Wasase: Indigenous Pathways of Action & Freedom by Taiaiake Alfred

The Settlers continue to erase our existences from the cultural, social, and political landscape of our homelands.

A true revolution is spiritual at its core.

How you fight determines who you will become when the battle is over.

The truly revolutionary goal is to transform disconnection and fear into connection and to transcend colonial culture and institutions.

Many Onkwehonwe today embrace the label of “aboriginal”, but this identity is a legal and social construction of the state, and it is disciplined by racialized violence and economic oppression to serve an agenda of select surrender.  The acceptance of being aboriginal is as powerful an assault on Onkwehonwe existences as any force of arms brought upon us by the settler society.

Change cannot be made from within the colonial structure.  Institutions and ideas that are the creation of the colonial relationship are not capable of ensuring our survival.

All of the world’s being problems are in reality very small and local problems.  They are brought into force as realities only in the choices made every day and in many ways by people who are enticed by certain incentives and disciplined by their fears.

[Colonization]: we cannot allow the word to be the story of our lives, because it is a narrative that in its use privileges the colonizer’s power and inherently limits our freedom, logically and mentally imposing a perpetual colonized victim way of life and view on the world.

However noble and necessary justice is to our struggles, its gaze will always be backward.  By itself, the concept of justice is not capable of encompassing the broader transformations needed to ensure coexistence.  Justice is one element of a good relationship; it is concerned with fairness and right and calculating moral balances, but it cannot be the end goal of a struggle.

Peace is hopeful, visionary and forward-looking; it is not just the lack of violent conflict or rioting in the streets.

To be Onkwehonwe, to be fully human, is to be living the ethic of courage and to be involved in a struggle for personal transformation and freedom from the dominance of imperial ideas and powers.

A warrior makes a stand facing danger with courage and integrity.  The warrior spirit is the strong medicine we need to cure the European disease.

The new warriors are committed in the first instance to self-transformation and self-defence against the insidious forms of control of the state and capitalism use to shape lives according to their needs – to fear, to obey, to consume.

Survival is bending and swaying but not breaking, adapting and accommodating without compromising what is core to it’s being.

Imperialism has not been a totalizing, unknowable, and irresistible force of destruction, but a fluid confluence of politics, economics, psychology, and culture.

Political power and money, the things we’ve worked so hard to achieve, are still not going to be enough to liberate us from the present reality.

We still turn to white men for the answers to our problems; worse yet, we have started to trust them.

We are the prophetic seventh generation; if we do not find a way out of the crises, we will be consumed by the darkness, and whether it is through self-destruction or assimilation we will not survive.

Before we can start rebuilding ourselves and achieve meaningful change in the areas of law and government, of economies and development, we must start to remember one important thing: our communities are made up of people.  Our concern about legal rights and empowering models of national self-government has led to the neglect of the fundamental building blocks of our peoples: the women and men, the youth and the elders.

We will begin to make meaningful change in our lives of our communities when we start to focus on making real change in the lives of our people as individuals.

It is still true that the first part of self-determination is the self.  In our minds and in our souls, we need to reject the colonists’ control and authority; their definition of who we are and what our rights are, their definition of what is worthwhile and how one should live, their hypocritical and pacifying moralities.  We need to rebel against what they want us to become, start remembering the qualities of our ancestors, and act on those remembrances.  This is the kind of spiritual revolution that will ensure our survival.

The European way is to see the world organized in a system of names and titles that formalize their being.  Onkwehonwe recall relationships and responsibilities through languages that symbolize doing.

Living as Onkwehonwe means much more than applying a label to ourselves and saying that we are indigenous to the land.  It means looking at the personal and political choices we make everyday and applying an indigenous logic to those daily acts of creation.

Survival demands that we act on the love we have for this land and our people.

Everyone involved in the Indigenous Industry knows that we are negotiating with our oppressor from a position of weakness.

Communities are disintegrating socially and culturally at a terrifying speed as alienation, social ills, and disease outpace efforts to stabilize our societies.  In this environment, negotiation is futile.

It is senseless to advocate for an accord with imperialism while there is a steady and intense ongoing attack by the Settler society on everything meaningful to us: our cultures, our communities, and our deep attachments to land.

Fifteen years of working in Onkwehonwe communities and organizations has taught me that continued cooperation with state power structures is morally unacceptable.

What it comes down to in confronting our imperial reality is that some of us want to reform colonial law and policy, to dull the monster’s teeth so that we can’t be ripped apart so easily. Some of us believe in reconciliation, forgetting that the monster has a genocidal appetite, a taste for our blood, and would sooner tear us apart than lick our hands. I think that the only thing that has changed since our ancestors first declared war on the invaders is that some of us have lost heart.

Make no mistake about it, Brothers and Sisters: the war is on.  There is no post-colonial situation; the invaders our ancestors fought against are still here.

The freedom and power that come with understanding and living a life of indigenous integrity are experienced by people in many different ways, and respect must be shown to the need for individuals to find their way according to their own vision.

There are no redemptive teaching or easy answers on how to be happy, only directions towards the truth and rough pathways to freedom.

The culture of being colonized takes away a people’s ability to resist the racist aggression and political, economic, and cultural pressures of the colonial state and Settler society to surrender remaining land and rights and to further assimilate culturally.

The state doesn’t have to respond violently to Onwehonwe challenges, it chooses to do so.  The responsibility for violence begins and ends with the state, not with the people who are challenging the inherent injustices perpetuated by the state and who are seeking to alleviate their own present suffering under the state’s existing institutions and practices.

This is why, for the colonizers, the most important and immediate imperative is to assimilate indigenous peoples culturally: without an indigenous cultural foundation or root there is no memory store or intellectual base upon which to build a challenge to the empire.

Most settlers are in denial.  They know that the foundations of their countries are corrupt, and they know that their countries are “colonial” in historical terms, but still they refuse to see and accept the fact that there can be no rhetorical transcendence and retelling of the past to make it right without making fundamental changes to their government, society, and the way they live.

How do we make their history and their country mean something different to people who feel entitled to the symbolic and real monopoly they enjoy on the social dynamics of our relationship and on the cultural landscape?  It seems that if we are to move beyond the charitable racism of current policies or paternalist progressivism of liberal reconciliation models, justice must become a duty of, not a gift from, the Settler.

The colonial relationship is a dynamic relation of arrogance, complacency, and complicity.

This is what we have inherited from our colonial past: relationships founded on hatred and violence and a culture founded on lies to assuage the guilt or shame of it all.  We are afraid of our memories, afraid of what we have become, afraid of each other, and afraid for the future. Fear is the foundation of the way we are in the world, and they way we think about the future.  It is normal, and we have grown used to it.

The present framework and the end-state of the decolonization process has left our societies nose-to-nose and on the verge of a violent future.  Think about it. Either Onkwehonwe accept the Settlers’ response that justice is unaffordable or simply too onerous a cost for them to pay – an acceptance that would mean Onkwehonwe will continue the suicidal death spiral we are currently embroiled in – or Onkwehonwe will rise to challenge the Settlers’ cowardly and selfish unwillingness to redress injustices.

Decolonization… is a process of discovering the truth in a world created out of lies.

If language is the essential characteristic of an Onkwehonwe mentality, how do we explain that the men who signed treaties surrendering millions of square miles of our ancestral homeland, who waged war against their Brothers and Sisters, and who worked with the colonizer to decimate the earth for profit, were all mother-tongue, unilingual, Indigenous language speakers?

The Onkwehonwe languages held as sacred repositories of culture today are very different from the languages spoken by our ancestors, who were the originators of the ceremonies, clans, and stories that are the substance of the traditional culture we are seeking to preserve and reinvigorate.

People always divide this way, between the ones who live for money and those who live for something else.

We transcend colonialism and begin to live again as Onkwehonwe when we start to embody the values of our cultures in our actions and start to shed the main traits of a colonized person: thinking of ourselves before others and projecting the imaginary fears and harmful attitudes onto situations and relationships.

Being “Indian” and being “Aboriginal” is accepting a small self, imprisonment in the small space created for us by the white man: reserves, aboriginal rights, Indian Act entitlements, etc.

I see three kinds of imperial forces that are causing our demise: destructive forces, which cause discord and imbalances in our lives that lead to sickness; deceptive forces, which cloud our minds and prevent us from seeing and thinking clearly about our situations; and useless forces, which are simply distractions that use up our time and energy to no good effect.

If the goals of decolonization are justice and peace, then the process to achieve these goals must reflect a basic covenant on the part of both Onkwehonwe and Settlers to honour each others’ existences.

Change will happen only when settlers are forced into a reckoning with who they are, what they have done, and what they have inherited.

The terms of restitution are calculated not according to morality or rationality, but according to what the settlers  themselves determine they can afford or want to pay in return for their new post-colonial identity.

Imperialism is a machine that destroys indigeneity in all its forms and produces identities, like that of the aboriginal, that are compatible with empire’s capitalistic purposes.

Aboriginalism is assimilation’s end-game, the terminological and psychic displacement of authentic indigenous identities, beliefs, and behaviours with one designed by Indian Department bureaucrats, government lawyers, and judges to complete the imperial objective of exterminating Onkwehonwe presences from the social and political landscapes.

Aboriginalism obscures everything that is historically true and meaningful about Onkwehonwe – our origins, lineages, and names; our land, our heritage, and our rights – and puts in their place views of history and of ourselves and our futures that are nothing more than the self-justifying myths and fantasies of the settler.

There are many differences among the peoples that are Indigenous to this land, yet the challenge facing all Onwehonwe is the same:  regaining freedom and becoming self-sufficient by confronting the disconnection and fear at the core of our existences under colonial dominion.  We are separated from the sources of our goodness and power: from each other, our cultures, and our lands.

Aboriginalism is a cultural strategy on the part of the state; spiritual defeat and cultural assimilation thus accomplished, political and economic negotiations become a sort of mopping-up operation.

In this spiritual and psychological war of genocide and survival, immersed in colonial cultures, surrounded by Settlers, and falsely labelled as citizens of the states which have forcibly integrated them, Onkwehonwe are offered only two choices on the question of culture and identity within the aboriginal paradigm: accept being excluded – and the alienation, loss, and frustration that that situation implies – or choose to become assimilated

The End of Suffering: Fearless Living in Troubled Times by Russell Targ and JJ Hurtak

Suffering results from our delusional cultural conditioning created by family, school, and television from which we create our personal story of who we are. From earliest times, it has been known that suffering can be transformed when we finally learn to change our minds.

Our suffering almost always arises from a time frame not of the present, rather than from existential reality.

We carry in our memories anger, guilt, and especially resentment toward people who have mistreated or betrayed us even long after those nasty people have departed…. We cling to this garbage because it is part of our story -- who we believe we are.

The hidden craziness underlying the conditioned behavior that makes us suffer is the dualistic, "either-or" mode of thinking we have been immersed in since childhood.

The middle ground is vigilance and the fearlessness to experience the situation as it is.

Each day we have the choice to defend our ego and relive our story, or we can find a way to choose differently.

One could say that enlightenment is the state in which we experience everything for the first time.

For the most part, our everyday suffering is not caused by tragic events of the heart, but rather by insults -- real or imagined -- to our ego story.  Suffering is the response to those imagined attacks that interfere with what we want and what we feel we need.

We are spiritually asleep if we allow the regrets of the past, the worries and fears of the future, and the expectation of others to guide our lives.

Many now believe that it is nonlocal awareness, rather than matter that is the ground of all being.

Ultimate reality is devoid of all dualities and thus is wholly impervious to conceptual thinking.  It can only be accessed in nondual intuition, prajna. 

Suffering is instantaneously released when we finally surrender me and mine; suffering will not and cannot be released until that surrender is accomplished.

The insult cannot exist without a person to perceive it as an insult.

Lack of forgiveness is as exhausting as it is unnecessary.

Freedom affords us the opportunity to choose again at any given moment.

When we give up seeing the world through the lens of our conditioning, we no longer project our fears, hopes, and prejudices onto everything we encounter.

Nothing exists on its own, divided or separated from other things.  Everything is interdependent and cannot exist without other things, including the Self.

Peaceful reconciliation within oneself leads to compassion and justice for those who are suffering.

We live in a nonlocal reality, which is to say that we can be affected by events that are distant from our ordinary awareness.

There is no distance for consciousness.

We have an intuitive inner knowledge that transcends the conceptual limits of time and space.

Our personal awareness is nonlocal, fills all of space-time, and is one with it.  That's who you are -- limitless consciousness!

Although we reside for a time as physical bodies, that is not the limit of who we are.  Our true self is nonlocal awareness.

It appears that the ordinary reality we perceive is not one universe but a spiderweb of timeless interactions (a kind of nonlocal signaling) in which the future appears to be tugging on the present in order to become actualized.

We must overcome memory, imagination, and analyses in order to see in to the distance and the future.

When we give up seeing the world through our conditioning, we have an opportunity to experience our lives in liberation and spaciousness.

To discover this self, you don't have to go anywhere.  Better not to go.  Just be still.  You don't have to change anything.  Just be still and surrender to the love that is inside, trying to get your attention.

The highest concentration of neuropeptides in the body corresponds with the location of the chakras.

The transfer of memory need not depend on the cell at all, because our minds are nonlocal -- not located inside our brains or bodies.

Our ego and our story are among the principal sources of all our suffering and block our path to conscious awareness. 

When physical reality and sacred space are undivided, body, mind, and spirit move into spaciousness and timeless awareness, where we give up judgment and experience our inherent loving nature, rejuvenation, and healing.

You must go beyond the individual personality and ego to experience unity and fellowship without judgment or condemnation.

Evil is the self-serving imploding energy of ego.

The Dharma: That Illuminates All Beings Impartially Like the Light of the Sun and Moon by Kalu Rinpoche

Suffering comes from the endless search to satisfy that which cannot be satisfied.

[The mantra tayata om gate gate paragate parasamgate Bodhi soha] condenses the experience of emptiness into a verbal formula.

Why Young Men: Rage, Race and the Crisis of Identity by Jamil Jivani

You're a wishful thinker when you want a better life but don't know how to plan for it.  Wishing is about all you've got.  But you're a thoughtful wisher when you know the specific, attainable steps you need to take to get to the better life you're looking for.

A University of Toronto study found that 40 percent of job seekers from ethnic minority communities across North America "whiten" their resumes by "adopting Anglicized names and downplaying experiences with racial groups to bypass biased screeners and just get their foot in the door".

Government job programs sometimes support people's perceptions of unemployment as an active form of exclusion.  When job opportunities can magically be created by government funding, there is an accompanying assumption that job creation is a choice that could have been made beforehand but purposely wasn't.

The information gaps created by distrust of these authorities are quickly filled by conspiracy theories.

Egypt is far younger than any country in the West, with 60 percent of its population under the age of thirty.

Launch: An Internet Millionaire's Secret Formula To Sell Almost Anything Online, Build A Business You Love, And Live The Life Of Your Dreams by Jeff Walker

You need to tell an engaging story about your products and services and why they matter.

The vast majority of our decisions and behaviors are based in emotion and mental programming -- and then we use our precious logic to justify those decisions.

You want to go through the responses, group them into themes, and rewrite them into good questions that you can expand into teaching points.

Your most scarce resource is focus.  The world will conspire to distract you.

You should start the day by focusing on your highest-value activities before you get caught up in other people's agendas for you.

Meditations with the Navajo: Prayers, Songs, and Stories of Healing and Harmony by Gerald Hausman

As the people move upward, First Man makes day and night.  He becomes a being of power and has in his possession sacred stones and shells. The concept of evil comes early, but rather than a negative phenomenon, it is a force which must be controlled and used when needed. First Man says, “I am filled with evil, and yet there is a time to use it and a time to withhold it.”  Thus, First Man and the emerging People are not good or bad; they hold within themselves the powers of darkness and light.  Neither perfection nor the elimination of evil are goals to be sought; the key is always balance.

Kunzang Lamai Shelung: The Words of My Perfect Teacher by Patrul Rinpoche

Wherever you do something positive, whether of major or minor importance, it is indispensable to enhance it with the three supreme methods.  Before beginning, arouse the bodhichitta as a skilful means to make sure that the action becomes a source of good for the future.  While carrying out the action, avoid getting involved in any conceptualization, so that merit cannot be destroyed by circumstances.  At the end, seal the action properly by dedicating the merit, which will ensure that it continually grows ever greater.

It is no good listening with only your body physically present, while your mind wanders off after your thoughts.

The tendency of consciousness to get engrossed in the objects of the six senses is the root of all samsara's hallucinations and the source of all suffering. 

Healing and the Mind by Bill Moyers

Healing begins with caring.

In gaining a sense of control over our medical treatments, in making conscious choices about how we spend our lives, and in allowing others into our sufferings, we are releasing innate healing capacities that make us nature’s allies in our own recovery.

We form our communities today around illness.

The Miracle Morning for Writers: How to Build a Writing Ritual that Increases Your Impact and Your Income by Hal Elrod, Steve Scott, Honoree Corder

How you start each morning determines your mindset, and the context, for the rest of your day.  Start everyday with a purposeful, disciplined, growth-infused, and goal-oriented morning.

More important than the time that you start your day is the mindset with which you start your day.

Amateurs wait until they feel motivated before writing.  Professionals treat it like a job where they clock in and clock out everyday.

Surfers of the Zuvuya: Tales of Interdimensional Travel by Jose Arguelles

The planet is shouting out: “Hey humans!  Come clean or you will be cleaned up!"

Our truth is the sum of our imperfections and how they give us our unique perspectives.  Our perspectives define personal choice.  The choice is to cover and hide, or to shine in our individual truths. 

Your ego is the guy who won’t let go.  The ego’s job is to maintain the static blocks.  It is the controller.  It is the secretary of defense.  And it is the CIA mastermind of all denial mechanisms.

Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for A New Kind of Entrepreneur by Derek Sivers

Don't be on your deathbed someday, having squandered your one chance at life, full of regret because you pursued little distractions instead of big dreams.  You need to know your personal philosophy of what makes you happy and what's worth doing.

Business is not about money. It's about making dreams come true for others and for yourself.

Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently promoting what's not working.

If you think your life's purpose needs to hit you like a lightning bolt, you'll overlook the little day-to-day things that fascinate you.

If you think revolution needs to feel like war, you'll overlook the importance of simply serving people better.

When you're onto something great, it won't feel like revolution.  It'll feel like uncommon sense.

If you're ever unsure what to prioritize, just ask your customers the open-ended question, "How can I best help you now?"

It's counterintuitive, but the way to grow your business is to focus entirely on your existing customers.  Just thrill them, and they'll tell everyone.

For an idea to get big-big-big, it has to be useful. And being useful doesn't require funding.

Your first idea is just one of many options.

Women Rocking Business: The Ultimate Step-by-Step Guidebook to Create a Thriving Life Doing Work You Love by Sage Lavine

If you want more money, you have to first "bless that which you want", as the Hawaiians say.  Noticing what emotions money elicits from  you is the first step to improving your relationship with it and healing any hurt you've had because of it.

We're the ones who choose to associate money with worry, shame, and blame -- then blame it for not showing up for us.

We all have places where we go unconscious about money.  We stop paying attention, we overspend, or we hoard.

We re-create our childhood money story in adulthood… until we do the inner work.

Happier people on average make approximately $1 million more over the course of their lifetimes.

Money is just energy, and when we give our life force in a way that contributes to others, we invite energy to come back to us as an exchange.

Money is a tool -- like a hammer -- one we can use to either build things up or tear them down.

If there is food in your fridge, if you have shoes and clothes, if you have a bed and a roof, you're richer than 75 percent of the people in the world.  If you have a bank account, money in your wallet, and some coins in the money box, you're more fortunate than 92 percent of the people on the planet. 

When we, as women, adopt a humanitarian cause or service-based mission above and beyond our immediate client base, we rise above our typical income levels.

Stop trying to figure it out all at once.  Your business will evolve one client, one customer, one sale, or one project at a time.

The voice of fear---  your own personal gremlins -- simply get louder when you try anything new.

Having a purpose is a gift, even when it feels hard.

Trying to figure it all out before you take the first step will not only slow you down but keep you stuck.

Trust that all your desires are leading you to the next right step.

Successful people are successful not because of their talents but because of the choice they made to show up, over and over and over again.

Your leadership, skills, and capacity to wo-manifest will get polished in the experiences of life that are waiting for you.

Failure and success can be equally scary when you really decide to go for it.

Don't take criticism from those who are standing on the sidelines.  Don't accept judgment from those who aren't dipping their toes in the water of risk and transformation.

When you can bring your wounds into the current moment and dialogue with the parts of you that want to hold you back, you'll alchemize that pain into fuel for your future.

Pay close attention to which stories run on replay in your mind.  Watch your emotions and your moods. Notice what you do to lift yourself up.

When you balance your vulnerability with your credibility, you become solid in your leadership and create an energetic field around you that invites the right clients to come in.

Living big without boundary-setting, a support system, and conscious self-care practices can set you up for a truckload of stress.

The secret to not burning out has no more to do with avoiding work than it does with pushing or stressing out.  The secret lies in your ability to fully engage and plug in, as well as your equal ability to unplug and unwind at the end of your day.

Your purpose is like your side effect to the flowers that bloom when the bees create  honey.  The goal of the honeybee is to make honey, but the true and more spiritual purpose of a honeybee is to aid in flowers blooming.  And what's even more of a relief is that your purpose unfolds without pushing or prying the flowers open; it's a welcomed side effect to you following your desires.  So as you say YES to what's next for you, your purpose unfolds.

When you take the time to clean your mind, whether through meditation, quiet time, or an hour spent in nature, you tap into a timelessness.

You need to have enough spaciousness in your schedule to access the million-dollar ideas.

Your soul didn't come here to sit in peaceful feelings all the time. 

Zero Limits: The Secret Hawaiian System for Wealth, Health, Peace and More by Joe Vitale and Ihaleakala Hew Len

Ho'oponopono is a process of letting go toxic energies within you to allow the impact of Divine thoughts, words, deeds, and impacts. 

Everything in your life -- simply because it is in your life -- is your responsibility.

The problem isn't with them; it's with you.

A clear intention is nothing more than a clear premonition.

Concern about weight is a memory. The only thing to do is love it and even give thanks for it.  By cleaning it, you ensure that the Divine has a chance to come through with an inspiration.

By asking for forgiveness we cleared the path for healing to be manifest.  What was blocking our well-being was nothing more than lack of love. 

Problems are just replayed memories of the past showing up to give us one more chance to see with the eyes of love and to act from inspiration.

Complete responsibility means accepting it all -- even the people who enter your life and their problems because their problems are your problems.  They are in your life, and if you take full responsibility for your life, then you have to take full responsibility for what they are experiencing too.

Whenever you want to improve anything in your life, from finances to relationships, there's only one place to look: inside yourself.

You don’t say "Please forgive me" to the Divine because the Divine needs to hear it; you say it because you need to hear it.

The purpose of life is to be restored back to love.

We are living in a belief-driven world.  Whatever you believe, that belief will work.  

The Deepest Well: Healing the Long-Term Effects of Childhood Adversity by Dr Nadine Burke Harris

High doses of adversity affect not only the brain structure and function but also the developing immune system and hormonal systems, and even the way DNA is read and transcribed.

Because the body is like one big, intricate Swiss watch, what happens in your immune system is deeply connected to what happens in your cardiovascular system.

Dysregulation of the stress response can lead to increased inflammation, hypersensitivity (think allergies, eczema, and asthma), and even autoimmmune disease (when the immune system attacks the body itself).

Research findings show a strong correlation between childhood stress and autoimmune disease in both children and adults.

Many physicians had no clear understanding that clinical illnesses like asthma and diabetes might also be manifestations of toxic stress.

Infants of depressed moms have a harder time regulating their sleep; they sleep an average of ninety-seven few minutes a night than infants of non-depressed moms.

For a person with toxic stress, moderate physical activity (like breaking a sweat for roughly an hour a day) can help the body better decide which fights to pick and which ones to walk away from.

Many people with over-active stress responses don't know what's happening in their bodies, so they spend all this time chasing down the symptoms instead of getting to the source of the problem. 

The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More and Change the Way You Lead Forever by Michael Bungay Stanier

The essence of coaching lies in helping others and unlocking their potential.

At least 45 percent of our waking behavior is habitual.

Resilient systems build in fail-safes so that when something breaks down, the next step to recover is obvious.

There are just five types of triggers: location, time, emotional state, other people, and the immediately preceding action.

It's hard to change your behavior, and it takes courage to have a go at doing something differently, and resilience to keep at it when it doesn't work perfectly the first time (which it won't).

One of the laws of change: as soon as you try something new, you'll get resistance.

Call them forward to learn, improve and grow, rather than to just get something sorted out.

When your brain feels safe, it can operate at its most sophisticated level.  You're more subtle in your thinking, better able to see and manage ambiguity.

If you're not sure about a situation, you'll default to reading it as unsafe.

The strategic question: if you're saying yes to this, what are you saying no to?

People don't really learn when you tell them something.  They don't even really learn when they do something.  They start learning, start creating new neural pathways, only when they have a chance to recall and reflect on what just happened.