know, how do we enter into that place? I think when we start to have the idea come to us that way if we brush off our curiosity, and we embrace getting to be fully who we are, and shedding all the false parts of ourselves we took on because of traumas we’ve been through, our family systems we’ve been through, our cultural systems, our world systems, you know, we’re in a huge cleansing, like we spoke about at the very first and so that’s where it begins.

I remember when I was younger and I worked in Texas for 13 years with street kids, really hard situations, really challenging situations with riots and all kinds of things occurring. And I’ve been sent in as one of the first women to run a home there that had been set up originally for kids that needed to be adopted. And then everything had started to shift in our social structure and, you know, we got birth control measures were put in place, we got foster homes put in place, a lot of this kind of thing took place. And so, what had happened was there was a lot of dumping of children into this institution that they were sending me into. There were about, I don’t remember exactly how many kids but probably maybe 300 kids and staff to take care of them, but they had gone into riots. And because they had kids there that had the murdered people, they had runaways there and they had everything in between and it was a crazy, chaotic time. It was a huge teaching field for me, a wonderful study if you will. But what I learned was, you know, I really wanted to empower the kids. And so, when I got there, I arrived, a lightning bolt struck the transformer on campus through a storm. And so, I’m this little one running around in my raincoat going into each of the cottages where the kids were ages six to 18 and saying, “Please gather your kids, do a headcount, I’ll be back in a minute.” “Well, who are you?” “Well, I’m your new superintendent, and I’ll be back in a minute.” That’s how I introduced myself there. And we worked really hard for the kids to take ownership, “This is your home, what do you want this to look like?” And we went through a lot to get to that space.

You know, it’s like, Carlos Castaneda talks about it like sitting on your front porch, and there’s a bad spot on the porch that will always be a bad spot. So, don’t sit on the bad spot, you know? So, it was a study of was this institution sitting on one of those bad spots? Or could we, through our own efforts, and creativity, and heart, open to something higher in ourselves? And the kids did that. And just as they got that, they had started to own, they had started to get into better places in their lives and back in school, this aggressive, angry chaos was gone, then government decided to sell this institution to the mental health, out of the juvenile delinquency programs and into mental health. They promised everything for what was left there but I had a feeling. I got all the kids but about five kids that were able to leave, be placed in a good place, and the other five we couldn’t get them placed.

Little Ronnie who had come to me and he was either catatonic or in a rage and wasn’t able to be social, wasn’t unable to go to school, just a hard, hard place. Most of these children had horrible abuse situations, and scary, scary lives, most of their lives, torturous lives. Ronnie was one of these. We got him a job at the billing station at the front of the gate. He made relations there, he was doing well and about to go back into mainstream school for himself, and then this happened. And they started manhandling him and wouldn’t let any of us that knew him and what he felt safe doing in order to help him through this moment of transition. And it was just such a horrible– They put him in lockup, and they wouldn’t let us get there and he was reaching for us. And I walked over to my office, and I was just in tears. And I was praying. I was like, “So, Creator, what was it that I didn’t see? What could have kept this from happening to little Ronnie? Can I learn from this so that it can make that worth something for Ronnie?” And the voice came to me, and it said, “You can take your pebble, and you can throw it in the pond here in this reality and it’ll make ripples but eventually it’ll come still water again. But if enough of you go into the inner labyrinth, and climb that ladder and throw your pebble there, it will be a wave that washes over this reality and then that will change and shift.” And so that took me to the Jung Institute and it taught me how to go into a process of individuation, to go in there and start to unpack all this luggage that I carried from our lifetimes like I was speaking about, and start to get down to “What’s me