Apple Pie Playground with Valerie Parachutes, Beginner's Mind, and Breathing Your Way to Unconditional Love Valerie spends a solo hour on Apple Pie Playground tracing a childhood parachute game into Zen beginner's mind, the whole-body mechanics of breathing, and a Pema Chödrön story of unconditional love, asking what it would take for ordinary listeners to join a larger plan to heal the world. A Parachute Game and a Plea to Join the Plan Valerie opens Apple Pie Playground by welcoming listeners back and thanking BBS for bringing the audience together across what she calls the Apple Pie planet. She wants to talk about parachutes, warriors, and stepping into a new game she names A New Earth, describing circles that talk of a galactic plan to save the world, with homegrown heroes, special technologies, and a narrative of abundance and evolution. She recalls a childhood game played on military bases, where army-brat classmates would circle a real parachute, raise it together, and run beneath it to trap the air, learning that every person's effort mattered to keep the dome aloft. She turns that memory into a plea, repeating that she and her listeners want in, addressing guardians, alliances, galactics, commanders, and Michael directly, asking to join the healing and liberation she believes is already underway for the planet. Shoshin and the Case for a Beginner's Mind From the parachute image, Valerie pivots to a question about how ordinary people might matter inside a plan so vast, and she introduces Shoshin, the Zen idea of beginner's mind, as a doorway. She describes approaching every experience, large or small, with open curiosity rather than the certainty of an expert, letting truths become self-evident instead of needing to be proved. She lists research-based principles for living this way: releasing an expert mindset, meeting experience with curiosity instead of judgment, and refusing to assume before carefully observing what is actually new. Valerie names habits, the pressure of daily roles, limiting beliefs, and fear as the things that crowd out a blank slate, and she proposes wonderment, rather than mastery or control, as a better focus. She suggests that feedback and even the act of questioning, more than arriving at answers, are what shift a person onto what she calls a truer path. Discovering a Whole-Body Way of Breathing Valerie turns the beginner's-mind lesson toward something she says people assume they have already mastered: breathing. She tells listeners that the whole body breathes, not just the lungs, and she credits a recent lecture at the Pranada Wellness Center, delivered by Dr. Ollie Adams, with the idea that this whole-body breathing is set up during embryonic development. She describes fascia, the collagen membrane that wraps every muscle, bone, ligament, and organ, and singles out the diaphragm as an organ that is itself a fascia, expanding and contracting to manage pressure throughout the body. She explains that the diaphragm began this work in the embryo stage alongside the developing heart and lungs, and that it continues making room for the lungs to expand and then drawing them back for the next breath. That pressure, she says, is felt from the head to the feet, synchronizing every pressurized place in the body with the rhythm of the lungs. The Heart, the Pressure Points, and a Question About Brains Valerie connects this fascia system to the heart, saying the two are synchronized in a spiraling of membranes so that whatever happens anywhere in the body, the heart must address. She describes pressure points at the feet, behind the knees, the pelvic floor, the roof of the mouth, the collarbone, and the neck, all intertwined with the nervous system, with breath signaling the heart how to move life force energy through the body. She calls meridian pathways the connectors of these points and says intentional, peaceful breathing lets a person align with what she calls the truly miraculous within. From there she wonders aloud whether higher selves at higher dimensions need a brain at all, proposing that intuition belongs to the gut and love to the heart, and asking what is left for the brain except problem-solving or functioning as a kind of language machine, perhaps an evolutionary tool shaped by other beings altering the human gene pool. The Eighth Chakra and the Flame of Christos Valerie takes the question further by asking whether human evolution is a matter of sacred hearts or superconscious minds, and she points listeners to the eighth chakra as one place to look for an answer. She notes that tradition usually places this chakra at the crown of the head as the seat of the soul, but says some teachers locate it instead in the thymus gland, between the lungs and in front of the heart. She describes this area as a seat of intention and intuition that also carries out much of the body's immune defense, calling it a healing center in its own right. Some, she adds, consider it the place where Christos energies and spirit join to ignite a sacred flame that animates a person, a God-source being inhabiting a physical body. Valerie calls the image beautiful and says all of it becomes possible because people self-regulate their complexity as human beings through breath. A Bodhisattva's Breath and a Call to Be Warriors of Love Valerie closes by turning to a 2019 Lion's Roar interview with Pema Chödrön, who tells of a woman traveling through a small town in the Middle East where locals grew hostile and some men threatened to throw stones. Frightened and feeling utterly misunderstood, the woman suddenly felt a shared suffering with the very people confronting her, and let that feeling collapse into pure compassion, becoming, in Valerie's words, a bodhisattva, a warrior of love. Valerie says the woman's only tool in that moment was breath, breathing in the calm that carried her to unconditional love. Returning to the hour's opening image, Valerie tells listeners that this same breath-powered, unconditional love is the warrior's weapon that can actually ascend the world, more than any galactic plan or hidden technology. She thanks BBS and her listeners for their heroism, invites everyone back under the parachute, and signs off until next Sunday.
