Keeping Your Commitment

Karen Kenney: 00:00:02

Hey, welcome to the Karen Kenney show. I'm super duper excited to be here with you guys today, before we dive in to today's topic, today's show, I just want

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to say thank you. Thank you so much to everybody who used the tip. Ja, first of all, I'm not gonna lie, it was wicked fun to all of a sudden be like ding and then seeing

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show. So just thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. For those of you who are maybe tuning in for the first time, I'm so happy you're here. My loyal listeners. You know I

Karen Kenney: 00:00:52

love you. Thank you for coming back again and again and again, and I hope you find today as helpful as some of the folks in my group, mentoring program, the nested Okay,

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so I don't know what I'm going to call this one. It's either going to be like keeping your commitment or habit versus ritual or whatever, but I'm going to tell you just a

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quick, little brief story and and then we'll dive into the point that I shared that folks found really helpful in keeping their commitment. So we all know, right? Like,

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sometimes we say to ourselves, like, Okay, I want to make a change. I want to either start an old habit or start a new one. I want to create something new. I want to

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transform something in my life. And look that sounds all good inside your head, right? Like, like, maybe you just watched some inspirational speaker, you read some

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book and you got amped up, or you watched something and you're like, Yeah, me too. I'm gonna go and fill in the blank, right? I'm gonna start a business, I'm gonna go back to

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the gym, I'm gonna write that book, I'm gonna do whatever. Well, that all sounds good, right? Until you get down to the nitty gritty and you start to do the thing. And

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then even when we start to do a habit, or we start to take steps towards keeping our commitment, towards whatever the thing is, things can get a little weird. Things can

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either start to lose their sparkle, get a little dull, or you just stop doing it all together. So in the nest, as I said, if you don't know the if you're new to the show, my

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nest is my group mentoring program, my spiritual mentoring program. And in the nest, we do all kinds of stuff. I bring together all these different things, like

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obviously spiritual practices, I shouldn't say obviously, but spiritual practices, creating a daily spiritual practice. So it's spiritual mentoring, it's subconscious

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reprogramming, it's brain science, it's self directed neuroplasticity, all these things, right? Sometimes we do some somatic things, some pattern interrupts, right? We work with

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both the conscious and the unconscious mind in the nest. Okay, so we were talking about creating a DSP, which stands for, I call it a daily spiritual practice. And so many

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people will say like, Yeah, I'm going to get up early in the morning and I'm going to set aside time to meditate, or I'm going to get up in the morning and I'm going to set aside

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time, you know, to pray or to contemplate or to do some spiritual reading, or I'm gonna, like, what cross, whatever genres of religious or, you know, spiritual

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traditions, whatever. Some people like to do their rosary. Some people like to do journaling. Some people like to do, like I said, meditation, prayer, like whatever. Do

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their Course in Miracles, daily lesson, right? And like I said, so many people have the best of intentions, and they're like, I'm gonna start doing this thing. But when

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it comes down to actually, where, as we say, the rubber meets the road and you get, excuse me, you get your ass in gear, and you make it happen, right? One of the ways that

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we can help to make it stick. And I'm gonna break it down for you, and this is probably going to be a pretty short episode, because it's really just a little tip for how to

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maybe shift your perspective. And we know in A Course in Miracles, when we say what a miracle really is, is a shift in perception, in your mind, from fear to love. And I find

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that a lot of people try to make change from a place of fear, like, I don't want to be this anymore, like, now this is bad, or this isn't good, or something's got to change

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about me, because something's broken or defective or fucked up, or whatever, right? So we try to do a lot of stuff from fear, rather than being called forth to make

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change out of a place of love and what becomes possible and returning to who we really are, right? Okay, so one of the things that I basically shared with my

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people is right, we're not going to think about creating a DSP, a daily spiritual practice, whatever that is for you, and that's part of something we do in the. Group

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two is, we try to help, you know, I try to help people figure out, like, what would feel like, you know, because I don't want people, I'm not interested in telling people

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what to do. I do like to help people understand that they have choices, and to help them figure out what feels right for them. Because what might be right for me,

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what feels good in my body, what's in alignment for my hat and my mind and my history and my background might not gel. It might not be, you know, copacetic for

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somebody else. So I'm really interested in helping people create their own personal, lived experience with the Divine Right, their own spiritual practice that makes

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sense for them. And sometimes they'll say to me, you know, well, what's the best practice to do? And I'll say the one you're gonna do, the one you'll actually do, right? We start,

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we can start small, even with, like, five minutes a day, and then we can work up from there, you know. And of course, in Miracles is a line that says something like, I'm

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paraphrasing, that like, five sincere minutes in the morning with spirit, right? With Holy Spirit is enough to put that in a teacher, right? I always say that the part

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of you that's in connection, in constant communion and good connection with divine intelligence, five minutes in the morning, five minutes at the end of the day, right?

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But five minutes in the morning, especially is enough to put spirit in charge for the day. We're way off to a better start, right if we start with that rather than picking up

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our phone or looking at the news or going online and getting bombarded from the outside in, it can behoove you. It will be you to spend some time getting quiet and

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going in before you try to go out, and especially, too, if you're an entrepreneur or a writer or a creative or somebody or a parent, anybody who's about to stop bossing

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other people around or managing people or leading people or sharing your quote, unquote take on things or whatever before, because we're all influencing each other all

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the time when we go out into the world, right, whether we do it online or in person. So it would behoove us, before we go out and we start inflicting ourselves on others,

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that we get a little inner inspiration and a little inner guidance, right? So we take some time to get quiet in the morning. Okay? So people like, kk, I want to start a DSP,

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like, right? They want to create a new quote, unquote. I'm doing air quotes. If you listen into this habit, they want to create a new habit. Okay, so one of the things that

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I was saying to them on this call is, how about we shift our perception of not thinking about this as just creating a new habit? Let's look at it as creating a

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ritual. Now, look, there's a bunch of books, there's a bunch of resources and things you could look up about what makes something a ritual, and how to make something a ritual,

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whatever. And I just want to keep this you know, so much of what I do on this show is like, I want to keep it practical. I want to keep it applicable, and I want to keep it

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doable, so people will actually get off their ass and do something, and if I give you like all this stuff, it will feel overwhelming and whatever. So I'm going to

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keep it short and sweet today. Okay, here's a way to look at it that might shift your mind from maybe thinking about something like even though you want to do it, there's

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a little resistance. There's this hesitancy, there's this desire to, like, draw back. There's this, like, kind of whiny part of you that's like, Oh, I gotta do this thing.

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Like, mer, mer. Like, poor me, I don't want to have to do it. Like, and that's like, I that's like, where people are, like, I want the change. Like, I just want the change,

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but I don't want to have to do the work to get the change. Okay, so here's a little different way of looking at things. So if you had a piece of paper right now, I would

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just have you draw a little line down the middle, and you can do this or not, or just imagine it in your mind, right? But if you had a physical piece of paper, I would write

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at the top right, keeping my commitment, right? And then on one side, I would put habit on the other side. I would put ritual. And here's a little just comparison. And let

Karen Kenney: 00:09:07

these words just kind of land in your body. Don't, don't. I would encourage you to not just think about them from like the neck up like in your head. Don't just think about

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them. Let yourself kind of feel these words and see if you can sense the difference between what I'm saying. Okay, we're gonna start with a habit. So a habit, a lot of

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times, is just done from a place of rote, right? Ah, it's hard for me to say, Ah,

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I o, t, e wrote, okay, versus ritual, with ritual. Ritual, we do things with reverence. So it's a difference between habit and ritual. Something being a habit versus

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something being a ritual that we perform. A habit is something that we do. A ritual is something that we perform. And I don't mean perform. Like for other people to see. This

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is us performing like, like, doing it mindfully, okay, doing something wrote, which means, and these are the words I want you to think about and write down. Also,

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when we do things from a place of rote, we're often doing them from memory, because we've done them a bunch of times, so it's just in there, right? We're doing it

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mechanical, right? In a mechanical kind of way, just by habit. We just do it. We don't have to think about it, okay? And then we often will do it without meaning. Those are

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the things where it's like, oh, this is just the way it's always been done. This is just the way it's always been you know, I often think about that Bruce Hornsby song, which,

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every time I hear it, now I cry. I cry every time I hear this Bruce Hornsby song, when he talks about, and I've mentioned it on another podcast episode, the lyrics is, you

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know, that's just the way it is. Some things will never change. That's just the way it is, right? But that next line, which is always so inspiring for me, is he says, ah,

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but don't you believe them. But what happens when we're in the road, right? We just do it because that's the way our family's always done it. That's the way our grandmother

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taught your mother taught the aunties taught you, taught whatever. Oh, this is the church we always went to. This is the way we say our prayers. This is the way we do our

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thing. This is what my tradition says, and I get it right. I come from some lineages and yoga, etc. There's power to that. But if we start to do things from rote, just from

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habit, just from memory, just from being mechanical and without meaning, without thinking about it unconsciously, we're just doing it. That's not really going to inspire

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you, fire you up, keep you doing it. It's almost like, you know, sometimes I'll see musicians on stage because my sweetie, right, I'm married to a professional

Karen Kenney: 00:11:55

musician, and they'll be singing and playing, and then they'll turn around and they'll talk to somebody else, and then they'll come back and do it. And sometimes

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I've seen people, if they're playing in a venue where there's TVs, like, they'll be singing and playing and watching TV at the same time, and I'll say to my friends or

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musicians, I'm like, how do you guys do that? They're like, ah, we've done it 1000 times. Like, it's just in there. We can just do it, but you're not connecting with the

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people in front of you or the material in front of you, or the divine in your hat. If you're just doing shit from memory and mechanically and without meaning, versus if

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you choose consciously to do stuff from a place of reverence. You do it as a ritual from a place of reverence, and you do it from this place. You do it from deep

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respect. You do it from high regard. You do it with honor, with presence, and you do it from a place of love and devotion. So you're not just going through the motions like you

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would rotely. Right? Is that even a word? I don't know, but I'm going to use it. You're doing things actually from a place of deep meaning, high regard, respect, honor, and

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not just for yourself, but for the change you are envisioning, for the relationship that you're committing to, to the practice that you're showing up for, whether, like I

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said, whether that's a DSP, a daily spiritual practice, or you're going to the gym, or You're making a commitment like this, to do a podcast like for five years,

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or whatever, to commit to something, to have it have deep meaning to you. It's really, really different than just going through the motions. And when I shared this, I won't

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forget I was on the call and I was talking about this, and when I do the group calls in the nest, I don't put it on speaker mode, because I want to see everybody. I want to

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be able to see how my words are landing right, the connection that's being made, if I'm losing people or not, if they're present, like whatever, right? I like to see

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their body language. I like to pay close attention to what's happening, you know? And so I won't forget when I said this to them, Hey, the difference between habit and ritual

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is doing one is rote and doing the other one with reverence. And I talked about this, and I can't tell you how many faces I saw, you know, when somebody like, like, it's like, a

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aha moment, like, oh, and you see their eyes kind of widen and their face light up, or they nod their head. But I can't tell you how many pens I saw go into action taking

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notes when I said that, and then I heard back from them, you know, in the Facebook group, like, wow, I have been more committed to my DSP than ever before. And Pat. It was

Karen Kenney: 00:15:00

because of this, and I wanted to share it with all of you, in case you might find this helpful too. So if there's some sort of change that you've been wanting to make, and

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this is important too, and I try to say this to people in a way that they understand, like when we're talking about change and transformation work. It can be really easy

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to look at ourselves as broken or wounded or screwed up, or we need to be, quote, unquote, fixed. That's not this right? I want everybody who's listening to this right

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now to hear my words like wicked loud and clear who you are as one of God's kids, who you are as part of the universe, if that language is is more preferable, who you are

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as an extension of the Divine is an extension of love. That part of you is perfect, it is innocent, it is unchangeable, it is already like the chef's kiss, the

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vegan chef's kiss, right? It is already beautiful. You are already worthy. You are already loved. You are already lovable and capable of loving. You are already enough.

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And if there are some pots of that changeable, mutable ego personality that you might like to tweak a little bit right? Like that you might want to do a little work on,

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and you've been finding it challenging or hard, or you you start to do it, and then you don't do it, and you flub it up, and you're not staying in alignment right with

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your in self integrity, like to yourself, or maybe to somebody else. You gave your word to somebody else and you were going to do a thing or whatever, right? This can be a

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really powerful way of looking at it, to draw try to do the thing. And maybe it's not a ritual. Maybe it's not a thing that you're going to repeat on a daily basis, but maybe

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it's just a thing that you gave your word that you were going to do, you were going to show up for somebody, right that that it's important to them and and you gave your

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word, so it must have been, at least for that period of time, important to you to do things from a place of reverence, right? Again, deep respect, high regard, high

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esteem, with honor, with love, with devotion, because that, like, both you and them are going to be way better off. Now I'm not talking about going into things and

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like, having reverence, placing reverence where it doesn't belong, right? Like, don't be putting a bunch of people up on pedestals and getting weird and culty, and I'm just

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saying like, but this is reverence for you and your word to yourself, reverence to that outcome that

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change that thing, whatever it is, right, getting that book done or going to the gym and taking good care of your body, moving your body, doing your journaling, whatever

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it is. Because if we just go into it out of out of habit and and I'm not saying, Look, I'm not saying that having a habit that you can do in your sleep and walk through like

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it's bad, it's just it's not very mindful and it's not very present. And people can tell when you're dialing it in. People can tell when you dial in, because when you

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dialing it in, what you're kind of letting people know is including yourself, is I really don't give a shit. This isn't that important to me. I'm just going to kind of

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like and do the least I gotta do, and like, do it half ass and whatever, because I can just spit it from memory. I'm not going to prepare. I'm not going to pour any penny,

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pour any soul into it. I'm not going to pour any love into it, right? So I hope this is helpful in some way. And I always say, like, I'm not here to tell you what to think. I am

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interested though, in getting you thinking and getting you thinking about, like, huh, yeah, okay. How can I apply this to my life? Oh, that's a good point. Or even if you

Karen Kenney: 00:18:56

disagree, at least you're thinking and you're getting to know yourself better. You know what I'm saying. So hopefully this is helpful in some way. Okay, so whether you're

Karen Kenney: 00:19:04

trying to keep your commitment to yourself about some new some new, you know, practice or change, or whatever you're trying to do, okay, think of it like habit. And I don't

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mean verses. It's just like, You know what I'm saying, habit versus ritual, wrote versus reverence doing it from memory and mechanically and without meaning and just

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kind of mindless, right? And versus doing it with deep respect and high regard and honor and love and devotion, you're doing it from that devoted place, and that makes all the

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difference in the world. It's also the difference between taking something like seriously, when we do things with reverence, it's because it has deep meaning for us and

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we're taking ourselves in that thing, whatever it is, seriously, versus when we just always do things. From that rote point of view, because it's not the habit, right?

Karen Kenney: 00:20:03

A habit is neutral a lot of times, depending on the meaning we assign it, but it's more about doing something from a place of roteness, right? And a lot of us, like a lot

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of us kids, and I'll use this as an example, maybe this will help, but I'm going to wrap it up, Catholic kids, right? If you always I was raised a Catholic kid, Catholic kids,

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most of us can recite the Lord's Prayer and the Hail Marys and all that stuff, right? You see people in church. They don't even have to be present. Their body knows when to

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stand up, sit down, kneel, right? Do the cross on your forehead. Peace be with you. The whole shebang, right? The whole thing. We know all the shenanigans, because it

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would just got in there and got in there and got in there. And people can be like, on their phone doing something else, and the words are just coming out of their mouth

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that's doing something from rote, versus being really present and really paying attention and letting the the feelings in the in the moment, in the in the movement,

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or whatever you're doing, have like, Hold hold weight, right? To hold weight, to hold reverence. So I hope, whatever it is that you're trying to create, that you take that

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seriously, that your dream, your vision, your your your hope, whatever it is the change that it matters enough to you, that's the thing with reverence, right? Is that it

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matters. That's a good place to end, that it matters. And you all matter to me. You do. And just thank you so much. This show matters to me. It's why I brought it back. I

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took a little took a little eight week break, and we're back okay, because it matters to me. And being able to share what's on my hat? What's on my mind? To be

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able to, you know, teach and offer things and to be of service, it's a big deal for me, and I do do this show with reverence, right? I do do as reverence because it means

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a lot to me. So I hope this was helpful to you in some way. You guys, if you're not already on my email list, because I have something fun, something fun that I'm going

Karen Kenney: 00:22:02

to be doing, I think, in September, and you're not going to want to miss out on this. So get on my list. Karen kenney.com/sign, up. Sign up, and you're

Karen Kenney: 00:22:13

going to get on my list. And also, when I talk about the nest on this show, if it makes you curious, please, for the love of all things holy, follow your curiosity. You

Karen Kenney: 00:22:24

can find out more about it online. Again. Karen kenney.com/nest, N, E, S T, look, it's 50 bucks a month. You come in, you try it. It's not for you. You sneak out the back

Karen Kenney: 00:22:36

door. You're done whatever, right? But most of the people that come in, they love it. I have people that have been doing it for like, four years because they love it. So

Karen Kenney: 00:22:46

it's a beautiful community. And if you dig this show I'm telling you, you will dig the nest. Okay, so thank you so much for being here today. I hope you have an amazing rest

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of your week, whenever you're listening to this and wherever you go, may you leave yourself and the animals and the people you encounter and the environment, the plants,

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right, the trees, the rivers, the mountains, whatever the beaches, whatever you come across wherever you go, may you and your presence and your energy and how you're

Karen Kenney: 00:23:20

showing up. May it be a blessing. Bye, bye.