[Music] here we go welcome to the being known podcast with my friend dr kurt thompson my friend pepper sweeney we are here to explore and discover what it means to be truly known on today's podcast we are going to be wrapping up season one i'll do everything i can to get kurt to just land that plane we're gonna wrap this dude up [Laughter] oh my goodness right on what a great uh start to the podcast this season has been uh enlightening and um it's just been amazing you know i think back um on the uh eight episodes that we have recorded and the places that we've gone and i think back to that very first episode when we just sort of introduced the idea of being known and the idea of interpersonal neurobiology christian spiritual formation and attempting to tell our stories in a more true fashion and [Music] just the foundation that was laid there for for the work and i just appreciate um so much how you you spoke about those things can you remind our audience um uh this idea of uh christian spiritual formation can you remind our audience you know sort of your definition of what that is we know pepper that takes us right i think to the whole notion that we described in one of our episodes about the process of storytelling and you know i think that in our world we sometimes think of christianity as a religion and we kind of line it up with all the other world religions and especially in the west we have this category for where religion sits right i have my leisure i have my work i have my family i have whatever it is that i have and then i have my religion that's you know it's a category and the thing about following jesus that is so significant is that christianity isn't a religion it is a story it is a way of understanding the nature of history it's a way of understanding the nature of what is the story that we're actually living in it's not a religion we often talk about it as if it is or we often live like like it is but it's really a story and so that story is the basis on which everything else that we talk about rests and so when we talk about spiritual formation again it becomes easy for us to think about our spirituality as being this separate category kind of like our religion is a separate category but the story of the bible the story that the bible tells us that we're living in is this story in which this beautiful arc of how god out of love made us gave us this enormous freedom and gifting to become deeply known by one another in order to create beauty and goodness in the world how we have in our own sense of wanting to do things our way have kind of really broken our commitment to god into each other and we've kind of screwed things up and we look around it's not that hard to see how we've done that and god's unstoppable pursuit of us that his love for us that made us is the same love that pursues us and continues to do so most formidably i would say and most powerfully in the life and death and resurrection and ascension of jesus and that we really believe that we are all as part of this story that we are being formed into people of great beauty we are being formed into people of great kindness and goodness and that we are called to be creators of that beauty in the world and so i'm i'm well aware you know that we we christians and and and our our jewish brothers and sisters talk about the ten commandments and you know i tell people i'm just really glad that they're only ten because if they were 20 i'd be breaking all 20. i'm glad there's only i have to account for 10 every day and they remind us of like all the different ways in which i'm not formed very well in the image of jesus but life is about god forming me into the best version of curt informing you into the best version of pepper that we can be in order for us to be prepared and practiced for the world that we believe is coming this new heaven and new earth that we read about in the new testament and that was prophesied about in the old testament and so when we talk about formation we want to ask why in what are the tools that we can use to become a better human being a more beautiful human being a human being that is more likely to create greater beauty what does it mean for me to be formed into an image of a person like that and that notion of spiritual formation of christian spiritual formation in and of itself then turns to any number of different things that we find in our world that can really help me be better at being human and in the same way that if i want to be a better tennis player a better golfer if i want to be a better pianist if i want to be a better at anything and i find something that enables me to enhance that skill set that enables me to perform my piano better then i want to use that if i find a new machine that i can work out in the gym that enables me to be a stronger athlete on the field then i want to use that and i think that what we're describing with interpersonal neurobiology is that what we're discovering as part of god's own creation this whole sense of neuroscience the science of the brain and its interaction its real interaction with human relationships as we pay attention to that we find that god has given us yet one more gift that when we implement what we can learn from that field it enables us to become like professional human beings in the most beautiful way that we can imagine pep commuted i do my best work on mute so um one of the things that strikes me is that um uh formation feels like an active word and so that it's not a destination right i mean i feel like part of the uh just the process of going through the formation is is the important part right it's not it's not like okay it's it's not called christian formed right it's not because i don't know that we will ever be that this side of heaven so so i just like that it's an action word and that it's something that we're working towards and it it feels to me like almost all of these subjects that we've talked about this season are about that formation are about that journey you know right and i love what we read about in the first chapter of jeremiah where the prophet speaking the words of god who says to jeremiah before i knew you i formed you i think that's the other thing that that word formation i mean i think you you really point out an important element that this is a here and now this is a present activity yeah and it's not a passive thing i'm not just watching something happen i'm engaged and at the same time someone else is in the process or something else is in the process of forming me and that this formation process is active and it involves other people who are bringing their lives to bear with mine right this whole being known thing if it's if it's one thing it's not it's not passive i mean it right it requires us to pay attention and to work right you know right that's that's what that's one of the things that i've i've discovered this this season is um you can't just sit and wait for this to happen to you you have to engage you have to do the work right great work to do yeah right it is i you you you couldn't have said it better i i think although i'm gonna try to say it better here right if you i couldn't have said it better just shut up no no i'm shocking trust me i could have said it better but i trust that you will be able to [Music] you could have said it better but let me give it a try because my vocabulary is so much stronger my intelligence like so much deeper [Laughter] holy to slowly this is killing me i i i just i want to say first of all that now i have no idea what i was going to say work work yeah uh you know we like to say that the brain is able to do a lot of really hard things for a long time as long as it doesn't have to do it by itself and so much of how we live our lives when it comes to hard work i easily and quickly imagine oh i'm i i curt i'm gonna have to do that hard work of formation and and indeed the work is hard when malcolm gladwell talks about those 10 000 hours of practice he's not kidding when we think about the people who become masters of their craft if they're a carpenter if they're a musician if they're a producer like you are or a director i mean like you've spent hours and hours and hours of working at your craft as an actor i'll never forget that story about you know the elevator i think we may have told that story and you do hours and hours and hours of working to imagine what is it like to be in the grocery store coming out of the grocery store delivering the groceries you're not just delivering a line you are bringing a character onto the stage and in some respects that's exactly what we're doing we are bringing ourselves our characters onto the stage and we who want to be people of beauty and goodness we who want to be known we have to recognize that if we're serious about being humans of great beauty and goodness it is going to take it will be the hardest work we ever do but i think it is easy for us to imagine that we live in this culture where you know becoming a person of character is something that i hope happens to me and i shouldn't have to work any hard at any harder it than i work maybe getting in and out of the shower as opposed to all the hours that you put into being an actor practicing practicing practicing practicing and so we can be overwhelmed by that sense of how difficult this work is because it is indeed difficult and some of the beauty is that in the course of that very hard work when you and i can say to each other uh and i ask you how you are and you tell me the truth and what you tell me is that life has been hard and i want to make sure that you know that i'm not leaving the room and vice versa and like you can't make me go that enables me when you say that you're not leaving the room when i'm telling you about my hard stuff that enables me to continue to do the hard work because i see what it's doing for you and and vice versa and so this is also a part of the beauty of what well i think what what i hope we're trying to do with this podcast is we're not just trying to give people information we're not just trying to entertain people uh we really are wanting to invite people into the very dance that the holy trinity is inviting us into and acknowledge that this is hard work jesus didn't say if anyone would follow me come pick up your tesla and then come along right he said come and pick up your cross this is hard work narrow is the gate he's not flinching about the notion that this is hard work and that there is no more beautiful work that we can do in the world in our lives you talked a little bit um when we were talking about story one of the things that struck me was that we and you you leaned on you talked a little bit about it there we collaborately tell our stories so remind us how we collaborately tell our stories again we like to believe that we are master i like to believe that i'm the master of the universe that i'm in charge of all the things that i think and i often fail to recognize that so much of what i'm thinking is being shaped by the people who are in my life and i'm not always aware that in fact that's how life began for me when my when you know when our parents whoever gave birth to us when they became aware that they were pregnant with us they started to tell stories about us they were perhaps they were glad that we were coming perhaps they were anxious that we were coming as my parents were perhaps they were anxious even after i was born as my parents were and the people in our lives are already telling stories about us and then they teach us our words and they teach us our family our familial traditions and so forth and our sense of who we are is a thing that we discover in the presence of and with the help of other people who are telling us things about the truth of who we believe we are and that never stops right i mean pepper how many times have i been at some point in my life in my day i mean since you and i've known each other and i find myself in a hard space and i bring you to mind and when i bring you to mind what i sense in my own soul necessarily changes because i sense our relationship and i sense my not being alone i sense your voice i sense your physical presence i sense times we've shared i sense laughter i sense embrace i sense like you like you are in literally in my mind and body in this and in that moment i begin to tell a different story about about the moment and about myself and when i wonder if god loves me i might have a hard time imagining jesus i don't have a hard time imagining you and so hence when we have talked about the part of our mission with this podcast is to enable people to tell their stories more truly we have to recognize that i can tell my story more truly to the extent that i'm doing that with people who are reflecting the truth about who i really am and that's why collaboratively telling my story is important for me to be aware of because i'm always doing that the question is not am i telling my story with someone else or not the question is always who are the people that are helping me tell my story on a regular basis we all have them and they're either literally physically in our lives or perhaps they're even deceased but they're in our head and so this notion of being known necessarily is a notion in which my story is being known by others in order for me to be seen by them in order for that act of being seen and soothed and safe and secure to transform the story that i tell about myself but that doesn't really ever happen by myself it has to happen in the presence of others who are coming to find me and so to reverse so many of the effects of shame that have kind of wrapped you know wrapped itself around my story in ways that i want to be different we also discovered that uh story is connected with your anthropology and your plausibility structures yeah and um and you reminded us that you know you have to think about who is telling us who we are um right with with that um right and um you yeah i remembered you said uh well i i i'm my i my penmanship is so bad that i wrote myself a note to remind myself what you said and i literally can't read what it says [Laughter] [Laughter] well i think for our audience we'll cut this part out later i think i think maybe or maybe maybe we will maybe we won't i mean i think there's you know there's the mute button there's the there's the penmanship we have any number of different there's the dog barking in the background it's a this is a high-class production [Laughter] okay growth of any kind takes place when we're stretched beyond our current capacity is something that i said can you talk about that a little bit yeah well it's like being in the weight room and knowing that we operate with a certain degree of strength and if we want that strength to increase we have to put more weight on the bar our listeners will get that immediately and i you know i like that idea in principle i agree with that idea in principle there's nothing about that idea that i enjoy in real life nothing about it that as others have said no growth ever happens without pain of some kind and this again gets back to the notion of what does it mean for me to be known my capacity to push through the extra weight someone has put on the bar in the weight room makes a difference if i have a spotter who's saying this is going to be harder i want you to push i want you to push i'm with you when you're pushing this bar off your chest or whatever it is that you're doing and that whole notion of our uh encountering suffering suffering that comes sometimes because things that have happened to us in our own traumatic experiences suffering that comes sometimes as consequences of our own choices suffering that also comes and this is a different kind of suffering suffering that sometimes comes as a side effect of moving toward goodness and beauty there is a certain suffering that i'm going to in have to endure if i'm woefully out of shape and i'm deciding i'm going to get in shape i'm going to start to become more aerobically fit i'm going to start i'm going to go to the weight room and like i'm there's going to be problems with that i'm going to get winded my muscles are going to be sore for a certain period of time there's going to be a certain kind of suffering and i think that that's important for us to know that that whole movement toward formation which requires greater and greater sifting greater and greater taking away of the parts of me that are unnecessary not unlike the character eustace in c.s lewis's voyage of the dawn trader who upon waking to discover that he'd been transformed into a dragon needed aslan to come along and literally peel the scales off of him and it didn't just happen once it happened there were several layers of that peeling process that took place every single one of which was a painful encounter and again what's really crucial here pepper is this notion that that kind of suffering is made different when we are not suffering alone when saint paul writes in his letter to the church at rome therefore we rejoice not only in anticipation of the glory of god but also in our suffering for suffering produces perseverance and perseverance character and character hope and hope does not put us to shame because the love of god has been poured out into our hearts through the holy spirit this notion that we are not put to shame that character is formed in the course of perseverance in the face of suffering because of the presence of the holy spirit and how's the holy spirit present to us well the holy spirit we would say in christian theology is present to us on its own but the holy spirit is also deeply present to me when i'm talking to you and this whole notion that the holy spirit is being poured out into my life because you are speaking to me and recognizing that you are jesus body and you are speaking on jesus behalf to me and saying kurt in the middle of this suffering i'm not leaving the room in the middle of this next set of weight exercises i'm going to be with you and we're going to work it out it is in these places that beauty often emerges in ways that we would not have anticipated because we have so little practice at being willing to do the work of constructing beauty in the presence of others but also in the presence of our suffering so one of the things that we really want our audience to hear is that the process of being known [Music] is not a party all the time right the process of being known often encounters often brings us into encounters with pain often with our own shame with our own difficulties on the way to healing and recommissioning regeneration and that creates suffering but that suffering leads to beauty in ways that we heretofore would not even have imagined that it could have emerged hence being known leads to beauty often in the presence of suffering but suffering also in the presence of others where in which joy still is to be found even though things are hard yeah that's that that's that uh that formation that that that journey that we talked about it's it's right yeah um when we when i asked uh you to define the mind one of the things you said was is it embodied and a relational process tell me about that yeah well it's an interesting thing that we uh you know we live in a world in which you say well tell me if you were to just ask ask your average person on the street like well what is the mind i mean most people would say well it's the thing that you think with right we human beings we think about things right and that's true and we discover that my mind doesn't really do much for me apart from my body and so we we recognize that long before even as a newborn as an infant as a todd long before i'm able to think my body has been formed and my brain is part of that and so we like to talk about this notion that the mind is an embodied and relational process because without the body or without relationship we stop being human and so so much of what brings people into my office is related to how they've either become disconnected from their body or from their relationships and as such my mind becomes more fractured more disintegrated as we like to say and as we read about in genesis that the lord god formed the man from the dust of the earth and he breathed the breath of life into man's nostrils and man became a living being that man comes first as mud first is we're first dirt and into that dirt is breathed life that amounts to what it is that we believe that we have that forms our souls we are living souls that includes our our bodies and so one of the most important ways that we can tend to our mind is by tending to our body because it's not just my brain that thinks things it's also my gut it's my breathing it's my hands it's my face it's my trunk it's my legs it's all of me that is sensing and imaging and feeling things it tells my brain what it is that i'm sensing and imaging until i get that from my body and then i have to make sense of that but i only make sense of that effectively over the course of time in the presence of other relationships because there's so many things that we experience that we feel that we long to have that experience with other people when you know you can watch a great movie that's making you laugh but like you want to watch that movie with your best friends and you want to have your laughter intensified by the presence of everybody else in the room when you are experiencing great sorrow the presence of your friends enables your sorrow to be transformed that sorrow is felt literally in your body in your chest but that sorrow is also shared when you look at the tears in your friends eyes because they are with you in it when we talk about the mind when we talk about loving god with all of it we can't think that we're only loving god with our thoughts we love god with what we feel with what we sense with what we image but i also love god in the context and presence of relationships that enable my mind to be what it is in the first place my mind can't actually at the end of the day become all that it was made to be apart from being in the presence of other relationships who are helping me tell my story more truly tell my story in accordance with the way the biblical narrative would have me see it to be do you sometimes think that um god created us in a relationship with one another so that we could understand our relationship with him you know pepper i i don't just i think i don't just sometimes think that i i think there's no other way to understand it i mean i you know how many times do we hear people say well i trust god it's just humans i don't trust and you know i've had many of those folks in my office to whom i usually say well i think the reality is that we actually only do trust god to the degree that we trust human beings right and they're like well no that can't be true because i can name all these people that have done wrong by me and like god hasn't done me wrong and so forth and i'm like well the reality is that we really can't separate our lives from god with our lives from people from our lives with people right when jesus says to those who he will ultimately judge well you took care of the poor and the naked and you took care of me and he said when did we ever see you and he said when you did it unto the least of these you did it unto me and i think this is this i mean the way i think about about it would be like this you know if you're part of a family and uh you you you love everybody in the family uh your relationship with your parents is definitely going to be contingent upon your relationship with your siblings you know how you get along with your siblings is mediated by your parents if you have we as we like to say in the business right sibling rivalry isn't about siblings it's about parents and parenting and if i'm like you know we often hear people say yeah i didn't i didn't have a very good relationship with my sister with my brother to which you want to say huh well how was it that your parents allowed that to happen you're like i don't know i don't know what my parents have to do with that like that that's what's between me and my sister well yes and it's not just that we would say well what's your relationship like with your parents such that you talk with your parent about that relationship with your sibling well i don't really talk about with my mom or dad about that oh i wonder why that doesn't happen and we see pretty quickly that you can't really talk about your relationship with your siblings in a way that isn't affected by your relationship with your parents and so i tend to think of it in those terms that i i can't really separate these things now this is both a hard thing for us but it's also a beautiful thing because it means that the work of being loved by and seen by god in a way that i can take in most palpably most viscerally most realistically can be done in the context of the crucible of how i'm doing that with real people and though in the abstract and we would say that we believe that god loves us perfectly and that humans love us imperfectly even so in that imperfection with which we love one another we have the opportunity to repair those ruptures and it's in that opportunity for repairing ruptures that we also see how god has come to repair rupture with us and once again get a better picture of god by witnessing what we do with each other you know jesus interestingly enough in john's gospel did not say and they will know that you are my disciples by the way you loved me i said no you they will know that you are my disciples by the way you love one another i can't think of a more poignant comment in all of scripture that would point to the notion that our relationship with god is deeply connected to our relationship with each other yeah we had the opportunity to talk about emotions uh on one of the episodes and and you said that emotions are important um but they're not the most important right and i got the feeling that that you were saying on that episode um sort of between the lines that some of us uh culturally put emotions up front and um say that they are the most important thing and and that's how we should live our lives get you know with that is your gauge emotions is your gauge is that a fair assessment well i i you know i think uh we do uh live in an age where both simultaneously we pay a lot of attention to what we think and at the same time we can sometimes allow what we feel to be the litmus test for what is real in the same way that we've said that gasoline is important in our automobiles you know moving around that everything is if everything about driving a car is a function of fuel regulation in that way emotion is important for everything but in the same way we don't build a car just have a place to have a place to put gasoline emotion is not the only thing that determines reality at the same time that thinking in our culture is really important it's also the case that we've now come to a point where what i feel what what what what enables me to be comfortable whatever wherever i find comfort that is the litmus test for what is right and what is good and what's difficult about that is that there you know as it turns out pepper there are plenty of things that i could easily feel good about that are not necessarily good for me i feel really good about eating like at the moment eating you know a sleeve of mint oreos but that's not really good for me and we may talk about and this this is the other piece about this and you know we get into this when we talk about empathy which i think over in over in subsequent seasons we'll talk more about this this notion that when i feel um if you will hear people say i feel offended for instance i feel offended i feel offended i feel bad i feel like they and if not only if that i mean that feeling uh i sense is the plumb line for what is real for example and therefore if you do not only not just empathize with how i could feel bad but therefore also don't line up your decision making relative to what i think we should be doing then then that's not okay in the in this sense this is not unlike a toddler or an adolescent where you know they have feelings they how many times has you know someone has an adolescent said to your parent well you're you're just being you know unreasonable i feel i feel hurt i feel this i feel that because you know i won't agree to what it is that you want me to do and so i want to be able to validate their feeling it's important and to say and your feeling is not to be the final judge of our decision that we make and jesus himself gives us a model for this when he says like i don't really want to do this crucifixion thing if it's up to you i don't feel like doing this and yet he chooses in a direction that i would say actually points to something else that he also feels in addition paying attention to something beyond his immediate emotional state to what he anticipates a future emotional state will be we read about this in the letter to the hebrews that we fix our eyes on jesus the author and finisher of our faith who for the joy set before him endured the cross scorning its shame and sits at the right hand of god this sense that i right now feel one thing but part of what maturation part of what formation does is it enables me to recognize what i feel in this moment and pause and imagine a different new state of emotional state in the future that enables me to make a particular kind of choice now that invites me to continue to suffer because i believe that i'm going someplace very different in the future we um we ended our our first series um with with neuroplasticity and um i've i've been looking at the um eight rules of engagement for neuroplasticity is that what you called them these things that we can do to enhance it yes yeah yeah and um i i love that it because it's because it's sort of a uh tangible thing that that we can give people to help um to help enhance neuroplasticity can you mind going through those eight things for us i was one maybe you could do that of course sure let me if you have that list because my notes i can do that um [Music] okay so aerobic exercise yep i can see that your fit is a fiddle yes diet and by diet you weren't talking about nutrition necessarily um although i'm sure that's part of it what you were what you were talking about was the idea that when we eat um we try to at least have some meals where we're sitting for about 30 minutes we're paying attention to what we're eating and we're with someone if we can be and we're having a conversation and and um and then sleep and i remember i asked you how many hours of sleep a person needs and and and you said it's not a matter of hours it's just a matter of hitting the four cycles yeah within the course of the of of the night right right um creativity was a big one yeah it's a huge one yeah um and uh i'm gonna stop there for a second so so what would you say to somebody who said you know creativity's you know i'm not a creative person so how can i how can i add creativity to my daily walk yeah and i would say that if you have a pulse you're creative that we were made to make things and we make things every day um we uh make relationships we make work we make a lot of things but because we are people whose imaginations for the most part beginning around about third grade sometimes even earlier for some start to get confined to a particular educational regimen right these are the things that we're going to go to school and learn we're not necessarily invited to be curious about the nature of how education is ultimately about preparing us to be creatures that create it's not just about getting through my grades getting on to a job or to college or whatever it is preparing me for the world in order to create things and so we can then be imaginative in creating not just in the arts but also creating an everyday work that we imagine a relationship in which we're going to have a conversation which we want to make we want to create beauty to have to to occur in the natural course of this relationship i want to have that in the course of the meals that we prepare i want to have that in the course of how we uh think about how we're going to do christmas this year i want to think about in the course of what i'm doing with my physicality how am i going to uh create goodness and beauty with my physicality and taking care of and stewarding my my body and i also think that when we hear these things aerobic activity sleep diet creativity one of the things that is significant about this is that we we imagine that we're having to do these things by ourselves our listeners most of whom are going to be individuals imagine that oh okay i hear these things and i'm supposed i am supposed to do these things and that's true but to the degree that we say hey i'm gonna i'm gonna go for a walk but i'm gonna ask my neighbor to go with me i'm going to do i want to take a painting class but i'm going to ask my friend to take the painting class with me any number of these things where we are engaging the relational aspect of the mind right we were embodied in relational creatures anytime that we involve relational engagement with this practice of creativity everything is exponentially enhanced and so i really want to imagine what it would be like for any of our listeners if they were to have someone in their life say i see you as a creative person the question is what is it and where is it that you really want to create and our immediate response well i don't i don't know like i'm not i'm not a creative and i would be curious to know where what happened to you what happened to you such that the way you tell your story is that you're not a creative person that's not a fact that's a way you tell your story and the way you tell your story i would indeed i would suggest isn't true to who you are there's not a single one of us on the planet that is not destined to create in some way shape or form we may not all be hanging paintings in some gallery but we're going to be creating something and part of our job here on this podcast is to invite people to become more curious about what that is kind of reminds me of a story i was uh have you ever gone fabric shopping with your wife i make a practice not ever to do that so uh my wife was making some window treatments for our house at one point and um we were going weekly if not bi-weekly to the fabric store and never coming home with anything and dude oh and we and and i'd be you know we'd be looking at these fabrics and i'd be getting frustrated like what what you know my eyes are starting to bleed what are we what are we doing here and my wife looked at me and she said um you know this is me being creative this is part of my creative process and honestly it really something really switched for me in that and i was like i can get on board with that i yeah that's that makes sense to me and so it became a much more pleasurable experience we were doing it together we were you know um but i just thought we were wasting time there for a while wandering around aimlessly in the fabric so getting back to our um our practices yeah uh mindful practices um meditation um i actually uh our friend amy bought me the um into the silent land and um have started that which um you know you said you could read in a sitting which i would tell our listeners that's not true um i i would say you could count this so so uh the uh number seven on the list is deep reading and i would say you can count this as deep reading so you'd be killing two birds with one stone when you get into the silent land um but but breathing and paying attention to your breathing and meditating um and and whatever those mindful practices are uh humor um is is one that you had listed um and deep reading and i'm missing one i think i think we we talked about um deeply connected interpersonal relationships yes of course which is what the whole podcast is about let's just leave that one out only the most important one let's talk more about sleep it's beautiful yes it's good interpersonal connection yeah yeah yeah well so yeah let's only let me just say this even so even right now like so an example so uh you asked me to give give me you know to give me a list and so here's the truth um i was afraid that i wasn't going to be able to name them all and so i pitched the ball back to you because i knew that you i knew that you had a listed lit you had them listed there and i was afraid i wasn't going to be able to name them now it could have been better for me to just say like pepper i like i'm afraid i can't name them all do you have them listed there maybe you could name them because i'm like i might be able to name them but i'm afraid that i would miss one or two so i'm aware of this and so now that i'm like making my confession that i might have just thrown you under the bus because you just asked me the legitimate and i'm just like no okay pepper could you please name these we'll see if you've been listening and there you go like you you know you you just you you list them right off with the exception of the most important one and um that might be a reflection of our relationship and in any event i but i just want to say like that that just happened like i i literally like i feel it in my chest like i i feel this uh connection this even as we're you know making this recording on the internet and i i feel this connection and this kind of connection is part of what enhances my neuroplastic expansion right this is this is what changes it strengthens the story that i believe i'm living in in the world because i'm that much more connected to you now after my having you know pulled the shenanigan you might not feel as connected to me but we you know but i i just want to say that even even in our interaction right now um i'm having an experience of the very thing we're talking about hmm yeah for sure uh i just want to say you know i want to encourage people to go back and and you know re-listen to some of these episodes we we didn't talk a lot about uh specifically the episode that we that we had on longing and beauty but i think that was all through this whole episode today and vulnerability as well because vulnerability is not something you do it's something you are and i think that just in the course of talking about all these things today i think those things were sort of sort of spoken about without being spoken about um i am uh honored to be here with you kurt this has been a great great season i look forward to um to getting back to it and and our next season do you want to you want to give a little bit of a peek into what uh next season is going to entail go ahead back at me sure um i think that our next uh our next you know a couple of seasons um i think they're gonna be a couple of things that we're gonna do one is each of these topics that we've covered we're going to drill more deeply into each one of them that's one thing i think they will that we'll be doing sure i think i think we'll be uh inviting each of us to actually even share more about our stories and how our stories provide examples of the very things that we're talking about i think we are going to enter into a time where we will be exploring even more of how the biblical narrative speaks into a lot of this interpersonal neurobiology that we've been talking about and i also think that we're going to do i mean a couple more things i think that will be relevant one is we're going to be speaking uh increasingly about how do these things that we're talking about apply to our present day in life uh relative to the current time that we find ourselves in as well as naming explicitly how we take any and all this to practice creating beauty in the world in very very concrete ways and i could not think of a better way to have those kinds of conversations than to have them with you thank you kurt thank you so much thank you for this whole series and uh i look forward to when we can be back together again thank you and thank you to our audience for listening in love you love you this podcast is produced by kurt thompson pepper sweeney and myself amy chella audio production and music is provided by noah needleman if you want to connect with us you can find us on our website being known podcasts.com or you can find us on social media at being known pod be well and be known who lives