The TEDx Episode: Foster, Parenting, and Being Better

Join host Hilary Crowley for a special TEDx episode of the Good Energy Healing Show. She shares insights from her talk, exploring what TED truly stands for (Technology, Entertainment, Design). Crowley reveals three powerful, cut segments from her speech: the importance of airing and repairing our struggles, the necessity of compassion, and the transformative power of looking for the good. This episode is a heartfelt call to action for anyone who wants to help foster children grow up in a real home. All while becoming a better adult along the way, too. 

Watch or listen to Hilary's TEDx talk now 

Transcript

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Well, this is called the TEDx episode. Um, I did a TEDx this spring, and uh it was released this summer. And um, has anyone out there done a TEDx? Um, gotten up on a stage and spoken about something that you care deeply about, you want to explore more deeply, you want to connect with an audience about, you know, that's that's what will get you to a TEDx. Um, so as I was preparing for this episode, I thought I would double check to see what TED actually stands for. Um, it was established, the TED conference was established in 1984. Um, I guess at the original conference, you can check it out online. It it introduced introduced ideas like um like sonic um the sonic tracking of uh water, like being able, I remember uh being out on the ocean and you just were following the buoys, and you didn't have like GPS systems keeping keeping you safe and making sure that you didn't run into a rock. Um so anyway, that was one of the technologies that was being introduced. Another was the um, I want to say it was like the CD, like the the album replacing the vinyl album with CDs. Uh those were two things. So that takes you back to 1984. Um Lucasfilms was um uh showing off some ideas. Somebody from Lucasfilms, George Lucas's uh film group was talking about the advancement of storytelling um through technology. Um anyway, back uh in 84, they did it and then it and then it didn't like make a profit. So it was like a good idea, and then um, you know, this is what it means, like good ideas, great ideas. It was a good idea, but then it had to take a break until like 1990 until they could figure out a way to not not lose money, not lose money on it. So that's a history, it goes back to 1984. And so um I always thought, and I should have known better because I got on stage representing and wearing the hat, you know, TED X, that I thought that the E D in TED X standed for education, but it stands for um entertainment design. So TED stands for technology te entertainment d design. And uh the X, um, which is the organ, the organization I was involved with TEDx, was uh just simply represents that you were part of the independent, not part of the TED Global, which is the international arm of it, or TED, which is like the home daddy, mommy conference, you know, TED, the the original. So TEDx means you're out independently. So I was TEDx. Um, my um talk was called, I can't figure out what they what they titled it, because if you go to YouTube and I'm going to ask you about four or five times today to please Google Hillary Crowley TEDx so I can get some listens out there. Um because uh the title was a little provocative, everybody. Uh the title was um Your Fairy Tales Are Hurting Our Foster Kids. Kind of feels like someone's blaming somebody, but you know, provocative is good out there and it's catchy. I just don't know if it's catchy enough that anybody wants to hear about how their fairy tales were hurting um foster children. There's a much bigger story in that. And that's one of the things about doing a TEDx is that you take um, in my case, 11 years of experience, 12, 13 years of experience just as a foster mom alone, but then like take 30 years experience of doing healing and transformation and getting to the root and the essence of what people need and continuing to like help and heal and all of that stuff and squeeze that into 10 minutes, or in my case, 12 and a half minutes. Wow. Um, so today on the Good Energy Healing Show, I wanted to share a little bit that got cut, that got taken out. And um I tried to sneak it in at the last minute and it it and they caught it and it and it got put it got put back out onto the shelf. Um, all because I like being directed, I like being produced, I love getting advice, and I like being able to tell my story in a way that can best be heard. And I and I wish that for all of you, whether you're having like a short, quick conversation with others, um campfire around uh this time of the year, wherever you find yourself on a telephone call with a friend you've connected with every day or you haven't connected with for a long time, you know, find find a way to say what you need to say in a way that will be heard. And that doesn't not always mean. That does not always mean that you do it in the shortest, most abbreviated way. I'm up against that a lot. Um, in many of the courses that I teach, like at Krapalu, at um the Shift Network, you'll find me I'm a faculty member on the Shift Network. Um, and then just in any kind of interpersonal sessions that I have, there's a whole world of people, possibly people who uh were trained and rewarded uh for just um getting the answer right, but not deeply comprehending the answer or deeply who are you out there? Do you know any of you? Like, let's own it for a second. Maybe you're a teacher, maybe you're a teacher that likes to reward people for getting the answer right, but not really diving in to see if we comprehend, comprehend the message or the lesson that the story is telling. So um, yeah, take your time, take your time to tell the story you need to tell. You know, you'd be surprised how many people lose patience after 30 seconds when if they could just hang on for three minutes, they will see you, as they say in the speaker world, land the plane, land the point. If somebody says, What's the point? I'm like, Well, this is not a point system, people. This is not a point system. It's not about me. I'm not talking so I can get a point or give you a point. I want your heart to shift and change. So, of course, that's what you want to do for the TEDx. And you don't have 30 seconds, but you have like 20 times the amount of that time. I was I was told that TED Conference, if they're gonna look at you, they really need you to come in under 10 minutes. They really, really are noticing that people don't want to spend that 18 minutes, that famous 18 minutes listening to a TED talk anymore. They want to listen to 10 minutes. All right. So I was telling a story in 10 minutes about how I became a better person because I did the hardest thing in my life, which is to take on the trauma of a child and more than take it on, but remove it from the child, take it on yourself, and then say, I'm big enough, I'm strong enough, I'm faithful enough, I'm loving enough, I'm committed enough that I can go through this tunnel and come out the other side, a better parent for both of my children and a better person, certainly a better practitioner for all of my clients. Um, that's not why I did it. I did it because my heart just tugged and pulled and tugged and pulled. Um, you know, it's a hunger, as you know, um, whatever you're passionate about, it's a hunger. I do not understand why some people climb the Himalayas or um need to deep sea dive or um are really, really excited to get that, you know, corner office job. But you do, you know, you all have your own reasons, we have our own whys. And in my case, this was not a have to. This was a deep, deep, deep wanting uh a desire to, and it was part of um life for me. And so, lucky for me, um, I was able to uh I was with a partner with my husband who also had his own um values and overlapping desires, and that worked out really well for us. He's a great dad. But I had to do the heavy lifting on my personal journey on my own, and I wanted to share that. So the best way I could um kind of encapsulate that is I I open up the TED Talk with this metaphor, which is um what do we call a true story metaphor? Like it's a metaphor, but it's like a true story metaphor. Uh I don't know, because metaphor sometimes is like, oh, well, that's not real. It's like, no, no, no. Life is filled with metaphors, um, which means um uh the higher story, the higher message, the meta, the metaphor. So true story, I can still remember it like yesterday, because in my mind it wasn't that long ago. And then also, of course, I rehearsed it into the TED Talk. Uh, I was driving down the road and I had my son in the car, and I checked the dates on it now. Like I really check the dates. I'd had him for like a week, like maybe eight days. Um, but right away um I realized that I needed to hustle. Even before we got custody of him, I asked if he could swim. And the word is that he could not swim. He had never had a swim lesson. And um I considered that a life and death um value. And this is one of the pieces that got caught from the TED talk. So I explained to the audience, I said, you know, there are things that uh people need in this life, but in our case, because we're around water a lot, a lot, um, I needed my son to learn how to swim. And I didn't want to force him to learn how to swim, of course, but he was forcing, he was forcing me to make sure he had the best teachers to learn how to swim. Because here's the line, because he didn't know, he did not know that he did not know how to swim. How many of you relate to that? Whether it's swimming or something else in life, uh, relationship, um, trying, all of this. Uh, what whatever you're striving for, whether it's athletics or writing, or we just don't know that we don't know. And then in the childlike mind, you jump into the deep end and someone has to grab you, has to get you. So we were coming home from his very first swim lesson, and we were interrupted by a turtle in the middle of the road. The only thing is that I was in the front seat, he was in the back seat. I adopted a child, not a toddler, not a baby. I adopted an older child. He was nine years old, but at nine years old, he was still traveling in the back seat of the car. Is that still going on right now? I don't know if the car seats have changed or the rules have changed. I seem to remember around age 12, my boys got to move into the front seat. Oh my gosh. Anyway, um, and then of course I remember my childhood where it was like no seat belts, and um, I mean, seatbelts may be in the front seat, but certainly no seat belts in the back seat. And then there's also what's called the station wagons, where you're just basically put into like the trunk with windows. You know what I mean? Like so, so, but okay, but as a mom, I was all in about safety, and you have to be because it's not even legal. So he's in the backseat. He didn't see the turtle, I did. So I jumped out of the car, I rescued the turtle. And when I turned back, my son had also jumped out of the car, and he was like really close to like traffic and in the road. Like this was scary for me. And I was immediately thought he had done something wrong. I thought he had done something wrong because like where was he going? What was he doing? Oh my gosh, I've all hands on deck. Is he about to bolt? And he actually said, I thought you were leaving me. And that, and that, and that, that little bit, I thought you were leaving me, did stay in the TEDx talk. But when you watch it, know that the missing piece is that we were at a swim lesson because he didn't know what he didn't know and he was doing dangerous things like jumping into the deep end. And so then I thought he was doing another dangerous thing like jumping out of a car. But in fact, I was the one doing a dangerous thing, not telling him why I was jumping out of a car. So I jumped out of a car, which is arguably just as dangerous as jumping into the deep end, if not more. And then he jumped out of the car because he wanted to be with me. He didn't want me to leave him. And I could see in his eyes that he thought I had left him. And then I felt in my heart, it is time, Hillary, to be better, to do better, to learn, to figure this all out, to figure this whole entire story out. So if I haven't said it yet, I'm Hillary Crowley and welcome to the Good Energy Healing Show. This is the TEDx and episode, the TEDx episode. And I'm just gonna jump along. I'm gonna keep going and just I just want to uh get you to watch the TEDx, please, please, please. Um, I have a friend Scarlett Keys. Uh, she did amazing uh TEDx also through Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where I was. She did that two years ago in 2023, and um I think she has like a million views. I'm um hoping to get 1,500 views at this point. And I'm gonna tell you, 1,500 quality views with quality people on a topic that is not as um compelling as, well, Scarlet's is very compelling because it's it the idea is like, why do you love your favorite music? Why do what is it in your favorite music that makes you makes you tick? Like you, you're gonna want to check that one out. Like that does this one is harder, right? This one is like, what are you missing? What is this one thing that we're ignoring, which is children who have been lost in the system through um not lost in the system, but uh put into a system, taken from a home, taken from their parent for no fault of their own, because they're babies and they're children. And they need to be found. They need to be found by a home. Um, I even reference Annie. Um, you know, she sings that I don't reference the song, but maybe, maybe far away or maybe real near nearby, I will be adopted. You know, they'll they'll come back and get me my family that that my original parents or my new parents, you know, like that's not a song any child should have to sing, you know, maybe. What do you what do you mean, maybe? Uh these are children, these are children, but the brain is uh powerful, uh a powerful uh force in humans. And a brain that's been abandoned or abused or neglected quickly goes into survival mode. And survival mode can be healed by only one thing, only one thing. And I learned that compassion. An adult that says, I see your suffering, I see you're hurting, I'm gonna put everything aside, every shame or blame or fear aside, and I'm gonna humble myself so that I can compassion, have compassion. Compassion means to suffer with, and so I can take this off of you and put it where it belongs on an actual grown adult who um is more than happy to take over the parenting role. And so um here we are. There were three things that got cut. The the first thing uh I learned, I cannot believe I'd never heard this expression before. And I hope all of you are hearing it uh for the first time for me. I'd be proud and happy if you can if you have this. And please, please, please, if you do hear it, share it with everybody you know so that they can, you can be the first person they hear it from. Um but these are this is something that belonged in my house growing up as a kid. I'm sure if my parents um if my parents were alive and could have heard this, it would have been a really great conversation to have with them. Like, why wasn't this shared more? Um, so I've often talked about dysfunctional families, about how you don't um share your denial, silence, those are two things that kind of represent different ways of not sharing. And then um the other two is isolation and rigidity, like an inability to change and willingness to change, and then isolation, which is you just feel separate from the world, whether your family is separated from the rest of the world, or you as an individual believe that you don't belong to anybody. So um, but the uh expression here it is is called airing and repairing. To air and repair. Social worker came, sat on my um couch, and explained it to me. Um after I'd heard it for the first time, it was I was uh telephone call I was having uh with the state because I was really, really feeling I was in over my head and frankly failing. I thought I was failing. And so I um I called and I said, What do you do when you fail? You know? And they said, We don't like fails and we don't think you're failing. I said, You don't know. I'm I'm um I'm I'm scared, I'm angry, um, I don't think I'm doing a good job with either of my kids, my biological or my foster child. Um every morning is hard, every night is hard, the middle of the day is hard. I don't think I'm doing so well. And I got this beautiful message that says, we're gonna send somebody over to you because you're asking for help. And um, I'm like, yeah. And they're like, no, no, no, you're asking for help. I'm like, yeah, I know I'm asking for help. They're like, no, you don't understand. You, you, you, you, you, you, you just turned in the golden ticket. You just, you just, you just, you did the thing. And I'm like, what's the thing? And they said, asking for help. Asking for help. So many of us forget to ask for help. And so if you're a spiritual person, you might be asking for help from the creator, the God of your understanding. It's also okay to pick up the phone and ask for help. And sometimes asking for help sounds like me, which was more like I'm failing, I'm failing, I'm sorry. But it turned out that translated as I'm asking for help. And then once you ask for help, you get some help. And they said the next step is to learn how to air and repair. It's that simple. Once you air your thoughts and not hold them in, not hold in your shame, not hold in your anger, not hold in the the tough conversations that you want to have, or the quiet whispers, you know, that are like tingling on the back of your neck or have been haunting you on your shoulders, carrying the weight of the world. Once you air those out, lighten them up, air them out. And I do suggest, even if you are, if it's something, it's a burden you've been carrying or an anger that you have, like give it time. Get to a point where you are actually lighter, you know? Like, like give it a minute, give it 30 seconds, figure out a way where you can air, take a deep breath because that has to do with air too, breathing in, breathing out, airing, right? It's a beautiful word, airing, and then allow for the repairing. It rhymes, they know it rhymes. Whoever made up the expression knows that it rhymes, but they also know it works. So by airing and bringing things to life and bringing things to breath, and as an energy worker, I also know that breath is prana. It's considered one and the same. So infusing energy and removing that isolation of thought and connecting and getting over the denial and getting over the uh isolation and the and and the rigidity and uh in the silence by erring. That's when the repairing brings. So um always find a way to ask for help and to speak your life, your life experience, your story, your wishes, your dreams, your disappointments, your shames. Speak them out loud and they will begin to repair. Isn't that amazing? So, this is your own private TEDx talk because that part didn't make it. The next thing, um, and I've spoken about it uh several times on the episode, um, is about compassion. I even spoke about it today. Um, but compassion fatigue for those of you out there in the healthcare world, you know, that's a really, really big thing, or that's the world that originally coined it. You know, compassion. Compassion fatigue. But I would go so far, I would go so far as to say that I think compassion fatigue is everywhere. I just think that the uh the the uh repercussions of compassion fatigue needed to be addressed in in um healthcare because those are life and death experiences, life and death death consequences if there's fatigue. Um I spoke on another episode uh earlier about how I remember how compassion fatigue uh showed up really quickly, actually, in the time I spent on um Five East, which is a pediatric floor when I was 18 years old. It shows up really quickly. It's very much kind of like a boundary, but you got to call it for what it is so that um you're able to give yourself proper boundaries, but also not block the compassion. Well, here it is. You cannot do parenting in a way that is helpful and healing with compassion fatigue. It doesn't matter where you're at, you need to be the stronger, more awake person to being to being compassion because compassion, passion only means to suffer with. Passion means to suffer, and compassion means to suffer with. And then if you go, oh, I don't like the word suffer, I don't like the word suffer, suffer simply means to swim under, to go under, to dip under, souf, beneath beneath the surface. That's what surface, souf, souf, to go under. Okay, that's all it means. The compassion actually means what you're willing to suffer for, and suffer simply means what are you willing to? Here's the swimming metaphor again. What are you willing to swim to? What are you willing to go like a dolphin and just go up and down and breathe and breathe and then go back under and breathe and go back under, or even like a turtle, right? Okay. So uh, and I'm still surrounded by the loons, and by the way, uh quick update the baby loons are doing really well. If you listen to the last episode, um, they're like uh brown and fluffy and uh can swim underwater now. So yay to all of that. And I I um I noted that um having baby loons around floating on the water when there are boats and um bald eagles and all sorts of um other things that I guess could go wrong. I noted that I let my anxiety um kind of kick in. It felt very biological, even though I'm not a mother loon, because I looked at the mother loon actually, and the mother loon was cool, man. She was like cool. And you, you know, I thought I'd change the subject, but I don't think I'm changing the subject. Um those loons know how to go under and come up and go under and come up, and they go under, they leave their babies floating on the water like little ducks in a in a swimming pool, but they go up and they don't seem to sweat it. I mean, I don't know what they're thinking or anything, but like that goes back to like this like wisdom and trusting their own nature, their 35 million-year-old species-ness of being a loon. So beautiful, so cool. And it's not even the beginning. Like, then their next phase is that they go to the ocean. Like they're they're just doing this like part-time, and then they like have to learn to fly. They change what they look like completely, they turn into like seagull-looking animals for the winter season and spend it by the ocean, which is why Maine, USA, up where we are on the upper northeast coast of North America, well, south of Canada, that kind of area. Um, Maine, M-A-I-N-E, is um, and I have to say that because I have people listening internationally, and I appreciate all of you. And if I'm listening to your podcast, I want to know what you're talking about when you're talking about a province or or or an area of your country. We're very close to the ocean. So we have like lots of freshwater lakes, but we're also really close to the ocean. So they're gonna like by really close, it's like a one and a half hour drive. So who knows how long their flight is of these little baby loons, but they're gonna go to the ocean, get through wintertime up here where there's snow and ice and hail, and it goes on for half of a year. And then they'll come back. I think the second year they come back, or the third year, like they stay there. It's wild. Look it up. The loons, 35 million years, they do it right, but they don't make it look easy. And the hearts of everybody on this lake is just rooting, rooting for the baby loons, so that the species goes on for, oh, you know, do the statistics, you know, one more year of their 35 million years of existence. So to suffer, getting back to it, means to go under like the loons, but come back up, right? And um, what do you do when you go under? You go under and you seek and you search and you hunt and you find what you need, and then you come back up, and then you address what's on the surface, and then you go back down. Okay. So the idea of um standing with your foster child when the going gets rough, standing with your child doesn't matter if it's your foster child, it doesn't even matter if it's your biological child, standing with a child. Here we go, everybody, standing with a child, any child, being the adult, even if you're just quietly holding space, sending love, standing with a child while you're the adult that is definably safer and protective, that's called compassion. There's one really cool thing um out there in the world um that became popular, I don't know, sometime in between when I was a child and I was a mom. Um there's a kind of a description given to children if they ever feel lost or unsafe. And the recommendation in this description, it's such a general, general um um directive to them, and the child will have to um trust their own instincts on this. But they're told that in worst case scenario, if they're ever lost, like they've lost their way, ever lost, always look for a mother with a child. Always look for a mother with a child. Have you heard that? Did you know that? Um the truth is it works, is because there are dangerous people in this world, and in once in a blue, blue, blue, blue moon, I guess uh the mother with the child can be uh the dangerous one. Um but when you're a human, I don't look for a bear with a child or any wild animal with a child because they will be protecting their own. Um, but in the same respect, um look for another human with a child, and you will know you are going to be activating an already strong pull to protect you if you're a child, or protect your child if you're giving them that direction. So compassion is real. I've seen it in every every heart that I know. Um when I when uh when I'm around somebody who has is either a mother, foster mother, or has a mother's heart, lots of uh caregivers out there are like that, teachers are like that, um, doctors are like that. Um, whether or not you're a biological parent, especially coming from me, please hear me when I say that does not matter. Um what matters is that do you have that heart and are you a safe person to be around? But it is kind of funny how they tell kids to, if you ever feel really lost, find find a mother with like a baby carriage and just like because that's somebody who will actively need to address rather than uh make it weird or be weird. Okay, so that was another piece. So we have the um always ask for help. That's your golden ticket. We have uh stand by your child, even in the hard times. In fact, especially in the hard times, when things are awkward and weird and scary and exhausting and um just the tough times. I I I many a times I had um teachers or teachers' aides, you know, just kind of telling me how to how to do things or how to discipline or how to not discipline and everything. And I just I stayed with my heart and I stayed by my child and I um and I hung in there and I didn't outsource it to anybody else, not for one second, maybe to a def to a fault. I didn't outsource it enough. But at the at the beginning stages, I just I just was uh working with the social workers which said, we do not care what the grades are, we don't care if there are mistakes made, we don't care if there's conflict. What we're looking for is compassion, which means you're willing, it's the co-part, you're willing to partner up with your child and slowly, slowly take their suffering off of them as you as you carry the burden because you, mom, are able to release that. Believe it or not, that didn't make it to the TEDx talk. The third piece, the third piece is something that just goes right into this um this TED talk, this, this TED talk, but also this um podcast, The Good Energy Healing Show. But I mean it from the bottom of my heart. And I have been a foster mom through this whole uh um I I was a I I became a foster mom a couple years before I started. So I I did have this wisdom about me, and maybe that was one of my sparks to calling this the good energy healing show. Um always look for the good. Always look for the good in a situation. Whoa! Do you know that optimism? Optimism means to widen your spectrum and to look wider, to widen your spectrum, to look more. That's what optimism means. And we know optimism means, oh, somebody who sees the good in things. Well, you see the good because you look for it, it's always there. Many, many, many of you can recall in a split second the hardest moment in your life. And I mean the hardest moment in your life, and you see the blessings in that. You see that there's a blessing there. So I'm feeling like I'm having a deja vu. So maybe I'm repeating myself, but man oh man, this is worth repeating. Always look for the good. And that, my friend, is called healing. When you're able to find the good, look for the good, see the good, that is truly, truly called healing. And so here we are looking at the TEDx talk that I did. One of the titles is called The Unexpected Lessons from a Foster Mom. The other title is called Your Fairy Tales Are Hurting Our Foster Children. Doesn't matter. Just Google or look for Hillary Crowley, my name, TED X. I think I'm the only Hillary Crowley who's given a TEDx, I think. There's another Hillary Crowley out there who wrote a book about uh working in South Africa. Um same spelling. But I think if you do Hillary Crowley TEDx and then you see foster mom, you found me. I'm wearing a blue shirt, and I would love it if you checked it out. Because the more you listen to it, the more the algorithm works, and then more people will listen to it. Something cool happened to me today because I'm noticing that quality is everything, so not quantity. So the quality is that I got a phone call from one of my dance teachers who said to me that she shared the TED talk with one of her friends whose daughter, so our friends and our nieces and nephews and daughters and sons are now coming to their their child rearing age. And so her daughter is thinking of becoming a foster mom. And I was like, that's it. There you go. If this helps one person help one child or one foster family, then my work is done. Good for me. I got it out there, I got the conversation going, and I've created a tool out there in the name of a speech where people can see the arc of what I learned and how I grew and how strongly I believe that, in fact, truly, um every child deserves a real home. And these older children, which, you know, next time you're around an eight-year-old or a seven-year-old or a six-year-old or a nine-year-old or a 12-year-old, ask yourself if that really feels like an older person. It's not. The hook is that it's an older child. But these are children, these are little ones, and some are teenagers. And, you know, you're gonna hear that it's hard. You're gonna hear that um maybe you're you're you don't have the right setup, but you can still help. You can still have this foster mindset, which is to encourage and to nourish. But also, because this is my show, this is not TEDx, this is my show. You can look into being a foster parent. It's like there's there's a need. There's a really big need in every single state. There's a huge need, and the training is free, and the training is excellent. If you only go through the training, it will heal your own childhood to go through the training. It will wake you up to the world and you'll learn a lot about childhood development, and you'll learn about trauma, and you'll learn about hard things. Just do it for the free training, and then you'll get your licensing, and then there'll be a social worker who's gonna have a child for you, who's gonna have somebody for you. You know, you'll you'll know stage by stage, step by step. But if you have an inkling of wondering if you can bring um, you know, a family together and you don't want to do it, or you can't do it, or you choose not to to do it in a biological way, that it does not mean you cannot have a family. And if you want to know if it's hard, yeah, it's hard. But talk to anybody. Anybody. Like, this isn't a matter of like, you know, how hard is it going to be? It's going to be easier when you ask for help, which is the case in any anything you undertake that has any meaning in this world. Don't isolate, then it will be very, very hard, dangerous even. Don't isolate. And I think a lot of people isolate because they're from a history of isolation. We think that's what family is, is to isolate. But no, family is just to connect you to more family. I'm very, very proud of the fact that um we have a lot of different adoption stories and in our family. And because of that, we're kind of better for it. Um, I have a niece, and I don't want to get into any uh details on any of that. Just I'm just super proud and I love, I have a son, and I I just I just think that the world is better. I think that the original villages probably had one thing going on where people would would would would birth, right? They'd birth a child. And then of course we can get into the concept of how you feed that child. But I, you know, we know we know full well that um somebody can uh feed a child, but if there's two or other five or ten or a hundred other people breastfeeding, that the breast milk can be shared. So you can share uh feeding a child. Um and that is just the fact of how uh humanity gets started, is that it's all about breast milk. Um and then the next thing you know is that the village is probably raising the child. And if the biological mom is going through something, including maybe she got pregnant quickly again and she's has to bed rest or she's having health issues, somebody else would in the village would just raise the child. So actually, I actually what I'm trying to say, what I'm trying to say is I think fostering might be more natural than biological. Like seriously, and that this isolation thing of like where we have like our little like apartments or like you know, two-car garages or whatever we do where it's like, okay, it's mommy and daddy and and and you know, raise a child, okay, and then we'll we'll pay for somebody to to child care for us. And you know, I don't know. I'm thinking like that's pretty that's pretty a new model and it's a pretty stressful model. Maybe the original model was that um we're just part of this whole uh big village. And it has to be a village, it can't just be an extended family because in the village, that's where the kids grow up, become teenagers, become young people, fall in love, start their own families, you know, have their own biological. You can't have that if it's just just family. So, like do the math, everybody. Like, I actually think we're supposed to be like just in the village taking care of other children all the time and allowing people to grow their own way and letting adults who are going through hard times, which I'm haven't spoken about enough. But it's okay if you're an adult going through a hard time. You should be able to ask for help for your children. You should even be able to have an opportunity to have people uh help you raise that child, or or in my case, raise the child. There's there's no there's no harm in asking for help. And in fact, that's oftentimes what causes the biggest problems is not that children are put in the foster system, it's that children are locked away and not um put in the foster system. Now, now the issue is that there just aren't enough people in the village who are stepping up. So I'm hoping that my TEDx, which is doesn't have a lot of traction yet, will get some traction so that you know everyone, anyone is like having a thought, like, wow, what's missing in my life? Am I having am I having purpose in my life? Am I doing enough to grow? Is my soul expanding enough? Is the same old, same old commute every day and you know, putting money away and you know, planning for you know my retirement, which is basically planning for my end of life. Like, am I really like doing doing enough? And do I have to like jump through hoops or you know, start start some new problem that I need to solve? I'm here to tell you, like, you do not need to create any new problems. Your job as an adult is to uh contribute to the village. And right now, our village uh doesn't have enough adults, and we have too many children um who are put into institutions and that would love, love, love to have a family. And yes, it's hard, but it's it's also an opportunity to learn. And then as you go through hard stuff and you grow, your your your child grows too, or as your child grows under your leadership, seeing you grow, your child outgrows you. And oh man, nothing feels better than that. Nothing feels better than that. So I am Hillary Crowley, and um I just wanted to talk to you about this TEDx episode and remember that asking for help, swimming with compassion through life with every interaction you have is incredible. Um remember to air and repair. It might even work with your boss, you know. I think that the term, the phrase works a lot because you can just say to yourself, uh, not sure how I'm gonna handle this, but I know I'm gonna err and repair it. Might work for you internally, so you'll be more prepared for the error repair conversation when it happens. And then always look for the good. Look for the good. That's called healing. So air repair, compassion, healing, wrapped in help, asking for help, getting help, receiving help, giving help. Be be part of the word of helping, and you will be deeply rewarded with your soul feeling like its purpose and growth continues to expand. So please continue to follow me, subscribe to the Good Energy Healing Show, and um stay tuned for what comes next. Uh, I am going to be offering um a three-month package for people who want to find like more intuitive leadership if they're ready to find out more about how your life can be foundationally uh filled with good energy and intuitive guidance. I think a lot of people are seeking that, and I'm more than happy to share my expertise with a select group of people because I give I give it my all with one-on-one. And so you can find me at hilarycrowley.com. We just redid the website. Um you can keep listening to this podcast with plenty of plenty and plenty of uh free, free tips and information. You can this has been going on for years and years. And um give me some likes, give me five stars for likes and share this with friends and please share the TEDx when you find it. Um comment. Uh, comments are huge. Um, liking, sharing, viewing, uh, everything you can do. Um, let's get the word out there for the kids, for the foster children, because they are foster children. And as I said, um, and they are our children, they're custody of the state, and they are our children, and they need our help. So you all go and have an absolutely beautiful day, and thank you so much. Um, I've always, always loved um sharing what's deep in my heart, and today was no exception.