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protect it.

do you want to be free? well, you’re gonna have to stop giving it away for free. the thing you do reflexively. the thing you never run out of. the thing you use to feed everyone before you feed yourself. the thing that makes you available to others and unavailable to what’s yours.

this “thing” has a name. you have to be the one to name it, price it and protect it. and you know what? it’s all the same thing. “the thing” is your specific expression of the divine energy that flows through everything. …that thing. and maybe you’ll have to live for 40, 50, maybe even 65 years before you have enough lived experience to see, from the outside in (and inside out) what “that thing,” “your thing,” “what you are and who you are” even is.

i’ll give you a hint: it’s what the world gobbles up just as fast as you can plate it. it actually happens so quickly that it takes a lot of repetitions for you to actually be able to see what it is on the plate. and the good news is once you see it, you can’t unsee it. you cannot unknow it.

and you’ll realize: i am not the product. i am not the food on the plate. i am the one who plates it and that makes me the one who must protect it. the one who gets to price it, no longer the one that reflexively and warmly gives it out for free, just as soon as people start coming in with their empty plates and hungry mouths.