EP #148: Finding Hope in Uncertainty & Practicing Self-Acceptance with Natalie Kuhn, Founder of Make the Sun

Welcome back to another episode of Every Day in Dwarfens, a mental health podcast focused on the importance of finding joy and happiness and daily living. I'm your host Stella Stefanoppless and this week I had the privilege of getting to explore ways we can hold on to hope during very uncertain times, with one of the most poetic and spiritual and just brilliant people I've ever met, Natalie Koon, who is the founder of Make the Sun, which is a wellness initiative dedicated to guiding individuals and organizations through personal transformation and self-discovery. She hosts workshops, offers retreats, and she also has a sub-stack newsletter in community that invites people to really explore their inner landscapes, greater clarity and compassion. We first met at the Utamonia conference last November in Florida, where I participated in a self-reflection workshop, and I was blown away by the way in which she led this workshop and her unique perspective on how we move through the world, and the way that our own self-narrative will actually dictate the ways in which we do see the world. This episode touches on really deep topics around how we build our own self-perception, how we create narratives in our mind and stories we tell, what it means to really look within how to meet yourself during uncomfortable moments, and the role that self-acceptance plays in dismantling resistance in our lives. I feel like these topics are so timely and can apply to so many different scenarios in life because at the end of the day, life is uncertain, and we really can't control anything. And so when we talk about these topics around learning to find a sense of peace within yourself, learning how to "do the work," I think it's incredibly important to bring this to light because it directly ties into our happiness and our well-being. When we're able to find meaning through more difficult moments, when we're able to learn how to sit with uncertainty, we can have a better hold and a better grip on our own joy. So I'll leave it to Natalie to share why that is and how to achieve this and how to actually do all these things. Before we dive into this episode, reminder to like, rate, and review this podcast on whichever listening platform that you prefer. Hi, Natalie. Thank you so much for coming on to Everyday Endorphins. It is so good to have you here. I'm so happy to be here. Thanks, Stella. I feel like it was such a serendipitous way that we connected not only at Ud ammonia in Florida, but then like two weeks later in New York, while I was attending a newer presenting at the One Girl Summit, which was such an amazing surprise. And now we're here today. So I always feel a sense of gratitude and excitement when things come full circle, and when you're in the wellness and spirituality and well-being community and entrepreneurial community, it's a very close knit world, which I love. That's so true. Yeah, we had a nice back-to-back once you punched there. So nice to be here now. And I got to experience two different, but also kind of overlapping workshops that you offered. And I want to kind of anchor the conversation on my experience from doing the first workshop, which was around self-reflection. There is a really cool activity with kind of creating your own mirror. And it was kind of like a beautiful metaphor for how we kind of attract a lot of mirrors in our lives. And that workshop in particular, and we'll talk a little bit more about it, but it truly resonated with me. Because I just felt like everything you were saying about how we look at ourselves in the belief systems that we have truly dictate our lived experience and our reality. So that was really powerful for me to get to experience that. Oh, I'm so glad. Yeah, it's true. I mean, the company that I have now, I called it Make the Sun. And the workshop that you took is called Make the Mirror. And how make the Sun started it. The idea actually came about in 2020. I was living in the fourth floor of a brownstone in Brooklyn around the corner from Brooklyn hospital. And it was, it was one of the worst hit spots of COVID. And that hospital was seeing quite a lot of New York City at the time. And we had a view really of the line out the door from the ER. And it was locked down was March, right? So it's freezing in New York. There's visibility in the suffering that's pervading the city. We were in such a deep, deep state of fear and uncertainty and insecurity at the time. And I found myself taking like washable markers and drawing on the window of our apartment. And I found myself a message for myself a way of creating a sense of hope for how I wanted to see the city and how I wanted to see the suffering of our world alleviated. And the first thing that I wrote was you make the sun. The weather is the weather right now. The weather is pretty fucking shitty. The weather is dark. It was scary time. But ultimately in the face of circumstances that we can't change the one thing we can control is how we meet those circumstances. And that's really what that line was all about you make the sun. And that eventually transferred those messages. I really got into look, I was desperate for hope. I was desperate for a sense of that things were going to be all right, you know, maybe your listeners can relate to that. So I just kept going. I just kept creating these poetic invitations on the window for how I wanted to see the world. And then I transferred it to the mirror. How did I want to see myself and what's my role in my participation with the world. And then eventually it made its way into a pocket mirror four years later I left my previous job and and thought, you know, everybody has the ability to do this. Everybody has the ability to find the wisdom that's meant for them that's of them. Create their own mirror talk about self reflection. This is really the literal way of looking at our reflection and bringing our full holistic divine selves to it as a form of practice. And ultimately that's what that workshop was about. How do you not just see yourself but train yourself to see yourself kindly and with compassion. That's like the million dollar question, right, because it is how do we do that? It's how do we take that outside in perspective where we can kind of see ourselves objectively and not feel so tied like I think a lot of the suffering that we create for ourselves is because we tie our identities to certain things that are not within us but are external to us. And what I loved about part of that workshop, the one from the Udomonia summit, but then the one from one girl as well is the power of visualization and thinking about your life as if it's some sort of character that it's not you, but it's you embodying these other qualities that you know you want to emulate. And I think when you're able to kind of like depersonalize it in a way or create distance from the self and that other self that you want to become it's kind of easier to step into that new person. Yeah, you know, when your face is smashed up against the windshield, it's hard to tell if the windshield is dirty or clean if there's a horizon on the other side or not. And it's really only when you're able to peel yourself away, are you able to say, wow, there's a bunch of birds should on this windshield, I got to clean it up so I can see what's beyond. And that's what happens to with us with our identity structures, we get so close to ourselves as boss as employee as entrepreneur as perfect as broken as wife as sister as you know whatever it is as American as anti establishment. Whatever it is that we we just that is who we are I've got a word for it. I've got a label. If we don't get curious about that and hold that with some kind of loose flexibility, then chances are we've lost sight of it actually and lost sight of who we are where that just plays is just a facet of our being. That's a great point you make on curiosity in particular in the past year, I started to really try to change my mindset around this is going to get matter how I think about the thoughts that I'm thinking in my head. So instead of judging myself for thinking a certain way and a lot of the times I don't think that our thoughts are voluntary like a lot of the times they just kind of pop in. These intrusive thoughts are just things that come up and I wasn't in the driver seat for a lot of my life I took the back seat just letting all these thoughts populate my brain. And in the past year, I've really challenged myself to hold space between myself and the thought that comes in and in that space rather than judge myself for thinking those things invite more curiosity and think about like, hey, well, I wonder why this is coming up for me or I wonder why this is bothering me. And when I'm in the car, I'm going to be like, hey, I wonder why this is coming up for me or I wonder why this is bothering me. And I start to approach it like a sense of curiosity. The best way I can kind of relate this is for those who are listening who like writing or creative writing. You know, when I was younger, I wanted, I loved to write and I ended up minoring in creative writing. And something I love to do like, I remember in elementary school was create characters for stories. And so when you're thinking about a character, you're questioning what are they where? Who do they like to spend their time with? You know, all these qualities about that person, that character you're developing. So I've started to take that same approach into my life. So now in that space between the thought arising and then the judgment, I'm creating, you know, an opportunity to see what's arising and then think more critically from a curious perspective of, oh, well, I wonder why this person's Stella is like feeling this way. So I think there's a lot of value to be had in like holding onto that curiosity mindset rather than the judgment piece. Nice work, Stella. I wish I had gotten there sooner because that is the key. I mean, that's the key to all. That's the beginning of the, you know, what some would say, the spiritual path or the path of consciousness, path of awakening. There's a lot of different words for it, depending on what contemplative tradition you're considering it. But that really is the beginning when you realize that you are not your thoughts, you're the one experiencing your self-thinking. There's a lot of science that backs it to whether you're looking at neuroplasticity or physiology. The idea is the same. The first time you have that thought, it's not up to you. The second time you have that thought, it is. So the first time that that comes into your world, wow, okay, where did that come from? If you repeat it, well, that's your willpower, that's your volition. And so you have to decide, you have to become conscious about what it is you're repeating and then decide, do I want to be repeating it? Because, you know, there are a lot of things that inform our thinking. There's our physiology. I always ask myself when I'm starting to get, not critical. There's a certain where I'll think of it. But when I notice that my thoughts are getting harsh, I have to ask myself, are you fed? Are you slept? Are you hydrated? I'm in super simple. And then the next one is, have you moved? That's my framework. I got to ask myself those things. If I'm fed, if I'm hydrated, if I'm slept, and if I have moved, then now we're working with something that I can trust or relate to, you know, the other things that affect our thinking are our childhood programming and our cultural programming. So what were the messages that we took in and inherited from the closest to us, our caregivers in our childhood, doesn't make anything right or wrong, good or bad? It just is the world in which we grew up in and we didn't know anything other than that until we did, which usually happens years and years later. And then culturally, right? What are the signs from big media? What are the signs from educational system? What are the signs from our government that are telling us how we ought to feel about ourselves in this body, in this skin, with this hair, with this age, whatever it is. And we got to get really curious about that because sometimes we just take it as fact. I love the distinctions that you make around questioning some of more of the foundational parts of your well-being. Like, have I eaten properly, have I slept enough, etc. Kind of differentiating that from more of the cultural backdrop in which you exist from your childhood beliefs and the way you were raised to what's been in your environment because I think you can really start to get deep in that. But it's often times it's like asking us the most simple directed questions that come back to the foundations that build our health and our well-being. Deep, rest, movement, diet, all the really, really basic things that we can have agency over. And earlier you mentioned this concept of recognizing that you are not your thoughts, you're just the one experiencing them as a really spiritual perspective. Like that is the spiritual path, this concept of awakening in oneself. And I'd love to hear from you if there was a moment in your life, a catalyst or something that really got you interested in the whole world of spirituality. What's kind of propelled you into this whole space and also make the sun, I feel like some of the fundamental pillars of make the sun is around spirituality in these practices and principles. So, would love to hear what your entry point was into this whole space. Two things come to mind. One is when I was a kid and I felt like my, maybe this was my first spiritual experience. Let's call it like that. You know, my mom was a deeply spiritual woman. She actually was a nun and she left the nunnery, left the monastery because she wanted to have a family. So she became a school teacher and not in a dogmatic way, but she really believed that there was something beyond the mind and something beyond all of us that she called God, but she wasn't a sticky to the word, whatever is beyond you. And then my dad was a doctor. So I was either going to figure out, you know, spirit through the body or body through spirit, something like that. It wasn't quite sure how that was going to go. But I remember it was my first time in biology where they were teaching you about what happens when you get a cut on your skin. And when you have an open wound, what happens to the red blood cells, how it comes in round up, it actually forms inflammation. And it helps you get the nutrients that you need and ultimately, as soon as you get the cut, you begin to heal. And that was my first time being like, "Wait a second, my mind isn't doing that. My mind isn't saying go heal this cut." So if my mind is not doing that, like what else is going on in here? And that was sort of the entry. That was just the beginning where the envelope popped open for a second where my mind is doing some things that I'm unconscious of. And then my mind is doing some things that I'm conscious of. So what's beyond that? What governs that whole thing? So that was the first entry point. And then the second one was, "I lost my mother in a very unexpected way. All she was there one day and she was gone the next." And I think for a lot of people who kind of blow on to the scene of spirituality or religion or whatever it is, sometimes it's because there's a rude awakening from life circumstances. And for me, that was true. Where I went so deep into the well of grief that I needed to find some tools and some teachers and some ways to help me get out of the bottom of the barrel. So there was already something in my early, tween years where I was like, "Huh, there's something beyond this body, there's something beyond this mind, there's an energy, there's an intelligence at play here, I wonder what that's all about." And then the distinct and profound loss of somebody who I, the closest person that I've ever lost, that was a calling in for guidance of some kind, invisible support. And that led me into learning and really apprenticing myself to these teachings. Wow, thank you for sharing that. I think you're so right. A lot of the times there is kind of like a life-shaking earth-shattering moment that people experience, that you have no choice but to dive into the spiritual realm. Because if you don't, you're going to lead a very miserable, painful life. You know, if you're, I think it kind of goes to the point around creating a sense of meaning from things that happen that we can't control, specifically, very tragic things that happen. I think we talked about this when we connected last, but Victor Frankl's book, Man Search for Meaning, is like one of my favorite books. And the whole premise of the book is, is that like how do we create meaning in really tough circumstances? He was a Holocaust survivor. He talks about how he survived the Holocaust, his mindset, you know, the whole thing. And I do think that there's like this common denominator of people who really do feel deeply tied to something spiritual, whether or not they call it spirituality or religion or faith or whatever the label is. I do think the common denominator is struggle that they've experienced in life, whether that is the loss of someone in the physical world or you can agree of relationships that you thought once had potential and they never went anywhere, there's like many ways that grief can take form. I think it's interesting how something so "bad" can be the catalyst for something that's actually so amazing and deepens and enriches your life. I think that's right. You know, whether it happens for somebody as a sunrise or it happens as kind of like a car accident, whether it's profound and fast and chaotic or of its gradual, I think the common denominator is this baseline question. Is there more than this? Sometimes we arrive at that question in a cubicle. There's got to be more than this. And sometimes it's when, you know, something cataclysmic happens in your life, but I think spirituality and religion, things that help connect us to a larger intelligence or a larger, deeper sense of faith or love, whatever word resonates for you, I think is the attempt at answering that question. Absolutely. And I think a lot of the times in order to find that greater meaning or connection to something greater than us to the entire world, a lot of the times it actually starts with like going within and being really self-reflective back to the premise of those workshops that we were doing. And I'd love to spend a little bit of time talking about really what the value is of looking within and how to do that. Because a lot of the times when people say, "Oh, everything you have is within you and we have to look within, it can feel a little trivial or fluffy, like it's hard to, what does that mean? Where do we go from there?" Right? But then the folks who have done it, it's like there's this unspoken understanding of what it means to go within. So, would love to hear your perspective on that. Yeah, you know, I think that the industry of wellness has gotten a lot of language around it. And sometimes that language can be really crispy and brittle. And like if your word is fluffy, fluffy. And ultimately, all that any of this work is, is learning how to meet yourself in uncomfortable moments. And not even uncomfortable, just meeting yourself in just about any moment, which is to say, am I capable of experiencing the joy that I'm experiencing? Am I giving myself the permission to cry when I feel like crying? Am I able to acknowledge my rage before I weaponize it at somebody or compress it and have it go underground? It doesn't matter what contemplative tradition you're looking at, what religion, what spiritual path, they all are pointing to the same thing, which is, how do you be with yourself? And how do you be with yourself in a good way? Resisting yourself is where we get into a whole slew of trouble, right? When we resist the fact that we're experiencing rage, if we resist the fact that we're experiencing joy, if we resist the fact that I'm longing or pining for, that's where we get reactive. That's where we get impulsive. That's where a lot of addictions arise. That's where disease can arise. And so, looking within, turning within, it doesn't necessarily mean I got a pilgrimage to India and spend, you know, go through and eat, pray, love, chapter of my life. It means, woo! I'm experiencing something. Can I be with that experience? Can I experience what I'm experiencing? Rather than push it away, we're shove it underground. So a lot of times our suffering comes from resisting the experience, we're experiencing. So if I'm angry, but I don't want to be angry because I'm scared of my anger. I don't know how to handle it. Then, and we resist it, that creates suffering. Whether that's reactivity, impulsiveness, it can be the seed for disease, it can be all kinds of things, right? Downfall of multiple relationships, anybody? Then they're done that. Absolutely. When we're able to actually have the experience we're experiencing, some people call that flow state, some people call that in alignment with their divine essence, some people call that being with God or breathing with God. There's a lot of different ways to name it, depends on what resonates with you, what feels right, what words do it for you. Ultimately, it just means facing ourselves in a good way. I love that description or your take on what it actually means to look within. One of my favorite quotes or sayings is whatever resists persists. The more you push against, the natural flow of things, or any emotions or thoughts that arise, the more you meet that with resistance, the more it stays present. I think probably one of the hardest things to do is to feel acceptance for oneself is to lean into that self-acceptance. I think we actually can't talk about self-reflection without talking about self-acceptance. The role that that plays in dismantling any sort of resistance in our lives. Yeah, that's your dead-on. I think part of the reason why it's so tough is that we're not brought up to learn how to tolerate big emotions, right? And it's nobody's fault. As we know and we get older and either we have kids or our friends have kids, we can see parents are handling a what? And sometimes they need to get to work. But the child receives it as, you know, in impatience and they don't know how to handle the fact that they think it's about themselves. And so there's an intolerance with that feeling at a young age. And if we're not guided or our hand doesn't held with how to be with those feelings repetitively over and over again so that it becomes part of our way of being, then it shows up as sort of a crystallized form of pattern. And all is not lost, right? Once we become aware that we're doing something consistently, unconsciously and repetitively, even that awareness starts to change it. So, oh, wow, I had no idea that every time you ask me if I'm okay, I go, yeah. And then once I realize, yeah, I go, yeah, I dismiss it. Then I go, oh, wow, gosh, I'm, I did it again. I just did that again. Huh. And the more we start to become aware of it, the more we can slow down with it and eventually pause and take a breath and then have a different reaction. You know what? I'm not okay. And then we start to build that practice of here's how I really am feeling. Actually, here's what I need. Here's what I need from myself. Here's what I need from you. And then we start to build up this other muscle instead of that which is unconscious. We start to build that which is aware. Yes. The pipeline from acting from a place of a lack of consciousness from the subconscious, the things that are kind of automatic or we don't even realize that we're doing going from that to a place of awareness and acting with intention and starting to kind of analyze your behaviors and your responses from a place of better understanding yourself so that you can intervene when those unconscious habits just start to kick in that pipeline. I think the quicker you can get there, the faster you become resilient and the more able you are to take on more challenge in your life. I think this like really ties into another topic that I wanted to talk about with you is, you know, how we can survive and really uncertain and insecure times. I know right now the time that we're recording this a month after the election coming into a very interesting political backdrop in the new year. That's one example of being in an uncertain time. I mean, there's a million other things happening right now in the world that, you know, signal to uncertainty. So separate from the backdrop and of the world and what's we're living in, a lot of my listeners are in their 20s and 30s. And one could argue that that age group, that decade, those two decades are a series of uncertain times. So it's something that is just very characteristic of life. So how do we survive in these really challenging moments or moments where we we feel confused and we don't have the answers? Well, first I will say, like it or not, consciousness is a full-time job and it's exhausting to stay aware and tolerant of yourselves at all times, which is why we often choose numbing out, whether that's on our phone, addiction has a whole range of ways from behavioral to substance, everything in between. So it is a muscle, staying awake, staying aware, staying conscious to ourselves and tolerating tolerating ourselves is a muscle. We have to build it. And we have to have a lot of compassion for ourselves, for the pitfalls that come with it. The moments that we do backslide, the moments that we do just doom, scroll and just try to, you know, leave ourselves for a while. And then gradually, gradually, lovingly, just like any other muscle, we get stronger. We can stay more awake more of the time. Now, while we're dealing with that attempt, more awake, more of the time, while our circumstances continue to be volatile and uncertain, it's a requirement of these times to find our anchor points. So anchor points can be routine. This is something that I do in the morning that helps me align myself for whatever is to come. It could be relationships. This is a time that I have with myself to focus on the relationship with myself. Ten minutes. I do 10 minutes of staying awake and aware while I'm brushing my teeth or a relationship with a best friend or relationship with whoever, you know, a therapist. There are anchor points in our relationships. And then I think another thing that's required of these times is celebration, celebrating small acts of progress because the new cycle is never going to end. There are powers that be that want it to keep going and unfortunately the world is a troubled place and it will keep going. So we need to balance the ballast of panic and fear that we feel about our Earth, about the wars, about AI, about political polarization, about mental health pandemics. With, I did my 10 minutes today. I nourished myself today. I drank an entire glass of water and I never do. These little moments that just soothe the spirit remind us that we are more than our fear and anchor us in presence because a lot of times fear is worry for present or past. I mean, for future or past. So what are the things that anchor us in the present where we can say right now in this moment, I'm safe. Right now in this moment, I'm okay. Even when I'm really, really not okay, that some aspect of me is there's an inner sanctuary past our worries and our troubles and our bruises and our hurts that has never been hurt. And we practice is our ability to visit that inner sanctuary. I love that. It's kind of like how do we create a sense of safety within ourselves when we live in a world that's gonna make us constantly feel unsafe, right? How do we come back to the things that ground us, to the things that self-soothe so that we learn to not be reactive, but are responsive? There was a quote that I saw, I think you'll appreciate this on socks at the class when I went and I took a class out the class and the quote said, "Be right where your feet are." And that really lit something up in my brain 'cause you can think about it in many ways. Yeah. We forget that we have this thing underneath our neck. Our bodies. We are tired of this. Exactly. We get so lost in our thoughts and our stresses and our worries that we forget that there's this beating heart that doesn't need a reminder to be. There are these breathing lungs that are giving the gift of a new day without us asking for it. There are these systems that are keeping us alive that are granting us another moment. And it's not to be taken for granted. My partner went through a massive stage for cancer journey this past year. I'm grateful to report that he is all clear. But it's one of those things that let's not wait until death is knocking on our door to realize that life is for living. Yeah. And isn't it so unfortunate that oftentimes we do wait for that crisis moment to wake up and to challenge ourselves to be really immersed in the present? I think that's why it's so important to continuously remind yourself of these practices that you can do, ways to stay grounded. I mean, we talked about a lot of things. We talked about the importance of building that path towards self-awareness as a way to be more introspective, as a way to be more kind to yourself, as a way to be on that path towards self-inquiry. We talked about the importance of anchoring on things that ground us or I guess in the messaging of my podcast on the things that bring us endorphins to stay present and aligned. And there's one other topic I do want to touch on before we pivot to the question that I ask every guest on the show. But I noticed that in a lot of your workshops, or at least the two ones that I participated in, there was kind of this visualization component to the flow of the activities and the journal prompts. Can you just talk a little bit about the power of visualization and visualization as a technique to bring the things that you want into your life into fruition? Yes, goodness. How to make it concise? Because this is sometimes, for some people, this is their entire body of work, their life's work, thinking of Joe Dispenson. But the idea that, actually, let's start very simply. You know how they say, if you can see it, you can become it. If we see a female president one day, then that gives a lot of other folks some hope that maybe they too can become president one day. Representation matters if you can see it, then you can become it. It's not dissimilar for the internal world, too, as it is for the external world. So if you can imagine that it's possible for you to have that vocation you've always wanted, that relationship, that's full of love that you dream of, the life that you want, then you can work that back. You can start to cultivate the qualities, the steps, the strategy, the feeling, the ecosystem in which that can be born from. But if you have no idea that that's the flower that you want to grow, then you're certainly not going to put the nutrients in that soil. So visualization is this great tool to say, and in the workshops that you did, a visualization is one of these tools for dissolving the mental constructs and the mental resistances that we have around our dream making. So we want to dream something, but then the mind says, but that could never happen. So there's certain visualization techniques that say, well, let's go into a fantasy land. And then that fantasy, actually, if you really commit to it becomes more and more real because your synaptic pathways start to develop toward it. Your brain chemistry starts to normalize around it. Your physiology starts to open to it. Your energy starts to-- and this gets a little fluffy, but manifests it-- the heart is a magnet. So what is it that you are drawing in and what is it that you're repelling? And this is just science. You know? It's magnet, electrical. And it's like, if you want to attract certain things into your life, you need to be that so that you can attract it back to you. I'm sure you're familiar with, to be magnetic, lacy Phillips course and teachings. And that's a framework that I've kind of practiced and really resonates with me. But I think it touches on exactly what you just shared. Her framework is unblocking, expanding, and taking a line to action. So the unblocking part is what we spoke about with having more self-compassion, having more self-awareness, recognizing what those limiting beliefs are, and kind of that path towards self-inquiry, really getting to know yourself. The expanding is exactly the point that you made on seeing what's possible for you out there. I forget exactly the language that you use, but if you see it, it's possible for you. So she talks about having different types of expanders in your life and surrounding yourself with people and experiences that show you that what you want to manifest is possible. Like you first have to see that something's possible to even know that it's possible for you. And then the third part is taking a line to action. And it's once you do those first two parts, you then start to prime your brain into acting in alignment with the things that you want in life. So it's in the action where you then start to become that it what you want to be or what you want to attract. So that framework has been really helpful for me. And I think you kind of just touched on every single part of that throughout, not just your previous answer, but this entire interview. And I think we have to do a part two because I have so many follow-up questions that cannot fit in this one hour. But Natalie, I would love to hear from you as we wrap up today. I think we've kind of touched on your perspective of happiness because a lot of it, I think, comes back to actually tolerating the wide spectrum of emotions, exactly what you described earlier. But I'd love to end on hearing from you and what brings you a bit of endorphins or joy, whatever you want to call it, what are those things that you anchor on to every day that just boosts your happiness incrementally? Boy, there are so many. Walking my dog is a profound joy for me. I absolutely love that little guy, his name is Smooch. And we are privileged and lucky enough to live in a neighborhood with trees and a view of the sky and even a view of the ocean. So being able to cast my eyes on the natural world brings me a lot of joy and walking my dog is that portal or that entry point. And then my partner Kevin makes the most extraordinary coffee. And there's such a nice ritual, a lot of people have rituals with coffee, but I can tell when he's about to get in there for the coffee kitchen, I can smell it, and then the taste, it really brings me into my senses. And that sensorial routine or ritual is inactive presence, it's inactive meditation. For both of those things, yeah. every day, multiple times a day, fills my cup back up literally and metaphorically. Literally and physically exactly and metaphorically. I love that and I wish I had a view of the ocean for my home. It's not within the home. We got to go take a walk, but if they're nonetheless, yes. Yes, that's fulfilling maybe my dreams of experiencing time on the West Coast or somewhere right near the ocean. But I love everything that you to share. Natalie, truly I feel so inspired by your work and by your teachings and really the philosophy that you advocate for. I certainly got a lot out of this interview and I'm sure whoever's tuning in is also really gaining something that's valuable to them. And like I said, definitely we need a part two because I have so many follow up questions. But until then, where can my listeners follow you and connect with you? Oh, that's so great. My website is youmakethesun.com. And then my Instagram handle is this is Natalie with NoH, N-A-T-A-L-I-E. This is Natalie. And Stella, thank you for doing the great and courageous work that you're doing of spreading an endorphin high into the world because it's so deeply needed, especially in these times. So thank you for the work that you do. Thank you. I so appreciate that. Thanks for tuning into this episode of Everyday Endorphins. If you liked what you heard and you want to continue to follow along, make sure to like, rate, review and subscribe to this podcast on whichever listening platform you prefer. If you want to stay plugged into Everyday Endorphins outside of the podcast, I'm on Instagram, I'm on TikTok and you can also drop your email to subscribe to my newsletter. It's the Everyday Endorphins sub-stack where I talk about the interviews that I've done that month, any events happening in New York that I've hosted, and just a stream of consciousness of my thoughts. Thanks again for tuning in and reminder to keep spreading endorphins and finding the things in life that bring you joy. Until next time.