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Volunteers and employees are all given responsibility and allowed to shine. Tasks and assignments are based on desire and love, whether one has been doing that task for a decade or a day, and then given the time to titrate to their own personal capacity.

Now, it’s just a matter of giving back. One of the greatest changes in me came from realizing that life itself is not about me at all... it’s about other people and my own interactions with them.

A week later, I was able to see more of the passionate side of Exodus. Where they were more reverent with Chongwol there, this day he was not able to make it. But you could feel his influence on the men in the room from the week prior.

But this day. This moment. Every line and limitation I’d looked for has blended and blurred. Every idea of what is supposed to be has been erased. We are the ocean, as the Tibetan Monk would say. A variety of waves, a part of the same source underneath.

I found every possible way to shame that part of her because I had no access to that part of me. It wasn’t until years later that what I thought was wrong with her was everything I demonized in myself.

[F]rom The Age of Eros, a manifesto written by Nicole Daedone, one of the women who birthed Women Over Dinner, “I’m going to ask you to consider the possibility that the way we think about things might not be completely accurate. That we might be confusing force with power.”

We all inhabit this world together, we are all connected, we are all experiencing emotions that elicit behaviors and patterns and for the most part, we are all seeking the tools to work with it all and to get free from our prisons, whether that’s literal prison like our incarcerated pen pals or the internal prisons we build for ourselves.

Donald offered to mentor other incarcerated Soulmakers who were in our program if there was anyone who I knew who may need more support. I met my first Prison Monastery Bodhisattva, a person whose life is dedicated to ending their own suffering to then help others get out of suffering.

To learn something new, you have to admit you don’t know something and then be open to learning. At the same time, you have to know you are brilliant, you are just learning a new skill. Not knowing is the only way to grow.

We have the force to build a new world, without the need to fight the existing one. We carve out new grooves and lay new paths in resonance with Mother Nature, together, one dinner at a time.

As a society, we set people to be punished for their crimes. We didn’t realize that punishment is a disease that affects all of us.

All of it was for this moment. This one exchange. I want for nothing, and he wants for everything, and yet here he is pouring more love into me than I could possibly imagine.