Audio What Story Are You Standing In?

Intro: Welcome to Ripples of Radical Generosity. In this space, we trace the human stories inside systemic change, conversations about belonging, leadership, and the evolving systems that shape our shared future. Here, we follow the ripples and the people creating them.

Vicki: Hello, Azul. Welcome to the Ripples podcast. 

Azul: Hi, Vicki. Happy to be here – rippling.

Vicki: Yeah, I’m very excited to talk to you. It’s April 1st, Full Moon. We’re doing two moon calls today. And it just feels like the horse is galloping very quickly at the moment in this year of the horse year, the fire horse that we’re in. Anyway, very happy to have you here. 

Azul: Yeah, happy to be here. I’m happy to be here specifically or especially because I read the piece that you wrote yesterday for the newsletter, and I think it touched on a bunch of pressure points that I’ve been sensing not only within Coralus, but largely, in the larger field.

I saw the AI documentary yesterday and I think I have a lot of things to bring to this conversation about that. But I wanna ask you, what inspired you or what called you to write that piece? 

Vicki: Well, I’m living in like this delicious swirl of coherence most of the time.

So like things that are in dissonance are like, really, like they wake me up quite a bit these days. I mean, there’s a lot of stuff and dissonance in the world. It’s not quite true that I’m like walking around l la la – everything’s great. But I notice things and I’m like, oh, where is that story coming from?

Oh, you haven’t composted that story, or, oh, that’s an interesting take on things. I’m seeing it this way and I also am like a super connector, so I continuously and incredibly curious about a ton of things and I read lots of different things, listen to lots of different things, and I’m making connections between them and I make sense from that.

Azul: Mm-hmm. 

Vicki: And so that’s the space I have been living in for 30 plus years. Plus I also get, you know, gorgeous downloads for like, here’s the future, go make it happen, Saunders. And I know that lots of people aren’t as practiced at that sometimes, and I see connections between things that people feel like are really different.

And so one of the thoughts, one of the things I was having is I see fluidity at, of course, and continuity in everything we’ve done from the very beginning. From SheEO to Coralus. And I wonder from some of the things that I’m hearing, if people see like the reset as a very big break and also Coralus as a big break from SheEO.

And I thought, oh, but these, it’s all the same thing. We’ve been practicing the same thing all along and then I saw, I noticed that and I said it out loud, and then I saw people look at me like, what, what do you mean. We’re not doing anything right now, are we? You know, and so I wanted to address that and try and write that, which was, it’s always incredibly painful for me to sit down and write.

I find it incredibly challenging, because I just have all this jumble of like, that wholeness in my mind, and to make it kind of linear, take me on a journey thing, I find it really tough, but I always end up getting good feedback for when I do that. I just don’t do it very often. Like two or three times a year, I sit down in agony and pull something out.

So this is one of those things. 

Azul: Well, I, I loved reading the piece and that’s why we’re having this conversation. Because it touched on a bunch of points and also, a bunch of things you mentioned were kind of portals into something else, and one of the things that relate to something you just said is you see it very clearly.

We’ve been doing the same thing. We’ve just been, iterating and responding to the world. What is that shape that it takes according to what the world is asking for right now basically, and then the form that it takes is different, but the force underneath is the same. And here’s one take of why people might not be able to see that, and most importantly, why they think the reset is like there’s nothing happening.

I think it’s because, it’s not that we have beliefs, but we see the world through our beliefs. So the glasses that you’re wearing, people call this your ontology or your epistemology prevent you from seeing something, even if it’s in front of you, like prevent you from seeing this cup as a cup. 

Vicki: Yeah.

Azul: And so it depends on very largely on your beliefs or your stories or your frames of reference, whatever you wanna call it, what becomes legible and intelligible and possible. Right? And so I think doing the translation work, I’m gonna call it ontological translation work, so translating different realities is very important work. This is a core, I think, part of what the world, but also what Coralus needs right now is those ontological translators who are able to tell that story, and that’s what artists have done forever in history. Right? 

Vicki: This is where poetry, music can take you into different realms.

I recently went to see a beautiful ballet with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Ballet Company about plants and the history of plants in Australia. And there was a word spoken and like the whole story of colonization, industrialization, what it did to plants, putting them in museums, the whole thing right through, like literally almost decimating all of nature.

And then it rises up in this beauty. Like, you get the story, you know, from the point of view of plants. It was incredible. But I think one of the things that I heard myself say that you sort of witnessed back, I just love when we’re having these conversations, was that, I feel like I’m quite practiced at trying new stories. I hold stories very lightly. 

Vicki: I hold myself like who I am very lightly as well, and so I’m constantly trying new stories to see what resonates with people that supports transformation, because that’s work. We talked about women working on the world’s to-do list.

I literally heard that in an interview and I’m like, oh, that’s a cool way of talking about the SDGs. It doesn’t talk about the SDGs. The sustainable development goals. And I said it once and then it was like, oh my God, that’s what we’re doing. And I’m like, oh, okay. Yeah, we just created a new one-liner.

But it’s trying it, and then it doesn’t work anymore. People are like, wait, I love that. Yeah. But the conditions have changed. The time has changed. Certainly it’s very challenging to be anyone doing communications at Coralus ’cause I’m trying shit all the time, and throw it out there. But yeah. 

Azul: And I think it’s to what degree do we align our sense of identity and our sense of worth to those stories? It has a lot to do with how much we grasp to them. And I see this in the systems that are already exhausted in our world. We know they don’t work.

We’ve tried this a million times like capitalism. You know, like even neoliberalism, patriarchy, like all these structures are just, like racist ways of organizing ourselves and each other, they just don’t work. But because we have aligned our sense of importance and worthiness to them, then it becomes a very, very difficult to let them go. And what happens is that’s to the detriment of all our relationships.

So I love, I love what you just said about you hold stories slightly, it might mean, I wonder if this is the case for you that your sense of identity is rooted in something perhaps more permanent or perhaps more ineffable like it’s not possible to put it into words, and that is a much more stable place to be in, and perhaps a more mature place to be in when facing the collapse of old systems and the birth of new worlds. Right?

Vicki: Yeah. I mean, there’s so many examples that sort of pop up when you say this, and I think it’s not like I think I have a deep impermanence 

Vicki: As a rootedness, right? Like I am every day waking up excited to create myself anew. 

Vicki: Very much in like, what might our potential be? What story am I holding that is not feeling right anymore? 

Vicki: Does this story work? Is this really the story? Like I was sitting with someone in New Zealand and they said, I just really miss SheEO and they were sitting with a brand person and the brand person said, yeah, that was like an amazing name. You should have kept that.

That’s when things really started to change, right? I’m like, no, COVID hit the world and lots of other things. It wasn’t ’cause we changed our name that everything went sideways. But this idea of it felt, I understood it. It was concrete, it was, you know, clear. And I said, yeah, but it wasn’t right.

Azul: Yeah. 

Vicki: It’s not true that like the hero’s journey is not true and us anchoring to it with SheEO was preventing a different reality of what we’re seeing that matters, that wants to emerge, come through. 

Azul: Absolutely. The thing with SHeEO is that you’re working from the CEO paradigm, which is a patriarchal capitalist paradigm by design. So all you’re doing is you’re saying women are at the top of this pyramid, but you’re keeping the pyramid 

Vicki: Totally. 

Azul: And so I love it. I love that name. It’s like, yeah, it was, it was fantastic if at its at its moment, and it was perhaps needed as a bridge.  But right now it’s insufficient. I think. And so if we are unable to see beyond that pyramid, then it feels like, well then what are we doing? But if you’re able to see beyond the pyramid, into a coral-like structure, into a living ocean ecosystem, into a field, then it’s limitless and then the SheEO structure becomes limit full.

Vicki: Yes, completely. Yeah. And I think, we have evolved,, I call it sort of meeting the moment that we’re in, as a community, as a field, as an organization, have been I think quite intentional at meeting the moment and taking brave steps all along the way.

When George Floyd happened, we started doing racial justice working group, and it was really uncomfortable. It was like the first call we got on, the first question someone asked me is like, Vicki, how are you racist? And I was, you know, like jarred, and then went through that and we all went through that and we were changed on the other side.

There have been so many examples of that along the way with COVID, we immediately, you know, all hands on deck. Let’s figure out what we need to do. Triage the whole community, figure out where our resources were, start to flow them.

We were amazing in a crisis, and we have practiced for a decade of how to flow resources with as little friction as possible, as cleanly as possible to one another by noticing who needs something and by learning to ask out loud to each other. ’cause everybody here wants to help, like everyone is part of this community ’cause they wanna support each other and we’re fighting conditioning in a way, right?

Because we’re like, I don’t wanna ask. She’s too busy kind of vibe. And yet that’s where most of our meaning is coming, from by contributing to other streams.

And so this, this constant sort of like shifting and experiencing, doing things differently over time to recognize we have agency to create different futures has been a consistent thread all the way through. 

Azul: So what I’m hearing is you’re talking about capacities, really cultivating capacities and you just named, we just named a few, the capacity to compost stories and take on new stories. The capacity to respond to crisis from a place of what is needed, not what I want. 

Vicki: Yeah. 

Azul: What are other capacities that you think are needed now in this space that Coralus is in? 

Vicki: Yeah. Well, I think I’ve learned the first one that I would say from you, so it was about a year ago in May, we got on a call with you for this pod we were doing, and you said, I’d like to invite everyone to show up with a different neurochemistry.

I was like, what? What do you mean? And off you went and I was mesmerized. I thought, oh my god, what? So, I don’t know if you wanna share a little bit about, but that like woke me up to another tool, another way of paying attention. And who knew? Maybe you did. I didn’t at the time know how prescient and how important that work is.

It’s what everybody is talking about now in times of collapse, in what is coming, how we must learn to… everyone’s talking about nervous systems, but no one really knows what it means. And so we demystify that through the practices. 

Azul: Right, right. And I, I was using the language of neurochemistry as one more, was what I said before, the ontological translation. Right?

Neurochemistry I find works because it’s very rooted in neuroscience, but it’s tapping into all these different ways of showing up in your body. I also call it reactivating exile capacities. So it’s basically the same work. It’s just different maps to say the same thing. And part of the neurochemistry had to do with breaking a cycle of dopamine and cortisol.

I’m not a neuroscientist and I’m just gonna explain this in a very artistic and simple way. So, you know, for those out there who are like trying to prove every little thing I’m saying through science, don’t do that. Don’t waste your time, but let this map teach you or affect you in a particular way and see where it takes you.

So, breaking this dopamine and cortisol loop that is what the system rewards us to do. So it’s a sense of dopamine, we get a sense of dopamine, when we get tasks done, when we feel a sense of completion, of productivity, when we do things fast, when we’re validated by other people.

When we get likes, the dopamine really operates in the moral economies of worth of capitalism where you want to be on top and you want to be special and important under a particular grammar of what important means. And so what would it mean to, in that case, we’re going into an inquiry in that pod, and so the question I asked was, what would it mean to come into this pod, trying to not invest in that dopamine loop and instead call in oxytocin, gaba, acetylcholine, endorphins, which are the neurochemicals that invite us into staying with discomfort longer, that invite us into a slower and deeper connection with others. Serotonin, which invite us into what we were talking about before, a deeper sense of belonging into something greater.

Serotonin has everything to do with the mystery and ceremony and art and not getting your sense of worth from the stories you’ve told yourself, but rather from somewhere else. And so to approach a question from those edges, basically you don’t center yourself. You center the question. The question is a living entity that is transforming you.

So if we apply this to where Coralus is now, the question is, you know, might be like, what is next? Or what is Coralus’ responsibility towards the systems that are collapsing? If you approach that question from a dopamine perspective, what you’re asking is, what can I do? How can I be the savior? How can my venture or my business profit from this, even? Whether we want to admit it or not. That’s often where we’re coming from, right? When we come from a different neurochemistry, what we’re asking is: How can this question transform me? What are the stories that are keeping me from seeing what is possible now from a very humble place?

Where do I need to decenter myself? And it allows us, I think most importantly, to stay with the question for longer. As opposed to jump into action, which is what we’re doing now at Coralus. Staying with the question for longer and letting the question transform us so that we can see it through new eyes.

Vicki: Definitely. And I think for me, this is why the sensing piece is so incredibly critical, to have people say out loud. What’s coming their way, what they’re noticing, what’s working, because it’s clues that may not even be for the person who sees them, but for somebody else. That’s where I’m starting to see a lot of magic right now.

Someone says something out loud and you’re like, oh my God, that’s exactly what I needed to hear. Or they say it and then you hear someone else say it and someone else say it and it becomes a strategy. Like the most recent one for me was unmasking. I was at an event in Sydney and somebody mentioned that they were being more successful getting people to come to workshops where it’s really hard to get people to come to anything these days, with when they started talking about unmasking, these unmasking behaviors and people are like, oh yeah, I think I need that ’cause I wanna bring my full self.

And then I saw someone else from our community do it like a day later on LinkedIn for their workshop. And then I walked outside my hotel and I saw two statues taking off their masks. 

Azul: Well, as you’re saying that right now, I just had a call with Erin who is gonna be one of the co-facilitator for the retreats, and one of the pieces that we’re bringing in is an unmasking self-portrait art practice that Erin… 

Vicki: Oh my god.

Azul: And as she said that, I was like, absolutely, this is what we need. This is what we’re saying. Please. 

Vicki: Yeah. Like whatever resonates in the field sort of gets shared and it does become a strategy. But we didn’t sit down and do like a study to create a strategic plan. 

Vicki: We’re like literally sharing what’s working in the moment. ’cause it’s changing from day to day. And this ability to get into, it’s a practice. Right. It may not even make sense to you at the beginning, but as you start to do this and pay attention to it, you start to see lots of other signs that are become guideposts.

And in order to see those signs, you actually, this is the big one. You have to slow down enough to be able to receive. Right? So you have to have a calmed nervous system to be able to see the signs that are guiding us to the future. Because when you’re going too fast, you’re trying to make things happen.

You’re in the doing and you miss the future walking by your door every day. Every day. 

Azul: I think there’s something else to this piece, and it is not just slowing down. I think there’s also an element of being in contact with these other stories, like how are you putting, you just said at the beginning that you’re very curious and you’re listening to conversations, podcasts, you’re going to place, you’re having, like if we are in our same bubble that is reinforcing those same stories, then the sensing we’re doing is a sensing that reinforces those stories. That’s what we’re doing in the retreats largely. We’re saying, here’s a bunch of other stories. 

Vicki: Yeah. 

Azul: Let them rub against your skin. Take a bite of them, see what they taste like, smell them, go for a walk with them. Just give them a chance. And see how they affect you. And I think then that allows us to see a bunch of signs of the future. Without that, I fear that we might stay in a loop space of sensing what we are already used to. 

Vicki: Yeah. Well, I think MJ has this fun practice too, of what are the seven reasons why that might have occurred. Instead of the one story that naturally comes up you, you like sort of expand your aperture to see that.

And I think this is something that, you know, you shared with me yesterday with some comments on the newsletter, and we integrated them in, which I thought were really brilliant around sensing without composting your story or identify this story you’re in and seeing what of that needs to leave, you’re just stuck in a loop, like you’re noticing things, but your, your behavior’s staying the same.

That was really profound.

Azul: I think that’s largely the work that Coralus is doing right now. And I think my place in Coralus has a lot to do with that, which reading your piece yesterday even helped me see it more clearly. Which is the loving process of composing our stories into seeing with honesty, with a lot of sobriety and maturity, how are the systems violent and unsustainable by design, how we can no longer continue to rely on them and also how have we benefited from these systems for a very long time. And to not go into the spiral of guilt and shame. But from them, tap into responsibility, like the ability to respond.

And to say, okay. And we have this network of folks who are also going through this journey, and we are at different parts of the journey, but we all have to keep going through it. I have to keep going through it over and over and over again. And then it feels so vital and life giving when I step out of my loops. Every time I step out, out of a loop, it’s like new, like fresh air comes back.

Vicki: I don’t know if you actu ally said these words without collapsing. I think you did. 

Azul: Surrendering about collapsing, 

Vicki: But yeah, I’ve been thinking about… I see this showing up around me a lot. I see it dropped in as AI comments here and there without collapsing at the end of the sentence.

You know, ’cause it’s sensing and feeling all these things without fropping in and we had a team call yesterday where I had a moment, which I was very surprised by. I was sort of sharing some stories from ventures that I see just in, you know, in the struggle. I just heard too many of these and I just went like right down.

It wasn’t fear, it was total grief. Aand a couple of days before ’cause that has to be shed too, right?  Hold it all.

A few days before MJ said,  I think one of the things we’re missing is we need to be having more grief practice as well. So there’s like the actual reality awareness of what we’re in and what’s coming, and then there’s the grief for what we’ve been through, the energy we put into that, the way that we’ve been part of that system that is not serving, in many ways. And to shedding that before you can actually go into the new.

And I had a big grief sort of thing going on last summer, just before the 10th ’cause somebody had asked me, out of the blue? Like, what did it take to get here? And I think I cried for about a week. Like I just cried and cried and cried. Because I actually went into that question and I’m like, oh God, I would never do this again or put it on anybody to do this. Just for the lessons.

The lessons are just so challenging when you really just go right in for it. There is just so much to compost and slowing down still sort of feels right to me. Although it’s not slow. It’s just a different activity. 

Azul: It sounds like you didn’t even answer the question. You led the question work through you. 

Vicki: Yeah. 

Azul: Which, that’s what it was. And I think grief is fundamental. I think you just touched on something so important because grieving the promises that we were given by the system that no longer works is an important part of, I think it’s an anti-fascist technique.

And let me explain what I mean by this and, and I’ll share more about this in retreats, but it’s understanding authoritarian and fascist movement and government as a mixture of broken promises that meet a sense of denial. And so when that happens, we look more for someone to blame than we even look for solutions.

We do look for simple solutions, but we look for blame and punishment. And so when we are operating from the old promises that no longer can be here because of the reality, even the biophysical reality of our planet, we can no longer have those delirious dreams that we used to have before that we were able to have.

When we grief those, we make a bunch of room for other stuff, for dreams that fill us up from a much more rooted, deep, compassionate place. Like we’re able to dream even bigger, bigger than these patriarchal, colonial capitalist dreams that are very limited.

Like yesterday in the AI documentary, I don’t know if I wanna spoil it for you folks, actually, actually just, I recommend people, go listen to it. 

There’s a moment where the AI optimists are working from this lens that is very myopic. They’re working from this lens of we can achieve all basically the colonial capitalist dreams in society without seeing how those dreams have been only working for a very small population of people. And the thread that those dreams follow is a thread that is limiting by nature.

Vicki: Yeah, I think this, when you talked before about letting the inquiry just be there, like let it work through you, I was taught this thing years ago, gosh, like probably 30 years ago, by Donna Markova, and she had said. Just float the blue balloon. And I’m like, what? It’s like blue pill red, blue pill. What do you mean? And she’s like, whatever that question is, just like put it up in a balloon, like float that blue balloon up in the air and just like, see what comes.

And you know, half the time you sort of forget about it and then something sort of pops in. So again, like off and on, I’m very much a doer, like, get to action is like one of my things. So it’s challenging for me to be in a place where you’re not producing. So that’s been a real, unwinding.

And one of the questions that still, I’m still asking, and it’s been three and a half years at least, is what are our ventures telling us? What are they telling us? And you know, MJ and I have opened up the cards a million times, looked at them, put them in different thing, like just tried everything.

And it’s not time yet, you know, it will come, you’ll see there’s clues in there, but looking at clues from, we have all this rich soil that has been created by the activities that we’ve been performing and all of the like, beautiful ideas of how things can be different. And yet they’re all requiring the system to be successful in most cases.

And so that’s no longer tenable. Right? They’re there as prototypes for this future that is not quite yet here. And that’s the place that we’re kind of sitting in. Which is incredible. And when I look back through all the things we’ve done, our very first, like launch into the world was about bringing in a new world.

Everything could be different. I mean, I have this, everything’s broken. What a great time to be alive. Let’s get innovative, let’s kind of dream up these things. And as we kind of went through that, our way of doing that was trusting our intuition to look at things that were coming our way and go, Oh, that feels like the future. I like that. That feels like the future. And we started very much from that, just the intuition. And so for me, that’s like sensing. 

Vicki: What do you see out there that feels like the future? Let’s start sharing those things so that we can tune into it. Voting is now sensing in a way, and we’re not moving capital right now because the sensing isn’t even forming a picture yet.

And money is definitely not the answer we have learned. Right? If we just keep writing checks in the way things are in the existing world, we might as well just give it all away. 

Vicki: So it was like a pause to figure out what’s next. But yeah, I think, this newsletter was about can we show people or can we explain continuity? Which I might be crazy trying to do this for this 700,000 time. Because explaining isn’t the way anything works at Coralus. We all know you have to experience it, right? Yeah. You have to experience your story, keeping you small and decide to let it go. To understand what it means to res story, you have to… I cannot write a sentence that’s gonna make you drop your story. You have to decide, I’m done with this story. 

Azul: Exactly. 

Vicki: Decide and cry. 

Azul: Yeah. 

Vicki: Because you’ve a story for so long. And then let’s go.

Azul: And then let’s go. Exactly. When we think about what Coralus is doing right now, all the, you know, the moon cos the retreats, the conversations, that takes a lot of work and it’s just so hard.

It’s not legible under the ontology of modernity right now. So it might seem like nothing is happening, but if you’re tapping in and you’re actually composting a bunch of your stuff. That’s huge. It’s immense. In my experience, it’s the hardest work then once that’s done, getting to work and building other, like, new stuff or coming together with other people and making things happen. It happens so fast. 

Vicki: It’s  gonna be so much quicker. Yeah. It really is. The deeper that you understand someone understand their gifts, your gifts, you just don’t waste time doing stuff that isn’t yours. And you just like gather it together. I mean, I think, I’d kind of like to, just before we’re closing, like a couple of things, I’d like to bring in Maori Cosmology ’cause this really helped me recently.

And we just talked about it on our moon call and we’re gonna talk about it again, later today. But when I was sitting in Aotearoa with Athena, who I adore, she was talking to me about Maori Cosmology as this way of looking at the world. So you step back and there are three different parts of it, and as Stacy would storytell, there are quite a few like subgroups within the three parts.

But very simple, I’m going back to your, like I’m giving you the artist Vicky Saunders rendition of this. This is not like textbook Maori culture. There’s three different parts here. So the first one is Te Kore, which is, there’s a vast field of potential. So if you think quantum field, like where everything is, the all, that’s one of the places, this is where creation is happening.

And then the middle part is the darkness where things aren’t yet visible. Then the third part is the world of light, where all the structures come about and you can see everything clearly. And so you go from this like vast potential to the darkness where things are starting to form and emergence is happening on the way to like, you know, here we are, this is what the structure is. And we have been trained to only think that what we see in front of us is the real thing, the five senses. And we know there’s all this other stuff going on. We’re just not skilled at seeing it or sensing it. When this frame came out as like an entire culture lives this way, between these three rooms back and forth, I was like…

And I think we’re in, we have heard this through lots of predictions out there in the world that our indigenous cousins have models to help us understand how to navigate these times. This is ad construct, that kind of gave me some like, oh, we’re here. And when we’re talking to the Interstition folks, they’re like, we don’t have language for this thing that we’re in. And once we sort of get that language emerging, maybe we’ll be able to like better speak to what path we are and where we are in the rooms. So I wanted to just share that. Where are we leaving you today?

Azul: Well, one is, I was thinking about, I am feeling into the metacrisis. So some folks might have heard the term polycrisis, which is the idea that we’re facing many, many different crises that are interconnected and have cascading effects between them.

And you know, that’s from everything, mental health crisis to, AI, AGI, to the planetary boundaries, et cetera. And there’s something lying under that lies deeper that might be called the root of all those crises, which is the meta crisis. It has to do with a crisis of meaning or a crisis of how we show up to the world.

And so instead of asking, you know, how can we fix it? I think the question is, what is the metacrisis asking of us? 

Vicki: Yeah. 

Azul: To a very, very different place to stand from. And that was coming through with the last piece that you just shared about Maori cosmology. What is the metacrisis asking of us in this?

And if we take this moment of, you know, I’m just gonna, well… darkness, which is the moment of the unknown, the seeds underneath the soil, the winter, you know, like we take this moment and really taking its gifts. Then what might come after it might exceed our expectations. Will exceed our expectations in what we thought was possible.

Vicki: Yeah. 

Azul: And if we don’t do that work, if we go at it with the same mentality of how do I fix it so we can keep going the way we’ve been going. I think it’s going to be very difficult and painful even for a lot of folks. And I just feel like we know better and we can do better. 

Vicki: We definitely can, and it’s together. I mean, I think that’s the big thing for me. What I’ve really learned in the last 10 years is together. Everything is possible. It’s when you’re, when you isolate yourself and it’s tough and you get in a shame spiral and a guilt spiral, and you just go, I can’t, I’m gonna like Close myself down. That’s where it really, the fear just sets in and it’s just impossible to move. 

Azul: Absolutely. 

Vicki: And so the invitation for everyone who’s listening to this, please find the others, get connected. Notice what people need. Give generously, receive generously so other people can give what they have when you need it. And pay attention. Share what you’re noticing. 

Azul: Right. 

Vicki: Thank you. 

Azul: That’s it. Thank you for this conversation. 

Vicki: Thank you so much. 

Azul: Yeah, and thank you everyone who’s listening.

Vicki: See you soon.

Vicki Saunders and Azul Duque explore how Coralus is evolving in response to a changing world, shifting from action to capacity and from certainty to sensing. A conversation on story, unlearning, and what it means to meet this moment together.

In this conversation:

• Composting old narratives that no longer serve, without collapsing into guilt or shame
• The capacity to stay with uncertainty, rather than rushing to fix or resolve
• The role of nervous systems, grief, and unlearning in times of systemic change

• The role of nervous systems, grief, and unlearning in times of systemic change
• Māori cosmology as a way to understand this moment; moving through potential, darkness, and into new forms of clarity
• The importance of finding each other, sharing signals, and building together in relationship

At its core, this episode is an invitation to pause, notice what is shifting, and ask: What story am I standing in and what becomes possible if I let it go?