The Storied Human (What is your Story?)

Season 5. Episode 7. Ten Words to Explore and Live By with Lauryn Axelrod, Monk and InterSpiritual Teacher

Lynne Thompson

Go ahead and text me!

When Lauren first starts talking about her Ten Words, they sound simple enough: Attention, Acceptance, Benevolence, Creativity, e.g. -- but as you ponder them, they start to lead you down a path of self-enlightenment, They work together, and they reflect on each other.

From the book's jacket:
"What if just ten words could change your life - and the world - for the better?

It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the world today. We are surrounded by war, oppression, depression, and fear. We need help. How can we heal ourselves and the world around us? What do we need to become better people in a better world today?

In Ten Words, Interfaith/Interspiritual leader Lauryn Axelrod offers a practical path forward. Based on a contemporary, but timeless set of ten simple words distilled from the common principles of the world’s great faith and wisdom traditions supported by modern science and psychology, Ten Words provides an integrated, interspiritual guide we can use every day to become happier, healthier, more fulfilled people in a kinder world that supports all."

Distilling Decades of Learning and Living....
Lauryn has done the work for us, over a lot of years-- she has studied and lived in several different spiritual traditions. She arrived at the Ten Words almost magically -- they came to her easily. She describes them as a gift. It's a gift for us -- a distillation of the world's greatest traditions boiled down into an interfaith/interspiritual guidebook if you will. Ten Words-- that can change your life, and maybe the world.

You can find Lauryn on Instagram and Facebook, and her website:
laurynaxelrod.com

Her book--

Ten Words: An Interspiritual Guide to Becoming Better People in a Better World, can be purchased at small bookstores or at Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Ten-Words-Interspiritual-Becoming-Better/dp/B0DD5S5P9V/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3N41ETOC7JGKP&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.UBnfVKuK1MRvRSc-RNmV9MpRMiwuG52kufi0ssBtr7A.7b5v5RZr6SJ-QnMvvl7Z-DdHKvo1Iy60pdlbzFVqfVk&dib_tag=se&keywords=ten+words+lauryn+axelrod&qid=1730071535&sprefix=ten+words+by+Lauryn%2Caps%2C147&sr=8-1


Thank you Lauryn for a fascinating conversation and for sharing your story with me! Check out our video version of this conversation on Youtube:
https://youtu.be/YS3HP9uD47o


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Original music "Saturday Sway" by Brendan Talian (for interviews)

Unknown:

Lynne, hello and welcome to The Storied Human. I'm Lynne Thompson, and my guest today is Lauren Axelrod. She wrote a book recently called 10 words, and I'm so intrigued how she found those words, and her journey is fascinating. So let's talk to learn about those things. But first, a little background. It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the world today. We are surrounded by war, oppression, depression and fear. We need help. How can we heal ourselves and the world world around us? What do we need to become better people in a better world today? What if just 10 words could change your life and the world for for the better? In 10 words, interfaith, inter spiritual leader Lauren Axelrod offers a practical path forward based on a contemporary but timeless set of 10 simple words distilled from the common principles of the world's great faith and wisdom traditions supported by modern science and psychology. 10 words provides an integrated inner spiritual guide we can use every day to become happier, healthier, more fulfilled people in a kinder world that supports all I really want that warrant. Lauren herself is an ordained interfaith, inter spiritual minister, spiritual director, chaplain and certified grief educator, graduate of one spirit interfaith, inter spiritual seminary. She's also the founding spiritual director of three mountains, inter spiritual community. Lauren writes the sub sec, sub stack newsletter, radical spirituality, getting to the root of what matters, and leads retreats and workshops, virtually and in person. I'm really looking forward to hearing more about this. Welcome Lauren. Thank you so much. Lynne, it's a pleasure to be here. It's great to have you. So I'm getting the sense that this took a lot of work a lifetime. This book just feels like the culmination of everything for you. You nailed it. It's exactly what it is. It's really a lifetime of study and practice and asking the questions, how do we become better people in a better world, and asking them in really varied and deep ways, and at a certain point, you know this, the 10 words that that that came from that study, and that you know, decades of practice and counseling people and having a lot of background in a lot of different faith traditions. Those 10 words, once they arrived, it was kind of like, Oh, here you are. You know, here you are. Finally, there's a guide that you don't have to subscribe to one tradition or another, because, like many of us, we're, we're multi faith, non spiritual, but not religious. We have, you know, all kinds of things that basically say we don't want to be in a box. Did you remember that there was a religious test going around the internet, and people were taking it. It was really long and comprehensive to find out what religion you were. And I came out, Episcopal shaman, right, right. That's what many of us are. Episcopal shaman, Buddhist, I think it was so yeah, there. I mean, I could totally, I totally hear you, yeah, yeah. Most, yeah. Most people I know are a mix of all kinds of wonderful things, right? And that's where we are now. You know, in today's world, like, while the the traditional faith and wisdom traditions have a lot to teach us, they really do. Like, once you get past all the doctrine and the dogma and all the traumatizing stuff, when you get to the mystical roots of what every tradition is teaching. It's the same thing. They're saying the same things, right? And that's what I was looking for, is, what are those common roots? What? What is true across the board, you know? And that's where these 10 words come from. Whether we're talking about atheism or Zoroastrianism, we can go from A to Z, and these words apply. You don't have to be religious. You don't even have to call yourself spiritual. For these words to make a difference in your life and in our world. I love the that practicality that you bring you. To such a deep study in so many years, I just that really appeals to me. Is it okay to share the 10 words now? Because I know short listeners are probably like, what are they? Of course. So you'll note that they all begin with A, B or C. They are that foundational, right? They're that basic. And these are words that we all know. There's nothing new here. There's nothing exotic. That's the thing about this. Like we know this, we just haven't really been doing it. You know, it's a practice. So I look at this as a practice. So the 10 words, the first word, is attention, because you're not going anywhere if you're not paying attention. And And these days, that's kind of where modern spirituality stops. Mindfulness, you got it right? Like, that's the end point. No, in this path, it's the beginning. Yeah, because you really can't go anywhere if your eyes aren't open and you don't have a map and you don't have good boots on, like you're gonna get lost in the wilderness, right? You have to pay attention and and mostly because, you know we're already on a spiritual path, whether we know it or not, it's called life. And if we're not paying attention to the details of our lives and the world around us and other people, then, then we're missing it. We're missing the whole thing. So the first words, attention, acceptance, authenticity, benevolence, balance. Fifth Word, contemplation, creativity collaboration, celebration and care. And what's beautiful about these words as well, they appear as individual words. Once you start working with them, they be they flow into each other. They become a complete path. Because if the first word is attention and the last word is care, to care for something is to give your attention to it, to attend to it, just at a higher octave, right? So it's really like, it's like a loop trail. It's like, and, you know, you can go around it and around it and around it and around it, or pick one word or pick another word, and it is, it just sinks in. And then there's transformation. Things change. You change the world changes. I love that, because it's rooted in in something so relatable. You know, it's, it's rooted in what we know already. We just don't even know we know it, right? Exactly. There's nothing exotic about this, you know. And I think that one of the dangers that we get into in modern spirituality in the West is exotifying it. Oh, yeah, you know, ooh, it's all about, you know, shamans and the Amazon, been there, done that. It's not really all that exotic, but that's what we do. We we want the exotic. We want the monk in the robes. I am actually a monk. Am I wearing a You are, aren't you? That's right, you follow the monastic tradition. Yeah, right. I I think that that's such a good point, because when we exotic by it, we make it, we create that distance, right, right? And then, yeah, yeah. And then it's also, you know, some dude in a robe is telling you what to believe and what is true for you without your own experience. And the thing about this path is it's a path of inquiry. What do these words mean to you? How do they show up in your life? How can you cultivate them, and how can you use them to help create a better world? I love how personal that is, because one thing that's so dangerous is looking to an expert in any area of our lives and and believing we have to have that someone who tells us you know how to be and right, it can be dangerous. So this is, this is a quest, you know, for ourselves, like, internally, for ourselves, yeah. So how did you get here? Like, how long did this book take to write? Well, how long it actually took to write versus a lifetime of study and practice? You know, the words themselves came out in about 10 minutes. I love that gift, yeah? And I really do feel like they were, they're a gift, and they're a gift, they were a gift to me. And I'm just spreading the gift, right? I'm just passing it on. That feeling, yeah, I get that feeling sometimes when I write poetry, there's certain things that just come and they're not even mine. They just came, yeah, this these are not mine. Lovely. That's so lovely. Yeah, these words are not mine. And like I said, they're nothing new. We know them. All I've done is, is, is put them into a structure or a framework. And really, a lot of it came out of my own quest. You know, after decades of deep study. Practice in, you know, everything from Zen to Taoism to I was raised Jewish. I grew up in Episcopal schools. You know, was, I was nurtured by an African American female preacher. So I can do the Hallelujah, do I hear you testifying, and I can sing gospel badly, but I can sing it, and I'd love to sing it, right, but, but what happened was, I mean, I could do my yoga, I could do my Tai Chi, I could do my meditation and my altar practices, and it was basically a spiritual smoothie. You know, I was taking all these different things and putting them together, because what was, what's missing in pick and choose modern spirituality. Well, while I love the fact that we are we are trying to find our own authentic path. What happens when you cherry pick is you have no actual structure, and the the traditional paths Say what you will about them, they give you a structure. Yes. So what I was realizing after, you know, 40 years of seeking and learning a lot and having a lot of those great, transcendent experiences, but really still feeling like, yeah, I don't know where I'm going. I don't know what's happening here, what I wanted was not a box, but a container of some kind, a vessel of some kind with transparent, flexible walls. You know, what I really needed was a map and there, and there isn't one that is truly interfaith, inter spiritual. And that's what I wanted. And that's where the 10 words came from. Really, for myself, you know, like I, yeah, I needed a path. I needed to be able to say I'm on the path or I'm not on the path. And when you're not in a particular tradition, you don't have that, you don't have a path, yeah, you know, a path. And so, so the 10 words really were my seeking to answer those questions for myself. And then once they came out, and I went, Oh, I think I have something here, you know, like that, that feeling, and I shared them with friends. And, you know, very quickly, there were a group of people who said, Ooh, I want to do that too. This is what I've been looking for. Yeah. And so we spent the first group. We spent a year a month with each word, really exploring, really investigating. And I kept religious notes, right? I kept notes about the process, and that's what became this book. That's great. You user tested it? Yeah, yeah, it's definitely tested. It definitely works. Like, after, at the end, at the end of that year, we all like, I, I felt like I grew more in that year than I grew in 15 years prior, and everyone else. It's like, there was suddenly, there was clarity and there was joy. You know, because a lot of modern spirituality is actually joyless. It is. It's like, we have to do this. You have to sit on your cushion. You have to, you know, it's, it's, it can be so like self flagellating, yeah, you have to let go of this. You have to let go of that. No, no, no. We need joy. We need to bring the joy in. We need to bring and the thing about these words, they're not thou shalt, nots right, and they're not thou shalt they're principles. So how does this principle apply? Let me bring this principle in. And these principles are very nourishing. You know, I'm getting the feeling that it's very freeing when you start to allow this. Yeah, instead of, I interviewed somebody who had a book called she wrote a book called blissful thinking, and she was sort of saying, there's so much of this, you know, meditation and initiation and all this stuff that I tried that really didn't work, you know, because it just didn't work for me. And I thought that was so brave, because it can be a little bit inhibiting. It can, yeah, I spent 15 years in Zen, believe me, I was like, I need some fun. You know, where's the joy? It's, it's and, you know, we're here in this body, on this planet, in this life for joy. Yeah, like, you don't get tangerines and fall leaf colors and sunsets and Aurora Borealis and and, you know, all of these things I'm just thinking about, like, what I've experienced in the last four days, or something, you know, where you just go, Wow. This is great. This is amazing. That's part of being a that's one of the worst. It's really alive, yeah, oh, that's so cool. It's, it's the point of being alive. Yes, it really is. It really, it really is. And I just love how you found that. So, were you always spiritual? Like, what were you like as a little girl? Yeah, my, my parents would definitely say I came out of the womb this way, and I was, you know, I, like I said, I sort of my upbringing. I was surrounded by religiousness. My family's Jewish. I'm an uncle who's a rabbi, you know, I went to Episcopal School, so I was in chapel every single day, saying the Lord's Prayer, you know. And then on Sundays, in this, you know, black Christian church. And then my mother was a seeker, and she got into Zen early on, and said, Here, read this Zen in The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. And off I went. You know, it was I just always, I always had some sense of like, yeah, no, this isn't it. There's something else. I mean, this is great, but there's also something else going on here, you could feel it. Yeah, I find that to be true with people that end up writing something this cool is that it was your whole life, and even as a child, you knew you had a sense. Yeah. I mean, at one point I was considering going to rabbinical school, and my uncle, the rabbi, talked me out of it, you know? He said, wow. What did he say? He said, Do you really want to be stuck in one tradition? He knew me. He knew me pretty well by that point. And he said, you really want to be stuck in one tradition? And I thought about it, I said, No, that's very wise of him, yeah, because even already, you weren't stuck in one tradition, and you wouldn't have been happy. No, I wouldn't have, you know, and I, and unlike a lot of people, and I, and I have, you know, it breaks my heart to hear the stories of religious trauma, right? People who've really been traumatized, they were traumatized by the religion of their family, the religion of their birth, felt not accepted, you know, pushed out, had a really hard time with, with, you know, the structures and the rigidity. I didn't have that, you know, I was lucky. I just got the good stuff. Yeah, I was lucky that way too. I pretty much got the good stuff. I was raised Lutheran, but it was the evangelical side, which was pretty liberal, and then after a long stretch, my husband and I went to Episcopal Church for a while, and then we went to the Quaker church, and now we're just taking a long break. But those were very positive experiences for me, and I didn't understand how how hurtful it can be to be in a place where people reject you. I did have one friend tell me years and years ago, over drinks that I was going to hell, like for sure, and I had known this person forever, and I'm like, and, you know, I I've since forgotten it, because she's like, done a 180 but I'm like, what, you know, think I was, like, 25 years old, and I'm like, what? Yeah, but yeah, it messes with people's minds. It really does. Yeah, it does. And, and, you know, the thing that I love about the 10 words, right, which, you know, the subtitle of the book is an Interspiritual guide to becoming better people in a better world. That what I love about them is there's no dogma. There's nothing you have to believe. I'm not telling you. I'm not defining whatever you call the sacred. I mean, we have, gosh knows how many names, right? You can call it whatever you want. You can call it the great cheesecake. For all I care, I don't care. You know, what I'm asking is that you find your own relationship with whatever you call sacred, yes, and the way that you do that is you, you know, you find yourself there's a great story. One of my favorite kind of spiritual stories is it's actually a Hasidic tale where a young man travels for a long way to go to this remote village and to meet the Rebbe there, the spiritual leader. And he gets there, and he says, you know, Rebbe, I've come, you know. And the Reb is like, so, why are you here? What do you want? And he says, I want to find God. And the rabbi goes, you're wasting your time. And the young man is, is, is just perplexed. He's like, but, but why? And he said, Because God's everywhere. You didn't have to travel this far. And he says, well, then what should I be doing here? Why? Why am I here? And the rabbi says, to find yourself, and maybe you'll find God in the process, right? And so it's so true, right? But this is a story that goes across traditions. I happen to like the that version of it, right? But the other version is the monk who goes to the to the, the Zen priest, and says, you know, tell me in you know, what is the core, root? Of Zen. And he says, attention. He goes, No, no, no, I know that. But like, what's it really about? And he says, Attention, attention, attention. You know? So one of the things you have to pay attention to is, Who are you, or what are you? It's the first question, first spiritual question. There are three questions, all of spirituality and religion can be boiled down to three questions. I'm a reductionist. I like getting down to the roots. I noticed. Yeah, right. So there's three questions, who am I? Or what am I? What's all this? What's going on here, and how am I supposed to live in relationship to that, those are the three questions that all religion and spirituality tries to answer. We think it's about God. It's not. It's about those three questions. We find God in the process, or whatever you want to call it, yeah, so you have to start there with yourself, yeah? And again, if you're staying outside of yourself, or you're looking to someone else to tell you you're never going to get there, you have to go inside. And I keep seeing that image of people climbing a mountain, and they're all taking a different path. Yeah, it's the same mountain, and they're going to the same thing. And I just love that, yeah, the mountain handle the that mountain is bigger than any path on it, yeah? So you can have lots of different paths. And that's the beautiful thing about 10 words, right? It's a map. It's a map. And it says, you know, you can take the map and go, Okay, I want to get to the summit of the mountain. Or, oh, there's a river swimming hole over there. I want to go there, or I need to get back to the parking lot, you know, like it that that the map itself can get you where you want to go, but it's not going to tell you what the destination is. I'm not promising you're going to reach enlightenment or Nirvana, or go to heaven or be richer, you know, more powerful, none of that. It's just, just explore the words, see what happens. Be curious. Come in from a place of inquiry, of not knowing, because if you think you know, what's the point of going on the journey, there you go. There is no point, right? There has to be some discovery for yourself. It's going to be different for everybody, right? That's what I love about these words. They're so flexible, open to you know they want you to you can jump in and you can explore your your own, your own way. Yeah, this is wonderful. So tell me about being a monk. How did that happen? Oh, I think I was always a monk. Okay, you were always, you just made an official I was always a monk. You know, my tradition, my home, but I call my home tradition, right? My home tradition, which is Judaism. We don't have a monastic tradition. There aren't monks in Judaism, because Judaism is very focused on the here and now, feet on the ground. What are you doing in the world with other people? But I spent a significant amount of time in in Buddhism and in Taoism, both of which have monastic traditions. And, you know, they appealed to me, but I also was like, I'm not. I'm not going to go to some mountaintop monastery and drop out of the world. I mean, I like to go sit in the coffee shop. I like to go to the movies. I you know, I don't, I don't want, I don't feel like you have to to extricate or pull yourself out of life to find spirituality. I think it's the opposite. I think you have to throw yourself deeply into all that life is to find it. So my version of monasticism comes out of a trend. It's a small trend, but it's an interesting trend called New monasticism, which takes the gems of a monastic life, which is living from your spiritual center all day, every day. But you're not in the cloister. You're in the world. You have a family, you're working, you you're participating, you're doing, you know, podcasts. You're in the world, but you live through your spiritual center. And it's also kind of where the 10 words got their start was looking at, you know, all monastic traditions, they have precepts or or guidelines or rules of life, right, that order, their their day, their week, their month, their practice. We don't really have those if we're not monks. And it's, and that's kind of hard, right? It's like, well, what am I supposed to do all day, every day? Every day? We kind of have to make it up. Yeah. So I started looking at all of the precepts and all the rules of life, going back to the Benedictines, going back to the Desert Fathers, desert mothers and fathers going, you know, deep into Zen and and, or Chan Buddhism, you know, Tibetan. Is Taoism, you know, all of the precepts, I didn't like any of them because they were too restrictive. You know, they were too restrictive, and so I had to make them up for myself. But the point was, I was trying to make up a structure that would keep me rooted in my in my spiritual center and living from that center, but still in the world. Yeah, new monastics, like, they have organic farms, and, you know, they may be social activists. I mean, it's really an interesting trend. And so three mountains, I founded three mountains with a group of people who also were like, Yeah, Sign me up. I'll be a monk. I want to be a monk. So good. Yeah, yeah. I just love the idea that you understood that as restrictive as some of those precepts were, we still need guidelines. We need to consistently have a checkpoint. You know, that's what I noticed, that it is really hard to make it up as you go along. It's hard to have a life without something, you know, guardrails or signposts or something, and we have to consistently try, you know, in a in a sort of organized way, but nothing restrictive. And that's what I'm feeling, is that we can use these 10 words to return to and not be, not be, you know, like I often feel rudderless without some spiritual tradition. I'm just like, Well, that didn't go well, what am I going to do today? You know, it's like, I just like that. I love what you're saying is that you've worked it out that there's good stuff that you pulled from being spiritual and being ex, you know, exploring yourself, and yet you've gotten rid of that kind of, you know, restrictive or so, really separating yourself. I mean, that's great for some people, you know, some people do sit on on mountaintops, and they do come back and bring us wisdom. Nothing against them. But that's not for everyone, right? Right? Not necessarily spiritual. You know, it's not necessarily spiritual. Well, it's a whole spiritual that's what I mean. It's to hold that as the ideal to say that I can only, I'm only really spiritual if I'm like, you know, sitting on my meditation 18 hours a day, and, yeah, and, and, and I really disagree with that. I mean, I It's like, creativity, right? Creativity is one of the words, one of the words. And, you know, it's like saying, Well, I'm really only creative if I'm in the art studio painting. Oh, really, where'd you come up with that idea? And what about what you just made for dinner? And like, yeah, like, you know it when we when we compartmentalize, when we say, well, I'm spiritual. On Sundays, I go to church, you know, and the other six days, six and a half days out of the week, I don't even think about it, then we do ourselves a disservice, because we really are living. We're on a spiritual path, as I said, every day, all day, every day. It's called life, whether we're aware of it or not, right? And so how beautiful that you found a way to help people become more aware of it, because I certainly feel that way. I feel like I was on this path that I didn't understand, you know, because I didn't have this kind of illumination. And then I started to realize, oh, I can sort of be present more and figure it out and start asking those questions, but it's tough. I think people do compartmentalize, and I think it's a little bit about capitalism. You know, we're good consumers, if we, if we label things. And now I'm going to go do something creative, and I have to, you know, pay for a class and be creative and be whatever. And I've often said that. It's funny, I did a lot of work with with my kids schools. I took a little time off from corporate work, and I did volunteer work with my kids, with other moms, with the school moms and their some of their homes were so gorgeous. They were decorated so beautifully. They were so talented. And not just decorated beautifully, but the domestic arts, like they knit it and they crocheted and they make the color choices like I used to just be amazed, and I realized they didn't see it that way. They didn't see how creative they were. And I'm, I'm just like, I'm there to tell them, you know, it's just like, Dude, you know, it's all over. It doesn't matter that it's not hanging in a gallery you're in, you're expressing yourself, and I'm telling you, it's beautiful, you know, you're very creative. So there's all and like the the beautiful dinners and the baking and the choices. I mean, there's creativity oozing out of people. It's like they don't even, yeah, you know, they don't know. They don't know. I mean, the same. Way I'm I'm stunned. So I'm also a hospice chaplain and and I, you know, regularly meet patients who I Saint them. I'm like, You're sainted, you know, because they tell me the stories of what they've done in their lives. And I'm blown away. I'm blown away by, you know, there's one gentleman who he's so lovely by. By day, he was an engineer, sort of high level engineer. In the evenings, after work. For 35 years, he would go to the Children's Hospital and hold the babies in the ICU, the babies that were dying, right? And I just, I'm just, like, you're, you know, totally like, like, anonymously. Like, not, this wasn't a I need to get on YouTube and talk about it, or Tiktok and look at what I'm doing, I'm holding the baby. None of that just quietly went and held those babies. And I just, you know, when you told me the story, I just broke down in tears, just like you kind of did, beautiful, yeah, and we are doing this all the time. People are saying, people are and they're connected, and they're helping each other, like we my husband, I always talk about, you have to remember who you really are and when you see it, when people, people who are not connected to who they are or that that we are connected, they don't maybe let it out until there's a disaster, then they have no time to think about it, and they Help each other, right? So interestingly, right? Just need just two words. You just named two words. No, seriously, authenticity and care. Yeah, right, that we, this is who we are. We are and benevolence a third word, right? These are like we are the this is who we are. We don't have to try so hard. We need to get the other stuff out, let the other stuff get out of the way, so we can be these better people that we already know we are. I love that. It also feels like you're talking about don't be afraid to live a simpler life and focus on what's important to you. I know that I'm trying really hard to let go some things and to simplify my life so that it's what means the most to me and brings me the most pleasure. And I think everyone needs to do that. And you just, you just made the gesture, right that I like to say, you know, we, we we focus so much in, in, in sort of modern psychology and modern, you know, spirituality, of like, I gotta let go of this. I gotta get rid of that. But what you did was this, I brought it back to my chest. Yeah? You brought in what you wanted. And there's only so much space, yeah. So if you bring, I'm bringing in simplicity, you're not going to have to work very hard at clearing out the clutter. It's just going to fall away when you focus on bringing it in. And that's what these words do. They're nourishing you. Just if I'm going to bring in the principle of collaboration in my life, right? What's that? What's going to fall away? Ego, greed, you know, yeah, selfishness, all of that stuff is just going to fall away. Because what I'm doing is bringing in collaboration as a principle, collaboration, community, cooperation, all those co words, right? They all fall under collaboration. I love that. So is there anything else you would like my listeners to know? Like, is there anything we haven't said? And also, how can we get in touch with you? Really, I would just like to say the beautiful thing about these 10 words, I mean, yes, get the book, because it does give you, in the book, you know, a little bit of background for each word, like why it's important, and where in our traditions, both, you know, modern and ancient, you can find this principle, some suggestions for how it might show up in your life, some reflection questions. You know, what to you know, questions to ask yourself, journal or do in a group, which is always great. You know, work in a group together, some suggested really simple practices that are not denominational in any way. But what we've found is that you can also just write the word on a sticky note and stick it on your computer or on your bathroom mirror or all of your house, right? And every time you see it, it's just going to be that ping of bringing your attention. Do you see why attention is the first word? Right? It's not the end point. It's the beginning. Bringing your attention to that principle, and you'll see it's going to show up. These words, this, these principles, will show up every day. Sometimes it's more one than the other, but every day they will all show up in one way, shape or form. So yeah, you can focus. Yeah, that's really good. It's I like the signpost feeling of it. I like that. We call them the waypoint. Sometimes these words, they're the waypoint. So good waypoints, yeah, and where you can find out more is the book is available on Amazon and Barnes and Noble and Cobo and apple and all your favorite retailers, independent bookstores too. They can order it. Shop, independent, shop, local in you can check out my website, which is Lauren axelrod.com, that's L, A, U R, Y n, a, x, E, L, R, O, d.com, check out my sub stack, which is radical spirituality, getting to the root of what matters on substack. And there's all kinds of articles and stories, lots of stories there. I tell a lot of I'm a storyteller, too. I love stories, yeah, so. And there's Facebook and Instagram. You know, the usual culprits, good. I'll put all that in the show notes. But not everybody. Reads the show notes, so I like to ask people while we're on together. And I kind of wish I had video. I usually just do audio, but I think that we had a lot of really interesting interaction. And I thought with my hand, yeah, maybe I'll put this up on I have a connection to YouTube, so this goes out to YouTube, but maybe I can try to get the video up on YouTube, because I really, like you know how how physical we work look. Animated, very. Animated. Yeah, animated, yeah, yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much. Yeah, spread the word, you know, I mean, my, my feeling with this, you know, as I said, it was a gift to me. I'm passing it on and and, you know, we all know you don't, you don't become a spiritual being out in the world to, you know, get rich, you do it because it's, it's a calling, and it's a passion and it's a service, and, yeah, spread the word. Because really, the more people that are doing this, the better off we're going to be in these scary times. That's a very good point. The more people that are doing this, the less fear we'll have. Yeah, yeah. Imagine, imagine a world where you know these 10 words are 10 commandments. Oh, there you go, and everybody's doing it. I like that world. The 10 Commandments were originally called the 10 words. I didn't know that. Yeah. So the original, the translation, the of the original, what they were originally called in Hebrew. And biblical Hebrew is the 10 words that's powerful. That's so cool. Thanks. Thank you so much. I

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