Hard to believe it's almost been two weeks since Shay graced our weekly Laddership Pod call with her beautiful stories and experiences.

As many of us continue to reflect on her learnings from whales (and dolphins!) and her powerful healing work with children, some amazing podmates have posted up this video and transcript of the conversation:

Shay Beider: What I Learned From Whales



Here's one of many beautiful quotes from it:

[The whales] loved with a kind of fullness -- like a true love. Like a force of love. At the same time, they had a total sense of freedom. So it wasn't the strings attached kind of love that, as human beings, I think we often are very good at. It wasn’t like "I love, but I love you with attachment with a string... with a little something in return.” They didn't have that at all.

I was like, "Oh, my God! How do you learn to do that?!" Like how do you love so fully, but with such a sense of autonomy that the other being is at every moment free to choose whatever they need to choose that is in their highest and best interest? And yet it's somehow all connected to the sense of family.

And the complexity of that, and the emotional intelligence of that, is extraordinary. As I have learned a little bit more about the whales, I understand now that, with some of them, their brain and neocortex are like six times the size of ours, and it actually wraps around the limbic system so it appears to neuroscientists that they are extraordinarily emotionally intelligent; in many ways, far more advanced than we are in that domain, and I felt that. This extraordinary capacity to love and to hold with preciousness, but also with utter freedom and genuinely -- in me, it created a sense of aspiration for "how could I learn to live my life like that?" And in the quality of the work that I do with children and families, how could I bring that in, that essence of love?