Tammra Broughton aka DJ sprouT: Music, Dance, and Healing

Ross Tayler: Today on Sacred Sundays, our guest is Tammra Broughton, AKA DJ sprouT. Tammra has been moving dance floors for over two decades, from underground raves to festival stages like Bass Coast and Wicked Woods. With experience in Five Rhythms and over 30 years as an advanced holistic practitioner, she has held space for healing in diverse environments. Guided by a deep love for conscious, intuitive movement and music, sprouT layers in grooves, heart and intention to lightly guide dancers through journeys of rhythm and release. She invites us to play with new states of connection, presence and transformation within, without and with each other. Welcome, Tammra. So good to have you here.

Tammra Broughton: Hi, I'm so happy to be here.

Ross Tayler: It's such an interesting full circle moment. We were trying to figure out how long ago it was, but let's just say 12 years ago I was a guest on your radio show that you hosted back in the day.

Tammra Broughton: It's true. It was called Living Proof Radio, I believe.

Ross Tayler: Right. We used to live in Squamish together, and now we're both on the island, so this is a cool way to reconnect.

Tammra Broughton: Yes, and we were in an immersion together for 12 months, and you did a little bit of life coaching with me and my husband. We've had all kinds of interactions.

Ross Tayler: Very cool. Tammra is going to begin by reading a story to us. So I'm going to hand it over to you, Tammra.

Tammra Broughton: Okay, awesome. Here we go.

[Tammra reads a story she wrote, a metaphor story about a young woman called Strong Swan who rides out to the base of a great mountain, looks into the river, the forest and the land she came from, and asks the elders and the great spirit to remind her of the tools she carries to create a loving life. It ends with the narrator waking from the dream feeling grateful and safe, trusting the knowing of her own heart and soul.]

Ross Tayler: I love that. That's great. I can see why you chose that story.

Tammra Broughton: Thank you. When you asked me, I remembered that in my first year studying neuro-linguistic programming we had to write a metaphor story, and that's what I wrote. It came up randomly recently, and I actually cried and got goosebumps, because everything feels really full circle right now. It's going back to those tools.

Ross Tayler: I think we've all climbed many mountains since you wrote that.

Tammra Broughton: Right.

Ross Tayler: What I love about it is that it's so relatable to the experiences we have, the challenges we face and the strength we seek in ourselves. And what I love about the story is that you don't know whether she climbed it or not. You assume she did, but really it was all about tapping into the gifts inside that were already there.

Tammra Broughton: Absolutely. That's what I've always taught people through my sessions, and I still do: we have the tools, the qualities and the resources within. Sometimes we just need help and guidance to find them. That's what I love about this work, teaching people that they have that ability within them. It's the same with intuitive dance, conscious dance, intentional dance, Dance Temple, Five Rhythms. I'll tell a little story about that. My first Five Rhythms dance was in Squamish with Bettina Roth. I thought, intuitive dance, I know how to do that, I've been doing that my whole life. What's really interesting is that I got there, the music started, Bettina spoke a little bit, and I couldn't move. I realized in that moment that even though I'd always danced to music and had fun, even from a young child, on some level it was performative. Going to Five Rhythms taught me to listen to my body and how it wanted to move, rather than my brain wanting to show how I could move. There was a significant difference in that.

People say to me now, I DJ at a thing called Dance Temple, which is intentional dance as well and not really facilitated, and they say, "I can't go to that, I need somebody to show me the moves." I say, just come and sit there. Sit, journal, stretch. Even my husband, who is very shy and introverted, just comes and stretches. There is no right or wrong way to dance. For me that was a huge awareness of how powerful movement, dance and music can be.

Ross Tayler: There was a time when I lived in Squamish that I would drive down to Commercial Drive for Bettina's classes. For me it was really liberating. I used to go to Just Dance with people from Squamish too, and I loved that. But I've definitely been on my own journey with conscious dance. My body loves it, but my mind sometimes struggles with it, and there are some limitations. I think we talked online about Dance Temple, and you invited me up to the Comox Valley for Dance Temple outside, and I was like, that's an edge for me. I prefer the dimly lit gym with some anonymity. That works for me.

Tammra Broughton: There's one of those dances here called Alchemy, on Wednesday nights, and it's ecstatic dance as well. It does feel like there's a little more anonymity there because it's dark and it's just for adults.

Ross Tayler: Nice. When I lived in the Okanagan, there was a woman who facilitated what she called jungle dance. It was a bit more tribal and a lot more rhythm. I loved it, and it was really small groups when it got started, which was part of the appeal. Five or six of us in the space, and it was just really great. Movement is such a healing modality.

Tammra Broughton: For me as well. I had some reservations about going back into the intentional dance space when I moved to the Comox Valley, because right around 2017, 2018, I started to notice that there was something really wrong with my health. For many years, right up until the end of 2023, having moved from Squamish and then landed in Nanaimo because we couldn't quite make it here because of COVID, I went through extreme depression, which I can't even describe. I don't even have words for it. Let's just say I have a whole lot of empathy for people who go through it. I didn't even know who that person was. It felt like something had a hold on me. When people say they're fighting for their life, I used to think, you shouldn't say the word fight, but now it's like, whoa, I get it. I actually gave up, and then I realized there had to be something going on here. I took a course called energetic interference removal, and I started to remote view myself, and I saw that there was a lot, Ross, a lot, of different types of energetic entities attached to my body. For two years I worked on removing them. It took me that long. Then my soul felt like it was back in my body, and I was in my body again. If you ask my friends how I was before, they'd say, it wasn't you. I'm a slightly obnoxious, pretty loud person, and I was quiet. I had very little emotion. I was flat. I couldn't access my intuition, which is a really weird feeling. I couldn't laugh. I couldn't cry. I don't even think I sneezed for a whole period of time. My body was dying, and it was very scary.

When I learned how to do this energetic interference removal, I reclaimed sovereignty of my own soul. I pulled my soul back into my body. I do this quite often now: I check to see if anything's attached to me. I create what's called a heart essence bubble, only letting in what's good and reflecting back what isn't for me. I have a whole process for removing those so that it doesn't fling onto other people. I don't give it to the earth, because I feel like she's had enough. I create a fire in the fourth dimension and send it there, and I ask that if there is anything benevolent inside that entity, it be sent back to its original essence. That feels in integrity for me. Some things are just mechanical, mechanical things that are in my body or on my body.

So I was very leery about going to Dance Temple. I thought, is my nervous system ready yet? A lot of people process while they're dancing, and I'm not sure they're aware that their stuff can jump over to other people. I didn't know if I was ready for that. But finally I went, and I was like, wow, this is fantastic. I loved it. I danced, I had a great time. I was starting to DJ again and connect with my reason for wanting to DJ, being a holistic practitioner: what do I want to promote through my DJing? I started to meet the community. Then, while I was away DJing at Wicked Woods Music Festival, which was amazing, kind of a pilgrimage back to where it all started for me, my cat Ivan, of 14 years, passed. It was shocking to me. I cried a lot. I made sure I cried and went and wailed in the woods, which was kind of perfect because I could release all of that energy. When I came back and felt like I could get out without crying, and had started a brand new job, I went to Dance Temple and couldn't dance. Instead I wrote a letter to Ivan, then flipped the page and wrote the letter back, and I just sobbed. I knew a few people there, and some people I hardly knew came over, and there has to be consent at these events, and they were just holding me. I thought, wow, I really needed this. I realized through that process that I had not processed a lot of other grief. I've since been digging into grief and what it really is, and life is a cycle of all those levels of grief over and over again. That part of myself was very repressed.

The second week I went back to Dance Temple, I cried and danced and flung my body around and moved that energy through, realizing I had not grieved my grandmothers who passed when I was 10, the grief of going through a divorce, the grief of my auntie who had just passed. Because my dad is a mortician and was a coroner, I wasn't allowed to cry when I was younger. I was like, I am tough, I can handle anything. But Ivan broke me wide open, and all of these amazing emotions have come up. Now I'm so much more aware of how I curate a set and the songs I choose. I look up the words and the meaning of the words. DJing for Dance Temple has allowed me to grow as a DJ, because it's not the same kind of genre or just playing a set for the nightclub and getting everybody pumped. It's starting really mellow, building up into this high fire energy, and then back down. Having been DJing for 25 years, I realized I can't just segue to a song. It has to mix perfectly. It's stretched me, and I've learned so much since starting this journey again with intentional dance.

Ross Tayler: Wow. And you're telling a story with the music and the through line of that music.

Tammra Broughton: Yes.

Ross Tayler: I want to jump back to where you started, when you talked about the energetic interference. I'd love a bit more detail on what that looked like for you, because I'm imagining you had a nervous system that was sensitive and open for too long, and you were collecting all these experiences. I ask because I imagine listeners would benefit from understanding it. A lot of us get subjected to things we don't even realize we're taking on. When you talk about energetic interference, I assume that's what you mean.

Tammra Broughton: Yes. I'm a very empathetic person, and I love that I have that ability. I also had no idea what boundaries looked like. I grew up in a very chaotic home, with parents who were alcoholics and people coming in and out of our house all the time. I started a nutrition practice, and I remember coming home and crying because of the stories I'd heard and taking them on, not even realizing it. Even in my first relationship it was, I'm going to heal you, I'm going to fix you. I didn't realize I had allowed myself to be a receptacle for people to dump on. There's a woman, Caroline Myss, and I went to see her speak in Scottsdale, Arizona, at an event called Celebrate Your Life. One of the audience members stood up and asked, what about this woman's situation, how does that apply? And she said, "Let's get one thing straight. Never be a garbage receptacle for other people's stuff." My whole core started to vibrate. I was uncontrollably crying. I couldn't speak for probably about an hour. I took my journal up to her to sign it, and she actually read what I'd written, because I had stopped writing and she finished it, and then she nodded yes to me. I knew what she was saying to me almost telepathically.

I came home and had a conversation with my husband at that time and said, all these things you've said to me, I willingly took on, but I'm going to have to give them back to you, because I've got my own stuff to deal with. That was my first realization of taking on somebody's stuff. I said, however you want to deal with it is up to you, but it's not mine, it's yours. Progressively it went on. As you know, I put on an event called the Conscious Goddess Festival, and that was a massive learning in boundaries. I was a little taken aback by how things unfolded for both of those years. After that was done and Tony and I got married, I was like, I'm letting go of this and this and this, and it seemed like right then, once I'd let it all go, my body started to fall apart. It wasn't until about 2022 that I found the course with the tools I needed. It wasn't that I wasn't aware of these things before, but I had lost hope. I had given up. I also realized I was so desperately looking for something outside of me to heal me. I remember even going on TikTok and getting scammed, because I was that desperate. Someone just told me they were going to heal me, and I can't even believe that happened, to be honest. I spent a lot of money on different modalities and healers and shamans and vitamins and therapies. Then I thought, you know what, I'm going to give this a go. Through that, plus fasting, learning how to fast for my age, and fasting for women is different than for men, and then gene testing, those three things combined helped me realize I'm not crazy. They allowed me to reclaim my health and my soul sovereignty, and gave me the tools to create really good boundaries.

When people say to me, "I'm going to do reiki on you," I'll say, I would really appreciate it if you did not do that. Or "I'm going to pray for you," and a lot of times I'll just say thank you and reframe it or protect myself from whatever they're trying to do. I had an experience very recently where a person wanted to light incense at one of my events. I'd said I'm really sensitive, as are a lot of people here, to perfumes and things like that. He closed his eyes and said, "Oh, I'm..." and I said, excuse me, I'm working, and he wouldn't let me get by him. I said, what are you doing? He said, "I'm an intuitive healer, and I'm just seeing what's wrong with you and healing you." I said, that's a big no. I can see your intentions are really good, and I'd like to just let you know that you have to ask permission to do that to people. It didn't quite land that well, and I'm hoping to reconcile with him, but I just didn't have those kinds of boundaries before.

Ross Tayler: There are so many things you've touched on. The key theme throughout is boundaries. Most of us don't have a sense of boundaries, and we don't feel comfortable speaking our truth. Your example at the end with that healer is a prime example, because so many people aren't used to hearing "No, I'm not okay with that," and then there's a reaction. For most of us who are sensitive, we know what that reaction feels like. That's part of what we're avoiding when we need to set a boundary: we don't want to feel what comes next, and that's a huge thing to navigate. Another thing you said, this whole idea of orienting outside of ourselves, comes up a lot with many of the guests I've had. We come by that so honestly. We orient outside because that's how we survive when we're young. To flip that orientation inside and realize we have everything we need to support ourselves seems like a foreign concept. It's not to say that things outside ourselves can't support us on the journey, but in most of the work I've done, there's the beginning of that with support, and then we have to integrate it. We have to do the true groundwork to create change in our lives. We're the ones who have to act on it. So it's complicated.

Tammra Broughton: Yes, it is. One tool I learned going through what I went through was polyvagal theory, and that being around other people is actually really healing. So it's really important to know how to self-regulate and reach in and find our own tools, but sometimes it's not easy and we need someone around to co-regulate. I think there's a fine balance between feeling confident that we can navigate something on our own and knowing when we need to reach out for help.

Ross Tayler: Totally. I think it was 2019, I was waiting for a ferry listening to a podcast about polyvagal theory, and a light bulb went off. I thought, my gosh, I need to learn about all of this. For me it became a perspective that changed everything. We all have a nervous system, we all share the same wiring. I could go on and on about that because it's a game changer. So many of the things we talk about come back to the nervous system being dysregulated, how many of us are walking around in fight or flight and don't even realize it because we're so used to it, and the impact that has on the body. I think you went down the same rabbit hole I did with Deb Dana, who does an amazing job of simplifying all of that knowledge and making it relatable and useful.

Tammra Broughton: Yes. I'm just getting started on her book, Anchored. I'm just coming back to those tools again now. It almost feels like I know what I did when I was so unwell that brought me back, and now I'm well, and I'm also going through menopause. Estrogen messes with everything: memory, vision. I feel like I just got to this great place and then it was, "just kidding, now you're going to go through menopause."

Ross Tayler: Another mountain.

Tammra Broughton: Another frickin' mountain. But I'm frickin' here for it.

Ross Tayler: The other thing you pointed to was co-regulation. When I learned about that, I thought it was really interesting because, as you know, I worked in wellness centers and treatment centers, and most of us haven't had a safe person to co-regulate with. That's part of the problem. In relationships, you have two dysregulated nervous systems trying to figure out how to get through, and of course it's not going to work. You need at least one person to anchor you, one person to be regulated so you can co-regulate with them. That's why pets are so helpful, because we can co-regulate with our pets. I say that and I don't have a pet, but when I'm visiting others a cat will come and sit on my lap, and I love it. We don't need other people, but it sure helps, and it's such a foreign experience as well.

Tammra Broughton: That's true. I think that's why I had such a hard time. I was an all-in person who would just trust anybody, but now I'm at a place where I think, wait a second, I need to know more about you before I let you do any work on me. And with my beloved and amazing husband Tony, who has stood by me through all of this, I noticed that once I started to feel better, and I'm feeling really strong now, though still dealing with some health issues, I have my mental health, and that trumps everything else, because without my mental health nothing matters. What I noticed was that all that time, he was trying to hold the space and just be there for me. Last year something came up that we had never experienced in our relationship before, and it dawned on me that he had been holding space for me for so long that now stuff was coming up for him. He was traumatized from what he was watching me go through. Seeing your wife at 78 pounds is probably going to be traumatizing. He also comes from a family where they didn't talk about feelings, very German, very stoic, and he's just starting to learn how to talk about his emotions. We talked about it recently and said, you know what, we're both in a pretty good place. Now is a good time to get some counseling and some tools for the next phase of our life, now that we're in our 50s, so we can roll into retirement feeling like we've got a plan. It's been survival mode for so long, and now we're like, oh okay, we made it.

Tony knows how to take care of himself and regulate through his sports. I just started doing yoga again after so many years, and it was great to go, I can do this, it's easy on my system, something I can commit to. What you said about having people in your life who know how to co-regulate, Tony and I go back and forth for each other with that, for sure. Our solution to everything is to make a joke about it and laugh. He would put on funny shows, comedians, America's Got Talent, The Voice, all these things, in hopes that I would start to connect with my emotions. We didn't watch anything scary or political, because I just couldn't handle it. I'm so grateful to Tony, because I really do feel he brought me back to life. I'm going to have a tear. We would cheer. And when I was really underweight and I sneezed, I thought, I hope I didn't break a rib.

Ross Tayler: Aww.

Tammra Broughton: It was so wild. Now sometimes we'll have a reaction, and it'll be the real thing we want to say, but then we'll make a goofy face and laugh, and then say, you know what, I heard what you said, I hear you. Rather than being reactive and getting into an argument, which we rarely ever do, we make a joke. But there are some things we have to take seriously now, too. The laughter has been such a gift.

Ross Tayler: Laughter is huge medicine. Huge.

Tammra Broughton: Huge.

Ross Tayler: So let's take a left turn into DJing. I want to hear more about your passions, and about your experience of sharing your music and what makes it such a passion for you.

Tammra Broughton: My goodness, it is in my blood, Ross. I remember dancing to songs with my mom, who would play records. She told me recently that I had a Girls Just Wanna Have Fun Cyndi Lauper record that I would play over and over and dance to, and I'd entertain myself for hours putting on records and dancing. Through my teens I had a group of friends who were eclectic in a way. We weren't into the popular music. We were into punk rock bands and new wave, things like The Cure and U2, who, when they just started, weren't that huge. I started to collect those records. Then I moved to Lake Louise and started dating a skateboarder and got more into punk rock. I called myself a music snob. I got an opportunity to play punk rock at the local bar in Kamloops, so I played music like Fugazi and Green Day, who weren't popular back then. I saw them at the Legion in Kamloops, and it's a really funny story: I actually had to talk the drummer out from under the van because he was so high. I said, Trey [?], you have to play, you have to come out, and he's hiding under the van. Side note.

I was always into the counterculture, and anything trendy or popular I was like, blah. I couldn't even tell you what the most popular song on the radio is right now. As a DJ I guess I should know that. I'm about to venture into some wedding DJing, so I'll be forced to learn it, and that's fine, because learning about all kinds of music is good. I've had two themed events recently where I thought, I only know old country, so it was a massive learning curve.

Right around the age of 21, I went with a friend and we backpacked around Europe for three months. This was in '93. I was totally into punk rock, listening to it on my Walkman. In London I encountered a real punk rocker and thought, whoa, I am not punk rock at all, I'm more like California punk rock. That guy scared the heck out of me. Then we were in Prague, where my friend's grandparents lived, so we stayed with them for a couple of weeks and I could relax more. On the train we met a group of guys, six or seven of them, very good looking, who said, "You've got to come out to this rave." We said, what is a rave? They said, it's a party out in the woods. We were two young women, like, sure, let's go. They told us this rave had been going on for two months, with DJs going night after night. People were wearing flight goggles and dressed up, and there was a guy standing beside a tree in a big top hat. I thought, what the heck is going on here? I didn't recognize this kind of music. I'm pretty sure it was techno or trance. I had a very interesting experience there. I won't go fully into it. It was a bit scary, and it took me two days to come down from it.

Then the guys said, you're coming with us to Amsterdam, we'll take you to another rave. We took the train to Amsterdam and stayed at a church youth hostel, which was the only place we could find, and they said you have to be in by eight or nine PM if you want to stay. We knew we weren't coming back for the whole night. We put our stuff away and got on a train two hours outside of Amsterdam to this beautiful, huge theater. We weren't really dressed for it. They said the only reason they were letting us in was because we were Canadian and probably wouldn't cause any problems. We sat in a foyer, then they opened the curtains, and there were these DJs, and we had the most epic night of dancing. That's really what inspired me to want to DJ. Everyone was so nice. We got back on the train, got in at 6 a.m., got the evil look from the people at the hostel who asked where we'd been, and said, we're going to bed.

I came back and invested in turntables. And another really cool thing happened: my stepmom had a stack of records in the closet and said, I'm not sure what to do with these, they're disco and funk and soul records that my boyfriend gave me when I was 17. He had been a DJ in the 70s for a Calgary radio station. I thought, these are probably valuable records. I started playing them and they were the best. Some were popular disco songs we've all heard, but a lot were unbelievable, very complex, and I thought, we have to have a party and listen to these. I started throwing disco parties. I'd go from Golden to Calgary to buy records. Our parties were an instant hit. They were sold out by 8 p.m.

But I had a lot of conflict doing these parties because there were a lot of drugs and alcohol involved. After one of the Valentine's Day parties, a friend overdosed the next morning and passed away. That's when I really realized, what am I promoting here? What am I encouraging? I was doing everything I could. I put literature up in the bathroom, I told everybody to watch their drinks and not mix drugs, and people were actually kind of mad at me. I found out this fellow had been partying days prior, so it didn't totally happen because of the event, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have happened had he not been there. I don't know. I had to take time to really think about it. From that point forward I thought, my events have to have some kind of meaning behind them. That's when I started doing more fundraisers. I did a lot for the Women's Centre in Golden and Women in Business, and for different cultures and things coming up through them. Rave culture is all about community and everybody being welcome. I love that environment, where people can come as they are, no matter what they look like or what their job is. You can be a super nerd and be cool. That culture is made for people who maybe don't fit into the regular club scene.

It's the same with Dance Temple, which I'm loving because it's a sober event. There's no doubt about it. People show up to be free, be themselves, maybe work through something, maybe shake something off. There's no facilitation, and that's what I love most about ecstatic dance. I pick a theme, and it's up to them whether they roll with it. We always have a little altar, and people can choose cards. And then this last winter I was really wondering where I fit in in the valley, because I'm still pretty new, and any time a DJ moves somewhere, even with all the experience in the world, you have to build a relationship with the community unless you're a superstar. Because I'd taken such a big pause and was going through a lot and coming back into my own feelings, over the Christmas holidays I reflected a lot on who has been supporting me, where I'm wasting my energy trying to fit in, and where I'm actually being celebrated. I consciously, with all the compassion in my heart, let some people go. I cut some cords. I don't think they see the value in what I'm offering, and that's okay, and maybe that's happening for a reason. This year, if people are into numerology, it's a one year, a let's-start-over year. It's the Year of the Horse. Regardless of whether those systems are real or not, it's what everybody's putting energy into, and I can feel it. Since I did that, I feel like I'm on this horse that I can barely hang on to.

Ross Tayler: Ha ha.

Tammra Broughton: I have six events this month, February, and it's a short month. Two events on Thursday, two on Saturday, so five, and I already had one. One is a big fundraiser for something called Yana, You Are Not Alone, and the community really gets behind it. They usually raise about $250,000, so I'm excited to be a part of that. But I also birthed an event that I think is finally my thing. I want to do something, but I don't want it to be exhausting, or politically charged, or spiritual. I just want it to be fun and creative, because when I was so ill I realized that art and creativity were so necessary for my recovery. My friend sent me a video of a woman doing something called Craft Rave in Toronto. She's knitting while she's DJing, which I thought was hilarious. I won't be able to do that, but I'm an ideas person and I can see how this could grow. The video pans out to people sitting at tables in a dimly lit restaurant, working on needlepoint, painting, making vision boards. As soon as my friend sent it to me she said, this would be really cool. Within a week I'd put it out in our local Facebook groups, and so many people wanted to be involved. Our first one was a success. I live in Comox, and I thought, since she was doing it in a restaurant, maybe I could support a local restaurant. There was a lot of construction for two years and a lot of businesses lost money. I proposed the idea to a place called Avenue Bistro, and they were very excited. Our first event was a daytime, all-ages event with a 10 to 15 dollar donation, nobody turned away. We filled the place, 60 people. The owner and chef told me they served about 55 plates, which was great because they're not even open during the day. The next one is on Friday, February 20th, a nighttime one, from 8 p.m. to 2 a.m., 18 plus. I don't know what your question was, but basically why I do it and what propels me is that I don't have children, and I realized through my experience that I love being in community. I love being creative, I love being around people, I love music and how it can shift our emotions. Sometimes it's more introspective, and other times it's a lifting feeling, a place where people can come and be creative, especially people who are shyer or more introverted. They have something to do with their hands and can still be part of the party. I just think music is healing, community is healing, and I'm learning how to make music. I'm a little concerned about AI right now and how it's influencing music, but I feel we'll find our way through that and a way to coexist. I know there are some great AI tools for music. I just have to navigate my way through it. But I love it, and it brings me a lot of purpose and fills me with life.

Ross Tayler: I love it. I love the history and evolution of your journey with music and DJing, and I can imagine listeners connecting to some of the parts of what you shared. Thank you for that.

Tammra Broughton: I also have an article coming out in Raven Tongue [?] magazine about my journey from a female perspective, because it has not always been easy. Just being an artist in general is an act of, I guess, something slightly political or activist. Some people aren't always receptive, and there have been lots of situations where I've been shocked by some of the things people have said to me or done to me physically while DJing. If you include the years, I've been in this profession over 25 years now, as an event planner and promoter too. I can see the bigger picture and want to create spaces that feel safe for people. I can't promise that nothing's going to happen, but I feel this Craft Rave is really gentle, in that it's mostly about just coming in. If nobody wants to participate in the crafts, they don't have to. They can sit with their friends and chit chat about whatever. I can't claim the idea as my own, but I'm already bringing new things to it. We have some crafters and artists doing demos and a little bit of vending, and more ideas coming up. I'm just trying to keep it as simple as possible and as easy on my nervous system as possible.

Ross Tayler: That's perfect. I think we've covered some great ground in this conversation. We touched on a whole bunch of different topics and it feels really rich. I always like to close with the same question. What's one simple way someone could connect with the sacred today?

Tammra Broughton: What's coming to me is that there is a song in you, and it's time for you to let it out. Whatever that is for you, there is a song inside. Like Wayne Dyer said, don't die with your song still in you. So listen closely to what our soul is saying, and let it sing.

Ross Tayler: I really feel that. Thank you. I'm so grateful to have had you here and to have this conversation. It's a beautiful full circle moment, as I said at the beginning, with you sharing your passion and your gifts and your story and the mountains you've had to climb. I really appreciate you being here on the podcast.

Tammra Broughton: I am so grateful to be here. Thank you, and it's really great what you're doing, Ross. All the things you've done and all your different iterations, I've been watching. The next event I'm doing, the theme is home, and home is right inside of us. I'm just happy you're feeling more at home.

Ross Tayler: Totally. And I'll put all your links in the show notes so people will be able to get ahold of you. Thank you for your time.

Tammra Broughton: If anybody has any questions about anything we talked about, I am an open book, so by all means connect with me.

Ross Tayler: Awesome. Thanks again. Bye for now.

Tammra Broughton: Okay, bye.