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Content warning: Brief mention of drug use. 

S2E11 TRANSCRIPT:

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Yucca: Welcome back to the Wonder Science-Based Paganism. I'm your host Yucca

Mark: And I'm your host, Mark.

Yucca: And this episode, we are talking about personal growth. So both, or all three of the past, present and future.

Mark: Right, right. Because one of the things that is incumbent on us as science-based pagans is to recognize that a personality is a process that life is not about arriving somewhere. It's about. Taking an ongoing set of steps forward. And we as pagans choose to pursue those steps in the pursuit of being better people, being kinder, being more effective being more competent in being happier. And so those are places you never completely arrive. There's always more that can be done in order to teach yourself about those things. And that's what we're going to talk about today.

Yucca: Exactly. So the journey is never done, right. There's always more to learn more, to grow more, to change.

Mark: So frustrating for those of us that are oriented towards perfectionism. The idea that you never actually can get there is incredibly frustrating, but I kind of made my peace with it a while ago.

Yucca: You can make tremendous changes. You can really change your experience of life.

Mark: Indeed. And you can change your experience of yourself. I mean, one of the things that many, if not, most of us are saddled with is harm. That was either intentionally inflicted upon us or accidentally inflicted upon us through processes like neglect from our earlier years. And we benefit by growing to heal from those experiences and taking what wisdom we can from them, but no longer laboring under the messages that they send us it's about who we are and how valuable we are and so forth.

Yucca: Yeah. And no matter how wonderful of parents or families we might've had, they're still human. And we're still part of larger societies. And there's a lot of work, at least for my perspective, that our societies have to go. And lessons that we pick up about ourselves, value judgments about us. That probably aren't very healthy and not very helpful in the long run for living a happy and fulfilled life.

Mark: Yes. And this to take one of what I'm sure it will be many trajectory, side trips. This is a gift that was given to us by the humanistic psychology movement of the 1960s, because until then, at least in the United States and in Europe, people were living to role. The idea was that you were to fit into your expected role as best you possibly could.

And that was supposed to give you fulfillment. And of course it didn't, and that's why the societies were filled with alcohol abuse and kind of quiet misery of people feeling in a trap, but in the human potential movement and humanistic psychology movements of the late 1960s into the early seventies, the idea of.

Really fleshing out and living in the fullness of our individuality became something that was celebrated. And that is now something that many of us see as the worthy pursuit of a conscientious life. And. So we're here to talk about some of the ways that we can help ourselves and one another to be happier and freer and less in pain than we have been because if our spirituality isn't for that, then what exactly is it for really? We don't believe in deities that are going to judge us. We don't believe that we are involved in some kind of a great cosmic balancing act. That's going to measure our quality and then make a determination about whether we reincarnate as cockroaches or not. We have this life. It is the life that's given to us.

And so being ourselves as fully as possible and doing that in a way that's as joyous and as beneficial as possible, becomes the obvious answer to the question. What is the meaning of life?

Yucca: That's beautiful.

Mark: Thank you.

Yucca: Yeah.

Mark: Thank you.

Yucca: Well, let's