Being native, there's things that we do to grieve and things that we never show and never talk about just culturally. And so just bringing all of that to the Hoffman process, it was very intimidating. But then I got there and I met my roommate, she's wonderful. We still stay in contact. The whole process itself taught me so much. It taught me that not only am I allowed to hope, but I'm allowed to be happy.
Welcome, everybody. My name is Drew Horning, and this podcast is called Love's Everyday Radius. It's brought to you by the Hoffman Institute and its stories and anecdotes and people we interview about their life post process and how it lives in the world radiating love. Please be aware that this episode references sexual assault, emotional trauma, and suicide. Please use your discretion.
If you or someone you know is suicidal, please reach out to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at +1 80273 1 8 2 7 3 8 2 5 5, or message the Crisis Text Line at 741741. welcome to the podcast. It is great to have you here. Madot, thank you. This is a beautiful story, and I wanna introduce you. You are a marine. You have been a marine. Now you're in grad school. You got your BA, your masters. Now you're working on a PhD in psychology. You work for Aetna Insurance in a program.
Tell me about the program. So it's the first of its kind across the nation. It's a veteran wellness program. I've been there for about seven months now, but they're already looking at expanding it across the country, which is really exciting and very much needed. You have quite the story to tell, so let's buckle up. And I'm really grateful that you're willing to tell this story. Maybe we begin it with Lee Lesser and meeting her. What year was that? I believe I met Lee in 02/2011.
Okay. Talk about why you met her and what eventually in meeting her led you to Hoffman. So when I met Lee, looking back, it's now kind of a a somber but but funny story. When I met Lee, I was coming out of an inpatient stay at the hospital. I had called the the veterans helpline because I was I was thinking about taking my life. And so coming out of the the inpatient stay, the vet center that I was going to, my counselor recommended this women's retreat, and I was really on the fence. I
didn't wanna go. And I called just because I said I would, and it was full. And I was like, okay. Not going. It's a done deal. We're okay. So then they called me probably four days in advance and they said, hey, we just had somebody drop out. We'd really like it if you would still be able to come. What do you think? And I said, well, what's gonna happen at this retreat? And they said, well, you know, we're gonna meditate. We're gonna try to teach you guys some
skills to use. And I said, that's that's some weird hippie stuff. I don't know if I'm in for that. Anyway, I went because I had nothing else to lose. So I went, and it was it was an experience having come from the marine corps and having kind of a a very structured, not emotionally available family, and going and learning sensory awareness to the point where it was reconnecting with myself. It was a very moving experience of I no longer have to hold myself at one arm's distance. I can self
regulate. I can come back to my breath. I can find this peace that's always been part of me and always lived in me, and it became a very healthy tool for me to use. Through doing that, I had already started making leaps and bounds. I mean, I was hungry. I was hungry for this type of work and connection because talk therapy wasn't working. Prescriptions for antidepressants, you know, those weren't working. And I knew that I wanted to live. I wanted to to do this work and really dive in,
and I wanted to get better. I didn't wanna have those feelings anymore. So through the process of that retreat and then years later working with Lee and and going to different veteran events through Veterans Path was just developing myself.
And then, eventually, my father who is also a marine corps veteran, he ended up completing suicide, and I was you know, I went back down the rabbit hole of being lost and being overwhelmed with all of these feelings and not really knowing what to do with anything, so I just locked up. And I, again, was not in touch with myself. I was pushing everything away. So Lee recommended that I go on another retreat to the Hoffman process, and that's how I got introduced to the whole Hoffman process.
And that was a life changing experience. And so you bring this history that, as you acknowledge, had so much trauma to it. There's such decorations as a White House security with top clearance, a relationship with Barbara Bush. What was her nickname for you? Tall Meg. How tall are you, Meg? I am six foot four. It's such acknowledged as with a badge of honor for your service to the White House, to the president, but there's also a lot of trauma.
Can you share a little bit about what you had been navigating all those years trying to find a way to heal? Sure. So I joined the marine corps. I had my parents sign the paperwork when I was 17 years old. I chose to join that young because I really hadn't aspired to do much in my life. In fact, by the time I was I was 16 years old, I ran away from home. It was just not a good situation. So joining the marine corps was really an escape. It was a way for me to get
out, so to speak. I didn't make good grades in high school. I didn't have any plans to go to college. I didn't didn't really have anything else to do except the military. And I was planning on being in the Marine Corps for twenty years, and that was just gonna be my life. Even if I didn't make it for the full twenty years, then I was gonna die in combat. My mom could use the money from the death benefits. So, you know, I had all these plans going, and it was not a healthy plan to say the least.
So when I joined the Marine Corps, I originally had signed up to be a military police officer. It was a wild ride. Being six foot four, men either looked at me like I was a challenge or they were just intimidated. You know, this is one of the two. But I made a a lot of really good friends, lifelong friends. But, unfortunately, part of being a woman in the military, it happens to men too, but part of that experience did include military sexual trauma. And it wasn't just a
a onetime thing. It was pretty brutal. The man that did this was one of the higher ranking members in my chain of command, and he ended up basically kidnapping me. And and then when he was finished, he dumped my body on the side of the road. I thought I was gonna die there on the
side of the road, but I didn't. And that was kind of the unnecessary maybe, but also necessary piece of grit that because it kinda bloomed in me, was that I I needed to get back to the part of the base where my room was or my barracks room was, but also, you know, going to medical and everything after that happened. I told him, you know, a bookcase had fallen on me. It wasn't something that
we would we could even talk about. And then when I got to my unit doing presidential security, I was one of four women in our security squadron once we got there. When I left, I was one of six. So we, I mean, we had to be top notch to everything. And we could never give any of the guys an excuse. We had to go above and beyond anything that they could and would do. Because if you if you didn't, what would happen? It was weakness, and it was like sharks scenting blood in
the water. I mean, they would just circle you, and it was awful. It was survival. I mean, you in order to perform in that manner, it was it was survival. And so, again, here comes this overly structured, overly intense part of armor that I had to constantly wear. And I know I had PTSD. I had also gotten crushed under some conex boxes. I have I have screws in my face in both sides of my jaw. I have a lot of physical stuff going
on, traumatic brain injuries, all this stuff. But it's something that even now, even through my schooling, I don't want to let it control me. It is a piece of me. It is not who I am. So you take all of that partially healed trauma and your desire to understand yourself better, not let it define you, and you head into the process. What happens? Take us there. Yeah. I had this kernel of hope. I've always clung to this little
kernel of hope. Even through the darkest times in the marine corps, even through all of the stuff with my dad, there was always this hope, like, life cannot be this bad. There has to be more. People talk about being in love, and I I didn't experience that. I didn't have that. I mean, my mom and I are we're very close, especially now. I'm I take care of her, but then I was like, I was very alone. I was very ostracized. Lee took over kind of that mom position
for me in a lot of ways. She was a mentor, and I sought her counsel. I I trusted her wisdom. And so she recommended this Hoffman process, and I said, you know what? I've done a lot of work through my PTSD and my depression and and learning sensory awareness and showing up and being present in the moment. I wonder if this next step can help build that kernel of hope into something bigger. And then I got to Hoffman, and I was terrified. I mean, it was it was beautiful. There's
it was just so intimidating. Like, you read everything, you know, going going into the process, but you still don't know what to expect. You know? And so I come in, and I know that I have all this trauma and my my dad's suicide still freshly on my heart. And and being native, there's things that we do to grieve and things that we never show and never talk about just culturally. And so just bringing all of that to the Hoffman
process, it was it was very intimidating. But then I got there, and I met my roommate. She's wonderful. We still stay in contact, and the whole process itself taught me so much. It taught me that not only am I allowed to hope, but I'm allowed to be happy. And I'm allowed to have play and be in touch with myself in different ways and have all these different complex feelings. It doesn't just have to be anger and fear, and I don't have to
be reactive all the time. I can be proactive and do things like self care for myself and really show up for myself, and that's okay. And it's okay to set boundaries, and it's okay to want to do different things and move through all of these different feelings and move through different parts of myself that may die and and rebirth. And it's a cycle. It's a constant cycle. It's also okay to have bad days, but it's also okay to have good
days, and it's okay to celebrate. There's there's so many things that I learned from the Hoffman process. You know, you talk about celebration and joy, and the process is a deep dive into the psyche, into some of the shadow of what it means to be human, but it's also a powerful celebration of life. Is it not? Is that part of what you experienced is the coming home to the joy, the goodness, the celebration of what it means to be human? Yes. Very
much so. I very sincerely feel like I went from being in survival mode to being allowed to just exist and strive for this this neutral existence. And that was well and good, but I still again, I had that kernel of hope. And then I come to Hoffman, and I learned that I can celebrate. I can play. It's a little hard for me still. Still working on that and still learning it, but I can smile, and I can laugh, and I can have joy, and I can play games like a kid, or I can read books that, you know,
make me laugh and and be happy. We share jokes every day at work. These are things that I never I never knew life could hold, and here we are. Those are ideas, but I imagine in the process, they were felt senses that this was an embodied experience you had and not just an epiphany. Right. It is an overall wellness. I mean, joy and happiness, it it not only affects your psyche, but it but your physical well-being.
If you carry stress and anger and resentment, it turns in into poison in your body, but it also makes you sick in so many different ways. And so this healing that came about, it was not just mental. It was very much physical. It was a whole whole life experience. When you phrase it that way, I think about the work you're doing right now in the insurance industry. Is that part of what you're doing with the programs you're developing? Yes.
I got the fortunate opportunity not only to work with veterans but also their family members because being a veteran and recognizing that whatever's happening with and to the veteran, the family's also experiencing that too. That's one of the things that gets highlighted in in the Hoffman process. Right? So it very much just overall wellness, not just mind and body, but everything, spiritual, tribal, cultural, every part of it, wellness. So that's what I get to strive to
do. And to help your people see the connection between not just what they're going through, but the impact it's having on the ecosystem around them, their direct family members. And not only that, but our ties to the land, you know, being native, that's another thing that comes in is our relationship. It's not just a relationship with self. It's not just a relationship with our work and our economy. It's a relationship with our land.
And so I know that talk therapy very much has its place, but so does recreational therapy. So being able to find opportunities to even bring that in for wellness opportunity for people can be very, very profound. You mentioned being native. How do you experience that part of you on a day to day basis, and how do you relate to that part of you? You live in Oklahoma now near Tulsa. Yes. I live on our reservation land. There's been a lot. Over the last few years, there's been a
lot going on with the tribes. Just in general, all of the tribes in the country getting their land recognized as reservation land for the treaties that were through our government. Part of that was I get to live on the reservation. I practice my culture and my language. And more than that, about two years ago, our national council, which is the ones in charge of the tribe and our our chief, created legislation. So it's it's literally a law in the Muscogee Creek Nation to have a women's honor
guard. Women veterans had a veteran's office, a a veteran service office through the tribe, and there's a a few women veterans that would come in and out, but they really didn't have this healing path, this this opportunity to recognize women veterans in their service. It was, again, it was just an another male dominated space. So for them to create this legislature to have a women's honor guard were called, which means red person, warrior, woman.
Just to have this space and this recognition was huge, but then we started wearing our traditional regalia to go do ceremonies and everything. And so we started getting asked to go to events across the country. We've been everywhere from California all the way to Washington, DC, and everything in between. It's been it's been really amazing. You know, one thing in reading about you and researching you, there's such incredible advocacy
you do. Your dad dies of suicide, completes a suicide, and you create a race to raise funds and awareness for suicide and suicide prevention in the military. Original statistics came out that it was 22 a day, but that's been disproven that it's actually maybe twice as much. And you became such an advocate for mental health for military vets and saying that we're trained how to be in combat. We're not trained how to come home from combat. It's absolutely right.
Absolutely right. And I still even now with the work that I do, I I get the opportunity to talk to reservists or people that may be transitioning out, veterans, and they still feel the same way. That part hasn't changed. The military has tried, of course, to do do different things, have different programs to kinda ease that transition, but it is still so hard to make that transition to come home because it is it's your entire life. You
eat, sleep. Everything you do all day long and all night long is is military, and then it's just done. You signed a paper and it's just done one day. And what do you do? It's different for every person. But part of the advocacy work, part of the drive to do the advocacy work is not only just to bring people home, but to let them know that they don't have to struggle in silence like I did. They don't have to isolate themselves and be afraid of their anger like I was just to be able to be
open and experience life. It doesn't have to be just this structured military experience for life. It's a whole plethora of everything else. Yeah. There's some real theme here of after surviving your dad's suicide completion and then your own suicide attempt and hospitalization. Once you heal or in the process of healing, you turn back. Rather than just keep going forward, you turn back to your community, your neighbors, your colleagues, your fellow military veterans,
and lend a helping hand. When it comes to being subject to military sexual assault, you turn around and create and connect with a California senator or congressman at the time to create a block advocacy change in the law. Can you talk a little bit about that? I got brought in at the very tail end. I wish I was able to do more with that, but congresswoman Jackie Speer was instrumental. There was even a documentary that was created called Invisible Wounds.
It's a deep dive into military sexual trauma, and it highlights not only what it is for women, but what it is for men. It's so much so. I would never in good conscience say yes. It's it's a good opportunity to join the military. The military is still very much struggling with this to the point where now we even see cases like a few years ago with Vanessa Gillian going missing for days and and weeks and no one knowing
what happened. And then it finally came out that she was gonna be reporting sexual harassment and sexual assault. And, unfortunately, she lost her life instead of being able to report it. So it is very much still ongoing, but now there are steps being taken to bring it to life, to say yes. You know, you first have to acknowledge there's a problem. And now that that's being done, now there's how can we fix it? How can we change the reporting? How can we
change the way the investigations go? Because all of that was also just an added trauma for me, for my own experience. I went to go report it, and I was told not to. I finally did report it after several other happenings and then being stalked by this person. My chain of command really tries to try to sweep it under the rug. And so that's a whole another piece of trauma of broken trust. How do
you move forward from that? Just to tie all of this together, part of the advocacy work and everything that I do, it is to tie back into your community because what is a more important purpose than being in community? I mean, if it's a veteran community, if it's your local community, if it's your tribal community, your religious community, whatever kind of community it is, it gives you purpose. It ignites that passion and keeps it going. That's part of why I do what I do.
That community is tied to belonging, and outcomes for people who belong are much better, who have a community, who are interconnected to the world around them. Isolation kills, does it not? Yes. That is one of the leading causes for suicide is the isolation. That's one of the key trademarks. If you know someone who is experiencing, you know, all of these very, very hard emotions and and all of these really painful
things inside. One of the things that they're gonna do before they complete suicide is they're gonna isolate. Megan, in your continued advocacy, you worked with Pups for Patriots, helping train military dogs. Do you still have a military dog? So, unfortunately, just a couple months ago, my service dog, he passed away. His stomach turned. And for German shepherds, it's unfortunately common, but also a very low survival rate for the surgery.
So I got him to the vet immediately and got him comfortable, but we did have to say goodbye. And then a few months later, we had a puppy, a stray puppy that showed up, at my partner's shop, and he brought him home. And now we have another dog. I'm training them to do PTSD service dog work. It's something that is still very near
and dear to my heart. It's something that I still get asked to help with, whether it's consulting for the tribal hospital I used to work at to make some different policies and regulations. Now I got to share some of the highlights and the policies and regulations with Aetna nationally so that they could push it out for people who may be interested in that information. So that people can actually get financial support to have a military service dog? Well, not
only that. There are certain questions you can't just say, well, why do you have a service dog? The proper question the legal question would be, what services does this service dog provide to you? And PTSD is one of the only mental health conditions that's covered under the ADA law for a service dog. Everything else, mental health wise, would be an emotional support dog. Megan, would you be willing to share PTSD stands for post traumatic stress disorder.
When you have experienced that in your life, what's happening? What does that look like? Could you take us inside for a minute? Yeah. It's been almost sixteen years since I got out of the military now, maybe a little bit longer. Closer to 18 makes me feel a little old, but here we are living life.
But even that long after the military and even still going through learning sensory awareness and the Hoffman process and different therapies that I've been able to participate in, you know, it's still a dysregulation within my brain and my body. So sometimes I'll have nightmares, and I'll wake up just completely drenched in sweat. Like, even my sheets and my blanket are just drenched in sweat, or I'll wake up and I'll be fighting my blankets and my sheets because there's there's no
one there. You know? But then other times it can be a smell, just a very specific smell that takes me back and floods me with these memories, these intrusive thoughts. And it can be a sound or a voice, or even just a familiar face.
It's not a weakness to have this. A lot of people say, you know, you you may be predisposed to developing PTSD if you've had depression or other mental health conditions, but it's literally your brain trying to cope, your ordinary brain trying to cope with an extraordinary situation. And that is that is human. That is in essence human nature. And the service dog helps in what ways? So it's accountability, first and foremost. It's accountability because that's that's an extension
of myself. It's almost like a a child that you have to care for. You know? But they wanna play. They wanna go on walks. They wanna get up and get moving and get out of the house. They wanna snuggle you if you're having a hard time sleeping. And if you're drenched in sweat, they're gonna give you kisses to wake you up. And even I've even trained them to turn on the lights so that I don't try to, like, throw them off the bed or something.
But also in public, you know, it's one of those where sometimes it's really hard for me to be in crowded spaces and have people behind me that I don't know. And so the dog can sit either facing behind me or they'll do a three sixty around me. The leash that I have allows them to move in a a three sixty around
me. But it's also something where if I'm having those intrusive thoughts, it's a grounding skill also where I can reach down and I can feel their warmth or even though he's huge, put them up in my lap and just let that deep pressure ground me to know that I'm here in the present moment. And you've shared previously that even helping you up the steps, helping you get up off the couch, some of your physical disabilities, your dog has at times really
played a a vital role. Yeah. My German shepherd, the one that recently passed away, he was one of the first service dogs to graduate during my undergrad and walk across the stage with me. And so that was pretty exciting. He loved it. He got a lot of treats and a lot of hot dogs for that. But even just the few small stairs, it was four steps to get up on the stage. His little harness that he wore helped kinda be able to give me that motion to get up because I have
so much fusion in in my back. My left leg doesn't always do what I want it to do. So, like, recreational therapies like snow biking and snowboarding and everything. I I wanna try those things because I've never done them before, but I couldn't get my left leg to cut in and so I could slow myself down. So they put me on a snow bike. And then the marine in me, I got cocky and took off and was zooming around and having a blast. But, anyway, those are the things that you just have to experience.
From your process, you mentioned earlier about some tools that you continue to use. What remains enduring as a tool or practice from your week? One of the enduring tools I would say was, I mean, obviously, just playing and celebrating and allowing that space into my life, but also recycling was a really good one. It is a tool that I use to acknowledge within myself what's going on, but also a tool that I use to express it and get it out. And to know that it doesn't have to control me, it
doesn't have to ruin my day. It is something that's there, and I can process it. As I hear you say that, one of the things that recycling does that I see you sort of talking about is that we titrate a little bit, which is allow people to go to the wound or the past or the hurt or the pattern or whatever didn't work, and then rewrite the story from that place to undo it physically and then to call in spirit and recreate it almost, rewiring the brain in the process.
Is that how you see it? Oh, absolutely. Not only do I practice that even just in my daily work, but it is something as a native person, when I go to to sweat, like a sweat lodge, that is essentially a similar practice. And so it's very present for me both culturally and spiritually and mentally, so it's a good tool. Megan, in a way, I wanna say it happened again because you're building your house four or five years ago. You hire a
contractor. You buy the land from monies that you were able to save up, and something happens again, doesn't it? Will you tell us a little bit what transpired and how you navigated it? Yeah. So the money that I had left over from my dad's life insurance policy, actually, between that and then what my mom had, we went in 5050. She's aging.
She's now got dementia, but we decided years ago that we were gonna live together to take care of each other, and and that was gonna be, you know, our life because we forgave each other and we grew a lot more together than than what we were previously. So we bought this property. We started getting, you know, all these quotes in from different builders. We liked this builder. We opted
to use him. Our bank vetted him. He was a professor at a local college, for entrepreneurship and construction, and so we were like, hey. This guy's on the up and up. We can definitely trust him. Until we got about maybe three months into the build. We had given him and even our bank, you know, our our bank signed off on giving him so much money to advance him for all these contractors that he said was
going out there. And then we started getting liens in the mail from these contractors that he had not paid. And then we started getting more letters and phone calls from these contractors, wondering where their money was. Why are you calling me? What what's going on? We give this money to this builder. He's the one that's supposed to pay you. And so immediately, the bank stopped any funding on the project. It was also when COVID had just started in 02/2019, so everything shut down.
And so it's like, what happened was bad, but then it got worse because of COVID. So, essentially, this house, it just sat there. It was just the studs. The wood was getting warped, and it was old, and some of the the beams needed to be replaced and all these things. And so finally, once COVID's kinda started lifting, my friends were able to come out and it's acres. There's multiple acres here and the grass had grown up even taller than I am. And it very
much looked like this crazy abandoned property. So my friends came out, we attacked the grass and everything as much as we could to make an area just for the tractors to be able to get in to brush hog it. And then this lady came out to try to help me kinda get things on track, but then the bank found out that she was also not a good contractor. I'm telling you, it was wild. So then my partner came along. Not only does he build hot rods, but he also knew construction.
He knew how to build houses and stuff. And so he was started giving me pointers and I hadn't even told him about it when we got together. It was just like this thing hanging out there. I I figured, you know, we'll have to give the house up, you know, foreclose it with the bank and everything. And then somebody, I don't know who, but somebody told him about it. And then he found one of the clips from the news stories, and then he asked me about it. And I said, well, I'll just go show
you. Like, I don't know what's gonna happen with it, but I'll go show you. So we went out there, and he was just looking around. And then I had to go, I think, on a business trip or something. And when I came back, he was like, no. Don't freak out, but I need some money. I was like, what are you what are you talking about? You need some like, did did something happen with the shop? What's going on? And as we're driving home, he starts going to the property and I was having like a heart attack.
Stay in the present moment, stay in the present moment. And so, I mean, fear, like I was sweating. My mouth was dry. It was like I was freaking out. And so we got here and he had had a dozer come through and work the property over to smooth things out and got all the grass cleared out. And there were people inside putting up drywall. There were walls on the outside of the house. Like, it looked like an actual house. I remember there's been many nights where we
came out here. Either I was by myself or my partner was with me, and we were stapling in different insulation, or I was out here painting or cutting up, you know, whatever. Just just learning how to build a house that I had you know, these are skills I'd never learned. But in the military, they tell you adapt and overcome. Right? And through the Hoffman process, I learned how to say yes to different experiences.
And so this was one of those. But also again, that grit and resiliency to not give up and not let go. And so happily now we've lived in this house for over a year. We moved in right before Thanksgiving. It was not a big Thanksgiving celebration, but we had a Thanksgiving celebration and that was kind of our welcome to the house moment. But we're in it, and we love it. And now we have all these animals, and it's a family, and it's a house, and it's it's everything.
Megan, I wanna ask about the military being both this place where you gained so much, adapt and overcome, such resiliency in that statement, and yet it's also a place that's caused you such pain and harm and trauma. How is it to hold the complexity that maybe the paradox of that the military has been wonderful for you and so painful as well? When I joined the marine corps, the motto of the marine corps was pain is weakness leaving the body. And at first, I was like, yeah. That
that's so hard. You know, hardcore. It's tough. You know? That's real strength, but it's not. Pain is not weakness. Pain is your body telling you that something is wrong. Why did they have to say that? I attempted to live out the embodiment of that motto, and then it was not okay. It was it was awful. So but it is. It's a complex spectrum of feelings that I I have for the
military. It is I do have this gratefulness because on one hand, I've been able to go through and get my education through my educational benefits and then also scholarships from my tribe, and I don't have any student debt. And there's not a whole lot of people working on a PhD program that can say that.
It's also given me these life skills of not giving up and just one foot in front of the other, having the ability to just break life down sometimes hour by hour when it's needed to get through, but also it enhanced my own personal tenacity. It enhanced different skills and traits that I already had and different leadership traits that I had, but it also gave me more depth as a human being because here I have experienced this trauma, but I'm also not willing to give up.
How do those things coexist in life? Well, I mean, at the end of the day, that that's life. Right? So I have this gratefulness, but also this anger, but never resentment. Say that again. Anger, but never resentment. Mhmm. I'm mad that I didn't get to to stay in for twenty years. I'm mad that there's people allowed to stay in the military even after they do these horrific things to other people. But I'm also grateful for the experience because now I get to help other people.
I get to help people come home from that and not only just come home, but find a path to wellness. And you've been able to guide people on that. Certainly, you were a part of a conference. I read online somewhere that you were the best part of this two point o. What was it called? I don't know if I was the best part of it. It was wisdom two point o. Wisdom two point o. Mhmm. That was another invitation from Lee and her husband that
brought me to that. That was another moment that I got to share about military experiences and different ways of trying to cope with that. You know, throughout your life, it seems like there's been a desire to not only turn and help others, but to not remain quiet. It just seems like over and over again, you've had a choice. Do I stay silent and stay small, or do I speak up despite the pushback I know I'll receive?
And it just seems like you have spoken out and spoken up every time injustice has happened and then turned around and been an advocate for systemic change as well. Is that just part of who you are? Yes. You know, I think part of that stems from my childhood. We were raised in a home where children should not be seen or heard. So it was there was so much wrong that happened. There are things that my family knew was going on, but no one ever did anything.
And so I think that my ability to use my voice and advocate and seek justice, it all stems from that. It's in direct response to that, probably. What's next for you, Megan? Where do you go from here as you eventually get your PhD?
So I want to I mean, obviously, I wanna get my PhD. I have to defend my dissertation and all the adventure that that is gonna entail, but what I really hope to do is to highlight a very specific need, a gap in care, if you will, that we have these therapies that are allotted through insurance programs, talk therapy, inpatient stays, outpatient intensive outpatient, you know, all all these sort of things, substance use treatment, all these different things that
affect our mental health. But it's not often that insurance companies will pay for recreational therapy or even therapists themselves will include that as part of a traditional therapy, if you will. So what I really wanna do for my dissertation is show and highlight the need for talk therapy and recreational therapy and being tied into your community that gives you purpose as a means to heal because it's not just one thing or another.
It's a blend of so many things, of so many pieces to create the human experience. That's what I hope my next step is also gonna be is not only being able to highlight this, but also create programs, whether it's through grants or whatever else that will host all of that. Megan, for your advocacy, for the work you do in the world, and also for the vulnerability and the stories you shared about your life, I'm deeply grateful. Thank you. Well, thank you.
And we say Mado is the way that we say thank you in in Muskogee Creek. So Mado, I appreciate this time and this opportunity. Mado. Thank you for listening to our podcast. My name is Liza Ingrassi. I'm the CEO and president of Hoffman Institute Foundation. And I'm Rassie Grassi, Hoffman teacher and founder of the Hoffman Institute Foundation. Our mission is to provide people greater access to the wisdom and power of love. In themselves, in each other, and in the world.
To find out more, please go to hompaninstitute.org.