374: [Episode Title TBD], with Holly Bridges

[00:00:00] Penny: Welcome back everyone to Beautifully Complex. I am really just crazy excited to have Holly Bridges here with me to talk about the nervous system and really getting into some of the complexities of what might be happening for our kids, and maybe some of the ways that we're starting to get it wrong and how we can pivot from that.

Holly, will you start by letting everybody know who you are and what you do, and then we'll just get right into it?

Holly Bridges: My name's Holly. About 15 or so years ago, I wrote Reframe Your Thinking Around Autism on the polyvagal theory and brain plasticity, because I got really excited, and it made sense of a whole lot of things. From there, I developed a modality of working with the body that was sort of motivated by that, and helping people to become more aligned in their system. I started with autism, but it has branched out very much [00:01:00] past that into people when they have, uh, dysregulated states, for want of better language.

But it moves into ADHD, it moves into trauma, it moves into long COVID now, and all sorts of things.

Penny: Mm-hmm.

Holly Bridges: It's about working with the body, and the whole person, so that you're inviting it to move into a different state. And then I use polyvagal kind of language because I find that's the most useful model we've got so far to allow us to imagine what's going on inside and how to talk to it.

Penny: Yeah, yeah. I remember my first mention, like the first time I read about polyvagal theory — no, I didn't read the actual theory, but I read about it, and I was like, "Holy moly, so much makes sense to me now," because I didn't have the nervous system and dysregulation on my radar as a parent until, like, [00:02:00] my kids were probably teens when I started learning about this.

And it really, to me, is kind of the foundation of living life and finding your joy and success and feeling good in your body and in your environments. And so it's so very important, and I think we all need to know about it. And even young kids, we need to start teaching them about their body and their nervous system.

Um, and so yeah, it's really exciting stuff, but it can be really complicated and complex, too. And so I find myself a lot of times trying to find that balance between being true to the neuroscience and also being able to talk about it in kind of everyday language, if that makes sense. Do you want to talk to us a little bit first, just kind of a foundation of like, what is this complexity?

What are we talking about when we talk about the nervous system, [00:03:00] in terms that I think will maybe better... You know, before we started recording, we were talking about the fact that the term regulation isn't great really anymore. And where do we go from there, I guess, is what my question is. How should we be talking about it?

What do we need to know? 'Cause our listeners here are parents and teachers.

Holly Bridges: Yeah, it's interesting. When I wrote the book, I made it like a Dr. Seuss book. It was a while —

Penny: Hmm.

Holly Bridges: — because I do stick figures, and it's a way of, it's a shorthand for, this represents this, this and this. And a lot of people love it. A lot of kids grab it and take it, show their teachers and things and go —

Penny: Hmm.

Holly Bridges: — "I feel."

Because it's explaining the physiology, and I'll give you a potted version, but I just can't help it. While it's really... people just go, [00:04:00] "That makes so much sense."

Penny: Mm-hmm.

Holly Bridges: A lot of people went on Amazon and wrote terrible reviews about how unacademic it was and all sorts of things. But I don't care. It can't be academic when you want people to be able to digest it.

Penny: Right.

Holly Bridges: It has to be immediately digestible and resonant. And resonance is really difficult — for individual brains to make sense of it for different people is hard.

Penny: Mm-hmm.

Holly Bridges: And the complexity of it — you actually start, you know, people try and draw maps of the polyvagal theory, and they put all this stuff in.

You can't even read it. Your eyes don't know where to go. It is just so full of information, because —

Penny: Right.

Holly Bridges: — the internal system is just, it's worlds upon worlds in that way. And so I'm always trying to teach the layers of it, so you understand the layers of it. But at [00:05:00] its simplest, I use the polyvagal theory as a map because it allows us to have a shorthand, as long as we —

Penny: Mm-hmm.

Holly Bridges: — honor the complexity of it. So the shorthand is: you have the vagus nerve. It's the longest nerve in your body. It runs sort of all the way from all the organs. It's like a tree. It's like a tree trunk. It goes into all the organs of the body with the roots, and then it's the 10th cranial nerve. It runs alongside the spine, goes up through the brain stem, and then it branches out to all these other little cranial nerves. And all of this is — for people who appreciate evolution, because I had someone mention this yesterday and I thought it was really relevant — the theory is that at an evolutionary level, we've got all these other cranial nerves which are new, and they allow you to operate your tongue, eyes, ears, head turning, muscles, socially engage with people. And so when this long one [00:06:00] is, uh, it can put you into flight or fight, it can immobilize you and drop you out. It's just highly responsive to the environment, the internal —

Penny: Right.

Holly Bridges: — environment. So it allows you to mobilize into different states. I see it like a nice piece of bamboo when it's working really efficiently. It can mobilize — you know, all these things sort of turn off and on, and it's chatting to all the organs, and it's a big conduit. But when it's under duress, it goes like a taut guitar string. It seizes the gut, and it seizes everything else. So you see when people get really stressed, their face looks stoic, their eyes go rigid, they can't tolerate noise, they can't digest food, heart rate's up, and they're walking in a headwind.

And then some people just live like that and get used to it.

Penny: Mm-hmm.

Holly Bridges: It's really fascinating to bring a lot of those [00:07:00] kind of symptoms back to the fact that the body is under duress. And then... so it's really interesting at that level, and I'll stop there.

Penny: No, I'm fascinated. I love to hear you talk about it, 'cause you talk about it in different language. And, like, the idea of it chatting — you use the word chatting, and I'm like, "Oh," this is so good, right? Because all these little bits of our body are talking to each other, and that is then giving information to the nervous system about whether we're safe or not, right?

And then it's going to respond to that. Keep going. I don't even know where to go next. I want to hear you do it.

Holly Bridges: I can't see it on my screen, but you probably can. I've got an octopus.

Penny: Mm-hmm.

Holly Bridges: I think of the nervous system like an octopus. It's got tentacles everywhere. It's sentient, it's really smart, and you can't tell it what to do. [00:08:00] This is it — with regulation, it's like you can't regulate an octopus. It's not interested. It can get frightened, and it can hide under a rock and not want to come out. And so it's highly willful. It's also very, very sensitive. And so the whole point is a lot of the language which we've just borrowed from, you know, 100 or more years of psychology and dogmatic thinking and pathology thinking, and putting things in categories and neat little boxes, and the whole mechanistic understanding of the body — none of that actually fits very well with what's actually going on.

Penny: Hmm.

Holly Bridges: We need a metaphor, a little bit of something to interface with this, so that you can properly engage with the system. And so what I find is, [00:09:00] because I don't come in with, "We're gonna do this, and we're gonna teach you this" — whether it's the person and/or their nervous system — you aren't dealing with their symptoms and the things they're doing wrong, or their emotional state, or fixing anything in terms of all the narrative of their life and all the things they may or may not feel they do well.

We don't really focus on any of that. I work with the octopus. And then, how you work with the octopus — it sounds really silly to say octopus, but if you think of the sentience of the nervous system, you have to talk body. You have to work with the body because that's what it is, and that's what it understands. You can't do it at the expense of the person, because they need to be implicit in it. I always talk to the person and the octopus, but there's an alignment you're trying to get [00:10:00] at, you're trying to inspire. Everyone has to be on board for it, with curiosity. So there's this sort of weird weaving of the relationship of the nervous system with the person, that — as you said — being in a body in this world, in this planet, you want it to work as well as it can, and it kind of hijacks you. And the point of the polyvagal theory is it will hijack you. For a lot of good reasons, it can have learned to retract.

It can have learned to, like an octopus, go hide under a rock and not come out. And then —

Penny: Right.

Holly Bridges: — you're working with a nervous system that's got a very small map, and it just bites back to that, and they can't get out of it. And a lot of our therapies are top-down. They're trying to talk. They're trying to manage symptoms.

They're doing all this stuff, and they're just [00:11:00] banging on the door of this, you know, locked, heavy door. And for me, it doesn't matter what you do here if you don't get this bit right, and invite this to open and learn and do something new. And then what I find when I do is, very swiftly, lots of things change for people —

Penny: Yeah.

Holly Bridges: — kids, but it can be teens.

Teenage boys love my work. I work with 30-year-olds. I work with 50-year-olds. It's really interesting — what happens is, if you just take this system-level understanding, if the system has been hijacked or has a very trigger-happy nervous system response into shutdown, and you give it more information and a better road to work on, it'll take it, because it's more efficient.

The body likes to be efficient. But somehow, if it's happened really early, it just doesn't know it's there. It grows around that as a knowing. So I work with [00:12:00] people who have had really early surgeries or birth issues and things like that — it's not always the case, but sometimes it is — and it's very clear then there's this real retraction of the system, as a learned pattern of knowing. But again, you know, you start talking like that, it's so delicate. You can't just charge in and go, "Well, we're gonna do this with you." That's who you know, that's what you know as your whole self. So the level of relationship to get to the point where you can invite that system to think about doing something else is very, very delicate.

Penny: Yeah.

Holly Bridges: I can pantomime it up quite a lot in order for it to make enough sense, and in different language to all the language we use with other stuff. But then when you actually get to the work, it's very, very delicate, gentle work, because it's so private. [00:13:00] It's a person's inner being.

Penny: Mm-hmm.

Holly Bridges: It's not calisthenics — my exercises look really easy, like I use a gym ball. Sitting in your chair, put your feet on the gym ball and push, kind of thing — the ball's soft. It looks really simple, so people will go, "Oh, that's nothing," or, "Oh, I can go and run a class on that." But it isn't, because the exercise has to be simple so that you're not overwhelming the system, so that someone who's in a highly shut-down state can access it, and it doesn't overwhelm them too much. And even that can overwhelm people hugely. But it's the relationship with it that you're working with.

It's a tool to talk to the octopus, in that sense. See where it will come out, and see where it just goes, "No." It just says no. And then you go, "Awesome," and you step back, because you're trusting it's smarter than you, and then we see what it needs. So there's a —

If you want me to keep talking, there's a [00:14:00] submission to the whole thing. There's a submission to the intelligence of it, a submission to the sentience of it, and then an invitation. And all of those words are very, very different to a lot of how we deal with people, you know?

Penny: Yeah, we use words. We try to fix, we try to fit, right? And what you're talking about sounds more like a dance without words to me. I wrote down all sorts of things as you were talking. You were talking about how you can't tell the octopus what to do, and I'm like, "Oh, yes, exactly" — there's those words again, and there's that top-down approach that does not work when the nervous system doesn't feel safe, right?

When it feels like there might be threat. Very sensitive — you said the octopus is very sensitive. I think that is really relatable to a [00:15:00] lot of our parents who are listening, for neurodivergent kids or kids with anxiety. I have anxiety myself. It's very sensitive, right? It can be so easily triggered, but I've learned over time how to feel safer more often, kind of, right?

To do that dance myself with what my body is trying to tell me. You said "invite it" a couple of times. I love that. I love the idea of an invitation, to invite kids to go on a journey with us. I interviewed Mr. Chazz, who's a child development expert and has a big social media presence, a few years ago, and I remember him saying — it's really stuck with me — the idea that we want kids to go on the journey with us willingly.

We don't want to drag them on the journey. We want to go on the journey together, right? And that kind of, it just evokes, again, that [00:16:00] invitation that you're talking about, and it's so powerful when we stop trying to force and pressure and give external motivation, right? And we just meet them where they are.

Holly Bridges: Yes. Words that I'm writing down while you're talking — one is freedom.

Penny: Hmm.

Holly Bridges: It's about freedom. That's a very different word to regulation.

Penny: Yes.

Holly Bridges: And then you have to offer something. While you want them to come on the journey with you, you have to offer them something worthwhile, and —

Penny: Hmm.

Holly Bridges: — language, again — you have to language the complexity of the polyvagal theory so that it makes enough sense, because it doesn't matter if a mom drags someone into my virtual room, I mostly work online, to do the work, if it doesn't make sense to the kid or the 20-year-old or whatever.

Penny: Mm-hmm.

Holly Bridges: They do it because I go, "This is what I think I'm doing. [00:17:00] This is how I think I'm doing it, and this is what I think's actually going on for you." And they're like, "Oh, no one's ever actually articulated that. That makes sense to me. I want that." So offering them something that is worthwhile, and then having something that's gonna produce reasonably swift results — and results is an interesting word — is very important if you want your kids to come on board.

Penny: Mm-hmm.

Holly Bridges: There's gotta be a reason why. And then results are a shift in the body, not... They become outside results very well, but you start to have a very interesting engagement with what's happening for the person. But again, like with what you're saying, it all very much then becomes about them, and a level of interest, and almost a treasure hunt, which is a very different orientation to "let's get it right." [00:18:00] I think a lot of the stuff with parents and teachers and everyone is — the way the world's set up, everyone's trying to be safe, everyone's worried their kid's not gonna be safe and be okay in the world, and they're trying to make them fit.

It does actually make perfectly good sense. It's just it doesn't work.

Penny: Yes.

Holly Bridges: You've got a wild octopus. I really feel like my job is actually to help the world have that octopus, but —

Penny: Mm-hmm.

Holly Bridges: — a different way around. These kids are brilliant. They're so brilliant, and they're here to bring in the new world, not squish themselves into an old one that I think is very much, you know, being transmuted, where things are coming alive. But they're so bright that [00:19:00] trusting that is really interesting, and they're working — from my end, working with them with that in play as an understanding, not necessarily articulated — but it means then you're working with the body, and you're just working with what is, so that they become more physiologically functional at an internal flexibility level. Then they can be their best selves, then they decide what that is, and you're not then harnessing them. It's really interesting, it's what you were saying with that chap, and then just stretching it a little bit so you're not harnessing, and you're really trusting that they're here for really good reasons at an energetic level. I find that so important when you're working with someone, because you can't want something from them. If you want something from an octopus, it'll squirt water in your eye.

Penny: Right. I love this [00:20:00] analogy, that you can't force it, because we do. And what you're talking about is this love and this wonderful intention of helping our kids feel good in the world and find success in the world. But what happens is the more we push and force, the more the octopus kind of retreats, right, and hides behind that lock and key.

How do you — I'm wondering, what language do you use to talk to kids about their body and their nervous system?

Holly Bridges: I find language that is appropriate developmentally, and what they can accommodate, because when your body's stuck in a really immobilized state — while all of these cranial nerves retract, constrict — it also affects access to executive functioning and working [00:21:00] memory, speech, all sorts of things. And so sometimes it's really hard to take information in.

Penny: Mm-hmm.

Holly Bridges: So being highfalutin isn't useful. I have to find language that'll work for the person. But typically, and this is what I've got in my book, I've got stick figures, and I go, this is when everything's working really well — not "when you're at your best."

It's, you know, people have a ladder model with the polyvagal theory where —

Penny: Mm-hmm.

Holly Bridges: — when you're at your best, you're in ventral vagal, and dorsal vagal is the worst, and you sort of climb up and down the ladder, or —

Penny: Yeah.

Holly Bridges: I don't think it's a very nice model. I think it's very simplistic. It so doesn't fit an octopus. They just don't go together. So —

Penny: Mm-hmm.

Holly Bridges: But I sort of draw a triangle. I say, "This one's when everything's working really well and you're at your most efficient, and this is when things are down, but you play on this side of the triangle." This side of the triangle is safe, [00:22:00] deep state safety at a body level, not an emotional level. At a body level, I don't think the body knows how to do that. That's actually what we're teaching. But when we teach it, then the body knows how to go up and down the other side of the triangle.

It's much more efficient. So I find language like that, and I'll draw stick figures if necessary, so they get a feel for what it is, the game, in a sense, of —

Penny: Mm-hmm.

Holly Bridges: — what we're doing. Within that, you're languaging it in a way that is clearly submissive. I'm submitting to their needs. I'm submitting to what needs to be. I'm creating enough space — so I'm making the rule that there aren't rules. I know what I'm doing. I'm the guide, but I'm not in charge of all of this and taking you here.

Penny: Right.

Holly Bridges: It's multidimensional, which is, I think, where we're moving to as a world.

We're getting cleverer. We're [00:23:00] starting to understand the internal states of the body — this new map I keep writing about, because I got so excited, of the vagus nerve, because it starts to make it look like a tree, and I've always thought about it like a tree. But we've kind of been taught it's just pipes, and a mechanistic kind of thing we can zap with a vagus nerve stimulator and away —

Penny: Mm-hmm.

Holly Bridges: That very much showed that you actually don't know what you're — you don't even know where it's going, because all of these wires are so intertwined. It's so complex. But we're learning to understand that complexity, and then we're learning to understand duality — which is, I'm in my body, but I'm not my body. I'm more than my body. And the thing is, with these kids and adults that I work with — you know, they're semi-adults — they know their body doesn't work very well, and their consciousness they're very deeply [00:24:00] connected to. So they have a very high-order consciousness, and I love the telepathy tapes and things like that, so it fits in nicely there. But you have to allow for the voluminous consciousness that you're working with at the same time. So again, it's finding the language for that person, and then they might speak, and you've still got to appreciate all of that is true, and find a way — with people like that I'll — I'm always, I'll do a tap dance. I just do a tap —

Penny: Yeah.

Holly Bridges: — I've got the —

Penny: I can see it.

Holly Bridges: — to try and find a way through. So I will talk about it to the mom, so that they don't have to deal with it. I might get the mum to model, or the dad, or whoever, to model the exercise and do it, so I can go, "See? [00:25:00] This is what I'm asking. Is this interesting to you? Can I make this interesting to you, so you think I'm worth your time?" And I think that's a really different lilt to come into therapy with, than, "We're going to do this, and I know what I'm doing. We're gonna take you here." You know? Right from the get-go, you have a huge list of assumptions and have-tos. And —

Penny: Yeah.

Holly Bridges: — the tricky thing is working without that, because people have a lot of safety in that line of functioning and reasoning. Whereas I consider myself, um, on the spectrum, neurodivergent, autistic, whatever. I don't like being put in a box. Not really. So I really appreciate when other people don't, and I appreciate, as you can see, my wacko brain being allowed to run free.

Penny: There's so much goodness in that. [00:26:00] So what I'm hearing maybe is that we trade the word regulation, and making regulation the goal, for safety — making this felt sense of body safety more of the goal. Your body feels settled, you feel good in your body. Is that still oversimplifying?

Holly Bridges: It is. You're right to try and find the goal — it is really hard to find language, because the interesting thing is, we're not necessarily calming the body down.

Penny: Mm-hmm.

Holly Bridges: I do do single sessions, but I prefer intensives, so we do a block of time, and then catch up for some weeks afterwards, so that we've got some safety for that octopus to actually come out and want to play, 'cause it's very delicate work. And so at that point, that octopus is actually learning to come out and feel [00:27:00] safe — not learning how to feel nice. It can be quite disruptive. It's used to being locked down, like —

Penny: Right.

Holly Bridges: — behind a really big door, and you're knocking on that door, and it's very annoyed. It —

Penny: Mm-hmm.

Holly Bridges: — doesn't want to... so that's where the delicacy is. You have to make it inviting, so that bear wants to poke his little head out and think there might be some sunshine, and it might be worth his time. And in that, the polyvagal theory makes sense, because it talks about demobilization. It talks about how the body goes into a freeze state. For people like that, a large element of them is always in that freeze state. They're working, without, to do the other stuff. They're working with that as their base camp. It's what they know. So when you ask them to relax or calm down, that's about as far as they can go — they don't necessarily have the pathways to [00:28:00] deep calm.

That's what I'm teaching.

Penny: Right.

Holly Bridges: So the goal is more teaching your body to feel safe.

Penny: Mm-hmm.

Holly Bridges: That is probably —

Penny: Yeah.

Holly Bridges: — appropriate language in that sense. Or teaching flow state, I like as —

Penny: Hmm.

Holly Bridges: — both of those words are more active as well than calm or relaxed, which is almost meaningless for people who don't know what it is.

Penny: Yeah.

Holly Bridges: "Thanks. What am I supposed to do with that?"

Penny: Mm-hmm.

Holly Bridges: I get floored when I do this work, because they have had such a chronic life with a lot of early surgeries, and so the body retracts, and it's very, very hard to work with. They were actually able to feel happy and [00:29:00] calm and safe in their body for the first time.

I have... their mom was next to them going, "I don't know what this feeling is," because he's emanating — it's almost hard to find a word — it was almost like joy, just the body just at peace. It's never happened. He's always constricted, therefore she is, because when you've got a 20-year-old and you're still doing this together because you have to — it's, so, freedom's one word, but it was just this beauty of this calm, because his body finally worked it out. That's taken an enormous amount of work, and the delicacy of it has been really complex, and the psychology of it's complex, and all the way you're articulating, "I think this is happening" — so that you're not just working on the body.

It's not like craniosacral, where you lie down and someone does stuff to you, which craniosacral's awesome. It's engaging all of the time, so that they know exactly [00:30:00] where they're going. I more liken it to — I draw a silly picture — like, on a cliff, and the water's down below. So I'm teaching someone how, with a ladder all the way down, to get there by themselves and come — actually be able to come down the ladder and know how to get up and down the ladder and where they are, as opposed to just sort of flying them off and putting them on a boat and going, "Oh, we're here." But you've got no idea how you got there —

Penny: Yeah.

Holly Bridges: — or back again. And so I don't like doing that for people. They need to understand what this is for themselves. And it's really, for me, the only way the nervous system will actually say yes, is if it's got this incredible degree of safety. So the work can look really easy, 'cause it's just a ball, and you're using acupressure points, or different ways to mobilize the body, [00:31:00] but it's not.

You're inviting the body to move into a state of safety, and you're seeing where it goes, "I can't do that. I can't go there." And that kind of cross point, that's the most interesting thing. You're inviting the "I" to notice that, because it doesn't notice it, 'cause when it's immobilized, it doesn't feel. You can see I've got sea metaphors — I love octopuses. But the actual work is very, very deep. But you —

Penny: Yeah.

Holly Bridges: — there. You go, "Hi, I think we're doing this." It's —

Penny: You have to start where they are, right?

Holly Bridges: Yeah. You have to start where they are. You also have to start with, like — a Substack I sent you, I wrote yesterday about —

Penny: We'll link it up.

Holly Bridges: — the complexity and the simplicity of talking about the polyvagal theory. You have to start simple, but it [00:32:00] isn't simple, it's really complex what's going on. And if it was simple, these people would work it out and get on with it.

Penny: And we'd all feel good.

Holly Bridges: That's not a problem. So what is it, and what's going on?

And, if you're allowed to talk about it at this level, there's a whole lot of complexity to understand, but you step down into that as well, so it's not overwhelming. So you start nice and simple, and then you find your way. But the freedom that you get when you get it right — which I do get it right, I try very hard, it's not always that fast. These people I've been working with for about a year and a half, in pockets of time, not every week. We do a chunk of time and then we leave it, and the body kind of catches up and stabilizes, and then we do a little bit more. So you're always moving it out of its comfort zone, and then it has to adjust. But the things that have to adjust, when it's talking to all the organs of the body, [00:33:00] the whole body's got a pattern of retract, and what its map is, and you're asking it to go off the map. All this stuff has to integrate, and then you've — this is the complexity.

The interface between all of this that's going on, like a quantum computer that we are, then interfaces with the world, and all that sensory information comes in, and all those relationships. You change this one, all those ones change. People's eyes shift. They get more peripheral vision.

People's pupils work properly. All sorts of things happen, which means that they then have to integrate that, like putting a piece of software in a computer and it has to catch up. And so you normalize all of that, stabilize all of that, and then come back in and do some more when you can. Which is, again, deferential to the system — not, "We're gonna do this to you" —

Penny: [00:34:00] Right.

Holly Bridges: — fine.

Because there's a whole person in there, and there's a soul. I really feel like I'm midwifing people back into their body. That's what it feels like when it happens. It's the most beautiful thing, because these wildly amazing people rarely ever quite land in their body —

Penny: Yeah.

Holly Bridges: — quite uncomfortable to be in, and it has all its uses, but it's also very hard to live like that.

Penny: Very hard. Very hard. And I think if you don't experience it, you really have no idea what that is like. And the work that you're doing, I think, is helping all of us find ways to try to understand, to try to meet them where they are, and to try to help facilitate a journey to feeling more comfortable in their body.

Does that make sense?

Holly Bridges: [00:35:00] Yes, exactly.

Penny: It's so fascinating. I could talk to you for hours and hours about this. I love all of this stuff too, but unfortunately, we're already at the end of our time together. I am going to link the Substack article that you wrote about mapping the vagus nerve in the show notes for everyone, so please take a look there for that, and Holly's Substack so that you can learn a whole lot more, as well as your website.

Do you want to tell everybody what the website is here now too?

Holly Bridges: I call my therapy ART, Anxiety Reframe Technique. So it's just arthollybridges.com. So it's quite —

Penny: Perfect.

Holly Bridges: — quite, yeah.

Penny: Yeah, and I'll link everything up, like I said, for everyone. Any thoughts you want to leave everyone listening with as we go?

[00:36:00] Holly Bridges: No, I just wanted to say thank you, actually. It's so nice to be able to talk at this level and depth about it, and then you can see, even if I may, the way that you are able to have a summation about what we're talking about with quite a lot of confidence. You knew what you were talking about.

Because what I've said made enough sense that it intrinsically connects with your authority and your understanding. It's in there. So it's kind of nice, 'cause then you're not actually struggling to find the words, 'cause you know what you're referring to. So it's kind of in there, as you're calling that part of people, in a sense, and —

Penny: Hmm.

Holly Bridges: — everyone's on board after that.

Penny: We're inviting everyone, right? We're inviting everyone to understand this better and to try to do this work, and, um, at least with your own kids or your own students, if nothing else. Thank you, Holly. I always love talking to you. It's just, I always leave with some sunshine in my [00:37:00] heart, and I really appreciate it.

So I will see everybody next time. Take good care.