Every journey begins with a moment that asks us to trust something we cannot yet explain.

In this inaugural episode of Bending the Light, Vish shares the unexpected story behind the podcast itself. As he reflects on turning fifty, an encounter with a stranger in a mountain café becomes the catalyst for exploring intuition, synchronicity, and the quiet ways life invites us toward our next chapter. Drawing from the Desiderata, Vedic astrology, yoga, and decades of spiritual practice, he considers how slowing down allows us to recognize meaning where we might otherwise see coincidence.

Rather than asking us to believe in signs, Vish offers a gentler invitation. What changes when we become more attentive to the patterns, people, and experiences already surrounding us? Ancient wisdom is presented not as an escape from modern life, but as a way of seeing it more clearly.

At its heart, this opening conversation reminds us that life may be speaking far more often than we realize. The question is not whether the signs are there. The question is whether we have slowed down enough to notice them.

Points of Light:

1. Awareness Comes Before Understanding — We often search for certainty while overlooking the subtle moments that invite greater clarity and self-awareness.
2. Meaning Is Created Through Attention — A simple encounter becomes transformative, not because it proves anything, but because it invites deeper observation and reflection.
3. Aging Invites Wisdom, Not Resistance — Growing older becomes an opportunity to embrace perspective and purpose rather than resist the natural rhythm of life.
4. Ancient Practices Sharpen Modern Awareness — Meditation, breathwork, and Vedic wisdom are explored not as escapes from reality, but as practices that help us experience everyday life more fully.
5. Intuition Is Strengthened Through Presence — The more we slow down and notice what surrounds us, the more confidently we can respond to life's unexpected invitations.

Get your Personal Karmic Blueprint Reading - https://www.vishchatterji.com/karmic-snapshot

About the Host:

Vish Chatterji is an executive coach, Vedic Astrology teacher, author, and former business executive who helps people bridge ancient wisdom with modern life. After a career spanning engineering, entrepreneurship, and corporate leadership, he now guides leaders, founders, and seekers toward greater clarity through the traditions of Yoga, Meditation, Ayurveda, Vedic Philosophy, and Jyotish, the ancient science of light.

Through his coaching practice, Head & Heart Insights, Vish combines practical business experience with timeless spiritual teachings, inviting people to lead and live with greater awareness, purpose, and presence. He is the author of The Business Casual Yogi and Astrology Decoded, and serves as a Faculty Coach and Educator with the Berkeley Executive Coaching Institute at UC Berkeley.

https://www.vishchatterji.com/

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Chay, welcome to Bending the Light. I'm Vish Chatterjee, car engineer turned karma mechanic. Are you ready to explore karma, dharma, mantra, ritual, and yoga philosophy to help navigate life, but all grounded in our modern world reality, along with a dose of healthy skepticism. I mean, after all, I am a trained engineer. Join me as we navigate the timeless wisdom of my ancestors, the ancient sages of India, from yoga to meditation to Ayurveda and Vedic philosophy, and Jyotish, the science of light, to help make sense of yourself, your life, your karma, and the world around you come with me on this journey to learn the power of bending the light, sign, sign everywhere, a sign. I'm sure all of you heard that song and that particular lyric this year I turned 50. In fact, this week I turned 50, and I'm wondering, what is that sign? What is a birthday? What is the sign of a birthday? One of these came to mind is actually a sign that hung in our hallway for many

years, probably over 20 years. In our hallway, we've had a sign called the Desa Dorada. How many ever heard of this? The Desa de Rada, it seems to be an ancient poem written by some ancient wise sage, but it turns out that it was written by a lawyer in Indiana, in Terre Haute, Indiana, and it was written in 1927 so relatively a modern time, and he was a lawyer who did legal work for a long time, and then ran, worked in his family's meat packing industry, and then retired early to write and do philosophy and contemplate, and wrote this poem, The Desiderata, that is often written anonymous, but his name was Max Ehrman. I'm going to read the Desera Dorada for you, the original text, and the first line is, go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence as far as possible without surrender. Be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and

clearly, and listen to others, even to the dull and the ignorant. They too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons. They are vexatious to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter. For always, there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your achievements, as well as your plans, keep interested in your own career, however humble it is. A real possession, and the changing fortunes of time. Exercise caution in your business affairs, for the world is full of trickery, but let this not blind you to what virtue there is, many persons strive for high ideals, and everywhere life is full of heroism. Be yourself, especially do not feign affection, neither be cynical about love, for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment, it is as perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune, but do not distress

yourself with dark imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars. You have a right to be here, and whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt, the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore, be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labors and aspirations in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul with all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams. It is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful, strive to be happy. Max Ehrman, 1927 The Desiderata. And so here I am, turning fifth.

50 turned 50 this week, just a few days ago, and that line: Take kindly the counsel of the years, take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth, take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth, and that really struck with me, because we live in a society where we are terrified of aging, we try every which way to be younger than we really are, we kick and fight our way into our 50s and 60s and 70s, and this poem reminds us that these are special chapters in life, and here I am coming into this next chapter of my 50s, and around my birthday Amy Lynn Durham, the executive producer of Magic Thread Media, reached out to me and said, hey, you should do a podcast. You have so much wisdom to share. You have so much life experience as a spiritual practitioner, as a yogi, as a Vedic astrologer, as a former executive, as a corporate leader, as an East meets West coach. You should do a podcast, and of course I thought,

Who am I to do this? Who am I? And so I thought about it. Amy laid out the idea of this podcast, which we ended up naming Bending the Light, and I'll keep you guessing what Bending the Light means, but I decided to really think about, should I do this? Does this make sense for me? And at the time I was in the San Bernardino Mountains, here in Southern California. I have a place up at 6200 feet high up in the mountains, surrounded by hundreds and 1000s of acres of national forest and I decided rather than going for a walk in the forest to contemplate whether or not I should do a podcast, let me go to a cafe nearby that has pizza night, and so I love pizza, you'll get to know that about me, so I got in the in my jeep and kind of drove about 1015 minutes away from the cabin, and up at this little cafe, ordered a pizza, ordered a glass of red wine. It was Friday, so I'm like, let me celebrate Friday, and let me just sort of sit here and see if there's a sign, see if there's something

that helps me make this decision. And so I sat there and my pizza arrived and I started munching on it and a few tables over this man got up and just walked up to me and I don't know what possessed him to do that but he did people do that I guess in the mountains and he must have been I mean he must have been quite old, because he told me he'd been living in the mountains for almost 60 years, so I would place him in his 70s at least, and he just started talking, and he had this sort of twinkle in his eye, this very wise, wise soul, almost. I wonder if he knew I was contemplating something, and he walked up, and he's wearing a short sleeve shirt, the top button unbuttoned, and around his neck was this huge gold medallion, this huge coin, and I had to ask him about it, and so I said, 'Hey, you know what? What is this coin you're wearing around your neck? And he said, 'It's called a piece of eight, which I'd never heard of, so I said I've never heard of that. What is a piece of

eight? It was pure gold, a beautiful thing.

And he said that it's a coin from the 1600s from Spain, and I guess you would receive that coin as a yearly wage, as a wage for your year, and people would literally break off pieces of the coin in order to buy things, they would break off piece of coin and use it as a transactional currency, and he explained to me that the coin itself was given to him by a very close friend of his, is he is married to a woman who's from Panama, and a friend of the family in Panama found this on a roadside in Panama and gave it to him as a gift, piece of eight, and so here's this, you know, whatever, a 500 euro coin, this the 1600s 1620 specifically coin found on a roadside in Panama that he picked up and I thought there's got to be some omen here, right? He had a conversation with me and wished me well, and then left, and the only sign I had was this old guy comes up to me and talks and is wearing a gold coin around his neck as. Astrologer, I'm always looking for signs, I'm always looking for

omens and signs from the universe. So, as an astrologer, I'm thinking, okay, it's gold, gold is a precious metal, it shines, it shines bright. Is this a sign that I need to shine bright? Money and currency is connected to the planet Venus, and Venus is about abundance and wealth, so maybe there's a connection that you know there's some, some wealth coming my way, or some abundance coming my way, but what does this have to do with the podcast? Because a podcast, as far as I know, from my, from my little place, it's not a money maker, it's something I'm doing to offer some knowledge to others. So, what does this gold coin or Venus have to do with a podcast, so of course I went home, and I started Google about it. What is this piece of eight? And sure enough, it confirmed that it's a piece of eight from the 1600s Spanish colonial currency, but it was one of the first truly global currencies of the world. It was a currency that was used across oceans, continents, and cultures, so

right away a global currency, global currents. This is the movement and circulation and reach of something across vast distances that a Spanish coin could be used to purchase something or to pay for labor in Panama. So, in essence, a podcast is my voice traveling across the world, potentially to people I'll never meet. I started to think, okay, there's there's a sign there, maybe it's a little confirmation bias, but something makes sense there. And then he'd explained to me the road that was found on was a very specific road called the King's Highway, and that's interesting. The King's Highway is a narrow, it's sort of a road that connects Panama from the Atlantic Ocean, the Pacific Ocean, so literally a connection of two different oceans, Atlantic and Pacific Ocean, and Panama itself, as many of you know, is a crossroads of the world. In fact, the Panama Canal is the way that you can cross from the Atlantic to the Pacific, or vice versa. So, Panama is this crossroads of the

world, and a bridge, a land bridge that literally connects continents, connects oceans, a crossroads, and that coin was lying in that spot on that roadway that is called the King's Highway, and so I thought, "Wow, this is getting even more specific, a more specific sign. And this man has been wearing this for at least 20 or 30 years, according to what he told me, and around his throat, the throat is the place of expression. It's a place where your throat chakra resides, and when you activate the throat chakra, you start to speak, you start to share, you start to express yourself. And many of us have challenges with expressing because of throat chakra blockages, literally. And he is wearing gold around his throat in astrology, we will recommend people who have trouble expressing themselves to wear gold around their throat, because you start to have golden expression from that energy of the substance gold on that throat chakra.

So that was kind of getting even more interesting, and then it is the pieces of eight and what is the symbolism of the number eight and what was interesting is every time I met Amy to talk about the podcast her phone kept showing something to do with eight and she kept telling me about how important the number eight is and I thought what is so important about the number eight and of course if you take the number eight and turn it sideways, it becomes the infinity symbol, a symbol of abundance, symbol of infinity. And in the Vedic tradition, the number eight is connected to the eighth house. The eighth house of a birth chart is all about secret hidden knowledge, the esoteric. So, I started to think that's quite interesting, and so if I take all of this together, this what seemed like a very mundane sign. Some, you know, older gentleman approaching me at the cafe to talk. At the moment, I'm contemplating a podcast. So, this is a very important thing when you start to understand

signs. It's, did the sign appear at the moment you were contemplating something? Is there a correlation that way? Right. So, here I'm contemplating, should I do the podcast, and this gentleman approaches me with a piece of eight around his neck, made of gold from a highway that connects east and west, Atlantic meets Pacific. I'm an East meets West Coach. I'm trying to draw from the Eastern wisdom tradition for the Western audience a crossroads, a road that travels that information, commerce, goods, ideas, this circulative currency that was one of the first currencies that truly circulated the globe, and of course I. Had my answer logically, I could talk myself out of doing this, but the omens and the signs were there, and hence I decided the first episode to be called Sign, Sign Everywhere Sign, because we are constantly getting signs from the universe, but we're so busy and moving so fast we cannot first of all, notice them. Second of all, slow down to interpret them.

So, one of the things about yogic practices, the practice of meditation, the breathing practices, it causes you to start to slow down. If I could just slow down life, I could start to pay more attention. If I start to pay more attention, I might start noticing things if I have the time to then research with these amazing tools we have these days, like Google. I sometimes call it Guru Google, because Guru Google has all the answers. Maybe today it's Guru Chat GPT or Guru Claude, or whatever, but Google does quite well, you can research and start to understand what is behind that particular thing that I noticed, and is there a correlation for that coin, the pieces of eight to what I am doing, and of course it was an older man, can't forget that a man in his wisdom years, the years of wisdom, the years to share what we're doing, so that was a powerful sign. Then, of course, the song sign, sign everywhere sign comes to me, and I'm thinking, well, is there anything about

that song that is interesting? And I was reading the lyrics, and it said, you know, there's sign, sign everywhere, sign, you got to have a shirt and a tie to get a seat, you can't even watch. No, you can't eat. You ain't supposed to be here. Sign, sign everywhere. Sign blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind. Don't do this, don't do that. Can't you read the sign? And then he says, and the sign said, Everybody, welcome, come in, kneel down and pray. And when they passed around the plate at the end of it all, I didn't have a penny to pay, so I got me a pen and a paper, and I made up my own little sign. I said, "Thank you, Lord, for thinking about me. I'm alive and doing fine. Sign, sign everywhere, a sign, which I thought was also very apt.

That the song title that came to mind at the end of the day, we are at the service of the divine, and you know it doesn't matter what your religion is, it doesn't matter what your spiritual beliefs are, there is some greater force that we are all subject to, and we don't know what to call that force, sometimes we call it God, sometimes we give it a, an elephant form and call it Lord Ganesh, this elephant-headed deity, sometimes we say there's no image, there's no form, there's nothing. Sometimes we believe it's some other phenomenon of physics, but it doesn't matter. There's something divine going on. There is something in the universe that is guiding, and what I'm realizing as I go deeper into my spiritual practices, I get older in my years, I start to notice that the universe is constantly communicating with us. When I first started doing astrology, I would look at somebody's birth chart and I would see a planet in a certain location, the sky, at the time they were born, and

I would make some interpretation, and the client would say, "Oh my god, Vish, how do you know that? How do you know that about me? I've never shared that with anyone. Well, how did I know that? What am I looking at when somebody is born, and on the eastern horizon at the moment of their birth was the zodiac constellation of cancer, cancer being a very emotional kind of star constellation, and I say, 'Wow, you have a deep emotional heart as a Cancer rising sign at the moment you're born. If you look to the eastern horizon, the star constellation of Cancer was actually there influencing your birth. You have a deep emotional heart, you're an emotionally oriented person, you care about exchange of feelings with people. You're more about the heart and heart emotions than you are about logic. And the person is, wow, how did you figure that out? What am I interpreting? I'm interpreting a sign at the moment you're born. This is the sign that was in the sky that tells me something about you.

That's what astrology does. They're monitoring signs. Oh, this planet just shifted. There's a sign, for instance. Right now, as I record this podcast, I pulled up a map, a chart, a Vedic birth chart, a Vedic chart of the heavens at this very moment, and at this very moment, Jupiter, the planet of wisdom, and Mercury, the planet of expression and communication, here in Redondo Beach, California, is directly over my head. Is that a sign? Is there a sign that with all the difficulty in scheduling time to do a podcast, I scheduled this time and. This moment I didn't plan for it. Jupiter, the planet of knowledge and wisdom, Venus, the planet of currency and money, and Mercury, the planet of expression and communication, are all together directly overhead from where I'm sitting. Is that a sign I can interpret that sign? Furthermore, directly on the eastern horizon, at the birth of this podcast, you could say is this constellation of Libra, and within it there's a very specific star cluster

that doesn't have a correlation in Western astrology. In Vedic astrology, we have a star cluster called Nakshatra. There's 27 Nakshatras out of 27 These star clusters, the one on the eastern horizon is called Swati. Swati, and Swathi is connected to spreading of wisdom and knowledge. I am actually at this moment thinking, am I making this up? How can it be that the star cluster of spreading wisdom and knowledge, Swathi, is literally on the eastern horizon for this sort of 20 hour period that I happen to be recording? I did not plan it that way. That's a sign, and what I like to argue with people is the sign is far out in space, way out there, right? These are stars and planets, 1000s and 1000s of miles away, that an astrologer is interpreting that far away sign. But what about the signs right in front of your face every single day? Right in front of your face, there are signs all the time. I'm working with a client on Zoom live one on one, counseling them about something going

on in their life, some blockage they're having, and a garbage truck goes down the street right behind me. Is it a sign? Is that something meaningful?

I don't know, maybe it's a coincidence. So my engineering brain says, well, that's just a random coincidence. My spiritual brain says maybe the universe is trying to tell me something. So, as I'm getting older, I start to trust that intuition, I trust that higher self of voice, and I ask the client, "Hey, is there some kind of garbage that needs to be taken out in your life? Is there something in your life, that's not serving you, that we need to get rid of, and the person will say, "Oh my god, that's exactly the question we have to talk about. I have this thing that I really need to get rid of in my life, I have this person, I have this situation, I have this job, I have this manager, I have this project, and I need to jettison it. And how did I get the question? The sign just about 20 feet behind me on the street, a garbage truck. You don't have to look 1000s of miles away. You don't have to be trained astrologer. So one of the things to think about is in your life, how do you

slow down to start noticing the signs? How do you slow down to interpret the signs? How do you slow down to trust that in your intuition to make meaning of the sign, and how do you not let your logical brain take over, saying, well, that was just a coincidence. I think I'm suffering with confirmation bias. We're constantly in unison in interaction with the universe around us. The universe is constantly sending us signs, and if we can start orienting our life and our decision making around those signs, it can be incredible. You know, I've studied yoga for about 25 years now, and one of the things we do in yoga is alternate nostril breathing, and so a lot of us will take our hand and we'll close off one nostril, we'll breathe in one nostril, hold for a second, breathe out the other nostril, breathe in again, hold, breathe out the other nostril. Very simple exercise called Nadi Shodhana, Anuloma Villoma, alternate nostril breathing. Very good for balancing left and right

energies, solar and lunar energies in the body, but the secret of it is as you practice this alternate nostril breathing, you get good enough where you remove your hand and you automatically can breathe in the left, breathe out the right, very subtle, breathe in the right, breathe out the left, very subtle, you start getting good at doing it without your hands, and then what happens, you develop an awareness of which nostril is open at any given time, you start to have a sensitivity of which nostril is more dominant at different times of the day, and just like in a. Astrologer looks at a Vedic birth chart to understand where the planets are, where the stars are, to help you in decision making. An advanced yogi, when you ask them a question based on which nostril is dominant for them, they will give you an answer or a prediction. I've seen this many times with yogi's in my life. I asked them a difficult question. They give me an answer. It turns out to be correct. Sometimes

they give me a prediction, and it's uncannily correct. And I didn't know how they did it, because they're not looking at a birth chart. What are they doing? And I started to understand this is one of the secrets, is they literally can tune into which nostril is dominant, and based on that, make an interpretation, it's a simple technique, but it requires years of that awareness and practice and intuition, and so here we are in this world, Googling, searching, asking AI, asking friends for all sorts of stuff, and the answers are all right here, might be a garbage truck on the road behind you, it might just be noticing which nostril is dominant and tuning into that. So, now it's important to explore what is the sign, what is going on as we age, and if I go back to the astrology tradition of ancient India, and I'm not talking about Western astrology here, right. So Western astrology has its own place, its own purpose. It's a system I don't really know much about, but you know, it's a

psychology system. Like, what is your psychology?

What is your mental makeup of the world? Vedic astrology is actually a powerful spiritual system in and of itself. The students of Vedic astrology are going through a spiritual journey in of themselves. The folks that I teach astrology to, they have a spiritual evolution that happens as they learn the subject. So, Vedic astrology is a way for us to understand the way the world works, the way that people think about things, the way to understand life, death, purpose. Why are we here? What are we here? Do all those kind of things. So every time I think about anything in life, I go back to astrology principles and think, what is there to learn from the astrology perspective, the Vedic astrology perspective. And first off, the word Vedic astrology doesn't quite do justice. The system that I follow in Sanskrit is called Jyotish, Jyotish, it's a combination of the word Jyotir, which means light, and Isha, which literally means God, or the divine, or consciousness, or light, or the

universe. So, Jyotisha, Jyotish is the light of the universe, the light of consciousness, the light of God, and what's interesting is both from the desiderata and sign, sign everywhere, sign, there's a mention of surrendering to this higher power, now in control of that divine, in that divine energy are these planets that are used in Vedic astrology, and each planet is a representation of a certain archetype of energy, and one of those planets, the planet Saturn, is the archetype of age and aging. Interestingly enough, in numerology, in Vedic numerology, the number eight that we've been discussing with this pieces of eight coin, the number eight is tied to Saturn. So Saturn, when it's prominent in somebody's chart, starts to age them. Things like wrinkles, joint pains, aches, difficulty walking, these are all connected to the planet Saturn. So, when Saturn starts to take its hold, we start to age. Parts of our physical body start to literally age, and we don't like that,

right? We don't like to look older, we don't like to feel older, we don't like the way our joints feel, all those things, right. But Saturn is also a planet of very deep wisdom, deep, deep wisdom, the wisdom of the ages, the wisdom that is beyond ordinary, everyday material knowledge. And so Saturn also gives us this wisdom. Saturn teaches us how to be the elder in the village, the village elder, and what I've noticed is that in our society, in Western society, we're so busy trying to be young and trying to hang on to our youth, we're fighting the aging process, and in process, we're literally fighting Saturn, and that's very dangerous, fighting Saturn will cause you more grief and more pain than embracing and gracefully accepting Saturn into your life. So, in where I live, here in LA, we're surrounded some very wealthy neighborhoods, and I see men and women who are entering their 60s trying to pretend like they're in their 30s, they're going. A plastic surgeon, they're getting this

lift, this tuck, this switch, this whatever chemical, drug, botox, everything to try and hang on to that youth, they're trying to dress a certain way, they're trying to speak a certain way, they're trying to get into hobbies and trends to try and embrace their younger days, or re-embrace their younger days, and the challenge with that is you are going against what Saturn actually has in store for you. Saturn is the planet of karma and the planet of deep spiritual wisdom, the planet discipline, but also the plan of aging. And for all of us, when we're born, Saturn is in a certain place in the sky at the moment of our birth, and as we go through the year, Saturn moves around the sky relative to the place it was when we were born, and approximately every 30 years Saturn comes back to exactly where it was when you were born. So that means once around age 30 you have what's called a Saturn return. Saturn comes back to where it was when you're born, and once around age 60, Saturn

moves around and comes back to where it was, and then again at age 90, Saturn comes back to where it was when you were born. We have two to three Saturn returns in our lives, depending on our lifespan, and what is special about those ages?

Age 30, what's the difference in how you saw the world and how you approached the world when you were in your 20s versus when you're in your 30s? Your 20s, it's all about having fun, enjoy, have fun, meet friends, start your career, start work. 30s, you start thinking about insurance and taxes and homes and investments, all Saturn type things. You start thinking about responsibility, you start to become responsible for others. This is all the Saturn sort of second return, and so the difference between somebody in their 20s and somebody in their 30s is very, very clear in our society, but what's the difference between somebody in their 50s and somebody in their 60s? This is the second Saturn return. Saturn goes over the place it was when you were born around age 60, and what are most of us trying to do when we're in our 60s? We're trying to relive our 50s, 40s, 30s, right? And what Saturn is asking us to do is to embrace those years of becoming the village elder, becoming the

elder of society. In your 60s, you start thinking about what is my legacy, what am I here to leave behind, what am I here to teach, and indeed somebody who's crossed 60 has a lot of wisdom. Research is very clear, the wisdom thinking far increases after age 60, and that is what Saturn gives as a gift, the gift of wisdom, the gift of the years, but if we're fighting it every step of the way, we lose that gift, and that gives us a lot of challenges in life. So, as I enter my 50s, I think, what do I do in these 10 years before my next Saturn return? What do I give back? What do I create, and how do I set up my legacy so that post 60 I'm in legacy creation mode, honoring that wisdom of Saturn. So think about where you are in life. Are you in that first 30 years, the second 30 years, or the third 30 years? Are you going through your first Saturn return, second Saturn return, or perhaps third Saturn return, and in the first 30 years, you learn, you get educated, you prepare yourself for

society, you start your career. Second 30 years, you start to establish yourself, you start to come into your own being, you start to have more success, financial prosperity, stability, responsibility. You become responsible for people, and then in that third phase, after 60, you start to think about how you give back, what you do for the world, what you leave behind, and so these ancient Vedic people understood these very basic fundamentals of how life should unfold, and of course, in our modern Western world, we've mucked it all up, and we wonder why we're so broken, we wonder why we're so confused, and so I believe it's about going back to fundamentals, the fundamentals of the way we understood the universe to work in ancient times, which then brings me back full circle to the Desiderata. These very specific lines: be yourself, you are child of the universe, and whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore, be

at peace with God. Whatever you conceive Him to be, the universe is literally unfolding as it should. And how many times a day do I forget that very lesson? It's all happening the way it should. Did I say the right thing? Did I bring the right content to the podcast today? Did I share my truth? Did I do it the right way? Did I speak in the right tone of voice and cadence? Can I remember that no doubt it is all unfolding as it should. And then, very specifically, in relation to Saturn, take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. How many times have people asked me, how does it feel to turn 50, and I say fantastic. I take kindly the council of these years, and I surrender the things of youth. I gracefully step into this place, and I will speak my truth quietly and clearly. In fact, I feel the older we get, the more aligned we are to speaking our truth clearly. And enjoy your achievements, as well as your plans. Keep interest in your own

career, however humble as a coach.

Whenever I finish a session, there's always some homework to be done, because the most powerful insights seem to happen between session. And so, for you, I offer you this homework assignment between now and the next time we meet on this podcast, find a way to slow down a little bit, sit in nature, sit in your home, and for a few minutes just get quiet and observe, observe anything that stands out to you, just get in the habit and the practice of silent observation of the environment around you, even silent observation of the thoughts that come to you, because the moment you're sitting quiet and a thought comes to you that could also be a sign. So just find a few minutes in the week, maybe it's five minutes, and this is not a meditation, this is just sitting, being with yourself, and seeing what shows up, and just learning to observe. Do that for a couple weeks, then maybe add an interpretation step that, oh, I observed something. How do I interpret that? So, if I sit quietly

right now. I get quiet. I hear a loud engine outside. What does that mean? Do I need to go somewhere? Do I need to accelerate something? Do I need to crank up a machine? Do I need to enable something to move forward in my life, next step would be to contemplate what that is, and that is literally the homework, so that is what I leave you with, with our first, my first, our first full episode of Bending the Light, Vedic Wisdom for a Brighter World. I hope you enjoyed our conversation. I look forward to many more. In the meantime, keep trusting your intuition. Keep remembering the universe is unfolding exactly as it should.