Welcome to Compass, finding spirituality in the everyday. My name
is Ryan Dunn. In this episode, I'm joined by Dori
Granenko Baker and Anna Del Castillo for a
heartfelt exploration of soulful practices and the deep
wells of community connection and healing that we
can each tap into, especially in uncertain
times. Anna and Dori share personal rituals
like grounding in nature and joyful body movement and
discuss how simple acts such as morning meditation,
holy listening, and gathering in circles can combat
loneliness, support mental health, and foster
belonging across divides. Whether you're looking for
inspiration to begin your own soulful practices
or insights on building deeper relationships in your life, this
conversation is a warm invitation to discover
or draw from your own deep wells. If
you appreciate conversations like this, we'd appreciate it if you hit the
subscribe button on your podcast listening platform. And if you've
already done that, then drop us a rating or review.
A quick one is great. You can just say that you like
Compass and appreciate what it does. Thanks so much.
Our guests here now are Dori Grinenko Baker and Anna
Del Castillo. Dori calls herself a spy for
hope. She is a writer, facilitator, and thought leader who is
passionate about helping people find meaning and live into
their purpose. She's done a lot of educating around faith
formation and young people, including inspiring yours
truly in, seminary class a couple decades ago, which we didn't
really discover until we reconnected for this podcast episode.
And I'll tell you, her book, Girlfriend Theology, is
a treasure for ministry practitioners and is widely shared
in educational settings. Anna Del Castillo
is a healer who is innovating at the intersection of justice,
politics, and healing. Anna served in the Biden Harris administration
as the deputy director of diversity, equity, inclusion, and
accessibility for the White House. And together, Anna and
Dory help guide our own Deep Wells,
a growing, diverse, and intergenerational collective
from across religious and spiritual traditions. They help
create resources and gatherings that work to provide care
and support to the world with a special emphasis on young adults,
community organizers, and social change leaders. Anna
is the executive director, and Dory is the chief visionary
officer. So there's a lot for us to talk about and
explore here with Anna and Dory, but let's get to the conversations
here on Compass.
We have just rolled through a soulful centering practice,
feeling grounded and drawing ourselves into this space. So Dory
and Anna, thank you so much for being here on the Compass podcast.
I'll start with this question. Maybe this is a little leading
as we've just gone through the soulful practice, but how goes it with your soul
today? Dori, let's start with you. Wow.
These are difficult times to be grounded. And so
I feel that my soul is good. I had some,
time in the dirt this morning with my plants,
and so I'm grounded. And
it's a constant effort to stay
soulful. Effort's not the right word. Constant
intention and intention. Well, it's so good to
be here with you, Ryan and Dory. And how is it with my
soul today? I have just arrived to our virtual
podcast space from a one mile run. I was like, I just
gotta get a quick one in. And DC, where I live, Washington,
DC, is just vibrant green right now. It's that moment
in spring where things are coming alive, and it's
just this, like, mysterious green color that almost feels
otherworldly. And so I'm feeling very grounded from time
outside and the changing season, but just echoing so much
of what Dory said of trying to stay
centered in times that that feel very uncertain. Before I could even hit the
record button, Dory said, well, we need to we need to do a centering practice.
Like, let's just pause down and concentrate on our souls for a
moment. And you started our own deep wells with
the expectations of of drawing people
into social or I'm sorry, soulful practices
for the purposes of bringing about healing and a
sense of connection with one another and a greater well-being
through that connection. So with that in mind, Anna, you talked
about running and maybe that's a soulful practice for you, but is
there or are there soulful practices that you personally
invest in regularly that have impacted your
emotional well-being? And Anna, may maybe we'll just pick up with you. Maybe
running is it. Yes. Running is definitely a soulful practice for
me. Running feels connected to a series of soulful
practices that I call joyful body movement.
So I love to do physical fitness classes with
friends. I love to do yoga with folks in
the park, but, really, I view the gift of moving my
body as a soulful practice that helps me to balance my cortisol
levels, to help me connect with how my body is
feeling, help me connect with breath. So those are some soulful
practices that I do on the daily and love, but I've
just started doing morning meditation with my partner. So we we did it to be
partner. So we we did it to be accountability buddies
because it's, like, first thing in the morning. Sometimes, you know, 06:50AM,
we're rolling out of bed, going to sit on the living room floor, and just
investing in ten minutes. It's a ten minute timer where we just sit and breathe
together, and It's a ten minute
timer where we just sit and breathe together, and we've done it
now for one week. So shouting at us for this little goal, and
it it has really made such a difference in how my day starts. Within
that meditation practice, is there a way that you keep your
mind centered or or present? It's I mean, I will
say starting a meditation practice after many months of taking a
break, it is hard to keep the mind centered.
And I have just been really trying to have a lot of compassion of when
I kind of see my brain already going to my first Google Calendar
invite. I just say a little mantra, which is be here
now. So if I'm sitting on that pillow and thinking about what I wanna have
for breakfast, I just gently say, be here now. And,
that has been really helpful of just having, like, a couple of words to
center me back in the present moment. And I actually get a lot of my
mantras from Dory Baker, who who I view as the
queen of having some gentle mantras to just
recenter and refocus. Dory, is that something that you're
purposeful in developing, or do they just kinda come out of you, these mantras?
Both and. Both and. Yes and. My social
practice, runs the gamut of many different
many different practices, but the one that starts me almost every day
whenever possible is to get outside barefoot
early. And to see the sun, I
actually, open my windows so that I'm seeing the sun
without filter for the first few moments of the day because I know that
resets my serotonin levels. These are also practical, they're also
physiological so some might wonder what makes it a biohack and what
makes it a spiritual practice. And for me the difference is,
very subtle and it's really just being mindful that we're
connected to something more than ourselves. So when I go
outside barefoot, I am, connecting to the Earth.
I'm literally feeling the you know, my body is benefiting from
the electromagnetic charge of the Earth beneath my bare
feet. And I'm also looking up into the sky and
remembering my ancestors, my wise and loving ancestors who mostly,
came from across the Atlantic Ocean as far as I know, and I
am welcoming in into my,
worldview, that that cloud of witnesses. Those people who
have gifted my DNA, my biological DNA,
but also I ask for their help in restoring
and repairing some of the damage that's been done by
those settlers who came, from Northern Europe onto
the land where I live, which is the land of the Monacan people.
And so, you know, I also I turned to my left and I turned
to my right and I honored the Monacan people whose
land I'm on. And I honored the people in the
city to the right of me, which was a major market
for the slave trade. And I remember their connectedness
to my neighbors today. And that little practice, like, sometimes it's
five minutes, sometimes it's ten, sometimes it's thirty
seconds. Mhmm. But that sets my day
off into a way of realizing that I any work
for justice I do today is flowing through, it's
flowing through me. It's not about me. Mhmm. And it also
relieves me from the burden of getting it right. Right? Yeah.
Because I won't always get it right. So it's, you know, it's just a way
of setting my intention. Mhmm. We gathered
here here, quote, unquote, within this space, this
proverbial space, for the purpose of talking about soulful
practices. I hear words like cortisol
and biohacking. These are sciencey type terms, right? Can
you talk a little bit about the relationship
between these soulful practices and how that might
affect our, our physical being is kind of these,
dual entities that, many of us assume that we
are? Well, I'll start, and then I'll let you finish. How's that? Sounds
great. I'll say. We started RND Wells because we
were alarmed by the mental health
epidemic, especially as it was affecting is affecting young
people. And I've spent my career focusing on
vocation and helping young people come alive to purpose. Ryan, you
were in a class of mine. Way back. Yep. And,
I just realized that if people can't get out of bed in the morning,
literally, if the anxiety and the depression is
immobilizing, then trying to find meaning and purpose
is is not gonna happen. Right? And so I just kind of
backed up and looked at, brain research that shows
that skillful practices mitigate anxiety and
depression. And this is coming from the work of neuropsychologist Lisa
D Miller, The Awakened Mind. And she also has
a book about, parenting,
awaken awakening the spiritual gifts of children, spiritual practices
and children, her words are spiritual and we just changed that
to to the word soulful because we thought it was a bigger on
ramp, more accessible to people who might have been harmed
by spiritual traditions or religious traditions.
So we're holding both of those things at the same time. Brain research
shows those of us with a spiritual tradition that we're
at home with, maybe we fought with it, maybe we've broken up with it,
maybe we we reconciled with it. We shouldn't be the
only ones who have access to these life saving practices. So
that's what we're about at R and D Wells is to try to create
easier on ramps and access points for people who, for a very
good reason, may have broken pathways to the
spiritual traditions of their parents and grandparents generations.
Mhmm. Yeah. Just to pick up from there,
we do use doctor Lisa Miller's
research, and we also really lean on the surgeon general's,
work. So the previous surgeon general did a lot
of research on the epidemic of loneliness, and I
live here in Washington DC and used to work in the federal government.
And I had the chance to actually hear Vivek speak about
this epidemic of loneliness. And he spoke to a room full
of, federal government leaders about how
important it is to have community and how important it is to take
seriously our mental health, especially when it comes to how we
gather with folks. And so just I encourage everyone to
read, that report that came out. I think it was in
2024. But that's something that we feel as humans, you
know. I'm I'm not a scientist. I didn't go to medical
school, but I do know that something changes in my
body when I'm sitting in circle with people who are holding space
for me. And I think that we're starting to
see a lot of public health research coming out about the importance of
having grounded community, of being with people. And
so we view that as a soulful practice of sitting in
circle. For some folks, it might be, no. I'm just gonna go, you know,
grab some coffee with a friend, and we're gonna talk about reality
TV. That's that's cool. We
are encouraging people to take a more soulful orientation
to gathering, to go a little bit deeper, but we just know
that it is so important for humans to be together. And,
that to me really rang true when I read the surgeon general's report. We're
starting our own deep wells for each of you
a reaction to a felt loneliness in your own lives?
That's a really good question. I think a lot about the value
of my own individual social practices, but that is
so magnified when I share it with a friend, even as simple as Anna doing
that morning meditation with her partner, having an accountability buddy.
Yes. We all suffer from loneliness, and my life is
spread around the nation. I have beautiful people all across the country, but I don't
always have people in my backyard or right across the street. So
the pandemic changed that for a lot of us. And after the pandemic, I
started having fire pits in my backyard. I don't need a very
big excuse at all. It could be a new moon. It could be, all
souls day. But I will call people up, and I might invite
seven and two might show, and that is exactly who's supposed to be
there. But there is something like I like Anna said,
there is research to back this up, but I don't know the research. I I
don't need the research. I feel it in my body. Mhmm. The morning
after I've had a few women or or men or people of all
ages around my fire pit, I'm I'm
better. I'm better. I'm more available
to be of some good in the world. My actual,
my, you know, my nervous system is more settled and
I'm less reactive and more able to respond with
love and and spaciousness. I was just gonna say to that
question, I think I came into our own deep wells
really by the ushering of creator that led
me to meet Dory Baker at a time when I
was a proctor at Harvard University, which is
a kind of fancy name for a residential assistant. So I was
in grad school, and I was doing research and living on
campus supporting a group of twenty five 18 year olds,
you know, 18 to 20 year olds who were in their first year of
college. And what I didn't realize was that that position was
actually going to become my ministry. You know, I was in divinity school
studying how to be a chaplain. I was studying racial justice and
healing, how to do spiritual care work. And I was meeting
with so many young adults who were really struggling
and who I think were leaving home for the first time, and they were
given permission to talk about their loneliness or the ways that
they viewed their body or the ways that they were getting language for the first
time to understand their family trauma and their lineage.
And I was sitting with them in these tiny little dorm rooms,
and I was like, wow. They need more support. And our
training is to refer them to mental health services at Harvard, which,
of course, I did. That's such a beautiful place for them to
get the care that they need, but there weren't enough counselors and
therapists to support them. So they were like, okay, Anna. Like, I you
know, in four months, I can go have this appointment, but what do I do
on the day to day? And it goes back to what Dory said of how
do we help people to get out of bed in the morning? Because the truth
is most people don't have a therapist that's working with them every
single day. You know, that's that's a great resource, but people need
tools to really understand what is emerging and what is
surfacing for them, especially in those, you know, in that age from 18
to 21. Those are that's times when you're like, okay. I'm on my own for
the first time. I didn't even know I could ask these questions, and I
don't have anyone to really sit with me, and just witness
me. So that is around the time that I met Dory,
and we just had this shared vision and shared desire to
provide more support. So, Anna, I'm curious. In in those
conversations then, how do you bridge going from somebody saying
I'm feeling a little isolated, alienated, or lonely to,
inviting them into a a
new soulful practice that that maybe completely,
for lack of a better way of putting it, foreign to them or uncomfortable for
them? Yeah. That's a great question. And that's something we think about a lot. And
I think Dory has taught me so much about how to be really inclusive in
soulful practices. So, you know, I was raised in a very
Christian household. I'm a preacher's kid. I, you
know, was very, very involved with the United Methodist Church. And,
I wasn't sitting in that dorm room saying, hey, can we pray together? Or, like,
let me teach you the Lord's prayer. You know, no shame to doing that, but
but I think our invitations to soulful practices and I when I was doing
that work, I didn't even really have the language of soulful practices, but it
was, okay, let's let me listen to you.
Like, tell can let's ask that question again. I just want you to sit with
that question and then inviting them to just pause and reflect
for sixty seconds on a question and have someone just do holy
listening with them, which is a practice that I would love for Dory to to
talk about. And then other things like, okay. I'm
I'm gonna give you a couple of journaling prompts. Can you do those before the
next time that we meet? Or it sounds like you really wanna talk to
your friend about this. Can y'all schedule a time in the next week to go
for a walk around the river and just like talk tell her how you're
feeling or like tell her about this feeling that you've just shared with me.
So those three practices journaling, grabbing a friend to go for a walk in nature,
and doing walk in nature, and doing
holy listening, like, those are soulful practices that, are
very simple and are not tied to any particular religion.
You know, it's just invitational. It's something
anyways, Dori, I would love for you to talk about holy listening because it has
changed my life. That's so sweet. Thank you. I also will
just add that, Anna's example of the dorm room is a
great one. What we're trying to equip people to do is like whenever
they hold the mic and that's a metaphor,
whenever they have the opportunity, whenever they're facilitating anything,
these are spaces where the mindfulness movement has already
crossed the super highway, right? We already know that a moment of
you know deep breathing together, we can do that in a science classroom
for all you know for all intents anywhere. So what we're trying to do is
broaden that movement and make it more inclusive of
all the world's traditions so that we're representing,
you know, and we're tethering these traditions to their context
by by writing about them in ways ways that come from the
people who are from those contexts, right? Whether that's Jewish or
Muslim or Christian or earth based traditions.
But the idea is there's a whole lot more out there than just breathing
together. So if you're facilitating a freshman orientation, you can do a solo
practice. That might have to do with mingling around the
room and touching base with a group of two people or three
people and answering a question that just brings your body
to life. You know a simple question like, tell me about the best vacation you
ever went on in your life or what's your favorite food from
your family of origin. Like those things get our, get our
bodies, our life force rises to the surface and we
can be soulful with one another and then move back into, okay,
what is the work that we have to do here? But, we're really excited
about looking for places in on campuses,
in in boardrooms, on, on,
on in corporations where we can infuse the day
with little social practices. In Christian Christian language that would be
prayer without ceasing and in Christian language it would be the priesthood of all
believers. But we're seeking to make those two,
invitations more inclusive. Like what does it what does it look like to lead
a soulful moment? In the midst of a tragedy, in the midst of I
mean this was way back. I remember when the Boston Marathon,
explosions happened. I remember thinking what would it be like if the young people there
had some practices in their back pockets so while the ENTs
are doing their work, there are chaplain
movement chapels chaplains leading folks in practices that
can calm us and make us be available for the next
moment. So there's lots of good work on movement chaplaincy
going on, and we've been learning from our colleagues in those
spaces about how to just do these how to equip people so these
practices are at their fingertips. Are there practices that you
have noticed that are conducive to bringing people
together from maybe across polarized
spaces? Yeah. So we'll talk about holy listening, and then I'll I'll let Anna
tell a few stories about when we've seen that happen. So holy
listening is a practice that, you know, just goes way way
back to Methodist roots for me and
some of the work that I did in my early early part of
my career but you know just opening someone
to tell a story about a time when And as we listen to that
person for just two minutes, I've done this in the midst of,
worship on a Sunday morning right in the middle of my sermon. I've stopped the
sermon. It was Pentecost and I just said, okay, for two minutes
turn to someone and tell a story about a time when fill in
the blank what you want to that story to be about, set a timer
and when you're listening you are only listening and I usually say listen
as if you may see the holy one, show up in the face of the
person that you're listening to. Like, allow yourself to be
surprised or just pretend even. You can't get yourself to that place.
Pretend that the holy one is gonna be better for you for a moment or
with you for a moment and then you take turns. So each one gets to
listen and each one gets to speak. And in that example of
doing that on a Sunday morning in the middle of worship, someone came up to
me afterwards and said they had been paired with, they paired themselves
with a person whose baptism they had been present at. It was an
older person and a younger person. And that person was
the younger person was about to be confirmed. And they had these two
minutes together, these four minutes together that changed the trajectory
of the next few weeks for them. And so there's always just this
possibility that, you know, two minutes of holy listening to someone can change a
life. That we expand. That's a very easy, you
know, simple practice, but we also have some deep dive practices
and one of those is theological reflection around shared
story. And we did that recently and I'll let Anna tell that
story because that was a moment when, all the
politics that are alive in our bodies got brought into the room and we got
to dive deep. Mhmm. Yeah. So this
practice, and you can find this on our website, but it's called Live to Tell.
And it is a soulful practice that Dory really birthed into
the world, but it is, it kind of takes holy
listening into a deeper practice where
you have someone share a story that they've prepared. It's usually,
you know, a two to three minute read about, a different
topic.
Difficulty. And that person gets the opportunity to read
a story in a circle of people. And the first
step of that live model is to listen. And so folks just
listen. They take it in. But I've done live before. And as a
storyteller, it's so sacred to have a circle
just listen to you with no expectations, no
fixing things, no trying to give you advice, but just listening. And
then we've moved through some other steps of theological reflection,
surfacing questions that come up for folks, surfacing emotions and
feelings. But in this particular time, we were leading a
retreat at beautiful Lake Tahoe, and this was a very
intergenerational group from across The United States. So we
had I think our our elder was in their seventies, and
our youngest person was 22. And most of the folks there
didn't know each other, so they were kinda coming by invitation of Dory and
Anna, sort of us bringing our people together.
And one of my dear friends who I've met in, in my
own activist journey here in Washington, DC, she and I have done a
lot of work together on calling for peace in Gaza and calling
for an end of violence there. And she is a young Jewish
woman, and she read her story of her own
personal loss and and also the loss that has
come the loss and the gain that has come from her
activism. And she read this story and it was very
clear that she has been pushing for peace in Gaza and an end of
violence, and and really holding the Israeli government
accountable. And so reading a story like that and as facilitators, you
never know how that's gonna land in a room because people had very
different thoughts about Israel Palestine. And and we didn't even know
everyone's view on on what's happening there. But we do know that that's a very
divisive, can be a very divisive topic. And by the
end of this person going through the live model, we had
people in tears. We had mamas,
like, mothering this person. We had someone who was like, I'm ordering
a cake to celebrate your brave decision. And we really
did. That night, we had a party, a celebration party to celebrate this person
and the brave decision that they had made. And so, I mean,
I just have chills thinking about what that room felt like because
that could happen in a way that wasn't a soulfully led
practice and it could have divided a room. It could have led people to end
relationships. It could have caused a lot of harm, but we really saw
that soulful practice bringing this intergenerational group
together in a way that was healing, I wanna say for all of us,
but really healing for the person who shared her story. That group was
also, racially diverse and
religiously diverse. And so what happened on that day, you know, we
were not far out from the encampments on campuses last spring.
We were in July, you know, everything's still literally on
it is still on fire in many of our realities. Right? We
weren't far out from all of that but in this space that was carefully
created and tended soulfully, there was just a little more
room made for us to show up for each other. No
matter what we how we've been raised, right, to show up in
that moment. There was a little more spaciousness and so that's what we wanna see
more of happen. And we believe these deeper dives when
people can be together for two days, sharing social
practices, we kinda feel like that's what the world needs right now.
That we need to be sharing across our deep
traditions that have so much wisdom and so much ancient,
reservoir, I mean deep wells. But how can we
not draw only from our own, but make space to draw
mutually from one another's and receive that beautiful flow that was
happening in that space that day? There's one other
thing that happened in that retreat that was similarly,
like, a bridging moment. I'm gonna let Anna talk about that one too.
Yeah. We we love to story tell, Ryan. So we're gonna tell you another story.
Bring it. So this practice I love, and I know that you've
had the incredible Tamisha Helms on your podcast
before. They are a dear friend of ours and
also the theologian in residence for our own deep wells. And
Tamise, in collaboration with, the poet Nick George,
who's also a member of our collective, created a soulful
practice, and methodology called mixtape, rest
mixtape. And so I won't go too much into it because folks can just listen
to your other podcast episodes. Link in the show notes. We got it. Yeah. That's
pretty sure. But what is so beautiful or what was so
beautiful about this practice, at Tahoe was that you
had two black teachers and facilitators
talking about hip hop and the history of chattel slavery
in The United States Of America to a room
conversation like this. This is the first time that I've actually sat
down and listened to the lyrics of Kendrick Lamar
or or have been asked a question about my relationship to hip
hop or my knowledge of hip hop. And so, you know, I've done a lot
of inclusion and equity trainings. And I've never
seen something as as like
inviting in as that practice where you saw older white
folks being invited into this conversation about our shared experience of the grief. And and
shared experience of the grief and
and and, like, detriments of the history of our country. And so that to
me felt so healing and unifying and just beautiful. So, Dory,
I don't know if I missed anything on that beautiful mix tape day, but you
feel free to fill in. I think you got it. It reversed the commute that
we're accustomed to making, and that is a joy to behold and be
part of a cultural commute.
Sounds like this is a organized event. How
might people who are wanting to have this kind of
sharing or listening experience, how might you imagine they
initiate something like this organically? I'll take that one because
Cool. I mean, obviously, our own deep wells, we are here for everyone. You can
we always share resources. We want folks to get connected with us because
our collective of practitioners and facilitators feel
really passionate about making sure that people know that they can do
this too. Like, they I think people just need a little bit of
invitation to say, you've been you know, I'm thinking about my sister. I I
told her that I'm a part of a really active women's circle where we meet
monthly and, have been supporting each other for four years. She
came to one of our retreats and now she's hosting her own women's circle,
you know? So I think sometimes people just need to see it and
need to be invited to say you are a soulful
human being. It doesn't take having a master of divinity
or being an ordained minister or having invested
thousands of dollars in a spiritual education. Like,
people we we are human beings with so much wisdom. And
so I would say to anyone listening, has this sparked any
ideas for you of maybe a deeper way that you wanna connect with your
neighbor or your friend or your partner? And if you need a thought
partner, please contact us. We would love to talk to you, but I just think
people need permission to tap into the beautiful wisdom that's already in
them. Start really small. So, yeah, we have, the Live to Tell podcast, and the
book, cast, and the book, Girlfriend
Theology, which describe that deep deep dive method. But there
are so many little easy ways. I'll tell a quick story. My daughter who lives
in LA, she's in her late twenties and was invited to a
birthday brunch the other day and you know everybody's around in their own little
separate conversations and she dings the glass and says, hey, let's
all tell a story about how we know Desi and why we love her. And
all of a sudden, I mean, you know, this is Priya Parker magic. Right? All
of a sudden, it's changed from a place where we all go away
with our own private conversations to this moment
where we open our hearts and got a little bit
got a little roomier in there. And and we got to
celebrate Desi and our love, in a
more collective, communal, inclusive
way. So this is not rocket science. Humans have always known
how to do it. It just takes giving people a little bit
of, confidence and the nudge. Like, the
nudge is our best gift. Right? Mhmm. I'm gonna
share, Anna had, mentioned earlier mantras. I'm gonna share
one other little practice that's just so easy. It's just such an easy on ramp.
You know, find something that is gonna happen all
through your day. Whether that's when you drink water or when you water
in or water out or when you see a bird. I have a
mantra. When I see a bird, I say to myself, birds make
me happy. And guess what? In that moment of shining a little
spotlight and being reminded that birds make me happy, I'm a
little happier. I'm a little less tied up. I'm a little
less, closed and concerned about whatever it was
that was bothering me. Be that in my personal life or be that in the
world as we, you know, as we see it unraveling before
us. So yeah. I love that. I call it tiny arrows
of love, but just figure out what your arrow is. It's tied to
ancient Christian practice of target prayers where people
would pray the Jesus prayer if they woke up anxious in the middle of the
night. Lord in your mercy hear my prayer. It
can be as simple as that or as creative as, as you
want it to be with whatever it is that makes you happy or that slows
you down. We have a practice called May You Never Thirst that we do
collectively when we fill our water bottles in the morning at a
retreat or as we sit down to dinner. We share with one another
reflection on the gift of clean fresh water and how lucky we
are to be receiving it. We turn that into a soulful practice.
Thanks for listing those, Dory. That makes me just wanna drop,
drop one or a question that I've been sitting with. And I think, Ryan,
this kinda ties up our work in general.
Is you know, I live in DC. I'm a young adult in my late twenties.
I spend time with a lot of young adults who are just trying to figure
it out. Like, we're trying to figure out what we wanna do in the world,
what our world is gonna look like. And the question that I'm sitting
with that I wanna invite people into through the work that we're doing at our
own deep wells is asking, who are you? Like, who are
you? Not what do you do? You know, what's your
dream job, but who are you? And I think if we can all
help each other to answer that question or even
just show curiosity by saying, like, hey. Who are you? We would
have a much more beautiful, safe,
and flourishing world. That's a great that's great, Anna.
Someone actually asked me that at the end of the funeral the other day. They
they came up to me and said, who are you? And it was such a
beautiful question to be asked. So thank you for
underlining that. And for
wrapping us up so well. We've talked about the on ramps that people might find
into some of these soulful practices. On ramp to
get to know more about what Anna and Dory are up
to would be the our own Deep Wells website. Correct? Mhmm.
Check us out on Instagram too. We're always sharing fun content.
And, yeah, subscribe to our newsletter. Cool. And, Anna, you had mentioned
having a podcast. You wanna drop the name of that podcast? Yeah. So
I've been I've been supporting two friends who are putting out a podcast called the
Soulful Parenting and Caregiving podcast, and I will
also plug an incredible podcast that Dory and our friend
Alejandra Salemi are co hosting called the Live to
Tell podcast, and you can find both of these on Spotify.
Alright. To explore more practices and resources or connect
with practitioners, visit the our own deep wells
website and discover ways to nurture soulful
connection in every part of your life. If you'd like to dive deeper
into anything that we've talked about or explore more episodes, be sure to
visit our website at
umc.org/compass. You'll
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Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time. Peace.