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Kia ora whānau and welcome to the Crystal Road Impact Podcast.

And we're going to talk about the power of heritage today.

For me personally, I didn't grow up knowing too much about my cultural background.

Unfortunately, it wasn't something that my great grandparents wanted to talk about.

And as a result, I grew up with a lack of identity and a lack of self-worth, really.

I kind of never felt like I really belonged because I didn't have those roots that I could connect to.

And for me, now in hindsight, I know how important heritage can be.

And it's one of the most important things that I try to integrate into my children's life by making sure that they know where they come from.

Growing up, I always felt like an outcast or I just didn't really belong.

And now I can see that it was because I didn't know where I came from.

I didn't realize where my roots lay.

And unfortunately for my generation, it's the ripple effect of my parents' generation.

Just a little story that I've picked up along the way is that I knew a man

he's in his 70s now, that would go to school, and if he spoke Māori, he would get caned.

But then when he would go home and speak English, he would get a hiding, and it was really, really conflicting.

And then that filtered out into parenthood, where the cultural aspects and the beautiful wisdom and knowledge

from the culture wasn't passed down because it had a negative impact on his life growing up.

And so I can see how for my own grandparents that they didn't want to

pass on the struggles.

So for them, they connect culture with hardship.

And with hardship, there's a lot more behind the scenes that we'll never really understand for that generation.

And we don't really need to, but the one thing that we do need to really have for it is respect.

Just to have the respect for the journey our grandparents went on.

Sometimes I kind of think, gosh, I wish I knew how to speak Nguyen, or I wish I knew how to speak more Māori, or I wish I this, I wish I that.

But in reality, I can learn.

And so I'm going to take

the power that I know lies within my heritage to discover where that can take me in my life.

I'm so interested in my heritage that it's giving me a new direction.

I'm so intrigued to find what actually lies within my personal heritage and I know along the way I'm going to know myself a little bit more and my identity and

sense of belonging is going to actually find its home.

And I feel like if we as a generation that don't, from somebody that doesn't know much about their heritage, if we can actually learn a little bit more, we'll understand where we come from.

And having that sense of belonging, it will just change.

I really, honestly, truly believe if we have a world of people that know where they come from.

We're going to have a world that is so much more powerful, so much more empowering.

So I found for myself as well, learning a little bit more about heritage and where I've come from, it's actually created within me more inspiration and more creativity to actually pursue my dreams.

Because I know that within my ancestral line, there is so much power and

There's so much strength and there's so much wisdom and if I just connect my heart and my soul to that, I know that it's just going to beautifully flow within me.

So I know that heritage has so much power and I believe that

that heritage lies within us already.

And if we open ourselves to the connection that we belong and we find our roots and we really dig deep down into that connection of our ancestral line, our bloodline, that our limits are truly limitless.

We're capable of so much.

If we take a moment to actually acknowledge and understand

Everything that our ancestors went through, everything that they enjoyed, everything that they sacrificed, the war that they fought, the power that they had within themselves and their communities, the love and the connection that they shared within each other.

we could actually really change the trajectory of our lives because they did.

And sometimes we get caught up in the drawbacks of our heritage and not the good stuff that our heritage may hold.

But if we maybe just take a moment and skip a few generations and go four or five deep, we might find that there's some real gold there.

Another point that I realized as well is if your heritage doesn't serve you, you're more than capable of creating a new one.

You can change the trajectory of your life and you can actually shape a beautiful, empowering, loving heritage for your children and their children.

I also believe that if your heritage doesn't align with where you're at right now, that you actually have the power within you to create a new heritage for your children and the generations to follow.

Thanks for listening, whānau, and if you enjoyed this podcast, make sure you give us a five-star review on Spotify and Apple Podcast, and follow us on all our social media platforms, and I'll see you on the next episode.