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Reply To: Class #5 Quotes and more

#1506
AvatarLeslie Brown
Participant

Thank you Brooke for sharing this. I LOVE the quote, the image and the name of the conference you were attending….The Reclaiming Youth! Another similarity and seed planting happened for me in the summer of 2004. I was sent to Arizona to attend a Youth to Youth conference before I started my job as a crisis counselor in a high school in the fall. I would be cofacilitating a group for students with the health teacher helping kids find natural solutions and connections with each other vs falling into peer pressure and substance abuse. I took 2 major themes away from that conference.

One was a quote that was overlaid on a “wet pavement” sign that was placed along a creek I had been walking along that path every morning while I was at the hotel and when I saw it the final day I had the feeling that the quote was planting a seed for the future…..”Some people follow their dreams. Others hunt them down and beat them into submission.” At that point I was not remembering my dreams. It would be 7.5 years later that my mother would start appearing with her elder wisdom.

The other important piece of information was that one of the conference leaders spoke about how all the marketing and ads on TV in the afternoon are geared toward teens and younger kids since they assume parents are at work. Knowing they have free access to download toxic messages to kids, they speak to their weakness and insecurities as they say, “You are not special, worthy, etc. unless you wear these sneakers, this sweatshirt, etc.” The speaker called them “merchants of cool.” I heard someone 2 days ago call it pain marketing….speak to an insecurity and tell then how you can fix it. How many of us never question those toxic messages and continue to live our lives assuming we are unworthy unless we drive, wear, own, have, accumulate, believe, attend………etc. I know that is what I have witnessed in the adults in my family. They had the stuff but were/are very empty inside with no sense of aliveness or joy. I heard another quote recently that said, “What we don’t transform, we transmit.”

May we continue to transform the old patterns and programs we inherited and/or absorb from the collective, decondition ourselves and become our greatness by utilizing what we already possess within ourselves but it got covered over with toxic debris. Thank you Brooke 🙂

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