Exploring Contemplative Practices and Collective Wellbeing Through Indigenous Wisdom

				Opening Minds, Opening Hearts Podcast Season 3 Episode 8 with Dr. Yuria Celidwen
Episode Title: Exploring Contemplative Practices and Collective Wellbeing Through Indigenous Wisdom

Mark: Welcome, welcome everyone. Welcome, Colleen. Good to see you again.
Colleen: Good to see you, Mark. I realize saying good to see you that we see each other, but our audience doesn't see us, but we're holding you in our hearts in these conversations and so glad you're listening. Halfway through the season now, which is
Mark: Hard to believe, in a way.
Colleen: Yeah, it's hard to believe, but in some ways this season, I can believe it because this season has been more full in some ways. I think because we're stretching beyond the known borders of our one little, teeny little faith tradition. Making space for our brothers and sisters in the world who also are deeply rooted in their own spiritual traditions, and I'm just loving the experience of being a student.
Mark: Yeah. And it's so beautiful for me just to be talking with our different guests. And really, it feels so expansive to me, and I think that's our guest today, especially, too, because we're going to talk about contemplative practice but again, from our point of view coming from Christian contemplation, it's much broader. And so we'll talk about other things our guest is well versed in.
Colleen: Yeah. And in the first seasons, I'm remembering too, we used to say we're talking with friends of Contemplative Outreach. And I think I want to say that again this season, because it's always good. Even at this stage of my life, I still find myself looking for friendships and hoping to create new relationships.
And so, I hope that we are finding new friends of Contemplative Outreach, as opposed to talking to people who just practice centering prayer. But we have room in our community for all types of prayer practices and traditions. Today is also, I will say, we're talking with a new friend of Contemplative Outreach.
Mark: Yes. And I think what we're also hearing, which has been wonderful, is beyond the human friendship, you know, opening up to other expressions in the contemplative life, the natural world and art and, just our relationship to our, work and our life and what's important to us, it's that kind of unfolding that I'm really hearing and really grateful for in our conversations. And that spaciousness.
Colleen: Yes, this episode I think will be really impactful for me. It already has been preparing for it, but I think for our community especially in these times too, like you were alluding to seeing friendship as beyond just friends with others in human form, but friendship with creation in all the many ways that we're invited to and that that extends a hand to us, so to speak so, I will let you introduce our guest.
Mark: Yeah.
So, I'm delighted to introduce all of you to our guest Dr. Yuria Celidwen,who was born to Nahua and Maya indigenous lineages in the cloud forest of the highlands of Chiapas, Mexico. In her words, “I am of earth, and my heart is on fire.” She was raised with one wing in the spontaneity of nature and another in the magical realism of dreamlands and mysteries. The songs of her elders captivated her childhood and polished the golden nuggets of mythical imagination and emotional intuition. These are the fertile grounds where the seeds of fierceness, playfulness, and wonder get their roots.
As a scholar, she investigates forms of contemplation and transcendent experiences from the perspective of the ancestral wisdom of indigenous peoples. She looks into how these forms are embodied in pro-social behavior and calls this research the “Ethics of Belonging,” to understand the world from consciousness, intention and actions toward planetary flourishing. Her new book just out on November 19th is entitled Flourishing Kin, Indigenous Wisdom for Collective Wellbeing. We are so happy to have you here. Yuria, welcome.
Yuria: [Speaks in Maya Tzeltal] Thank you so very much for being here Colleen and Mark and all of the audience of Contemplative Outreach. You just listened to my indigenous Maya Tzeltal language, and I always try to start it with the sound of my mother tongue, because it is a way of honoring, first and foremost, the lands where I was born. And then all of the relatives that are connected to those lands or my lineages of blood and bone, and also our lineages of earth and waters.
For our Indigenous traditions, we see our ancestors, not only our human lineages but also our earth lineages. By honoring them, I'm also invoking their presence, I'm invoking from the way that I was. I heard from early days to speak to, the lands, to speak to all these ancestors, to honor all these ancestors, and to also bring those perhaps boring sounds to your audience so that we can, Little by little, pieces by pieces, start making spaces for different ways of hearing, different ways of understanding, different ways of learning about the beauty of the world, and also the challenges of the world. Thank you so much for your invitation. I am already absolutely a sibling of the community. Thank you for welcoming me here, and I'm really excited with the conversation that we're about to have.
Colleen: Yes, we are too. And what a beautiful way to begin the conversation. I'm so grateful that through a steering committee, I heard your name mentioned by I think Jonathan Rhodes who has worked with you in some capacity but, when I Googled you I just felt like, this is someone that we have to talk to. And then when I looked at your bio too, I saw that you were from Chiapas and of all places I visited your country. I looked back through my iPhone photos and remembered that I was on the waters of the Sumidero, canyon.
Yuria: Oh, my goodness.
Colleen: Yeah. And I drove, I took a bus all through the countryside from Oaxaca to Chiapas and back and just saw all of your beautiful country.
Yuria: You know, Thank you also, Colleen for bringing the image of the waters, because the community, the lands where I was born and raised, they were called Coelha, that it translates to the wonderlands of flowing springs or flowing waters. And I recently was talking with them, with a sibling about how much of a metaphor water is for the practices that we do for the way of life that we encourage as Contemplatives. That most times we see perhaps the water's already flowing in these beautiful bodies of water in their rivers or lakes or the beautiful waves of the ocean.
But we forget that in order to reach the overground or the surface waters also go through a period of visiting the dark porosity of the grounds until they finally emerge and so much of contemplation is that part of bringing the unseen or the mysteries also into the surface and have a more direct experience of what that means. Just bringing the idea that you were in touch with the waters. Of Chiapas, it is another way of just bringing the, not only metaphorical but, embodied experience of being connected with those waters, both
from then to now to a more expansive way.
Colleen: Yes, and I wonder too, with that imagery in mind, or just kind of remembering the land where you're from, how much our stories are connected to our lands. And, we've been beginning these episodes this season, with this question for everyone connected to one of these points of agreement that emerged in these interspiritual dialogues that Father Thomas Keating hosted throughout his lifetime. And the community of friends that gathered with him every year, decided upon common themes that emerged across all of their traditions.
And there was always an Indigenous elder present in their gatherings. And the first point they wrote was that the world religions bear witness to the experience of Ultimate Reality, to which they give various names, and I'm curious for you. What is this view of Ultimate Reality, how would you describe this from your own Indigenous story, your own Indigenous creation story? What was that story and how did that shape your view of whatever you might call Ultimate Reality?
Yuria: What a beautiful way to start and then it brings me back to this same metaphor of the spring and the flowing waters, and the previous emergence of the spring into the dark porosity of the rock or of the mountain, or even of the underground, you know, until it reached the surface. And that brings me to now that you were saying origin stories, the Maya origin story, the Popol Vuh that tells a whole story about also going into the undergrounds and having some duels with the lords of the undergrounds. But ultimately, to just make a very long story short, ultimately to realize our power of connection, our power of lineage, and our power of re-emergence.
When we think about Ultimate Reality, I feel that we are hinting towards direct experience. We may get trapped in language, or the, interpretation or the meaning of language, because Ultimate may sound apart or maybe unreachable when in fact it's actually right here at this very moment and place if we are just open to what that experience and that, way of the basis of, many Indigenous practices is, how do we relate, how do we awaken to that deep relationality or what I call keen relationality that makes us part of the whole larger living family of cosmic living family even.
And it also brings me to these conversations that you were talking about that Fr. Thomas Keating was doing is, how once one has a very deep understanding or lead experience of Contemplation, one starts awakening to that experience, that direct experience of relationality, right? And that whatever our vantage point is just one single aspect of a completely cosmic interrelated story, from indigenous perspectives for example. And just maybe as a practice before that, I think it's really important to understand what indigenous means.
I keep having many times the question that, oh, but aren't we all indigenous from somewhere? And that's an unfortunate misunderstanding. The word Indigenous or Indigenous people has been a working definition for the past, maybe since the 80s really, that the international community of Indigenous nations or peoples reach to in order to find a way of self-determination, like what it means for us to be Indigenous. It is important to understand that it is a political identity, that it talks about the communities that have previous relationship to the lands, previous to colonial or invasive processes. And that are determined to keep preserving, and transmitting the culture, the systems, the judicial systems, the way of life, or understanding of the world.
Now, many times, people say, but invasion and colonial processes have been part of perhaps human history since very early. And that may be true, unfortunately. But the reality is that the way the world is organized at this moment is a consequence of a colonial process that started in the 1400s, following the doctrine of Christian discovery and domination in periods that started there reached all over the world the Americas, the African continent, Asia. Initially, the idea was to find trade ways, and then also ways to the Abrahamic Holy lands, but eventually, it became a way to divide the world's wealth for just the powers that were at that time established.
Now, these powers have much relationship with race and then ethnicity. So at this moment where the wealth stays in the world is a consequence of that previous process. So 85% of the wealth of the whole entire world goes to only developed countries that continue to be those countries that at that time were having that power. Right now, the 5, 000 approximate indigenous peoples of the world, are only living in 90 countries. There are 194 countries in the whole world, according to the United Nations. So, not every country has Indigenous populations. Not according to this division of power that I'm, telling you. So no country in Europe has indigenous peoples except the Nordic countries? Now that this have the Sammy population. And why is this? Because the Indigenous communities - because of race and ethnicity - have consequences of violence of land, this session of violence against women lack of access to health, life, safe of crime, access to education. As I mentioned, the traditional medicine systems have been persecuted, and we see to this moment that in some communities, Indigenous communities of the world, our Indigenous relatives, have 20 years less of life expectancy than our nonindigenous counterparts.
In the U. S. only, Indigenous peoples have seven years less of life expectancy, which is the lowest of all ethnic groups in the U. S. And the reason why I bring this is because without reckoning with those uncomfortable and horrific realities, then we have little possibilities of really advancing the well being of a collective community. And then we have little possibilities of also understanding what contemplative practice is, right? I know that this has been a broad response, but I think it's really important that we see the complexity of what this means.
And also the urgency to relate to these different voices, to start listening to different voices from these worlds that have not really had platforms before. And perhaps people haven't really approached our traditions with a real clear understanding of what is involved there. So I think this is broad, but it's also the first approach and a way of dealing with our complexity as human beings.
Colleen: Yeah. This is so important that you raise this at the beginning of our conversation too, because what it brings to mind is a tendency perhaps to engage in contemplative practice in some way to bypass the reality of suffering. Even though this isn't what our teachers might invite us to engage in, and I think it ties in Mark with where you were going next with us, too.
Mark: Yeah, because the idea is good, right? That we belong together, but in reality that's hard to do. And, this comes up in the contemplative and meditative traditions. Thomas Keating, our primary teacher here with Contemplative Outreach, in his book, God is All in All says, “We are accountable to everyone else. What you do, I do. What you are doing - your virtue - I can claim. I can also burden you with my vices.” Everything is in common, which is true. We would all accept that. If we were sitting in a circle doing centering prayer, we would feel good hearing that or be able to shake our heads but the reality of that, or how we have that come to pass, how we participate in the movement towards rather than just enjoy the ideal of that, is another story, and this is where you're doing a lot of your work Yuria, is the looking into that.
What does the study of self-transcendent states of compassion, of gratitude and awe, what does that bring to this in terms of change? I wonder if you could comment about that, about how do we really engage this ethic of belonging so that it's a reality. There's a history, of course. We have to deal with that history.
Yuria: I think both of the nuggets of what you're bringing, Colleen and Mark are important. One is the complacency of bypassing of many spiritual communities. That engaging in contemplative practice with the surface of contemplative practice, I would say. Because the practice itself is about really fierce, deep reckoning, observation not only of our own individual human story but our collective human story. And most times people shy away from feeling the discomfort of that process.
And it's very comfortable to do practice that only centers on oneself or on one's own wellbeing, or that centers only on regulating one's own emotions, right? Or feeling safe, feeling comfortable, sending love, sending good wishes. But if we do that from the comfort of only our privileged spaces, without as you said Mark, if we sit in a circle only with the same people that we know, only with the same stories that we know, without really having the courage first to perceive and understand the horrors that are outside our white picket fence, then what is the practice really changing? How is the practice really bringing wellbeing for the larger community?
And one of the things that I think Father Keating was doing was with the interreligious conversation. He knew, he realized the importance of the different interrelated voices, the importance of diversity, the importance of bringing new voices so that we don't just navel-gaze with our complacency. So he aimed to create these circles in which we could, in as skillful way as possible, converse about the beauties of life, but also the challenges, and perhaps more importantly, the challenges of the impact that we have on others.
Even just the quote that you mentioned, that I can claim what your voice has and you can also dispose of what I think I,own. And the reality is that it is very true that, our unskilled behaviors may put us in situations that impact many others in very harmful ways. So if we see how the world is as I had just explained earlier, there has been a profound impact in large communities of living beings, not only human, not only ethnic minorities, but also in the way that our largest bodies of water, our millions of species that are being affected because of climate change that human presence has accelerated.
So if we don't stop to see these kinds of harmful behaviors, then what kind of true wellbeing practice or collective wellbeing are bringing to the world? So that brings us to my Ethics of Belonging as you were saying, which is how I call this larger corpus of work that I've been trying to do for many years. Which is how can we create a sense of morality, or a sense of ethics, a few ways that are courageous to see the largest complexity that we are as humans, and then reckon with that complexity. How deep reflection of what ways would be skillful to then change those old stories that are not helpful any longer to build an identity of relationality. That we go deep into those narratives that speak of separation or of hierarchies or of domination over other species or the whole of creation, and I'd rather start dismantling those stories . Let them compose those stories, so that then they can nourish new forms of life, new forms of identities that we can then create from a very intentional, very centered way that includes kindness and compassion and caring for others and service that we have this deep reverence that brings us back to how secretly alive the whole planet is, the whole cosmos is.
And then we realize that we have a responsibility to serve this community. We have been granted this beautiful and unique gift of life because of the beauty and bounty of creation. But we enter in these places of complacency or entitlement and where we assume that we have the right to just be nourished, and we don't stop too much to think, how can I nourish the whole of creation that has been embracing me since I was born. How can I return? How can I be truly responsible for my role in this society? And then work, serve towards the wellbeing of the larger community. In a nutshell, that's what the Ethics of Belonging is. It's what is this sense of moral beauty that brings us back to relating, to service, to reverencing life.
Not only on the planet, but beyond. That we can wake up to the beauty and to the fragility of life all around us. And then, we wake up to how every single action, every approach that we take impacts all others. And then how a much more gentle, much more intentional caring presence really makes a difference. So Ultimate Reality is actually this very moment in which we choose to change the world to one of welcoming, rather than one of othering.
Colleen: There's a part of me that has a lot of compassion for the challenge that it can be to disconnect from this reality. Especially in the Western Christian context, right? It strikes me that it's very easy to overlook this connectedness and this acceptance of oneness. I want to say creatureliness because Thomas Keating uses this language, and I'll share something he said about this, but when I think about the creation story in the Christian context, it puts man over everything. It's this dominance that you're talking about. It's this dominion over. And then my relationship with the land or communities becomes even in my effort to do good, it's, oh well, I owe this, or I'm responsible for, because of this position that I hold, which is very different from a sense of, oh, because I am in relationship with, and out of this love that's emerging from my connectedness to and with. I honor this reality by acting out of this love, but there is this sad Western Christian supremacy of humankind over creaturehood.
And I wanted to share, especially for our community, because we've been emphasizing the later teachings of Father Thomas, that it's even within our tradition that he says to us. The importance of acknowledging and consenting to our creaturehood. And he says the capacity for intimacy with God is in proportion to our consent to be a creature and our willingness to remain so and that this is a part of this acceptance of powerlessness, which seems so challenging for those who have always in some way been entitled to the land or belonged to the dominant political identity. I'm not sure what my question is here for you, but your thoughts?
Yuria: Yeah. I'm very glad that you brought the Abrahamic origin story in a way. In my book, Flourishing Kin that was mentioned earlier. That's coming soon or when everyone listens to [the episode] would be out. I speak about this uncomfortable reality of how much of the creation story of Abrahamic traditions has impacted the way that the world now relates to or the world of humans now relates to the rest of the living world. And I say this because I go over in the book to analyze how the textual tradition was used in specific times and places and then interpreted to fit the political aspects of those times and places.
But since then, these interpretations of the text have not really been updated to the way the world is right now. And so unfortunately, the creation story of Abrahamic traditions does start, in the very first few verses, with the idea that there is dominion over all other living beings. Some have tried to maybe say well, we are talking about stewarding or stewardship. But the text does say dominion. When we think about dominion, we are already thinking about oppression. We are already thinking that there is an exceptionalism in which humans have a much better understanding or know better what others may mean.
And I'm saying here– I'm being careful to use the word human and not men, because in the Hebrew text, so the very origin of this text, the word to describe Adam means actually seed. Which has no gender, but the translation, the first translation into Greek, and then the later translation into Latin, used already the word, in the man, so saying man is over the rest. And then the story, of course, continues saying that man is over women and as humans over the whole creation. That's when we start feeling the uncomfortable aspect of how these stories have impacted so much of the world because of this process of colonialism, and have moved away from the way so many of these traditions in the world related to land, to all other living beings, to phenomena, things.
They were all part of our living family. Humans were never away from nature. We were always part of nature. We were never away of how we relate to the bodies of water, to the forest, to the skies, to all these different phenomena around us. And once we start seeing ourselves as part of this living system, not better than or not ones that decide upon, but just part of this living, this dynamic system that responds to also the challenges of the natural world, then we are able to realize as well that nobody is dominating anybody. But rather we are all trying to keep this perpetual dance off balance. Off balance that is never really rich, but it's always these waves, these ways of finding the best adaptation while everything around is also moving, to find also their own place, their own space, their own rhythm, their own shared breath.
With that, I want all of us to take a very deep breath. Because we've touched upon hard but important aspects of our shared story. That we need as a collective to understand and to reckon so that then we can repair, that we can repair very carefully, very gently, so that we can truly then start making the steps that we need to make the world really a welcoming place, to make the world a place where we all belong, where we are all kin, and that doesn't really mean that everything will be always good. No, but rather that we understand that we are in this way of balance that we allow for all to find its breath.
Mark: It is beautiful. Sometimes it actually feels possible to me as I've been around Christian contemplation and also my work with mindfulness meditation, it seems in those practices certainly there's a lot of this practice of letting go, of getting beyond self, my particular interests, my particular issues, whatever the selfing is, the me part of it. And that all the discussion about true self, false self, and all that, it seems very much tied into these contemplative and meditative practices. It shows up differently depending on the tradition. But I'm curious from your perspective about what actual practices do you do or do you see as helpful in moving that so that, that egocentric part which I certainly admit to be just because it's so obvious. And if you talk to anybody close to me they'll affirm that too.
I'm very selfing – but what does that mean to me? What does that do for me? And I know that it's there in contemplative meditative practices that you use that word a lot, self-transcendence, which I like because it's not like you're either in touch with yourself or you're discarding yourself completely. No, it's something else. It's getting beyond the self so that it's not just about me. But I'm curious about the practices that you see as formative or maybe even essential. For that kind of movement which is an ongoing thing in terms of my own experience of that. It's just keep coming back. Can you say something about meditative, contemplative practices, even from your own tradition that you seem to have a sense, seems to really move that.
Yuria: Well, you touch upon different, very important points dear Mark, and I'm going to weave them all into a tapestry of a response. But you mentioned the mindfulness movement, and while there's so much good that the movement has brought in terms of bringing awareness of the importance of Contemplation and of first-person experience, there's also an uncomfortable part of the mindfulness movement that I have both built up a critique in my upcoming book on why mindfulness also sadly ended up taking a personality of cognitive imperialism or colonial processes, because when bringing the practices of usually Asian traditions or Abrahamic traditions, in many ways, to the West. But I'm going to focus more into the Asian practices of Buddhism, which is what Mindfulness we are going to be based on.
The aspects of more compassion and social impact were not really included. The sacrality for example as well was stripped away from the practices order to secularize practices for a Western audience. This is very unfortunate because one, we lost a great opportunity to return to reverencing life as sacred and another because while doing that, then the practices started becoming about self-improvement, better sleep, better concentration, even to the point of improving or increasing the bottom line now in the workplace, so they became actually practices to benefit capitalism, and benefit the continual system of domination that we were talking about. Where is the mindfulness in all of that, right?
There was also a lot of this spiritual bypassing that we mentioned earlier. And so much of the focus than on the self rather than what I have brought a lot in my work of transcending that idea. And I attempt not to use the word self-transcendence because from Indigenous views without of course, essentializing that, that great diversity of Indigenous views in the world I point them to the consensual aspect that really relate these many different traditions of the world in which transcendence is about relationality, right? About connecting.
So then we return to the aspect of Ultimate Reality being right here, direct experience right here, right now. Not somewhere one day I will read, or not some space in which, farther from, my experience, but right here, right here in this moment, in which these practices keep me out of the narrow idea of my identity, my conditioned identity, my conditioned story that tells me, oh, I identify as this and that and the other, that starts actually making my words smaller and smaller and smaller, and then we start realizing that then we stop really actually relating to the whole world.
We start only listening to the human voice and then eventually only to our own voice and then eventually, that becomes really isolating. From this Indigenous perspective I've been working with many Indigenous traditions of the world for many years that's why I speak about these consensual aspects of relating. But the practices that I bring are about how to reconnect to that relationality, how to, as I say in the book, how to Flourish Kin, Flourishing Kin. And in the book, what I do is, in very accessible, very introductory practices, I guide the reader or the audience, because I also offer the guided practices that I guide with my own voice, into these ways of relating, right?
How could we start doing this, introducing these into our everyday life? How can we start as I said earlier, composting those smaller ideas of identity to then start recreating a new idea, a new story that is about connection? And how do we do this in actual practice, not every day? The mindfulness movement started doing, oh, we do X minutes, no, usually they start with 5 minutes, 10 minutes to practice.
But now my invitation is, let's do this five or ten minutes, but to nourish Mother Earth, to nourish our connection with all living things, to start awakening to this marvel, miracle, that Spirit that is through all of existence. How do we do that? So we can see then little with this as little as 10 minutes, we can start really changing those perspectives and then really feeling that we belong. So, I invite you to find the book and then connect to those practices.
Colleen: Yes I hear this reframing of where we're directing our awareness and I saw this in looking through one of your articles that it's the intention but where this intention is directed from, for personal kind of growth and success to connectedness and collective sense of wellbeing. And it's so subtle that our intentions can be misdirected and understandable in many ways because this is the operating culture. This is the whole belief system and I always think that contemplative life and practice is so counter-cultural, like we're really salmon swimming upstream of this very material world but an intention to think of mindfulness practice from the lens of focusing my attention on not my breath, but our breath. Even in that subtle shift, I could begin to open to a more expansive view of Us I don't even wanna say self. Yeah. Us.
Yuria: Yeah. Absolutely. That's why I entitled the book Flourishing Kin. As I feel kin is such a great way of really understanding all of our relationality, all of our presence. But we need to flourish it, right? We need to cultivate it. And I believe that we can bring this new story as a collective. We can make it flourish together. I think the world is ready to do this ontological shift, to center into the relationality of the heart. Now, not only in the mind itself, but into the heart, the body, the roots, and then the whole of spirit that's running through all of us.
Mark: You frame that so beautifully. I'm anxious to get my hands on that book of yours. Because this is something I see in the mindfulness world. And it is thankfully being talked about, but the way you frame that, it's almost a greater danger to think, oh, I'm doing all this mindfulness and contemplative practice, but just bringing the same old mind to that, and the same old behaviors to that. It happens in the Christian contemplative world too. It's what's in it for me, and so that you are addressing that and calling that out is so important because it's more dangerous to think, oh, I'm sitting every day for 20 minutes or twice a day for 20 minutes but, it's reinforcing something that is not moving in that direction of true kinship and it's not flourishing. Yeah.
Yuria: As we talked about earlier with our conversation and Colleen really beautifully welcomed me as a sibling to the community, or as a friend, but love to say sibling. It's about how do we create this as a community with all these different siblings, all these different voices, and we kindly challenge each other to advance. We need those kind voices of our close friends that can see when we are getting stuck in some pattern that's harmful, and we trust that they are telling us something that we don't want to hear.
If we start hearing also these uncomfortable truths, but to start bringing them, knowing that it's a loving sibling that brings them, we will start also moving towards a place where we can also understand our imperfections, and yet also embrace our willingness to make that effort, to wake up to those harmful ways and to dismantle them, to change them for a new togetherness. A Flourishing Kin story.
Colleen: Yes. Thank you so much, Dr. Celidwen. It's been so good to be in conversation with you, and we want to encourage our entire community and anyone who's listening to quickly go and get their hands on your newest book, Flourishing Kin: Indigenous Wisdom for Collective Wellbeing. And we hope that you will maybe come back and talk to us in future seasons. I feel like this is the beginning of a wonderful relationship. I feel like I could go on a long walk with you and just talk with you for hours. So, I'm so grateful that you were able to make time for us and share some of your indigenous wisdom with us today.
Yuria: Thank you so much dear Colleen, dear Mark and please count me as your sibling.
Colleen: Yes,
Mark: Thank you, Sister Yuria, for being here with us today.
Colleen: Yes.
Mark: And for sharing all of your wisdom.
Yuria: Thank you. Háka lé wél. Lhasa kamátí.