Read the Transcript:

Naomi Nakamura: Hello there, and welcome back to The Live FAB Life Podcast. I'm your host Naomi Nakamura, and I'm excited to introduce today's guest. Joining me for the third time is my friend, my coach, Julien Elizabeth.

Julien first joined me back in Episode 144, where we talked about uncovering the path towards our best, most authentic selves using astrology.

And then she returned to this show recently in Episode 216, where we had a conversation on reframing astrology for personal transformation. She is someone who I have worked with in the past. I have an annual reading with her around my birthday, but most recently, as I've shared in Episodes 214 and 215, I was really struggling to find my voice, the tone of my messaging, and really feeling vulnerable in how I communicate. And so I spent some time working with Julien in a one-on-one coaching capacity, and she gave me a lot of tools to work with that really helped me break through some of those creative blocks that I had.

One of the tools that she shared with me in our coaching relationship was yoga nidra. And so joining me today, we're having a conversation on exactly what yoga nidra is. So not only does she explain what it is, she explains and shares how she practices it. She shares who yoga nidra is for and all of the benefits and how it can help us and also how it's different from meditation.

As I shared, it is something that helped me in calming my nervous system and just quieting things down, being someone who has really been conditioned to be a Type A person as a Projector, living in a Type A world, as someone who has trouble getting out of fight or flight mode and someone who has struggled with adrenal dysfunction and stress as we all have. And so adopting the practice that she introduced to me of yoga nidra has had some really profound impacts on me in helping me to manage my stress, but also helping me to sleep and to rest in a very deep way.

And so we have a conversation. If you've never heard about yoga nidra, or you are familiar with it, you might learn some new things, but we have a conversation on that because it is part of her offerings as a astrology and wellness coach. So with that, let's get to the show.

Hello, my friend. Welcome back. This is your third time on the show.

Julien Elizabeth: This is my third time?

Naomi Nakamura: Yes. And we are having a conversation about a new topic that we've yet to chat about. So I'm really excited about it, but if whatever reason whoever's listening, have not heard your first two episodes, can you please tell us who you are and what you do?

Julien Elizabeth: Yes. My name is Julien Elizabeth, and I am an astrologer, which is how you may know me from my previous episodes with Naomi. And I am also a yoga teacher and a yoga nidra guide, which is what we'll be focusing on today. So I'll share all about that, but I really blend the two together.

And in addition to that, in my work with individuals through coaching and mentorship, I bring the cosmic and the deep inner subconscious together through these practices and these tools to help individuals find greater knowing of themselves and step into their lives with more confidence and ease and clarity and astrology, as well as yoga nidra are two of the most profound practices and tools that I've found for my own journey. And so it's a real blessing that my life allows me to share them with more people.

Naomi Nakamura: It's really illuminating work. And earlier this year, I had the opportunity to work with you. I get my annual readings with you, but I was feeling really stifled in many different ways. I was feeling stuck. And so we worked together for a few months, and I actually shared that experience in Episodes 214 and 215.

And so if you haven't listened to that yet, you can go ahead and check that out. But one of the practices that you recommended for me was to give yoga nidra a try, and this is something that my integrative doctor recommended to me back in 2020. And it was the start of the pandemic, and there was just so many things going on and I never really looked into it or really gave it too much of a chance. And so when that was something that you suggested that I try, I did, and I found it was very helpful in just slowing things down.

And I was experiencing a lot of internal stress. And for me, slowing things down helps to slow down and calm my nervous system. And for me, that's what stress management is when we are able to calm down your nervous systems. And this was, it was extremely helpful.

And so I would love to have a conversation today to share what is yoga nidra, because I've actually never had this as a topic on the show. So let's just dive in, and can you tell us what it is and who is it for?

Julien Elizabeth: Yeah. I think one of the big reasons why I suggested yoga nidra to you at that time was around sleep because yoga nidra can be such an incredible practice for restoration and-

Naomi Nakamura: Which why I really love it.

Julien Elizabeth: Yeah. And you and I are both Projectors, and we know that Projectors need to have a real tuned in connection to the nervous system and need to value rest. And those waves that we ride as Projectors.

Naomi Nakamura: Well, and at that time, it was right before, probably during the flares, my skin flares of what I now know it was eczema and atopic dermatitis. And so not only was my nervous system shot because I couldn't sleep because I was so uncomfortable all the time, but my immune system was in chaos as well. And so I really see it as something that just was part of my healing process, is part of my healing process.

Julien Elizabeth: Yeah. It's such big medicine and yoga nidra to answer your question, honestly is really for anyone. And that's something that I really love about it because it's a practice that is not movement based. So if somebody can lie down comfortably or create a position where they can be comfortable, that can also be sitting down or really propped up and supported and is able to have access to their listening, then yoga nidra can really shine in your life.

Naomi Nakamura: It's like the whole practice of savansana.

Julien Elizabeth: It is. Yeah. So it's generally done lying down. Yoga. We can think of yoga as consciousness or union and nidra translates to sleep. And so this is a practice of conscious rest or conscious sleep. Sometimes it is misunderstood as a practice that's meant to put you to sleep. And though that can certainly happen. And it's totally okay if it does. If practiced consistently or consciously can actually take your body into a sleep state, which is the real state that we need to be in for repair and healing to fully occur. So it puts your body into sleep, but can keep your mind active and aware and tapped into a brainwave state that is beneath your analyzing mind. And so you're not necessarily as plugged into your rational, logical, analytical mind, which is keeping lists, problem solving, analyzing the events of the day or of the future.

But instead drops you a layer deeper into a more dream-like state. And it's in that dream-like state that we experience real healing of things that are occurring at the more energetic or mental level as well as within the body too, because it's in a more passive brainwave state that we actually can have access to the congruence of the nervous system in the endocrine system, releasing hormones through your glands to stimulate restoration or healing. And essentially along with your endocrine system, your nervous system, can help you to really soften the response that we might call fight or flight or being in a really agitated or uncomfortable or in a stress state.

Naomi Nakamura: As someone who I have categorized myself for most of my life as Type A, having all the lists and all the planners, and always being busy with something, always something to do. Now, I know a lot of that is conditioning based upon the environments that I was raised in. And I operate in, but as a Projector, we do need rest, but everybody else needs rest. And when I was in the depths of adrenal dysfunction in that fight or flight, there were moments where I realized I didn't know how to relax. I didn't know how to rest. And in fact, that was something that I wrote in my journal one morning doing morning pages was what is deep rest, because we can all talk about oh, we need to naps and resting. But like you said, it's really also quieting the mind so that the mind rest, because to me, that's the expanded conversation on deep rest, and yoga nidra is one way that I'm starting to learn how to do that.

Julien Elizabeth: Absolutely. It's been called yoga for your mind, yoga for your subconscious mind, yoga for your nervous system. So a lot of times we come to a yoga practice for its benefits to our joints or our muscles or to our focus. And this practice actually asks you to make your body as comfortable as it can and receive. And it's through receiving that we can quiet the mind because a lot of people, and really I think it's important to talk about that we live in a culture that doesn't value rest. Resting and being well rested is quite rebellious. It's quite anti-capitalist.

Naomi Nakamura: A lot of people that I know, we think ... They're like, oh, I'm just going to rest. So they go and they sit on their couch and they lie down and they pull open their phone and they start scrolling. So your brain is still processing and being stimulated by what you're seeing and whatever you consume on social media. So is that really rest?

Julien Elizabeth: And even just the blue lights of the phone.

Naomi Nakamura: Yes.

Julien Elizabeth: The technology of it stimulating using your hands, your [inaudible 00:10:45].

Naomi Nakamura: The scrolling.

Julien Elizabeth: Yeah. You're using so many nerves.

Naomi Nakamura: I've been having arthritis, I think in my hands. And I'm like, I think it's because of scrolling.

Julien Elizabeth: Yeah. I mean, I don't know if you've ever had the experience of scrolling so much your hand goes numb, which has happened to me. And that's a moment where I pause and I'm like, okay, Julien, rein it in, put the phone down.

So to have an overstimulated nervous system, to be in a very activated state is beneficial to a lot of corporations, a lot of systems within our culture. And so to actually learn how to rest is difficult because it's not prioritized. So we think that we're resting, we go to sleep or we chill on the couch or we do whatever we do that we may consider restful. And there is some benefit to that. However, usually for lots of people, when you're sleeping, you're not necessarily turning off your brain, and we can see this with the types of dreams people have or waking up the next morning and not feeling rested at all.

And so yoga nidra as a practice is a great component to sleep. It's like a super food for sleep. You can take it and with consistent practice, it can be incredible for healing some sleep disorders like insomnia or other issues that prevent sleeping. It can help to regulate your sleep cycle so that when you do go to sleep, you're actually truly resting. And some people find that just 30 minutes of yoga nidra restores the mind in a deeper way than a whole eight hours of trying to sleep because it works so effectively at essentially almost massaging your brain and coaxing it into what you could consider to be a somewhat of a hypnotic state. So you're a little bit in a trance when you're experiencing this practice. And there have been some studies with this practice that suggest that about 30 to 40 minutes of the practice can feel just as restorative as two hours of sleep. So it's incredible for anybody who works a lot, who's really managing a lot. Mothers benefits so much from this practice. If you have a young child who's taking a nap, hop on a yoga nidra and get that extra boost. That can be really supportive for your life.

Naomi Nakamura: So you mentioned 30 to 40 minutes and I must confess, I am not very consistent in practicing it in a way that I would like to, because it is like ... you can pick up your phone and do a five minute meditation. How effective that is, only you can know. But the yoga nidra sessions, at least that I've seen are pretty long. And so to be able to dedicate that block of time on a regular basis, it takes a commitment. So for someone who's never done it before, can you walk us through ... how do you practice it? Do you do it in the morning? Do you do it at night? Do you do it in the middle of the day? How often do you do it? And do you have ... Do you get into bed, or do you do it on your yoga mat? What is your yoga nidra practice like?

Julien Elizabeth: Well, my short answer is anytime you want as much as you want, because it's so beneficial.

I had one of my students that I'm mentoring through this practice asked me, "Has anyone ever done too much yoga nidra? Is there an overdose?" And not to my knowledge that you can do too much. When I was really deep in my studies of yoga nidra, I had the blessing of being able to have a lot of spacious time in my day. And there was a period of time where I was practicing yoga nidra for four to six hours a day.

Naomi Nakamura: Wow.

Julien Elizabeth: Yeah. And that was when I was really deep in study with the aim of being a guide and a deep practitioner. So not necessary for that much devotion, but it does in general take they say 15 to 20 minutes to get into what's called the yoga nidra state.

Naomi Nakamura: So just to set this up, and this is the reason I ask this question is because I think the very first time I ever tried meditation on my own away, outside of a yoga class or anything was probably about 10 years ago, and it was Deepak Chopra did this like thing with Oprah.

And so I remember I was in Arizona at my family's vacation condo, and it was just my cousin and I, but she wasn't there. So I thought I'm going to try this. And she was a regular practitioner of meditation and she was the one who was like, "You should try this."

So I remember sitting there and like closing my eyes and not really sure what to expect. How do I just shut my mind off? Or should my eyes be open? Should my eyes be closed? I just didn't know what to expect. I'm like, am I doing this right? So that's the context of my question.

Julien Elizabeth: Totally. So one of the ways that I've described yoga nidra is that it is sort of a more feminine version of meditation. In meditation, they'll tell you to sit up straight and be still and be focused.

In yoga nidra, the suggestion is lie down and get comfortable and listen, and where your mind may wander is exactly right. So just allow yourself to be guided.

When you are new to the practice usually in most meditations or yoga nidra practices, you'll listen to, they'll set you up for success. They'll say, get comfortable, lie down, give yourself lots of pillows, pay attention to your breath. And that's where the practice starts. And it's a framework.

So there's a series of steps within the practice to guide you into that deep dream-like state. And something that I really like about that is that you're guided through each place and then you just arrive and you're like, oh wow, I'm really rested or I just have this beautiful visualization, or I feel really spacious.

And so the order of the steps is very particular, which is why the practice could tend to be a little daunting, because you're like, oh no, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, an hour. But it really gently guides you into the practice. And so I really love to play around with the time of day that works best for me because I'm always changing. You're always changing. Our lives are always in transformation.

And so for me, sometimes practicing right when I wake up can be really beneficial, especially if I didn't have as deep of sleep as I like to have. I wake up a little bit startled or not so rested. And if I have the extra 15 to 20 minutes, I'll pop on a shorter one and just allow myself to finish my sleep cycle, wake up with a positive intention and start my day from a more expansive place.

Yoga nidra is also really great for that mid afternoon energy lull where you might hit 3:00 or 4:00 and you're like, I'm just tired. And because maybe [inaudible 00:17:23].

Naomi Nakamura: When people usually start looking for coffee or snacks.

Julien Elizabeth: Like mantra or something like that.

Naomi Nakamura: Exactly.

Julien Elizabeth: Exactly. And so if you can take 20 minutes away from what you're doing and set yourself up and just pop in your earphones and listen, in 20 minutes, you can feel really, really restored. So I usually keep on hand some favorites that are a little bit shorter as well as some of my really deep favorites are much longer, but I'm just like you where sometimes I don't necessarily have the ability to luxuriate for an hour in a yoga nidra practice, but I just need to drop into a place that exists beneath my logic. And I'm happy to share with the community some varying length of nidra practices so that you can jump into it without feeling like you have to make a huge commitment.

Naomi Nakamura: That would be amazing. So should one expect to always fall asleep during a yoga nidra?

Julien Elizabeth: Definitely not the expectation. And I would say setting an expectation or an intention not to fall asleep can be most helpful. Though falling asleep does commonly happen because what is occurring in the yoga nidra practice is that you're guiding your mind into altered brainwave states or brainwave states that feel altered, I guess is a better way to say it.

And without getting too sciencey, what I'll say is that when you are sleeping or you are dreaming, your dominant brainwave pattern, so that looks like those waves that you might see in like a science video or something like that, an EKG. The dominant brainwave pattern in the yoga nidra space or in the sleep space is what's called alpha or theta. And that's the brainwave state you need to be in for that healing presence or for a dream space. And so essentially in this practice, you're guiding yourself consciously into that state.

Well, as you're surfing that brainwave state, it's quite easy to drop into sleep because you're right there. So it happens a lot. And I would say even in my own practice, practicing this for several years, more than half of the time I do fall asleep.

And so my suggestion for that is to once set the intention that you won't fall asleep, unless you're practicing yoga nidra before bed. In which case, maybe you need a little bit of a sleep aid. This is a great sleep aid. It's not something that you have to take like a pill. You just have to open up your ears for it. And you might have a few sleep devoted yoga nidra practices. So these are ones that are specifically created for sleep. They just drop you off into a sleep state. And those are great to practice in your bed. For the other ones, maybe you have different goals or different aims for a practice. You might want to separate those from the sleep yoga nidras. Does that make sense?

Naomi Nakamura: Mm-hmm.

Julien Elizabeth: So you might have a few that you really like to do or that you're exploring that you practice out of your bed. Maybe you have set up a little, what I call nidra nest on your couch or where you would practice meditation or yoga. So you're taking yourself out of what is patterned to be a sleep space so that you can practice the more healing benefits of the practice consciously. You're always going to get incredible benefits from nidra, whether you fall asleep or you stay awake.

Even if your mind still wanders or makes lists or analyzes, you're getting some benefit because all of those brainwave states, some that I've mentioned are occurring all the time. We're just playing with where your dominance is.

Naomi Nakamura: What role does breathing play with it?

Julien Elizabeth: That's a great question. So in general, the yoga nidra practice is passive. Meaning once the practice starts, you're not manipulating your breath or consciously moving or doing anything from a conscious place. You're letting the practice work itself.

However, practicing dosimetric breath or deep breathing, being really conscious with how you're breathing beforehand can start the practice early and help you to move into a restorative state, oxygenate your blood and drop in a little bit deeper.

There's a specific section within the nidra practice that does focus on the breath and the intention behind that is to bring your awareness and your focus to how your breath energizes your system. And it can help you establish focus or move into a more creative space because essentially your breath is the bridge between your consciousness and your unconsciousness, between your body and your mind. Your breath tells such a story for all of us.

Every emotion has a breathing pattern, right? If you're really excited, maybe you're like that. If you're really sad, maybe your breathing pattern is ...

So really through the breathing section of the nature practice, you're training yourself to focus on your breath so that in your conscious waking life, when you have emotions or you're having experiences or something big happens, your brain immediately knows to focus on the breath. It's trained to. Oh wow. I'm anxious. I'm not breathing. I need to exhale. I need to focus on my breath for a little bit. So it's really a brain training practice that is not meant to do with conscious action and more conscious awareness.

Naomi Nakamura: You're Bay Area girl, so you might appreciate this, being a Giants fan, because they know you are. The Giants have a breathing coach on staff.

Julien Elizabeth: I was just telling my friend yesterday that I really want to set the intention of working with baseball players. Well, I specifically was like, "I want to work with the Giants."

Naomi Nakamura: They have a breathing coach on staff, and they do grounding before the game and ... Yeah.

Julien Elizabeth: Yeah. I mean-

Naomi Nakamura: They're really setting a new wave in terms of that.

Julien Elizabeth: Yeah. I mean visualization, focused breath, conscious movement of the body. All of these things have incredible benefits, especially for someone who's operating at a high caliber and a high level, to have awareness of our ability to visualize. And we've heard so many studies on athletes or weight lifters who are able to go further because they rehearsed, and yoga nidra is an incredible tool for that rehearsal.

Naomi Nakamura: You need to correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you had shared with me how yoga nidra was a tool that was used to help people and I think specifically soldiers who were struggling with PTSD. Did we have that conversation?

Julien Elizabeth: We did. Yeah.

Naomi Nakamura: We did. And you said it was because it might be a lot of far out there from people who are not in this world, but they just gave it another name, and it was totally embraced and it was proven to be quite helpful for those people.

Julien Elizabeth: Yeah. So the pioneer there is a man named Richard Miller, and he was a yoga teacher. He still is. I believe based actually in San Francisco in the early days of yoga in the west as we know it. So in the '80s, '90s and early 2000s, and he discovered yoga nidra for himself and created a practice that is called iRest. So it sounds very San Francisco, right? It's like iPhone, but iRest.

Naomi Nakamura: Must have been in the late '90s.

Julien Elizabeth: Right. So he developed a practice called iRest, which is the framework of yoga nidra, somewhat scrubbed of the esoteric language and dialogue and the history in order to make it more palatable or accessible. And he brought it as a study, as a pilot study to the U.S. government and the military and VA hospitals and suggested it to be practiced by returning soldiers or those who were struggling with PTSD and complex PTSD and anxiety, and they went with it.

And through the practice very quickly within, I believe a short of a time as one month or two months, they saw dramatic reduction in reports of suicidal tendencies, depression, panic attacks, and then within a subsequent short period of time, a reduction in the need for intervention and the ability to taper down from medications.

There have been incredible studies on how this helps individuals healing and integrating traumatic experiences as well as helping with brain function. So adults or anybody who has been struggling with dementia or brain damage, dissociation within the body or even disrepair within the body. And in addition to that, it's incredible for a whole list of things.

So it's beautiful because we hear about the benefits of yoga, right? It's all over the media now that yoga really, really helps. And actually a lot of the research in yoga as this big broad umbrella has been through the practice of yoga nidra and meditation because of some of that pioneering work that Richard Miller did with the VA.

Naomi Nakamura: Amazing, amazing. And like I said, for myself, you know some of the things that I was struggling with in terms of feeling creatively and emotionally and just not very focused, stifled, but also with physical things going on with my body. It really helped to calm things down.

And I've been saying this for so long now that you can't silo between what's going on in your physical body and what's going on with everywhere else within you because it's all interconnected. And this is a really amazing tool that anyone can do. You don't need a prescription to have to practice it. You don't need anything to have to practice it. There's a lot of free resources that you can partake of to help you just try it and learn it. So speaking of which, you have some resources out there for people to experiment with yoga nidra.

Julien Elizabeth: Yeah. So I have several recordings, and I'm always sort of in a creation process, recording more and sharing more.

I share those recordings on my website as well as on SoundCloud and then through an app called insight timer, which I highly recommend as a tool for anyone really wanting to access some of these practices. There's a ton of yoga nidra. There's a ton of meditation and different yoga practices within this app. And I'm happy to share some specific ones that I think are helpful both for me as well as from others, because it is a bit daunting or it can be a little bit daunting because there's so much in this app. There's so many options.

But the best way that you might be able to find your way is using the search function and typing in maybe a specific ailment that you have say, insomnia, and you can search yoga nidra for insomnia, and that is great with insight timer, and YouTube also has great resources as well. So it's growing a lot. There is just a continued desire for it because it works and-

Naomi Nakamura: We're all stressed out.

Julien Elizabeth: And we're all stressed out and it works. And it's so nice. Yoga nidra, as I was saying, there's a specific framework. And the initial step of yoga nidra is what's called the body scan, and body scan meditations have their own wealth of research into their benefits as well.

And you can even just jump into this type of practice simply by looking for body scans, because this is incredible for just reconnecting you with parts of your body, and essentially it works by spending a lot of time having you feel with your mind the parts of your body that have the most nerve endings, like your hands and your feet and your face. And then using that awareness that grows and spreading it into the parts of your body that has less nerve endings, like up your arms and down your ribs.

By the end of just this part, you might feel like you're receiving this vibrational massage or you feel a little bit fuzzy. And that fuzzy feeling is a state called coherence where you feel like you're one being instead of a mind and a body or a mind and two legs. You're really connecting everything. And this is the part of a practice that really, if you have no experience, this is totally new. This part of the practice can be the most transforming. And that might be the part that you fall asleep in, but its benefits are so rich.

Naomi Nakamura: Yeah. The best part is for me is when I can feel myself letting go, I can literally feel my mind relaxing, which I can't will my mind to do. I can't tell my mind to do, but with this practice I can feel it, and it feels so good. And then when you're coming out of it at the end, if you didn't fall asleep, it really ... Transformative is the only word that I can think of to really describe what it's like.

Julien Elizabeth: Yeah. And what it's doing is it's down regulating your system. So our nervous systems are hijacked in a lot of ways and all the ways that we've talked about already. And so taking these 20 minutes where you could scroll, or you could grab a snack or you could do a whole ton of things, you can work out, you can go for a walk. But taking these 20 minutes and practicing yoga nidra can be incredibly effective for down regulating. And for a lot of us, that's the medicine that we need, especially after a lot of the external events of the times.

This practice can just help you come back to yourself, which is really where the greatest impact can be made, when we're all in coherence with ourselves and we're connected to our whole beings, mind, body, spirit, everything. Then our ability to make an impact in the world from my perspective is much greater.

Naomi Nakamura: I'm going to try it tonight because the NBA Finals starts tonight. And I have noticed during this whole playoffs that after every Golden State Warriors game, I'm so hyped up with adrenaline that I don't sleep well those nights. So I'm going to try it tonight after the game before I go to bed.

Julien Elizabeth: Oh, I love that. That's a good reminder to me. I love the NBA playoffs and it's the main game, right? The last one.

Naomi Nakamura: Yeah. It's the Finals on tonight. Yep.

Julien Elizabeth: Wow. Exciting.

Naomi Nakamura: So with that, if you could send me the links to some of those resources, I'll link to it in the show notes. But also where can people find you and connect with you?

Julien Elizabeth: So you can find me on Instagram. My Instagram handle is my name, Julien Elizabeth, and I share lots of stuff that's happening in my world, astrology, yoga nidra related. I also offer a yoga nidra mentorship called Deep Space where you can learn so much more about this practice and learn how to guide it. And so that will be ... We're completing a module right now through the summer season. And there will be another cohort that moves through in the fall.

And you can find information on that on my website, which is julienelizabeth.com. And then there's also access points to email me if you have questions and you'll be able to link into my meditations on SoundCloud and on Insight Timer through the show note.

Naomi Nakamura: I highly recommend people subscribe to your email community as well because you send such great insightful emails that I always keep in my inbox and refer back to often.

Julien Elizabeth: Thank you so much. Yes. I sometimes forget to mention that, but I do send a weekly inside email that is really oriented to the astrology, but in a practical and helpful way. So it's not just the moon is here, beware, but here are some great ways that you can work without energy for your life. So great reminder. Thank you.

Naomi Nakamura: I'll link to all those things in the show. Thank you so much for being here and sharing your wisdom and your time and your energy with us.

Julien Elizabeth: You're welcome. It's always so good to see you and connect with you, Naomi. I love the work you're doing. And actually have a student. I want to share. I have a student in my yoga nidra training who found me through one of our podcast episodes.

Naomi Nakamura: Yay. I love that. Thank you for sure.

Julien Elizabeth: What a blessing.

Naomi Nakamura: As a Projector, I appreciate that.

Julien Elizabeth: Yeah. It was a huge blessing for me too. I was like, this is so great that she found your work and she really resonates with you and then reached out to me. So I love that network we're creating.

Naomi Nakamura: Yeah. And that's why I love doing podcasts as well. And I try to keep them as evergreen as possible, meaning that they're relevant beyond just the time that they're published. And I have the same thing. I have people who come to me because they heard an episode that I did two or three years ago. And so this is my favorite way of sharing content because I also ... brevity is not a strength.

Julien Elizabeth: I love that. While your episodes are incredible and I hope that in two or three years, the Golden State Warriors are still in the NBA [inaudible 00:34:15].

Naomi Nakamura: Cross our fingers. Thank you so much.

Julien Elizabeth: Thank you, Naomi. I'll see you next time.