Anita Rao 0:00
At some point mid-pandemic, inspired by a bout of existential malaise, I decided to do a values exercise. If you've never done this, it's where you sit down with a list of more than 100 values and try to boil it down to which ones are most meaningful to you. I came up with curiosity, connection and self improvement. The first two are self explanatory. And the third speaks to a strong impulse I have to push myself to think in new ways, grow and change.
So you'd think all of this would make me a prime candidate for self help books. And while I've read a handful, there's something about the genre that I've always found grating. And it wasn't until this week that I put my finger on just what that was. I decided to deepen my knowledge of self-help by picking up one of the genres heavy hitters, Rhonda Byrne's 2006 book, "The Secret," which centers on one big principle.
The Secret Documentary 1:03
And that principle can be summed up in three simple words: thoughts become things.
Anita Rao 1:17
That's a clip from the documentary "The Secret" which preceded the book. And I followed what Rhonda instructed me to do. I kept a gratitude journal, wrote some daily affirmations, and mocked up a vision board. But the deeper I got into the book, the more alarmed I became at its messaging.
And I had an aha moment. One of the fatal flaws of this book is something I see echoed so often in self-help, the failure to acknowledge any of the systemic forces that shape our lives. I am open to learning new philosophies and ideas about how to live, but there must be a way on that path to acknowledge privilege and difference. This is Embodied. I'm Anita Rao.
The Secret Documentary 2:06
When I first understood "The Secret," I was getting bills every day. And I said, "This is — how do I turn this around?" The Law of Attraction states that what you focus on you will get. So I got a bank statement, I whited out the total, and I put a new total in there. I put exactly how much I wanted to see in the bank. So that what if I just visualize checks coming in the mail? So I would just visualize a bunch of checks coming in the mail. Within just one month, things start to change, and it is amazing. Today I just get checks in the mail.
Anita Rao 2:39
That is another little taste of "The Secret" for y'all. And while the skeptic in me has a really hard time taking this man seriously, this book is a sensation. It is one of the best selling self help books of all time, championed by Oprah and so many others.
Kristen Meinzer 2:55
I consider that the crown jewel of modern self-help books. The self help book that, you know, really brought us to this moment.
Anita Rao 3:05
That's Kristen Meinzer. She's a popular culture critic and podcast host who has been deeply immersed in self-help since 2017. In the podcast, How To Be Fine, formally known as By the Book, she and her friend, Jolenta Greenberg, documented themselves living by the rules of more than 50 self-help books. Everything from "The Four Agreements" to "Atomic Habits," to The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck." But the very first book on their list was, you guessed it, "The Secret."
Kristen Meinzer 3:34
The first thing I noticed about the book early on was, there's a lot of scientific language in the book. And there are a lot of people with scientific titles. People with PhDs from organizations that when I looked them up, aren't actually necessarily accredited universities. There is the Law of Attraction, which is always capitalized, capital L, capital A. And it explains that what energy we put out there is the energy we get back in the world. And that is scientifically proven true. Like attracts like, which I think is hilarious, because any physicist knows actually that's not true. They actually repel each other. Like you can't put two positives together so I think that's very funny. So that bugged me just from a scientific perspective. But also this idea that you got at, which is you can think positively as much as you want to, but that is not going to eliminate structural inequalities. You can think as positively as you want to, and that's not going to somehow protect you from hate crimes, for example. And so I took real issue with that. There's also the flip side of, you know, all those positive things that you can get back, there's the negative. And so does the person who gets cancer they didn't put enough positive thoughts out into the universe, so they invited the cancer? The person who survived the Holocaust, did they have to be in the concentration camp because they didn't think positively enough? And the book actually touches on this at one point and says, "Yes, that's what happened. Your thoughts weren't positive enough."
Anita Rao 5:07
Yeah, those were the moments where my jaw literally dropped. And I was like, "Is this book actually saying this, like, this seems totally wild." But there's a lasting appeal that the secret has. And there's a lasting appeal of a lot of these books. And I've been trying to think about, like, what is that and with "The Secret," I did feel like it did help me kind of pay attention to the tone and the character of my thoughts, which I think is helpful. Like I — I learned that I'm really hard on myself, and maybe I can like, be a little bit nicer. But I'm curious for you, like, as you've worked through some of these kind of big ones in the landscape, what are the ones that have stuck with you where you feel like, "Okay, there's actually something useful, I'm taking away?"
Kristen Meinzer 5:48
Yeah, well, they're not all bad. Not all these books are bad, a lot of them are garbage, I'm just gonna say frankly. And even doing my best to follow the rules of the heavy hitters, bad things still happen to me. But there are some books that I really enjoyed. And I have to admit that I think there were some confirmation bias involved. There was a book about committing random acts of kindness that made me so happy. It makes me happy to help an elderly person in my neighborhood, cross the street, or open the doors for people who have strollers. And it does feel good to help people. Most of us feel better when we have a little magic moment of connection when somebody smiles at us and says thank you, right. So those have been great for me, I've really enjoyed those. I've also enjoyed the books that say, go on a walk and listen to the birds and look at the leaves on the trees change color. But again, that's probably confirmation bias, because I happen to already love taking my daily walk every day. And I really believe what makes one person happy, isn't necessarily going to make somebody else happy out there.
Anita Rao 6:54
There is one season of your podcast where you all dug back through the archives of self help books from various decades in the 1900s. You did "The Joy of Sex" in the 1970s. You did a few others. I'm curious what you noticed about how the messaging of self-help evolved in the latter half of the 20th century?
Kristen Meinzer 7:13
Oh, yes. Well, you know, to answer that question, I should first mention what it was like at the beginning of the 20th century. It was very much still the Horatio Alger idea of, like, especially in America, you can be anything you want to. And so at the beginning of the century, we saw a lot of books that were really about how to win friends and influence people, how to go out there and, you know, be the person you want to be in present as that in the world. And I found some of those books quite appealing to be honest with you. But as we got later into the 20th century, some of the books started to be a little bit more edgy, as you mentioned, "The Joy of Sex". And those books were trying to talk about things that maybe we're considered taboo in the past. Same with feminism, we lived by a book called "Phyllis Diller's Housekeeping Hints" at one point, which was really pushing back against the idea of women being primarily the housekeepers and the wipes of the world. And so we saw the boundaries being pushed, but at the same time, there were still the trappings of misogyny and of inequality that were written into those books because the authors, as hard as they tried, were still living in a sexist, racist, classist society, I still see that very much in books today, there are a lot of books about female empowerment that still play into certain stereotypes of what women are and what men are unfortunately.
Anita Rao 8:48
For however much the self-help genre has or hasn't changed, what's definitely grown is an appetite for the content. There are more than 85,000 Self-Help titles in existence in the US today. And that number is three times what it was a decade ago. Many people think the self-help genre started with the 1936 book, Kristen mentioned "How to win friends and influence people," but actually goes back much further.
Beth Blum 9:18
Some say that we've had self-help for as long as we've had books and literature and reading.
Anita Rao 9:25
That's Beth Blum. She's a professor at Harvard and the author of "The Self Help Compulsion: Searching For Advice In Modern Literature." It was actually her mom who inadvertently nudged her into the world of self-help. While Beth admits to not reading every book her mom passed her way, a few of them piqued her curiosity. And as a literary scholar, she started to wonder just how deep the textual history of self help was.
Beth Blum 9:49
So there are people who say the Bible is early self-help are the Analects of Confucius in the period of classical antiquity. You had authors writing guides as to how to manage anger and worry, and how to master public speaking that really kind of resemble what we think of as a self-help handbook today. So every period has had its self help literature, its advice, literature, conduct literature. But in my study, I point to the 19th century and the publication of a book called "Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character and Conduct" by an author called Samuel Smiles of all things. And the book came out in 1859. And it was the first self-help best seller in the way that we think of today.
Anita Rao 9:49
And you say that while we think of self-help as a very individualistic thing, something that's really promoting self sufficiency and actually had much more radical roots. It was more about bettering the collective. Talk to me about that radical piece of it.
Beth Blum 10:51
Right, so Smiles' book, it was actually the first book to use the phrase 'self-help,' as its title. And it originated as lectures that Smiles gave. He was a journalist and an editor for the Leeds Times. And he gave these lectures to mutual improvement societies. So these were groups of working people trying to educate themselves and improve their conditions, and Smiles gave lectures kind of describing the biographies of different individuals throughout history, who transcended their circumstances and beat the odds to become successes in their various professional fields. And when he saw the positive response to these lectures, Smiles realized their inspirational potential. And he decided to try to publish a book about them. So initially, the project was really about inspiring workers to become self sufficient, and to have some agency over their futures and not to rely on the government for aid and assistance. But as time went on, the message of self help became increasingly co-opted by the government as kind of an excuse for, you know, you don't need to give aid to the people because they'll just help themselves.
Anita Rao 11:58
So this book in 1859 was really a watershed moment of realizing self-help could be a publishing sensation. It's not just novels that people want to read it's books like this. And that kind of continued throughout the 1900s. And you say that self-help operates in waves, there's an action and then a reaction. I'd love for you to talk about the 1936 book, we've been hearing about "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie. What was that book reacting to? And what was the reaction to it?
Beth Blum 12:27
Yeah, I mean, that book was reacting to, I think, a feeling of economic precarity, the Great Depression. Carnegie, he has a reputation for advocating kind of manipulation, and just being transactional in your dealings with people. But actually, what he says is, when you appreciate something about another person, when you recognize they're doing something well, just articulate that, verbalize it. He says, I'm not recommending flattery, I'm recommending sincere appreciation. And I think that's actually valuable advice. But the message of his title really becomes interpreted to mean well, we should just devote our lives to pleasing other people, and we should just be sort of instrumental and careerist in all our dealings with people. And so following that group of self-help you get another wave that's suggesting, well, instead of focusing on pleasing others, let's think about self fulfillment. Let's think about what our own values are and kind of inner flourishing rather than just this other directedness of Carnegie's self-help ethic.
Anita Rao 13:29
This action and reaction in self-help is a pattern that repeats itself over and over. The 1980s were a decade of opulence, the romanticization of business and excess, just think about the Wolf of Wall Street. That ethos is encapsulated in the late 80s books, "Unlimited Power and the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People." Then in reaction to the intensity of the 80s, 90s self-help took a much softer, more introspective approach with books like Eckhart Tolle's "The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment." They're also themes that reemerge over time. Like stoicism, or focusing on the things that you can control. This philosophy is embedded in some of the most popular self-help books now championed by folks like Tim Ferriss, and Ryan Holiday. So we have a lot of content focused around thinking about you. But I was curious if there were any self-help books that echoed the more collective roots of this genre? I put the question to Kristen.
Kristen Meinzer 14:41
Oh, yes, absolutely. There are books about community care rather than just self care. And these are books that I like quite a bit because the fact is that oftentimes self-help books, they have a smoking so internally, they have us looking at all the things that we could be doing better for ourselves, and sometimes the things that are making us unhappy, aren't ourselves. There are bigger cultural, and societal issues that working with others are going to help fix way more than me saying a mantra every morning when I have my coffee.
Anita Rao 15:15
Beth, you are a literature scholar. And I'm curious about your perspective on kind of the stigma around self-help. I do feel like there is this kind of belief that like, "Oh, self-help is like the lesser kind of book or it's like, not as serious as you know, other kinds of literature." How do you think about that?
Beth Blum 15:34
Yeah, as a literature scholar, I'm fascinated by the form of self-help, particularly historically. And in suspending the intellectual impulse to come down really hard on the industry and put it down. And part of that, I think, is something that's sort of beautiful and valuable, which is thinking about what the wisdom of the past has to offer contemporary readers thinking about how other people's experiences can be useful today, Thinking about creating a community of readers and a kind of constellation through the printed book, all of these things are formally, I think, very interesting qualities of self-help that tend to get overlooked when we just think about its systemic collisions and blindnesses.
Anita Rao 16:19
We've talked about how what's trending in self-help is a reflection of the questions and anxieties of the contemporary moment. And I'm curious about if there are any self-help trends that you're looking out for in the future, that could be a response to some of the cultural dialogue that we're having right now?
Beth Blum 16:35
Well, I think that today, you know, most self help is actually categorized under this broader rubric of mindfulness or wellness culture. And I think one's experience with self-help today is not about cracking open a sel- help manual. anymore. It's really just part of the atmosphere. It's about listening to podcasts. It's about encountering memes. And just these snippets of self-help cliches; be in the present, finding your true self, they've become so pervasive that it's almost impossible to escape. But it's also impossible to identify when we are being influenced by self-help and when we're not.
Anita Rao 16:35
Yeah, the internet has really, really changed the game of self-help and how we get this information. I would love to end asking both of you to share, I guess, where you turn now, when you maybe have that itch for self-help advice, and the itch to kind of get some guidance or insight into something that you're working with? Is there a type of self-help that you turn to? Is there something else that you do instead? Kristen, I'll start with you.
Kristen Meinzer 17:46
Well, after 10 seasons of living religiously by the rules of self-help books, I like to keep it a little bit lighter now. And if I want a little pick me up in self-help language, there are a few different Instagrams that I like to follow that, you know, Viola Davis, for example, she always has positive, upbeat things to say where she's cheering for people, you know, Rate My Dog, which is another channel, which is just celebrating like, positivity, and what is good about dogs and what is good about being alive in just tiny little snackable ways that are fun and remind us of what's good in us. And so, you know, that's kind of my favorite place to find a little pick me up right now.
Anita Rao 18:33
How about you Beth?
Beth Blum 18:35
Well, you know, despite my skepticism towards its commercialization, I really do love stoical philosophy. And when I'm very desperate, for instance, in the dark days of the pandemic, I would turn to the manual of Epictetus, the Greco Roman, he was a former slave and his student compiled all of his wisdom into a handbook. And I find it just a very grounding experience. It's all about kind of finding a sense of proportion and he recommends kind of zooming out from your experience and looking down on it as if from above and putting everything in its place. And I just find it to be a really constructive experiment.
Oludara Adeeyo 19:28
The greatest self-help experience I've had came from the trauma of losing my mother about 10 years ago. It brought my own mortality to the forefront of my mind and encouraged me to seek the self care that I needed. Going to therapy, starting a new career, reflecting on behaviors and thoughts, going on long walks, practicing yoga, learning to meditate and use breathing exercises.
Blake Randall 20:06
So I vividly recall a self-help experience that occurred during a particularly challenging time in my life. I was struggling with low self esteem, a lack of direction and a sense of being lost. So in my search for answers, I stumbled upon a timeless classic book known as "How to Win Friends and Influence People" by Dale Carnegie. I was immediately captivated by his practical advice and emphasis on building genuine relationships with others. As I consistently applied his principles, I noticed a remarkable shift in how people perceive and responded to me. I found myself engaging in more meaningful conversations, building stronger connections and experiencing a newfound sense of confidence and self worth.
Anita Rao 20:52
One of the reasons I think the self help genre has stood the test of time is because it's a pretty low barrier source of guidance and a moment of crisis. I genuinely find creativity themes self-help books to be pretty motivating when I'm in a rut. Elizabeth Gilbert's "Big Magic" and Julia Cameron's "The Artist's Way" have been there for me when I really needed a dose of inspiration. It can be a nice brain break to let someone else tell you what to do, or how to be. And this support is especially helpful when you're going through big life transitions.
Sondra Rose Marie 21:25
My best friend had gotten melanoma and passed very unexpectedly. But also I had come out of the closet as a lesbian, and I was looking for love. So I quit my job and I dropped everything and moved to LA.
Anita Rao 21:39
That's Sondra Rose Marie, she's a writer based in San Diego. It was when all of that change was happening in her life back in 2011, that she first turned to self-help.
Sondra Rose Marie 21:50
And that's when I came across Marie Forleo and her book, "Make Every Man Want You." And even though I am a lesbian, and I'm not interested in men, the book wasn't really about, like, attracting a man, it was just attracting people to you by being comfortable with who you are. And I saw changes as soon as I started reading and implementing what I learned in the book.
Anita Rao 22:10
So later on in this journey, there was one particular life coach who stood out to you. You bought her books, you consumed her content, you joined her online Facebook community. And I know you don't want to name her for privacy, but can you just kind of describe who she was and why her philosophy appealed to you.
Sondra Rose Marie 22:27
She was a life coach who was pretty popular on Instagram, I would call her like an influencer life coach. And it was very much like female empowerment. it was kind of at the same time that like the girl boss era was starting to take off. So she was like a great combo of,like, you can build the life you want while being a strong woman. And she also really embraced her femininity, which I thought was really cool, because I feel like for a lot of women, we're told, you know, don't be too girly, because people won't take you seriously. And this particular life coach was hardcore about being super feminine, while also showing herself as, like, a strong and capable businesswoman and explaining that we could all do the same thing.
Anita Rao 23:09
So there was a Facebook group that was part of this coach's extended community and you were pretty active and involved in the Facebook group. Talk to me a bit about that, and what that community space offered you.
Sondra Rose Marie 23:23
The idea that she, like, pitched it with was that we could all connect and support each other through whatever we wanted to talk about. So you had women on there saying things like, "I got laid off," or "I just realized my husband is cheating on me." But then you had people saying things like, "I just filed my first LLC," or "I had a $10,000 month in my business." So it was just all sorts of life and work things. And it seemed really, really idealistic. Like everybody seemed to have everybody else's best interest at heart for the most part.
Anita Rao 23:56
So you initially really felt like it was a safe and comfortable space. You were seeing people affirm one another there was, you know, support of a diverse group of people supportive, diverse kinds of things people were experiencing. But there was a moment in 2017 when everything really shifted. It was among the ongoing conversations about the removal of Confederate monuments. There was a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, which resulted in more than 30 people injured and one dead. And in the wake of an incident you turned to the Facebook group, take me to that day and visiting that space and what you found.
Sondra Rose Marie 24:29
I actually wasn't at home when that happened. I was visiting my grandma, and I didn't have any of my friends or my support network around me. So when that happened, I immediately wanted to talk to people about it. Like, I woke up the next morning I saw the news. And it was jarring. Not shocking. Like, I'm a black woman in America. Racism isn't new to me. But I think it was jarring to see so many people so comfortable showing their faces marching and saying, like, you know, "We hate you for your skin tone." Like, that's, that was a lot.
So I wanted to connect. And I thought, Okay, well I'm sure people in the Facebook group are talking about it. So I'll go in there. And I was surprised when I logged in that I didn't see anything. And I kind of scrolled thinking, okay, maybe they talked about it earlier. And I finally came across one post that said, you know, I think our Black sisters and sisters of color, you know, could really use our love and support today.
And I went to like the posts, and as soon as I went to like it, it disappeared. I messaged the person who had posted it. And I said, Hey, you know, thank you for posting that. I wanted to engage with it, but I don't seem to be able to. And that's when she explained to me that the self-help coach who was running, the Facebook group had told her that it was inappropriate and had taken it down.
Anita Rao 25:51
Wow. So in that moment, did you reach out to the coach? Or what did you do? What were you feeling?
Sondra Rose Marie 25:59
Oh, I felt betrayed. I spent time and money on this person. And I believed, you know, so much of what she was saying. And so I felt betrayed as a part of her community. I felt like, I didn't really have a place in this community. You know, as long as things were fine, I was welcome to be there. But the minute my issues came up, it wasn't a safe place for me to be. And it wasn't a place that cared about me.
I didn't reach out to her. I thought about it, I really did. And I actually talked to the woman who had made the post about reaching out and we both agreed that we didn't think she'd really be able to hear us. It was like, when you take off your rose colored glasses, and you start to see things and you're like, "Wait a minute, how did I miss that before?" but even the woman who had posted it, who was a White woman, she was like, you know, I feel betrayed. And we both ended up leaving the group.
Anita Rao 26:58
As Sondra stepped away from this group and took off her rose colored glasses, she started to notice other examples of how leaders in the self-help space we're failing their followers of color. To fill the void of that particular self help community in her own life, Sondra sought out the support of a licensed therapist, and did a lot of thinking and writing about how she wanted to approach the self help space if she ever went back.
Sondra Rose Marie 27:26
So I would say before I dove into it, right? Like I cannon balled into the swimming pool, and I loved it. Now I feel like I'm at the beach, and I barely put a toe in sometimes. Like I'm reading one right now about tidying up. But it's written by a licensed counselor. So now I think if I'm going to play in that space, or even kind of consume anything, I look at who's writing it, and if they have actual credentials of any type, because there is no like overarching view of who's writing these books and where they're getting their information. And I feel like it makes more sense to go with someone who does have some sort of ethical standard they're being held to and knows what they're talking about.
Anita Rao 28:09
We've talked throughout the show about the tension between the very individualistic focus of a lot of self help books and kind of the reality that we need to join as a collective to push back against some of these systemic forces to really create change. How do you reckon with that tension in your own life and in your own readings of self help?
Sondra Rose Marie 28:32
I feel like to some degree self-help doesn't really talk about marginalized voices, right? So I'm Black, I'm a woman, and I'm a lesbian. And I feel like, in some ways that frees me from having to feel like I need to totally follow anything I read in self-help, just because I'm so outside of the world that self-help creates, like, the reality they're living in. And so I feel like for me, I have a really strong found family. And that's so big in the queer community. When it comes to self help books, like, we talk a lot about, like, what we're reading or whatever. And if there are any useful nuggets, those are shareable. But I don't take it as seriously as I used to. I trade with my friends and my found family more information on what I learned from my therapist than I do on what I read from self-help these days.
Anita Rao 29:26
Do you think that there is a way as a collective that we can push self-help to think deeper to be kind of more systemic and its approach or do you think there's something kind of inherent to the nature of self help that precludes that?
Sondra Rose Marie 29:40
I think that in order to push self-help to be there, we need to get to the level where it is more inclusive. There have to be more inclusive voices creating self-help. One thing that stood out to me from the beginning of my journey into reading self-help, is that there weren't many books by people who looked anything like me. Like, not just Black, but even people of color, it was a lot of White faces.
And so I think if we had more people of color writing, if we had more people have different lived realities like physical and mental abilities, you know, neuro divergence, or queer people, I think that would make a huge difference. I also think it wouldn't be as accepted, because I think part of the draw of self-help is it makes you feel good. And sometimes talking about racism, or sexism or homophobia doesn't feel good. And so I think a lot of times, those books, books that cover those types of things don't necessarily make it into what we consider self health or wellness. Those go more into like cultural studies. So I think that's the problem is people aren't, aren't willing to look at the harder stuff and call that self-help as well.
Anita Rao 31:07
I love the question Sondra raised in that answer. And my conversation with her left me with a lot to think about, If we're only turning to the self-help books that comfortably challenge us, how much are we really going to grow? Is there space in the genre for work that can help us bridge the gap between individual betterment and social change? If you have any book recommendations for content in the self help genre that you think really goes into these questions, hit us up, we would love to hear from you. As we close out, I want to leave you with thoughts from two people who have been wrestling with the limitations of self help in their own lives, a former self help guru, and someone who lived by the rules of a self help book each month, for an entire year.
Rokas Leonavičius 31:53
I was 19 when I became a part of the spiritual community or self-help community. I didn't have any comparison to what's what, how the world works, and I was easily impressed. And now when I look back, and many of the teachers I met, there's a lot of good teachings, in the self-help industry and the spirituality. But unfortunately, I also feel that often gives a great space for the egos of the spiritual teachers to hide behind. So I think the main takeaway for me was that there are good teachings, but you shouldn't just take in the whole thing without any second thoughts.
Marianne Powers 32:46
As humans, we've always needed guidance on how to live life, you know, it's why philosophy exists. It's what the village elder used to do. And you could argue it's a really big part of religion. And so self- help in a way is offering that, it's offering guidance, and in some case, there's there's real wisdom in it. But what I don't like any more are books promising to change my life, or if I just do this one thing, everything will be okay. I suppose my biggest learning was that actually I didn't need to change myself. I needed to accept myself as I am.
Anita Rao 33:31
Embodied is a production of North Carolina Public Radio-WUNC, a listener supported station. If you want to lend your support to this podcast, consider a contribution at wunc.org now. You can find out more about all of the guests we talked to in the show notes of this episode. And a special thanks to everyone who contributed to the show, including Oludara Adeeyo, Blake Randall, Rokas Leonavičius, and Marianne Powers. We appreciate your contributions. This episode was produced by Paige Miranda and edited by Kaia Findlay. Gabriela Glueck also produces for our show. Skylar Chadwick is our intern and Jenni Lawson is our sound engineer. Amanda Magnus is our regular editor and Quilla wrote our theme music. Thanks also to Sean Roux for his technical support.
And thank you for listening to Embodied and happy 2024. We would love to hear from you as we kick off this new year of the show. What topics do you want us to talk about? What questions do you want to hear explored on Embodied? Leave us a voicemail or send us an email. We're at embodied@wunc.org. And if you liked the show, please spread the word in your own networks. Word of mouth recommendations are the best way to support this podcast. Until next time, I'm Anita Rao taking on the taboo with you.