TRANSCRIPT
Gissele: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Love and Compassion podcast with Gissele. We believe that love and compassion have the power to heal our lives and our worlds. Today we have Britton and Carolee back, and they’re talking to us about the education system.
Hello. Welcome back. Welcome back. Hi. Good to see you. Hello. Good. It’s been forever. It’s been, I know, it’s been like so long. I was wondering if you could start by telling the audience a little bit about yourselves and how you sort of left your world, decided to sell everything moved to other countries and what you did with the kids for the school system.
Carolee: Well, we are parents to four children and we were raised in the Mormon culture. And with that there’s a big emphasis and focus on family. Families are really, really important. And so, you know, we went through a lot of turmoil and challenge in regards [00:01:00] to our love relationship within this paradigm.
And truly didn’t actually have emotional intelligence and really lacked a lot of things we had a completely different idea of what we needed to accomplish as parents with our children too. Like everything was drastically different in that paradigm than it is now. So in our journey of healing, infidelity,
Like deconstructing from organized religion. We also had this complete awakening into how we were to raise our children and the paradigm of like what kids actually need as we also were going into healing of our own inner child. Right. As we became aware of the need to reparent ourselves, it fundamentally transformed how we approached parenting our kids.
I’m curious about what you found you needed to heal your inner child [00:02:00] in what you discovered your children needed that was different from what we currently do.
So back in, oh goodness, it was 2019. You know, at this point in our story we had three children and we had not yet even been pregnant with the fourth. That would come later in 2020. But our oldest was in second.
grade at this time. And I remember sitting down with his second grade teacher and she started explaining and expressing some awareness that she had of his emotional needs. He was already not liking school. He was already a pushback on learning. There was already some inclination towards depression and anxiety and like just emotional turmoil that this little second grader was experiencing.
And in a lot of ways. It mirrored to me my own disharmony in my own [00:03:00] life that I also had experienced. And so, you know, in the traditional sense I was like, oh, what do I do for my child? I’m really wanting him to succeed. I’m really wanting him to be emotionally intelligent. I’m really wanting him to love his life.
And we had done so much, I was the kind of mom that like, almost didn’t take care of myself because I needed to take care of everybody else first. You know? And so as I sat there, I, I was like, my child is too young to be carrying the heaviness of the world in his body.
Like at, at age eight. He really should actually just be joyful and having fun, like being a kid, why is he so weighed down? So there was this big question mark that I had about my children and about this one child specifically. That really kind of started opening my mind that there needed to be a different way, but, but I wasn’t quite sure what that [00:04:00] looked like.
And so what I did is I, I reached out and, you know, we were living in Utah at the time, and I, I started kind of looking into, okay, where, where are some therapeutic clinics that actually do therapy for kids? And I found a couple that were highly recommended, and I got him on a wait list. You know, there was no availability to like drop in for a session.
And so I put him on the wait list and I was just in this pattern of holding like something, I needed help, I needed a different perspective. I needed somebody who knew more than I knew. I knew that we needed to parent differently and we needed to approach differently, but I, the, the, the culture and the paradigm that we were in was very much doing the things that I was already doing.
And I saw that it wasn’t working, you know? And so what ended up happening after that, after that awareness and that drop in with this teacher and, you know, I really came from this compassionate place of like, just caring. I had so much love and compassion for this young child that I was, I’m the guardian, the mother.
I [00:05:00] mean, I, I love my children fiercely. That, you know. That was in the periphery. That was part of what I was calling in, and I was just waiting for the right thing to land. And it was in that fall timeframe that we actually had our very first psilocybin journey. And it was in that journey that my journey actually was very centered on my children.
Here I was doing this sacred container for the very first time with very intentional healing. We had the set and setting and a guide, and it was just very spiritual. And I’m in the kitchen at one point putting together this beautiful array of food. I was so hungry and I was like, Ooh, this is all coming together so magically.
And instead of seeing the food in front of my hand, like in front of my face, that I was preparing, I saw in my mind like a movie of my life. And the moments that I went to were none other than the moments of births. At [00:06:00] this point. I had three children and I watched, like I was in the room like a angel floating above a fly on the wall, my own self giving birth to my kids.
In those moments, all of a sudden by watching it like an observer instead of emotionally in it, I saw, I saw my emotional body, I saw Britain’s emotional body. I saw this interconnectedness of what I was going through at the time, and I saw it almost like it was this transfer into my children. And I put together something that nobody else had ever told me.
Now, I, I’ve had so many conversations. People understand this idea. And it, it’s not a novel thing anymore, but at the time, it was literally something I had never heard of, that there was this imprinting of me and what was happening, the story into my children and their own experience that, you know. And so I realized, oh, we’re all a lot more emotionally and [00:07:00] energetically connected.
And, and what I was holding trauma, sadness, joy, bliss, discontent, anger, frustration, like all of those energies that were different with each one of my pregnancies and each one of the deliveries, I realized, oh, I could see that there was this thread, this connection that that still was, those energies were still relevant in the personality and in the struggle and in the needs of my children.
And it was this big aha moment of the mother child relationship that I was like, okay, there’s something here. And within a week of that journey, we went to a sound healing at a place called the Institute of Healing Arts in Linden, Utah. And at that sound healing, I was talking to the, a woman at the front desk afterwards, and she said, we do processes for children.
And all of a sudden my eyes just widened and I was like, this, this is what I need. And without even [00:08:00] realizing exactly what it was, I signed up and booked a session for my oldest that I had really wanted and we dropped in. I took him to one of those sessions and we ended up doing several sessions. I ended up actually going to school there all of 2020.
I completed a year long facilitator training at this school because what they gave me in that session for my oldest, and in those sessions I realized was the emotional reeducation I needed as a mother to do parenting. Completely different. So it was like the mushrooms opened my vision, then guided us into a new place of re-imagining how to parent, which then emerged into an education that literally changed the emotional dynamic of our family for for good.
So that’s kind of that introduction of where it really, where it began and that emerged from that everything shifted. The way we parent and educate our children now is so fundamentally [00:09:00] different than how we began.
Gissele: And what about you Britton? What was your experience around shifting your perspective on parenting and how you educate your children?
Britton: Yeah, so when we started off, I had these plans and preconceived ideas about around how I, you know, I wanted academic achievement in my children. And you know, just that paradigm of like being. Top a students, super smart, studious, all the things that, you know, a, I think a, a typical parent, you know, wants for their children.
And so before our first was even born, I had already planned out the school that he was gonna be going to, which was a religious, private school. You know, like I was not I was not keen on public school. So going into that paradigm, that’s how we, we started. And I did. I, you know, I saw that dream come true.
We enrolled him in that school. We were accepted into it, and it was a very sought after school. [00:10:00] But as we began our healing journey as a couple, it was becoming clear that the choices for education were actually not in alignment with the soul of the child. And so, while we were like striving so hard to get Emerson to be such a good reader at age five, like we were actually destroying his imagination at the same time, and we had no idea.
And so it was kind of a sad thing to realize this, but what was great was we caught it early enough that the re the other three kids that would come would not actually endure the same education. And so Carol and I had all three. We had all four children at home. And we had this conversation before we were even pregnant, I think, or maybe during the first pregnancy.
We were talking about a
Carolee: little bit before the first pregnancy. Yeah.
Britton: About like, Hey, what would it be like? I have kids at home. And I was all for it. My, my brother was born at home and it was because my mom had this like really bad [00:11:00] experience with me in the hospital. And so I had been open to that paradigm sort of earlier on.
And so it was an easy, yeah. Like, let’s do it at home. And we started educating herself around that. And I think this is an important part about, you know. This is a really important part about like being conscious in everything we do. You know, it’s not that you have to have a chest at home to be conscious, but for us, we wanted to educate ourselves.
So we started looking into, like, we did the, we did a hypnobirthing class. I attended with her. We watched some documentaries around the business of being born and, and that sort of thing. And, and it kind of like opened up our eyes. And so we were really feeling good about that and about having our children at home.
And we weren’t scared. And in fact the, the mortality rates statistically speaking are better to have a child not in a hospital because of the intervention and stuff. But Did you have a water birth? Let’s into that. Was it
Gissele: the water birth? Yeah.
Britton: Yeah.
Gissele: Was it a water birth? I think three. The four curious water birth.
Curious because I mean, oh my God, [00:12:00] I gotta be honest. Without the epidural, I don’t think I would’ve made it, but yeah. You know, my husband and I have since talked about, I wonder what it would’ve been like to have had a water
Carolee: birth. All, yeah. Like Bri said, all four of them were born at home. Emerson our oldest I labored in the water, but at the very end, that was a 20 hour labor I had to get out of the tub.
And so he was not born in the water, but the other three were all born in, in a tub in our, in our room at the various places that we lived. Yeah. Cool.
Britton: Yeah. So I guess what I was trying to just get to is, as we confronted that paradigm of just like what, you know, Mormonism had told us and these different things, we were like really starting to question education too, and not just being academically superior.
That was not no longer the need. It was like. What does a conscious upbringing or education look like for a child? And so that’s what, yeah, that’s what opened the door. And we were, [00:13:00] I think we were led right to the right place. And and then we both had, you know, we, we’ll get into it later, but I just wanna say we, we both actually had separate confirmations of what would be best for our children.
And when we talked about it, it was like, okay, let’s do that. So,
Gissele: mm. Now I’m curious, what did a conscious education look like for your children?
Carolee: You know, at the beginning, you know, like Bri said, we have this video that we took. I’m nine months pregnant. It’s literally the day or two days before I’m delivering our first.
And at the time, we were living in this basement apartment, literally across the street from this very religious, private school. And we have this video of us as this young couple pointing at the school saying, this baby, and this is where you’re gonna go to school. And we had this vision of him, Hey, through 12, like just finishing it out, this is solid.
He’s gonna go there from the beginning. And, and so everything kind of moved towards that [00:14:00] direction. And you would say that, that seems very conscious, right? But it was actually very, like, self-serving. I can see that now. I couldn’t see it then, totally. But it was like, oh, I’m gonna be a good parent because I’m spending this money on this private education, and it’s going to have him rooted into the fundamental principles of, you know.
God, family country, like there was, it’s not only was it religious, that had a lot to do with patriotism. There was just, yeah, it was just a lot of things that were all kind of heavy and, we did put him in that program. He went there kindergarten, he was there for first grade. He was there for second grade.
I was a huge part of that school community. I had gotten hired, I taught high school photography. I managed their social media. I created an entire like database of organization. We were deep in it. Like we were deep, very active [00:15:00] and contributing members identity. Yeah. Mm-hmm. And then my child was struggling emotionally and it wasn’t meeting his needs.
And that, that, that catalyst of like as what I’m doing for my child, actually in my child’s best interest is kind of like getting hit in the head by with a two by four. Like I think conscious parenting is not making choices based on what you think you need to do or what makes you look and feel good as a parent.
It’s really meeting the soul development of the child and that key right there. Soul development is what we realized. We weren’t nurturing at all. We thought we were, you know, at this private religious school, one of the requirements like school supplies was literally scriptures. It was very religious. So our second grader had to go to school with a stack of scriptures, the Bible, the Book of Mormon, the doctrine, and like these, some of these are Mormon scriptures in [00:16:00] addition to the Bible, you know?
And he went to school as a second grader with these scriptures and would read from it and study from, it was part of his curriculum, and we thought that was his soul development. But what we realized through our own emotional reeducation that came about because of this school that I went to, the Institute of Healing Arts as I was seeking emotional intelligence that I could bring home and incorporate into our family life, was that there’s this incredibly gifted man named Rudolph Steiner that is developed the Waldorf method.
And the Waldorf philosophy actually is a lot more hands-off academic tending to the nature and the imaginative and like through storytelling and through earth connection. That, and there’s phases of soul development that when we force reading and linear thinking on a child before, they’re just naturally inclined towards it.
[00:17:00] We actually are cutting off their connection to spirit. We’re cutting off their imaginative qualities. Right? And so, like from that moment on, it was, I pulled, you know, our, 13-year-old at that time was not 13, but we pulled him out of the private school. We put him in a charter school, then we. Got him home.
From that, we started to homeschool him while the other ones all joined into a cottage school that was a Waldorf inspired. So we went this route of this highly academic into this more intuitive, naturally held, Waldorf inspired community. And that’s really where we’ve stayed since. And there’s a lot more that I can say about the choices that we’ve made and, you know, even how we educated our kids while we traveled the world.
But we’ll get into that in a minute. But yeah, it’s that, it was that shift, that shift of like, oh, academics is the accomplishment to soul development. How do I tend to the soul development, the imaginative quality, allowing my child to be connected to the [00:18:00] unseen world through spirit. There are actual things that we can do as parents to foster that, and that’s not necessarily part of the mainstream conversation when it comes to educating kids.
Agreed.
Britton: Gissele, can I add in something here because I, I know what most parents are going to immediately feel when they’re confronted with the education system that everybody basically plugs their children into when it’s like not. We’re, we’re kind of basically saying, look, there’s a better option.
And we really believe that there are unique options for every child. It’s not just that Waldorf or whatever is the only way, but ’cause we did Montessori, we, we’ve actually done every type of education. But what is, what, what really? Was interesting was when we were introduced to this idea that the soul incarnates in energies over time.
It’s not like the whole souls with baby.
Carolee: Mm-hmm. And
Britton: so when we [00:19:00] recognized this pattern, it was like, oh, you know, like when we introduced linear thought into the child to early, were actually inhibiting the proper entry of that spirit into the body. So this was like a big wake up call for me. ’cause it spoke to my, it spoke to my like logical mind, but it also spoke to my spiritual heart.
And and when I started diving into, you know, the education system itself and became familiar with it, it was clear to me that the system itself is built upon government competition. So, you know, like our system was designed for creating the best workers and the best ability to advance our war machines, right?
Like our technologies, our ability to be out governments and so forth. So, you know, like we, that’s why there’s so much emphasis on all this math that no one uses. There’s so much emphasis on all this even science that nobody uses and you know, like there’s select few that move on and do incredible things and discover more.
And we [00:20:00] need that. There’s absolutely, I’m not under, I’m not trying to undermine any of that, but honestly, like how much calculus do you use Justelle in your daily life? Right, exactly.
Gissele: I got 90 something in calculus and like 98 in algebra.
I could not tell you how to do that today.
Britton: Cool. And, and so we just, we saw that and it was like yeah, that kind of doesn’t make sense. So it was just a way of opening our minds of like seeing more information and being like okay, I’m, I’m willing to look at this a different way.
So, and, and so we stopped placing the emphasis on academic performance and like needing to know so much. And what we shifted into is this offering the, so the soul of the child, the freedom to explore. So how do we develop? So if that’s our basis of how we want the child to develop, then what is the program that will support them?
Gissele: I completely agree. And I think to be honest, like everything has its timing in terms of our human evolution. And I think the [00:21:00] timing is important to have this conversation. I have multiple degrees. I have two master’s, I have lots of certificates and bachelor’s degrees.
Like I, I did it all. I was all in on the education system because it was my way to escape the, the trauma in my household. It was how I was going to accomplish things. It was how I gave myself freedom. It was how I gave myself value. So as a person with multiple degrees, I always thought, my kids are gonna go to university.
They’re gonna do this, they’re gonna do that exactly as you stated, because the thinking was, I need them, even if they don’t use the staff, like, I need them to have opportunities so they could choose. that was the perspective, right? But as I saw my kids struggling with the things that I struggled in, in the education system with the lack of creativity, the linear thinking, the right, wrong, instead of like, this is where we teach kids about right or wrong.
They, they, this is why they see things in black and white. They were [00:22:00] taught originally as very little. There is a right answer and there’s a wrong answer. And so they lack the ability to be in the gray. They lack the ability to emotionally regulate and have difficult conversations and deal with issues.
And so for me, my thinking is now I support you whichever way you wanna do, explore your greatest excitement, your greatest things that lights you up, explore your freedom, explore. And we’re trying to kind of undo all of the educating that we did. as I unlearn all of that programming, it’s incredible what I look at in terms of, and I’m actually authoring a book on this with my child, with my daughter.
She’s writing it with me. Oh, cool. because she sees the things that we’ve taught them very similar to what you were talking about with her school friends. And that’s not what they’re taught. And the reason why I say it’s important to talk about this now is because young people that are going to university, they’re coming out with so much [00:23:00] debt and they’re not any better.
They’re not anywhere ahead. the cost of living is still high, the wages are so low. Mm-hmm. So I go back to your original question, which was, what are we trying to accomplish? What are we trying to accomplish?
And for you, your answer was, how do we allow children that whose souls is developed? Right. So tell me a little bit about sort of how you managed the education when you were traveling?
Carolee: Yeah. So
Britton: I just start with I love this topic
Carolee: so much.
Like where do I even begin? You know, when first when you talked about like the unlearning, right? I love our children. They’re so individual, they’re so just magical, each one of them. And they have been such incredible teachers for me. They’ve really taught me, right. The struggles that I mentioned that my oldest was going through really taught me how to hold more emotional space.
Like why emotional intelligence [00:24:00] was crucial. He has been such a profound teacher. And I am eternally grateful for this soul, for this boy, for this being that has had a lot of grace and forgiveness for how I’ve messed up. You know, like for the, the things I didn’t know. We’ve actually really seen, honestly, the difference of the education he received reading before he was even five years old.
We have seen how it actually has made the unseen spiritual world more of a distant thing for him personally. Mm-hmm. Like, we see a contrast, a drastic difference between him and the other kids. Not in a way of judgment of like, oh, he’s not as good as the others, but like, it’s just so obvious. It’s so obvious.
The difference, right? Mm-hmm. Our daughter, who is almost 11, because we pulled back because we decreased the need for academics, she wasn’t really even reading until she was nine. And for a moment [00:25:00] there she was really angry with us, like, mom and dad, I really wanna be a better reader. You know, like, she, why aren’t you helping me read?
And we almost had so much of a hands off approach that it was like, you know, we, it’s a pendulum. It like really swung. Yeah. We were so persistent with the oldest that I was like, Nope, you’re just gonna read when you’re ready for it. Mm-hmm. And that desire that she developed actually helped her be ready.
Britton: Right. the child will actually call in the thing that they need. And you have to just trust in that. It’s like a different paradigm of educating from a parent. And, and we saw this with her and actually with our other, that the next one down who’s just like a year and a half younger.
And so yeah, like, and you just trust in that timing because the soul knows best. Like this is a spiritual perspective, a spiritual take on like how you perceive what’s happening, what the child needs, and how the flow of life will go for them. And that you’ll just trust, trust deeper in the presence of spirit’s guiding fa [00:26:00] force for them.
That their soul that’s still actually incarnating, still coming in in different waves of energy is guiding their path to the education that they actually need.
Carolee: Yeah. we had this moment where with our oldest, we all of a sudden, you know, 20, 20 hits, schools closed down, everybody’s sent home essentially.
I then started homeschooling him. So like end of third grade into the fourth, fifth grades, he was at home being homeschooled. The other three were just barely beginning their educational experience. And so we had found, while we were still living in Utah, this really beautifully aligned Waldorf inspired cottage school that the other ones, the two middles, you know, ’cause I hadn’t yet had our fourth, our fourth was born in the fall of 2020, you know, and so here we were now.
Having the children educated in the Waldorf philosophy kind of way, which really tended to, there was a lot more nature, a lot more outside experience. [00:27:00] Not really reading stories, more oral storytelling and like, it, it also was a reeducation for me. I started taking training for Waldorf Mythologies, right?
There’s a, there’s a, a group called Lifeway North America, which is Waldorf Training. So I was doing these trainings in person, online attending parent support groups to really reeducate myself on how to approach educating from this very alternative, very, almost like hippie sort of perspective. I had a lot of pushback though, from the community around us.
People would ask questions you don’t care about, you know, like the push for academics and accomplishment was so big. And, and there, I mean, I’m not gonna say that this was a perfect approach that we did. You know, there were some struggles that even our children had going back to our daughter, you know, she was at, at that point in time, really into dance.
She still is really into dance, but while we were living in Utah, before we [00:28:00] traveled the world, she was part of a competitive dance team. And she’d go to her dance practices several hours a week and then she’d have the performances and competitions. And there were several times where she felt awkward because all of her peers could read and she wasn’t reading.
And there was a moment I remember at a recital, or actually it was a competition where one of the girls came up to me and was just like, why doesn’t Liberty read yet? And I just smiled and I took a deep breath and I was like, yeah, but let me tell you what her school day is like. She’s playing out. And I gave this beautiful picture of how she was outside and really connecting.
She was, had this freedom and that little girl kind of looked at me big eye like. That’s what, like, it kind of blew her mind, right? Yeah. You can do that. So, you know, it was, it was a struggle. Liberty, that’s our daughter’s name. She, she was a bit frustrated that she was so different. But now, [00:29:00] you know, we’ve landed here in Colorado and the children are all in different programs that are aligned for them.
And each one of our kids has unique needs, and we’ve been able to find community around the way in which we educate our kids. And it’s been really beautiful. But it did take, you know, part of, part of the pull away part of the selling our house and selling everything we owned and moving our family to Bali.
That five months we spent in Bali after we left the states was an unwinding, an undoing, like an unschooling. The kids didn’t really have any formal education during that timeframe. It was just us as a family living day to day and letting life be our teacher, which in some ways people call that radical unschooling.
That’s what we had to do to deconstruct the deep program that said, this is achievement based. You know, you’ve gotta accomplish this. You’ve gotta know this by this age. You know, when you go to traditional public [00:30:00] school, a lot of times they’re like, in second grade, these are the things you now know.
Yeah. It’s like, based on, you gotta do this on this academic performance. And we view it in, at second grade. Actually, that’s age eight. That’s age nine. That’s like the change, the shift, the souls incarnating. Like I see it completely from a different perspective now, but it, it, it called us into a reeducation like we really had to.
Re like, be open to rethinking everything.
Britton: And also what’s, what is so important for children to learn. Like we gotta put that on the table, like you were kind of saying.
Carolee: Yeah.
Britton: And life skills are so important, let’s be honest. Like, academic is second. Definitely second. And, and so life skills, you know, and and so the kids were learning that in Bali.
Like obviously it’s a whole new culture, you know, the roads are very different. The way people get around is different. Everything is different. And they were learning so much just from being present in that, in that new culture. And the people there are [00:31:00] absolutely phenomenal. Just loving, caring, so in touch with, you know, because they’re on this beautiful island and they’ve been isolated to some degree.
And the, the, the Bolonese people are special people. Like, there’s just an energy there that’s so different. So I’m so grateful that they got to be there and like see how the Bolonese people hold the island and how they operate in their culture and how they just love everybody. Everybody’s like, I mean, they just have such low crime rates, you know?
Mm-hmm. So so yeah, the, it started off when we got into Bali as like just radical unschooling. There’s just no school, there’s no structure. We’re just hanging out every day. We’re just kinda living, we’re just exploring. We’re seeing what life’s about here. And they were all in adventure mode. And that’s, I think that’s incredible.
Carolee: Absolutely. Well, and I think something else that I wanna point out is when we plug into this system, right, the system of academic school, and then, you know, we, we were really in it. [00:32:00] We had our kids in schools, well, Emerson, but the other ones, even in their Waldorf college school, there was this schedule. It was like school till a certain time of day, then.
Competitive sports and competitive dance and other activities, and the society at large, the way in which we’re doing it as a family culture is actually doing a disservice to the family core, I think, because it’s making us all so busy that we don’t actually know how to be together.
Mm-hmm.
Right. Be present.
And so like, you know, as much as, as much as like we really want our kids to develop skills, you know, we’re, we’re flowing into that. Like, our daughter’s doing some different camps this summer. One of them is gonna be, she’s gonna get back into aerials. It’s been a minute since she’s done that exploration, but like education is more than just the academic.
But if we fill our day so full with academics and then on top of it we’ve got all these other activities, when’s family time? Right. And so [00:33:00] that’s part of what we had to deconstruct as well. And part of what the blessing of selling everything and like going on this journey that we went on, you know, landing in Bali, doing just, we had a lot of family time.
We really grew to know each other as a family and that family life that in and out, not so busy with all of these different outside connections really helped to bring something beautiful that we didn’t even know we were missing as a family core. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You know? And so while we were in Bali, like I said, we did kind of just this radical unschooling.
We didn’t really do anything. We were there for five months. We thought we were moving there and we journeyed around the island trying to discover which part of the island we was gonna be home. And during that journey we realized, oh wait, this isn’t home. This is just now. So let’s explore the island and enjoy the island and the now and then what’s next?
And as we were talking about what would be next, we [00:34:00] knew that we needed support. That’s the other thing, right? Like. In our modern society, we have been programmed to do things as a nuclear family alone on our own. Mm-hmm. Not as much a part of like a community. Mm-hmm. Right. And we realized we needed somebody else to come be with us.
And I knew that if I could find somebody that had the, the mindset, the upbringing, the understanding of the Waldorf philosophies, just as like a baseline that, that this person could be in alignment to like accompany us on what was coming next. So I put out a call on a Facebook Waldorf group for a nanny that was Waldorf trained because we wanted to do homeschooling.
We wanted to have education for our kids while we traveled. But I knew from my own experience of having homeschooled our oldest, that it wasn’t something that was my own [00:35:00] forte through the homeschooling experience before we sold everything. I identified, oh, I actually am one of those women who’s like adult women, A DHD.
Then I didn’t know, you know, like I couldn’t focus, I couldn’t stay present. I had a hard time guiding him as intently as I really wanted to. It wasn’t necessarily my calling, but my calling really was to do this education for my kids differently. So we found a woman, her name’s Shayna, and we ended up flying her to meet us in Vietnam and she was 10 years plus Waldorf assistant Waldorf teacher.
And she traveled with us all the way through to Egypt until we decided, oh, our travel’s over, we’re gonna return to the states. She was with us that entire time and she would hold circle. She had, she brought so much of her own training and she was able to like. When we got back to the States and actually decided that we were gonna drop our kids into [00:36:00] programs that were their ages, I was a little bit worried that maybe they would be technically behind in their academic skills.
But Shayna actually did an incredible job in keeping them right where they needed to be. And the kinds of programs that were aligned for us that we found here in Colorado, our kids just jumped in so seamlessly and they had this lived world experience that enhanced what they brought to their education.
Mm-hmm. So it wasn’t a disservice. Nobody was behind. Everybody was exactly where they needed to be. And then some, it was just truly beautiful to like, do education this way.
Gissele: Hmm. I love, yeah, I love what you said. I think the gift that you gave your children was also the gift of seeing beyond their environment.
The gift of flexibility, the gift of being able to see beyond, because I think part of the structure of the whole current education system, like you were talking about, at least in Mormonism, there’s a level of [00:37:00] nationalism, so people can be very well educated, but very well educated in their box, right?
And right. Some people may not travel anywhere, may not look at different cultures, may not see different perspectives. So there’s no development of critical thinking to figure out, okay, well do I want this or do I want that? Like, really getting to know themselves and really getting to know what choice they consciously wanna make.
And I think that’s sort of the gift you’ve given your children the ability to see different environments, the ability to have flexibility and also give them the education. There’s definitely a movement right now, especially on TikTok about the unschooling movement. And you, you see both sides of the equation.
’cause there was a young person that came out and they were talking about being unschooled. And so basically they got to determine. You know, what they were interested in and followed their flow. But they, they also mentioned that they did struggle, like, like you were mentioning your daughter, they did struggle with learning, being with their peers around like learning English or math, which then if you are in a [00:38:00] traditional workplace, kind of puts you in a different position.
How do you feel right now about the education that your kids have gotten as they might be stepping out into the workplace in the future?
Britton: Let me drop in on Emerson. So our oldest, ’cause that’s kind of, it doesn’t really apply to our younger ones yet, but our oldest two is basically almost 14. He’s going into ninth grade. We were actually just at his they did like a ceremony last night.
Carolee: He’s attending a private school here in Boulder.
Britton: Yeah. And they, we did a ceremony of a rite of passage and beautiful. I mean, you’re not gonna get that in a, in a regular school either. No. So it was really cool to see in his growth, his emotional, I think the most important thing to answer that question is emotional intelligence. It’s not academics.
Anybody can learn anything. we’re in the a age of AI now. Yes. You know, Internet’s even history, it’s in the past now. It’s ai. Like we can literally tap into all of human consciousness, [00:39:00] all of human knowledge at our fingertips, learn any subject, get expert knowledge on it. It’s incredible. Right. And it’s only gonna improve.
Mm-hmm. So. Right. Education will undergo the most dramatic revolution we have ever witnessed in human history in the next four to five years. Mm-hmm. It’s just gonna be incredible. I mean, all the universities are already outta date. People don’t even know how to grade things anymore because what is plagiarism now?
Like, everything’s being on the table. So this is a really cool time to have a conversation like this. Mm-hmm. So what is more important now? It’s just about, you know, what the kid wants and, and I know it just seems like, well, you’re just giving all this freedom. They don’t know how to choose and blah, blah.
It’s like, you know what? I actually have a lot of faith in my child. I have a lot of faith in his own intuition of what he, what he wants. I also have a lot of faith that he can learn anything he wants. I actually didn’t go to school until I was 28, 29.
Mm-hmm.
Britton: You mean university? Yeah, university.
Gissele: Yeah.
Britton: And and I was self-taught a software engineer, [00:40:00] and I learned it and I was like one of those like kids that just like figured it out on the internet in the nineties, you know, like, so I taught myself that. And if I could do it in the nineties, I mean, who can’t do it today? Right. So I, you know, I think I think he’s gonna be fine.
And he’s actually, it’s funny, you know, we’ve gone through this whole circle with him. Guess what? Guess what he’s desiring to do now? Public education. He wants to go to a public school. Yeah. A public high school. A public high school where he can like, have more social where he has more options with the ladies, where he has more like, cool classes, like, you know, I remember in my high school I did digital electronics, I did auto mechanics, I did welding. I, I did a lot of trade stuff. ’cause I was really interested in like how to work with my hands and Yeah. And all of that was really interesting. So, you know, he wants to do that.
There’s also more athletic stuff. So all of that is important too. And I think those are good options for children. It’s just that the public education system has about zero emphasis on the soul development of the child. And that’s where we [00:41:00] really wanted to shift. And now we have all of except for their youngest one, all of the three older ones have basically gone through their early years through that solid development.
And the crucial period is from zero to eight, zero to seven, zero to eight. And I think they’re, they’re well equipped to like shift into more academic stuff now. And he, and you know, our oldest, like you said, it’s like how is he gonna go in the workforce? Well, I, I just don’t have any, I, I’m not even thinking about it.
’cause frankly I don’t even think about the workforce. You know, like, that’s another thing you have to question Gissele, like, what is the workforce like? I’m not in it anymore. I was in it for 22 plus years, self-taught programmer, did all the things, and I’m just like it, it’s time for everybody to just follow their path.
Like that is not gonna look like what our culture has done for the last, you know, a hundred years.
Gissele: Absolutely agree.
going back to the, the whole concept of education thinking about ai, right. It’s so true. Like the education system, all of it has to change from elementary school quickly [00:42:00] can be irrelevant quickly, all postsecondary quickly.
Exactly. Very quickly. It has to shift because of ai.
AI detection tools do not work.
They don’t really have. And in fact, they leave it all up to the university professor to determine whether or not somebody cheated or not. AI just gets better and better. Right. And, and people are trying to catch up in terms of software. So the whole content based education is no longer going to be
it’s about those skills. You were talking about how do you foster creativity? How do you foster exploration? How do you foster passion? Many people, and I’ve, I’ve talked to so many people and some people cannot tell me what their biggest, boldest dreams are. They can’t tell me what their passions are.
They can only tell me what they, what that’s in the box. But they, they don’t know. They’ve never really been like enable themselves to tap into that. What’s my biggest, boldest dream? What is my heart’s desire [00:43:00] for many different reasons. And so I think that this new system has to change to allow, like you said, for that soul evolution because otherwise it’s gonna be obsolete.
You can just teach yourself something right? so right now, my husband and I are kind of at this impasse, We want to support our children and we want them to be open to do what their biggest, boldest dreams are. And at the same time they’re finishing high school, right? So they’re gone through that system, right?
And we, they went to public school, we’re like, this is experience. my daughter is looking at different options. And again, feeling a lot of pressure from the education system itself, like guidance counselors or you have to pick, and I’m like.
Why do you have to pick who says that at 19 you have to make a decision You make a decision that’s gonna be the same decision for the rest of your life. you don’t have to go anywhere at 19 or 18 or 21, [00:44:00] determine that for yourself. But that is not the messaging that we get.
And even from family members there, there was a constant like, oh, where’s she gonna go? Or what are they gonna do? And, you know, what are they looking into? And I’m like, she doesn’t know yet. She’s right now, she’s taken a year, like a leap year. But beyond that, we don’t know. I just want her to live her dream.
I don’t care what she does.
Carolee: Well, it, it’s like educating our kids with this new, this kind of perspective that we talked about actually is what’s gonna foster their ability to tap into what that dream might be. Exactly. You know, I think back, and I, I touched on this in our last episode, right? Where I was like, oh, I was programmed so deeply to like go to college, but not to actually accomplish anything with it.
Right? Here I was, yeah, this Mormon girl at this Mormon university. I knew from the moment I stepped into the college sphere that I was gonna study photography. That was an undeniable fact for me. Like I had found the camera, I loved the dark room, and I went straight [00:45:00] into an associate’s, a specialized associate’s in studio of photography degree two years, and then moved into a fine art degree in photography.
Like I graduated with a degree in photography. Nice. But the avenue of what I was available, what was available to me to do with that really only had like two options that was shown. I didn’t have the tools to really tap into the freedom of possibility that could come to me. Right. This is something that at 42 years old, I am just now finally giving myself the permission to figure it out.
What does, what does living my dream look like for me? Right. Because I remember graduating from university and I had basically two paths that, well, yeah, like three, three paths kind of that were before me. One, I would get married, I’d become a mother, and because I’d be a mother and my primary role would be to be at home a homemaker home, women don’t work.
There was a lot of judgment about working moms [00:46:00] in my culture of upbringing. Mm-hmm. So in order to be, photography was a great job idea for me because I could be a mommy photographer. Hobby. Yeah. Yeah. I could be a hobby. Yeah. Like a mommy photographer, which you hated though. Which I could do like weddings or I could shoot babies or I could do families.
Mm-hmm. And I kind of did all of that, but every time I stepped into that I’d, I had a little bit of like this chip on my shoulder, like I don’t really wanna do, like, there was this sort of resentment, it wasn’t fully imagine kids for photographer, you know, coming in with that energy of like yeah, go ahead.
Yeah. Option number two was to go the same route that my professors had done. What did they do? They graduated with their, with their BFA, they then went on to their masters spending an exorbitant amount of money. I got accepted to Cran Brook Institute of Art, one of the top 10 photo programs, MFA programs in the nation, and it would’ve been 80,000 a year.
Oh my God, for me to like get this master’s degree in photography. That is crazy.
Gissele: Yeah.
Carolee: And then [00:47:00] that avenue would’ve been to return to the university, possibly the same one that I graduated from with my undergrad and now become a professor. So that was option number two. I either become a mom or I become a professor.
I was a little bit more radical and had actually right after graduating, had secured a job offer in Manhattan to be a manager of a photo studio for a photographer named Gabriela in Atory Penn. And that felt like such a big hoo, my professors were so excited. I was the very first student from this university in Idaho to even have this opportunity in Manhattan, and yet I didn’t choose it.
There were things that didn’t feel right and I ended up just moving in with my parents in Utah and got a job at a, at men’s warehouse selling men’s suits. And so I felt like I had failed even in that third alternative option. Mm-hmm. Right. But like with our kids, when you allow them the freedom to discover who they really are outside of this box the way [00:48:00] things are done, maybe our kids will go to university.
I don’t know. It could be really fun. University can be a really fun time of life.
Yeah.
But also our 13-year-old last summer wanted to go to Ireland to do this filmmaking and theater camp. Mm-hmm. And we said to him, you know what? That just doesn’t really work for us, but we don’t wanna say no to your dreams, so can you make it happen?
Mm-hmm. Can you help fund your own desire? Like, can you get behind it? And he came up with his own idea to go down to Boulder and literally hang out at this outdoor kind of street called Pearl Street. It’s like all these shops, it’s outdoor sort of mall. And he essentially busked. He sat there with a big poster that he made and drew 92nd caricatures for donations at not even 12 years, no, he was 12, [00:49:00] almost 13 years of age.
He raised $4,000 in two months to fly himself solo across the ocean to go to this camp in Ireland. After he did that, we were like, this boy is not gonna wanna be, he’s gonna be alright in an office. Yeah. He’s gonna be fine. He’s not, he’s not gonna wanna Somebody’s thumb. Yeah, no, he’s,
Gissele: he, I mean, think about it.
You enabled them the opportunity for, for him to figure it out, to get creative, to like, that’s amazing.
That’s so amazing. Sorry. You know, and so I don’t see, I mean, he might want to have like a fast food job, but only actually for the experience. Yeah. I could, I could
Britton: see him doing something like that just to see what it’s like
Carolee: and then probably not lasting very long knowing that he could literally sit and socialize and have fun and be creative, you know, and, and love his life.
I mean, he made so many friends hanging out right outside this pub on Pearl Street. The people at the pub, they really [00:50:00] loved him and they watched over him and they like really supported him. You know, people would take his drawings of, there’s one guy that took a drawing that he made and actually turned it into a T-shirt and brought it back to him.
Here’s a t-shirt with this picture you drew of me. It’s like my, my 12-year-old
Britton: son’s making friends with the pub goers. It’s, it was mean, was quite fun.
I was just
Gissele: gonna ask was any part of you worried about him doing any of that? Like, were you just like, oh, just go for it.
No, I, I mean, I asked as a person who used to be a very fear-based parent. I mean, I grew up with yeah, two very traumatized people, unfortunately. And so like, my first angsting is my kids when they were younger. It’s just like, protect it. Was that, that fear so I’m just curious as to like, were you just totally child on faith that they would be okay?
Depends. Mm-hmm.
Britton: I, you know, if it was my daughter down there, it might be a little different. I wouldn’t, but
at the same age, I wouldn’t probably let her be alone down doing the same thing.
Britton: But
that
Britton: he, you know, we traveled the world [00:51:00] for 18 months, so like, he became, they all became so independent, you know, like we’d go into, I remember our first LA when we went into LAX, our first airport experience was a debacle.
It took us four hours to move from the parking lot to the plane. It was so hard. So time. And, and by the time we, we got home back to Salt Lake, and I think it was 14 months later, the kids were pros. You know, they just knew what they were doing. We traveled so many times by playing, but he, I, I honestly did not fear one bit.
In fact, he’s, he’s had some interesting experiences and he’s kind of alluded to a few of them and told me some, and I’m just like, Hmm, that’s cool. you really have to give the trust to the child and, and that that’s how the child will fruit this idea of the fear that you talk about.
Gissele, like we do have a, a generation of parents like our generation. We helicopter, we’re way too protective. You know, even the school, the private school he is going to right [00:52:00] now they’re overprotective. They took him out on these travels and stuff. Really cool stuff. Like, they went down to this and did a solo, it was gonna be 24 hours, but the weather was just a little bit too cold so they wouldn’t let the kids sleep.
You know, like they had to pull ’em back into camp and stuff. And it was supposed to be a 24 hour experience. And it’s, I just feel like we’re so soft. And it’s not that, it’s not that alpha male strength or hardness that we need to have, it’s just that, you know, life is real and raw and we need to learn how to navigate it.
And the only way we’re ever gonna gain that experience is if we do it. here’s the key to education. You cannot learn education through concepts. These are just introductory mind tools. Mm-hmm. Real education is experience experiential. Like why are schools not fully developing kids through experience?
And why do we have to study, study, study, regurgitate, regurgitate, regurgitate. And you mentioned it earlier, you said, oh my gosh, you know, like the, the plagiarism and the, we, we have built up so much complexity around our system of education that we’ve had to double that [00:53:00] complexity to ensure that people are staying within those bounds.
And now what’s happening is the complexity is building so much within our system that we need to develop even a greater solution that over sim, that simplifies everything. And that solution, I believe in part, is ai because we have this incredible amount of knowledge. So how do we make it so that everyone can access this knowledge in the most intuitive way?
We develop a consciousness that can actually just give it to us the way we need it. And I think AI is actually a solution to the problem that we’re experiencing as a society. So I’m very excited about it. I’m also very balanced. Like I, I’m the type of person that loves to go out. We, we live on an acreage here.
We have a little stream that flows through our, our acreage, and we go out and spend time outside and love the outdoors. And
Carolee: I know
Britton: that it’s so important to be connected to Earth, but we can’t just abandon our technology and our knowledge. So we have to, we have to like integrate that into and balance it.
So I’m mentioning a lot of things, but true education comes through experience. So I am [00:54:00] so in trust with him and his ability to, to be protective of his own energy and like sniff out an idiot when he sees one. Yeah. So, so totally.
Carolee: You know, he, something else to just add here in our home, we actually don’t have a television.
Hmm. We, we went from a house before we like sold everything to where we had four TVs, one in our bedroom, one in the family room, one in the kids space, one in the basement, to now we don’t even own a television. We have a projector and a white wall that we project movies onto. And we have our computers, but we are very protective and selective over the kind of media, media access video games, you know, and movies.
That was something that also really surprised us, especially when we were in this culture of Mormonism. And they were like, our, our kids can’t play with your kids. And I was like, in some ways, sometimes I was like, but your kids literally watching movies that I’m not gonna let my kid watch for like seven [00:55:00] years.
Right? Yeah. There’s a, there’s, there was some weird stuff. There’s like, what are we exposing our children to? And, and you know, even with ai, we’ve really got to like help these beings, these magical souls that are incarnate as children be rooted into their emotional body before they engage with the media or technological world.
Right? Our 13-year-old, going back to him, you know, he’s got a phone, but we have controls on it. There’s a limit to when it’s unlocked. he does not have access to social media. And I was having a conversation last night at this eighth grade passages ceremony with some of the other parents, and they were like, what do you do about social media?
And I’m like, I’ve literally, I don’t know when or if we’ll even let him have it until he’s like, later teens. Right. Because it’s so damaging. And he also has said to us, mom, sometimes it’s really hard to be with my friends because. They don’t really know how to have a conversation. They’re just on their phone playing games, and he can see [00:56:00] already how he’s not hold to that.
he has a more balanced energy with his phone. He understands, you know, it’s important for him to have a phone, especially with the level of freedom that we give him. You know, he knows how to get himself around. He knows how to use public transportation. He’s really reliable with it. He’s really, you know, and it’s not to say he hasn’t had hard experiences.
He was riding his bike and he crossed the road and a car actually hit him. It like clipped the back tire. And he had the bike got damaged and ruined, and he had a little bit of an injury from that. It wasn’t too terrible, you know, everybody stopped and made sure things were okay. But like those kinds of experiences, they’re, they’re teachers like experience, like we have to, as parents be okay letting our children experience life so that life can also teach them what they need to know and how to be safe and how to protect their energy.
You know? And he’s, we have this really open communication with him and I, and [00:57:00] yeah, it’s just a really beautiful parent-child relationship to where there is just this trust. And again, like Brent said, our daughter, Liberty is almost 11. I wouldn’t feel the same. she’s just a different child.
Emerson’s just even an older soul. Like he can show up down and do this thing, and he doesn’t seem as young as he is when he’s in that space, you know? And mm-hmm. And so, like, understanding the nature of each of our individual children is an important part here too.
Gissele: Yeah. I completely agree with that.
Yeah. So I just wanted to go back to the whole concept of ai. I do believe AI is the way to freedom for individuals. I think that we’re gonna have to shift how we work. And I think hopefully gonna enable us if we allow ourselves to have more freedom. And to freedom to kind of live our dreams rather than, than thinking it’s gonna take jobs.
But going back to the concept of your children, you know, I was, as, as you were talking, I was thinking about even my own childhood, you know, like the majority of people that I [00:58:00] knew grew up as latchkey kids. We didn’t, we had parents that had a lot of trauma and PTSD.
And so we were kind of bubbled, right? And so kind of passed that along. But there has been a shift in society. We went from latchkey kids where are your kids? To helicopter parenting. And I think that’s all the trauma. It’s all these traumatized people and very fearful people that are parenting.
And so there is a level of fear that has to be faced and addressed because eventually the kids are gonna leave the nest. Like you are raising adults, you are raising individuals that are going to be able to navigate the world. And that’s really what you wanna do as a parent. I’m raising adults so that they go out in the world and are, be able to face whatever they need to face.
I’m not like keeping kids. We wanna give our kids the greatest opportunity to be able to handle any adversity. And sometimes that can feel scary for parents. It can be [00:59:00] scary to let go or to see them get hurt or to face big moments. But that’s how, like, that’s what they’re here to do. It life ex experiential, as you mentioned, it’s not about bubbling or wrapping our kids because then they’ll be too afraid to live.
Right?
Britton: Well, yeah, I mean, and we, we, this is where like, I think Carol and I have been trying to, to kinda like emphasize the point is that we really went from this perspective that. Life is, you know, just a series of events that happen to us to really, it’s this spiritual journey. And when we drop deeper into trust with life, when we drop deeper into trust with, with how the flow of energy is gonna be in our, in our life and with our children, we can just trust that things are gonna work out the way they’re supposed to work out the way that it’s beneficial for the souls of those that are embodied.
And that’s how I feel I live now. It’s not from this place of [01:00:00] like mechanical prediction of fears, although it’s important to understand the 3D world and like what it can do. And of course we teach our children that, but it’s balanced now with this idea that we are spiritual beings and that we’re here for spiritual evolution, not just mental evolution.
Right. It’s a spiritual emotional evolution. So there is a guidance force, a guiding hand. It’s through all of it. And I think that’s a big part of how we live our lives. So I can’t not, I can’t not mention that when it comes to this trust and fear, because we moved through that. We totally moved through it.
We know what the threshold feels like to like, be like, oh my God, if I walk away from academic performance and math, my kid’s gonna be an idiot and he’s not gonna have the job and he’s not gonna, you’re not gonna, all of that was something that we confronted. Yeah. And so I’m telling you I understand you’re saying, it is true.
Everyone that does this, the alternative education, they have to confront those thresholds. But there is some beautiful things on the other side of that that you just don’t even know are waiting for you. [01:01:00]
Carolee: Yeah. I wanna add something, you know, going back to what I said about my own education and photography and what I wanted to do and this, these three avenues and none of them felt truly alive for me.
Mm-hmm. And so then what? I believe that the way in which the world is shifting is calling us each into this revolutionary approach to how we make money and how we live our soul, destiny, like in providing services to the world. And so ultimately, there actually is an avenue for me to do everything I love to do.
My art, my poetry, my photography, my storytelling, my like what really pulses had I been held through soul development and guided into a discovery of what my unique blueprint said about me and the potential for me. You know, maybe I wouldn’t have been [01:02:00] so stuck in like the exploration of what could be possible for me in a, a vocational realm, right?
And I think, you know, we’re at this threshold. We’re at this point in our society where we are being called into thinking about ourselves in a completely new way. You know, you look at, for example, the invention of an airplane or the invention of anything. Anyone who invented something had this sort of like inner rebel that was like, I’m gonna look at life different.
You can’t look at life different when you’re so programmed to be inside of a box. Here are your avenues for success. Go to school and then you do these jobs for these people and this is where you make the most money. And this is the maximum amount of money. You know, like that’s all an a paradigm that’s dying.
What we’re fostering with our children is what’s your dream? How can we develop [01:03:00] that essence of who you are and then trust that if there’s a job that somebody else created that fits your dream, that you’ll find it and you’ll be happy. Or maybe you’ll just be a pioneer and do it your own way. And that’s cool too.
Like we don’t have to live in somebody else’s paradigm anymore of what is right and what’s wrong. Right. It’s, it’s all this gray area of exploration and creativity and expression like I saw, what is her name? Lindsay Sterling. She plays that violin and she like does her leg kicks and dances in this really bizarre, amazing new way.
And she went on to America’s Got Talent and like they completely denied her. They were like, nobody wants to see that. And she tells this story about how she cried in the bathroom about the rejection and then decided to just start posting her stuff on, on this new platform called YouTube. And then it blew up had she been accepted into the paradigm that people said, this is how you do it.
This is how [01:04:00] you succeed. She would’ve actually been in this box of control and maybe even limited by what they wanted her artistic expression to be. But because she was rejected in that paradigm and given the freedom to explore and just express in her own way, like artists Express in their own way, we’re all actually artists.
Whether or not we express with a medium of art, like the, the engineer who’s really deep in math is an artist with their way in which they’re creating too. That requires a level of presence with yourself and a knowing of yourself and courage to be different. And I think that’s what we really need to focus on giving our children in education is that courage to be different and the foundation of.
Academics so that they know where they’re standing and they feel competent. And then the freedom to explore to quote unquote make mistakes. Because truly we learn through doing so do something, and if it works, do more of it. If it doesn’t work, [01:05:00] then what can you do differently? Like, I’m trying to do that for myself at 42.
How amazing does it feel? It feels amazing to actually give that to my kids. Like let them experience it as children, as they’re being raised in it, you know, and the world is their oyster. I think that there’s gonna be so many opportunities that they will create themselves or that will come to them because of this magnetism within themselves of not having to live according to somebody else’s roles.
They get to discover what they truly came here to be and to do. Like each one of us has just this unique blueprint of who we are, and the journey is to discover that and live our highest timeline.
Gissele: You know, I was thinking about, as you were talking, and I’ve thought about this so much what would the vision of a new education system be, and one of the things that we teach children is conformity and what they’re [01:06:00] programmed to do is to belong.
Children have such a need and a desire to belong that. Has they’ve been taught conformity that makes it difficult for them to go out and expand in their greatest vision and to see, and to be different because especially the way showers they’re meant to, to not do things that aligned. You talked about the Wright brothers, for example, the Wright brothers.
Nobody was flying. There was a competition, but nobody had ever flown before. Like successfully. They had to hold onto the vision every single time they crashed. And every single time somebody said, see, we’re not meant to fly. So for you to hold that vision against the green can feel almost life threatening.
If you are in an environment where you were taught conformity, when you’re taught like, this is how we do things. This is right and this is wrong. And so it does take a lot of courage to do that. And we are [01:07:00] society in general that really fears different and we fear different because I think of what that means for us, for people that are different, that are living different.
It means potentially for some people, an end to what they know, right? This is why all of these things that were people deemed different like trans rights and L-G-B-T-Q and, even people that are like doing things like being furries, like people that dress up as animals and they just embody and hey, that’s not a threat to me.
But for some people they’re like, well, if that’s the case then I don’t know what’s gonna happen in this world. I’m not gonna know how to navigate this world. And that can feel threatening. So it really is about dealing with ourselves and our own fears so that we can create environments where we’re not afraid of exploration, where we’re not afraid of individuation, where it doesn’t have to be so difficult to be so different and not [01:08:00] belong.
Because that’s currently what our kids are taught. They’re taught conformity. They’re taught that belonging is more important than, than creativity, than different color. Inside. These lines don’t be different. Two plus two always equals four. Not always you get like an an egg and a sperm that goes back to one.
I like to say one
Britton: plus one equals three. And the reason why I say that and is because with, with me and her, there becomes the we. Mm-hmm. And so we have a third entity that actually arises out of that. Yeah. And so the math that we have been taught, in a way it’s paradigm is right.
But there are other paradigms to look at things at. Yes. So I, even the simple one plus one, yeah. We can confront those things and look at ’em differently. And then what you’re saying now is actually very in, in tune to what we were kind of closing the last session with. You know, it’s the integration of differences, not the [01:09:00] conformity that we need to be focused on.
Ah, man, look at creation. You walk outside and hopefully if you’re not in this city, you see the diversity of life. You see the diversity of the rolling hills, the streams, the rocks, even the rocks on our property. We have there, there was a massive flood here in 2013 and it brought in so many rocks from way, way up the mountains.
And so on our property we have granites and crystals and quartz and all these things. And it’s so beautiful to see the diversity and its diversity. When we look out in the universe, everything’s so different and everything is, is beautiful in its own right. And that is creation. So why aren’t weinvested in, fostering that diversity and bringing it up?
Let’s get into the diversity of the soul. Let’s get into what the soul expression wants. You know, like really foster that from an educational paradigm. And we can see a society that will thrive because everyone is connected and our souls know it.
And when we are allowed to [01:10:00] express that, then every need will be taken care of automatically because someone will come in to the experience, to our realm, to our life planet, and they will fulfill that need for society. And they will do so in a way that they don’t feel resentful. They don’t hate it. They actually, it’s their journey.
It’s their calling, you know, like they want to do it. and they will bring something new to it. And so like that’s the paradigm. That’s a before is if we will embrace it. Mm-hmm.
Carolee: But it’s requiring, like we’re, we’re being called to be warriors of this new way, right? Like even here. So we, we did this journey.
We, we traveled the world. We had a beautifully aligned caregiver who also helped in the education of our kids. We landed back from Egypt in Utah and decided, having never lived in Colorado before that Colorado was gonna be our new home. Mm-hmm. Part of what guided us here was the fact that we connected with aligned communities that offered the kind of [01:11:00] programs that were alternative and just really spoke to this soul development.
But interestingly enough, just this year after only being in Colorado for one year, there, one of the programs that we have our children attending in North Boulder came under attack by a former employee who just wasn’t in alignment and she reported the program to the city of Boulder. And the city of Boulder came in and shut down this program that had been operating based on some zoning violations.
And they had been, took 20 plus years. 20 plus years, right. This, this, these elders that are really like holding ceremony with the land and connected over whether or not like the plumbing and the, and the are, are up to code in some of the buildings, or do they actually have permits for these buildings?
You know, Chris, some, some of the actual zoning complaints you. Have legitimacy, but the [01:12:00] real question we need to ask is why, why are we so controlling through procedure and through like government to limit like the freedom, you know? And, and there was this article that was written and people’s comments were like, oh, the parents doing this must be like just stupid hippies, you know?
And it’s like, actually we really need to have a revolution around education. And part of the problem that I think the zoning kind of tapped into is public education. The enrollment in that is said to be down and people are doing these alternative. You need to ask why.
Britton: instead of asking why the city’s like, well how can we enforce and bring the the enrollment up?
It’s, they’re just all on the wrong paradigm altogether, you know? So it is kind of a sad thing that’s happened. And we’re, we’ve been dealing with that this year. Yeah. 2025. It’s been a very big struggle for one of our child. It’s
Gissele: It’s all fear. you’re asking them to go beyond the use of force.
If you look at [01:13:00] systems, and I also, again, have been studying systems for a very long time, which is how I ended up understanding that we are all the systems. We have created systems through our fear, through our, unwillingness to look at ourselves and to do the difficult work and to really have loving compassion for ourselves and other people.
That we have these systems based on separation, isolation, punishment. And so people don’t wanna do that. They just wanna do what they’ve always done. And so with the education system, when you look at, at what children have been taught, they’ve been taught that they should all be the, you were talking about diversity, right?
Like right, everybody should look the same. Plastic surgeons, everybody should have the same nose issue, body should look the same. Everybody should have straight hair. Everybody should have a specific body type. They’re all trying to be the rose. Like what? Just one specific type of flower. Instead of saying, how do we embrace the beauty of diversity?
Because when we embrace the beauty of diversity, you’re less likely to be controlled. You can’t be sold [01:14:00] certain things, you can’t be put in a certain box. And this is not to criticize anyone in particular. This is all us. The, the fact that we are in this society. It’s because we all contributed or aligned to this particular perspective about fear-based approaches.
They need to punish, they need to hate, they need to separate, they need to align and belong. And so changing these systems really begins with changing ourselves, which is the work you guys have been doing in terms of you authentically being yourselves and authentically looking at your spiritual journey and authentically being in relationship with one another.
And in relationship to community, those systems are probably the last things that are gonna change.
But as a consciousness, we’re not at the stage.
I think we’re still in a lot of fear. I do think that based on what you have said before, I think we’re already, like, there’s a future self, that’s already there, that’s [01:15:00] calling us all because I, I do think that we have achieved it, but the version of us that’s living right now is seeing all of these systems collapse and seeing all of these people as they’re desperately grasping at straws,
There’s way too many people, thanks to social media awakening.
when we are stuck in fear, ’cause we talked about fear a lot and like how a lot of people are still stuck in fear.
Britton: They, they look at these people in quote unquote authority places and they, they think that they must submit to them. And I just wanna say that I think part of the cure for fear is inspiring stories. And that’s why Carolee and I sort of branded our story the magical story of us. And mm-hmm this is, this is inclusive of like, our story as a couple, our story individually, our story as a family, but also everybody’s magical story that’s waiting to be experienced, if you will step into it, if you will, challenge the status quo, if you will, challenge the [01:16:00] conditioning that you were given.
And our inspiring story to share is that we can heal from the deepest, darkest sorrows and we can step into a life that is a sovereignty that is around, that is abundant in freedom, that is abundant in the experiences that we want to actually live. Like Carolee listed all the things that she had passion about.
And guess what, now she’s found the intersection of all of those things in her life, right? And, and so have I and, and that then the we, the third, the one plus one equals three has also found that. And we, and that’s this, that’s what you’re seeing here is this experience of us on this podcast. And so we’re so grateful to have been able to share this message on your show and talk with you and find a lot of alignment around these things.
And so, you know, if people wanna hear more about our journey and like connect with our, our offering, they can go to the magical story of us.com and join our mailing list and, and learn all about the different offerings we have around how they can heal and step into this sovereignty and this empowerment.[01:17:00]
Gissele: Awesome. You actually answered my last question, which was, where can people find you and work with you? So that’s amazing. It’s very aligned. This is so great. Thank you so much for this conversation. I’m so grateful for the work that you guys are doing. I’m so impressed by the, your courage to be able to, to dive deep into yourselves and to be authentic as possible, and to raise little people that are also going to be bringing that into the world.
So my deepest gratitude to both of you thank you and thank you everyone for tuning in for an episode of The Love and Compassion Podcast with Gissele. See you soon. Thank you, Gissele.
Carolee: Thank you so much.