Recover from the wounds of a difficult childhood
Grow up to a glorious life
What it is
This is a transformative journey from infancy to the end of adolescence or from age 0 to 26 years to understand how these years were for you. Based on developmental psychology, this workshop is a therapeutic process to identify and heal wounds that still impact you. It is an opportunity to get in touch with your younger selves that faced difficult situations coping and making adaptations that feel set in stone even years after those decisions were made. It is an opportunity to let go of the shackles your past imposed on you and design a brand new way of living- of thinking, emoting and behaving. You will have the wisdom to take care of your emotional unmanageability,begin healing the parts of you that are still in pain and receive ongoing support on your way to who you see yourself being.
Benefits and Outcomes
- Clarity – Your moods and emotions are no longer a mystery to you. You know the familiar aches and have accessed the little child who has faced them for many years. You clearly see the parts of you that were wounded and still feel painful or incomplete.
- Willingness to let go of pain – When you see the pain you have been holding on to, while resisting and denying it and know the impact this old pain has had on you and your life, it becomes easier. You become ready to release it.
- Healing – Letting go of pain, feeling the difficult feelings that were suppressed, ignored or avoided opens the doorway to true healing.
- Ease – Living day to day with the critical parent voice in your head becomes easier. You know that nothing bad will happen if you ignore the blaming and shaming that runs on auto-pilot till its volume goes down and it appears less and less often.
- Choice – No longer do you feel without an option. You can choose to go with your new understanding of your vulnerability or continue pitting yourself against people and situations that are not kind to you.
- Assertiveness – This way of communication becomes possible. Your inner child relies on either aggression or remains passive allowing others to walk over you. You learn to be firm without turning aggressive. You learn to act rather than react..
- Emotional Regulation – To hold your angry, sad, afraid, bored,hurt inner child and soothe them teaches you to first feel your feelings fully and allow to them be.
- Community – You participate with a group of those you can trust and feel comfortable. Continued community support exists for you to champion your inner child.
How you got here
Your life today is the culmination of many experiences from the moment you were born. None of them was chosen by you, and some of them were wounding and harmful. They hindered you from becoming the person you really wanted to be. You saw yourself being hurt, sometimes you assumed that that was normal. It was part of the game or that life is full of ups and downs and other such maxims that you heard and made a part of your belief system. Today when you experience lack of power, motivation and sometimes even choice, you wonder how you ended up here.
And now
This workshop shows you step by step how at each stage of your life – from infancy to adolescence you embraced or rejected people, situations and places to get to where you are at. Which is why it feels that a lot of things are not what you wanted or chose. You will understand why you are who you are and how you can get to who you now want to be.
Supporting your journey
- From despair to hope
- From gloom to joy
- From doubt to clarity
- From denial to acceptance
- From emptiness to openness
- From hurting to healed
- From fear to courage
- From anger to compassion
- From desperation to patient
- From stagnation to flow
When you face some or all of these issues
- Over thinking –
- Numbness and frozenness
- Inability to feel or handle emotion
- Emotions surfacing inappropriately
- Dysregulated emotions
- Impulsive action taking
- Compulsive patters
- Unhealthy choices
- Toxic relationships
- Lack of boundaries
- Inability to draw or adhere to boundaries
- Feeling fake, inauthentic
- Saying yes when you want to say no
- People pleasing
- Not able to ask for support
- Feeling disconnected
- Lack of belongingness
- Always dancing to others’ tunes
- Not following through on planned actions
- Not identifying needs
- Not fulfilling identified needs
- Missing something
- Wishing things were different
- Not staying present
- Self blame and criticism
You will be able to make these changes
- Over-thinking – Close loops of imagining alternative scenarios, stop judging your actions, have clarity when you take actions, keep the focus on yourself and your actions, stop having unrealistic expectations from others or constantly saying “ I would do differently” or expecting everyone else to have your values.
- Numbness and frozenness – To wake yourself up when you see yourself going into a freeze of emotion or action and motivate yourself to get up and take action irrespective of situations and people.
- Inability to feel or handle emotion – Become present to your body and notice when the energy of emotion shows up. Estimate how you want to take care of yourself in the moment and release the emotion when it becomes possible or when you are by yourself.
- Emotions surfacing inappropriately – Clean up the past clutter of your emotions so what presents in the now can be handled without rubber-banding to an earlier storehouse of unprocessed anger, sadness or shame.
- Dysregulated emotion – Learn to soothe your body and mind adequately using whichever tools you need.
- Impulsive action taking – Learn to practice the pause between thought and action. Learning from past impulsivity. Slow down thought itself through mindfulness practices and regular sharing with community and identified friends.
- Compulsive patterns – Go into the history to understand the origin of patterns. Heal the emotions associated with those stories from the past. Begin a corrective regimen of dropping the behaviors while remaining patient and gentle with yourself.
- Unhealthy choices- Understand the reasons for those choices, healing the original hurt and adopting healthy choices. Being in awareness while making choices knowing your predispositions that built over years.
- Toxic relationships – Understand your role in the toxicity, choosing to steer clear of drama, changing your own behavior to not play into the hooks offered by the ones that are manipulative or abusive. Knowing without doubt that it takes two to keep the toxicity alive.
- Lack of boundaries – Realize how you have exposed and compromised yourself in your personal and professional relationships. Change the thoughts relating to how powerless you are to change. Know that these are not your thoughts to begin with – you bought into someone’s pattern and made it your own.
- Inability to draw or adhere to boundaries – First learn to draw boundaries in your speaking and body language and practice holding on to them for your safety and sanity. Set up support systems to remind you of your boundaries. Renew / rebuild a boundary when it is broken by others or yourself.
- Feeling fake, inauthentic – Allow yourself to get in touch with your deepest feelings, understand the values you stand for. Identify which areas of your life these values are constantly threatened and you feel pressured to compromise. Then take action to reclaim your authenticity.
- Saying yes when you want to say no – Ask who is the one saying yes? Is it a fearful little child? Why do you say yes to the things you don’t agree with? Is it out of fear or to remain in your comfort zone. Is it out of habit? Or to honor a promise that is now redundant? Is it that you don’t trust yourself with the alternative if you were to refuse what is being offered? Understanding the reasons will make giving up the petty pay-offs easier.
- People pleasing – When did you adopt this behavior and what were your motivations ? From a time in your life when pleasing was survival behavior to it becoming second nature when you are a full grown adult capable of taking care of yourself, you will slowly release yourself from the compulsive need to please others all the time.
- Not able to ask for support – Knowing why you don’t ask for support will be the starting point. Whether you feel small or less than when you ask for support (a view you heard and adopted in childhood) or were let down or betrayed by someone from whom you asked for support,it is important to know. Because these reasons are no longer valid in your present scheme of life. Giving them up will allow you to ask for support without the fear of being judged or taken advantage of.
- Feeling disconnected – The real disconnection you feel is with yourself. That is the first connection you need to make. The most important part of any therapy is the construction of your sense of who you are – your sense of self. The healing you experience allows to discard judgements, labels and opinions to create a solid self.
- Lack of belongingness – Wounds of abandonment and shame have taken away your belongingness in your own body, leaving you uncomfortable and inadequate. The sense of self you build supports you to belong no matter where or with whom you are at work or at home, in any location and at any time.
- Always dancing to others’ tunes– Do you have your own tune ? A tune you really love and are committed to? Else you frequently get dragged into other people’s agenda. Disconnect from the other tunes, compose your own music and dance with joy.
- Not following through on planned actions – Were you told as a child that discipline is important, following rules is for yourself and not the authorities, the rule makers, your parents or teachers? Did you believe what you were told or did you follow rules fearing punishment? Or did you rebel because you did not understand the rules or even try them out to see if they made sense for you? This program teaches you to be firm with your inner child to achieve your goals and follow through on your commitments.
- Not identifying needs – At any moment do you know what you want? Or do you walk around with a sense of “something is missing” because that is how it feels. Listening to your body and your mind helps identify your needs instead of offering stock solutions which are out of alignment.
- Not fulfilling identified needs – Once you have zeroed in on what you need, what can make it worth your while. That is where real self love comes in. To go after that which is most dear to you and not give it up for a cheap substitute will become your way of life.
- Missing something – Self awareness changes the something to a real need. Sometimes a breath of air is all that is needed and sometimes a huge enterprise will not satisfy you if your dream is even bigger. To know is of the essence.
- Wishing things were different – At the lowest rung of your development is hope. It is needed to survive and yet you need to go far beyond just hoping and wishing to taking action and putting yourself out there to realize your most cherished dreams. As a child if you did not learn these lessons or they were not modeled by the ones you looked up to, you need to be the nurturing parent to yourself and continuously motivate and inspire yourself to strive and thrive.
- Self blame and criticism – The nagging voice in your head is not even yours. It is an amalgamation of all the voices you heard growing up and continue hearing. Not only will it not bring progress, it will replace any affirmative action you want to take. The endless loop of not keeping your word and blaming yourself needs to be cut. It has to be seen as useless and detrimental to your growth.
- Not staying present – You are not present because you are in your head. This is where we started with overthinking in point no:1. What can be more important than being in the present where life is? A past wrong or a future worry? Every time you stray into the past or the future you are losing the precious gift that the present is.
Who I am
I am Meena Iyer. In my student years I qualified in Journalism and Mass Communication and ended up working for 18 years in advertising sales. In my early forties I made a decision to jump ship. The opportunity to begin becoming self aware came with Landmark Education. I completed the entire curriculum for living in less than a year. I was powerfully called to coach and continue my own journey of self exploration via counseling psychology, clinical hypnotherapy, reiki, NLP, TA, Gestalt. I began working to support students and young people going through substance abuse. For about six years I ran a residential de-addiction and rehabilitation center in the city of Gurugram. My team and I built a strong community that met for therapy and for celebrations. They were people who had struggled and were fighting a “one day at a time” battle to stay sober and clean and their family members were part of their journey too.
Post Covid and my own center shutting down, I offered my expertise at two well known de-addiction centers. I now work for myself offering one-on-one therapy and coaching and the inner child workshop online. Just last year, I had the opportunity to train in Holotropic Breathing and get a facilitator certification from Jiva Auroville.
My journey My expertise
I am at heart, a nurturer. My clients have the experience of being held with love and care. Not that I mince words when it comes to holding them accountable and taking them gently down the path of discovering what led them to where they are.
As a clinical hypnotherapist, I would always begin working with hypnodrama – the process where you express from your subconscious everything you feel towards your parent, partner or even boss. Clients would be surprised how much surfaced that they weren’t aware of. The job of then integrating all the content that emerged, seeing the mountain of repressed emotion and beginning to change the patterns that exist to this day would begin with their full commitment. .
I would regress clients to the age when the first experience of fear, anger, jealousy or confusion happened. As they met the wounded three year old or 12 year old and built a bridge of trust and compassion, tears of relief, sadness and finally acceptance brought them into peace and integration.
Studying TA (transactional analysis) for two years brought me an understanding of how it could be integrated with the age regression model I had learnt in Hypnotherapy. I also saw how restrictive a life script we have written ourselves based on our early lives, what drives us and what inhibits us as ironclad rules.
My work in de-addiction and rehabilitation also gave me a thorough understanding of 12 step programs like Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous and even Co-dependents Anonymous. I know how important group and individual therapy is for all members living in a dysfunctional family system. The rigor and discipline that these programs demand are so essential to recovering from any addictive substance or behavior
NLP came to me when I was faced with the challenge of building an online private practice. Right from setting goals to working on my own inhibitions as a solopreneur to take my work out to my prospects, staking my claim to be paid what I deserve and visualizing where I saw myself, it was a big piece of the puzzle. Building neural pathways to healing the inner child, anchoring loving affirmations the inner child in us craves, fading out jarring experiences – all of this was appropriate learning and application.
Working closely on my own relationship issues with therapists who understood codependency, narcissistic abuse and TA was valuable. It showed me that when we stop protecting ourselves from the harm that we ourselves and others inflict on us and don’t permit ourselves to feel our feelings or be unashamedly ourselves, we have little awareness of the power we have to bring about change. So protecting, permitting and empowering our journey of self awareness become the cornerstone to lasting change.
Two years back I took on the basic curriculum of Gestalt. It was a shock. I was blown away by how much work happens in a session just looking at my clients, their gestures, their body language. I learnt to listen for the central theme in the picture that they paint, how that changes as they tell their story. I understood the polarities that emerge by simply summarizing back to them what they said, by asking them to give a voice to their doubts, fears and pain.
Following up with the basic program in Logotherapy emphasized to me the central problem of purpose in the human condition.
Suddenly, out of the blue came Holotropic Breathing, last year. Completing the six modules for certification as a breathwork facilitator showed me how the work of therapy sometimes feels incomplete without unlocking the secrets our bodies hide. The biographical, perinatal and transpersonal themes of my own life and the corresponding responses from my own body and the sharing by my mates on the same journey placed this work very high on priority for taking anyone deep into their psyche to free themselves up from trauma and find true connection with their spiritual selves.
I am an expert in listening to and listening for. My guide is how clients resonate when a question of mine takes them to something they always knew. It rings like a bell of clarity, making their path clear. I allow clients to learn from their mistakes. I make connection a priority.
Methodology of the Workshop
The Inner Child Workshop I facilitate has evolved since it was first hosted as a retreat in Goa in 2019. The theory part of the workshop
- Crystallizes the theory of mind taught in hypnotherapy curricula to understand who the Inner Child is.
- Touches upon neurological research establishing the impact of trauma.
- Explains psychosocial development and touches on growth disorders resulting from neglect and abuse.
- Includes regression therapy stagewise through infancy, toddlerhood, preschool, school and adolescent years.
- Initiates releasing childhood trauma through guided visualization and letter writing.
- Anchors affirmations to strengthen healing.
- Teaches basic EFT tapping to identify and integrate difficult emotions.
- Sets the foundation for re-parenting your inner child.
- Readies you to participate in a community of support that meets weekly to share progress and swap stories of healing.
This is the most comprehensive Inner Child curriculum that is available as a foundation to anyone looking at healing childhood trauma. It is useful for those who have forgotten (suppressed) traumatic events because of an overpowering sense of shame or guilt. Children take on the pain of their parents directly or indirectly in complete unawareness. Adults do notsee the connection between their frequent emotional breakdowns, their illogical behaviors, their confusions, dilemmas and the conflicting messages they have internalized as children and pass on to their children. This is the only Inner Child program that combines the cognitive, emotive and energetic fields of understanding.
Most of you who have gone through childhood trauma have overcompensated by working hard, been uncompromising with yourselves. Having found independence from families of origin you have not spared any effort in creating a new life for yourself. Chances are you have done many motivational programs and even worked with coaches to sharpen your self awareness. All of this is, however, focussed on the adult in you. It is logical and assumes that at all times you function as a rational adult. It skips your emotional side.
Dealing with only the logical parts of you, ignores a vast part of what makes you uniquely you. And from the world of emotions, you direct your relationships, you dream about your future, you get inspired or put off. The inner child is an emotional construct. The circuits in the brain correspond to the emotions in our body which cannot be ignored. Once the clutter of repressed emotions has been cleared the logical adult
When you work with the body through yoga or even breathwork, it helps to have done Inner child healing. The unfinished parts of your predominant narratives would get accessed and prepare you to release trauma from the body with ease.
This workshop is for you
If you
- Are aware that your childhood years were difficult.
- Don’t have a clear memory of your childhood years and yet have a feeling in your gut that things were not pleasant.
- Find yourself justifying the actions of people in your life knowing that you were hurt.
- Feel confused about how to interpret things that happened in childhood.
- Are already in therapy or coaching seeking to accelerate your healing.
- Are actively seeking healing from significant emotional issues
- Are dealing with loss – death of a loved one, divorce or a broken relationship.
- Are looking to work on chronic unworkable behavior patterns.
- Are in a toxic relationship at home or work.
- Suffer from addictive behavior – substances, activities or emotions.
- You want to work on physical health issues.
- Find it hard to say no
- Are unsure how to make sense of some happenings in your life.
- Are stuck in a cycle of shame and guilt.
- Struggle with sticking to your commitments -lack discipline in some or all areas of your life.
- Feel empty and purposeless a lot of the time.
- Find it hard to regulate your emotions.
- Feel numb and experience neither painful nor pleasurable emotions.
- Have fears about your future as a person or as a professional.
- Are looking for non-judgemental support as most of the people you know cannot be trusted.
- Find the same stressful loops in your relationships with your family, friends or colleagues.
- Need food, shopping, binge-watching to relieve your stress.
- Feel lonely and unloved whether alone or with the people you know.
- Feel something is missing and can’t define it.
- Have done the Inner Child healing with other therapists and don’t think it benefitted you much.
- Practice psychotherapeutic or energy healing modalities and want to add this work to your repertoire.
This workshop is not for you
If you
- Think that therapy is a feelgood or therapists tell you what you want to hear.
- Think that by reading self-help books and watching youtube videos on Inner Child Healing, you will have done justice to your inward journey.
- Feel that working on yourself is a one-time thing.
- That coaching is all fine but life teaches you its own lessons and that’s good enough.
- Believe that since the past can’t be changed, there is no point studying it.
- Make fun of those who engage in self awareness work or judge them about not having made any progress at all.
- Exploit others and dread the day they wake up and challenge you 🙂
- Manipulate others while mentoring /leading them and don’t think you need to change anything about you.
Why I do this workshop (the back story, it’s quite long, read on…)
This work, like everything else, is about me. I know what this work accomplished for me. It changed my life. Of all the work I’ve done to heal myself, this has been the most profound and powerful. This work is ongoing and keeps me learning more everyday. It has supported and continues to support me in every area of my life. So it’s only fair that I outline what it accomplished for me. So here I go – full disclosure !!!
- Relationship – When I began learning and training in Inner Child Healing I was in the grip of a toxic relationship. It was draining, and yet, very difficult to get honest about. I had launched a biz that was reasonably successful. I had built a community and was in a comfort zone financially. The work plus life partnership was bleeding me of everything – money, credibility, self esteem and peace of mind and yet it seemed to offer something I was unwilling to let go of. Healing my inner child and re-parenting the part of me that was clinging on helped me to finally see sense. Continuing to nurture and integrate my inner child supported me in accessing the appropriate tools, people and healing to power through on my own and reinvent my life, work and priorities.
- Work and Building a Business – Inner Child healing showed me how I had been impulsive and without boundaries at work. I would demonstrate my total commitment and work hard always. It seems I had fought the odds to come to a big city and work and that was it. Quick to take offence, hardly any patience and with little ability to take real feedback I plodded on taking on work that came to me. In the early days, it was about having my own money and affording the life I wanted.I had begun with a huge self worth deficit, felt a lot of shame when nobody even knew where the city I had graduated and post graduated from. I did not look for a mentor to guide me and carried on till my mommy break. Years later, when I quit my corporate job to set up my own business, it was the same story – hatred for paperwork meant no records of work, no testimonials from clients. It was my wilful inner child running that part of the show. It is Inner Child work that helped me see how I needed to take stock, bring accountability and have a vision and mission. As I prepare this page to talk about this work, I am aware how much this growth means to me and therefore my commitment to share it with others – whoever feels ready to take it on.
- Money and finances – I came to a clear understanding that since getting my first job and leaving my parental home I was acting out the anger I had felt in childhood about being deprived. I resented the austerity and struggle. When I began earning, my mantra was to just keep afloat spending as I liked with no thought of whether I would even use the things I bought or if they were good for my health. I was slowly getting into debt with no plan of how to pay for the extravagant life I lived. It did not help that I struggled as the sole wage earner. I realized that all the things I bought myself were the decisions of a wounded inner child filling her inner void. Working on my patterns developed in childhood, I slowly became free of debt and learnt to spend wisely and invest for my future.
- Inner world and spirituality – I realised how I devoured spiritual books and content. Having fought loneliness and lived in self doubt for years, I was convinced this quest would yield me what I missed deeply. I flitted between non-duality, vedanta, yoga, spiritual teachers – grabbing a word here, a principle there feeling very good about myself. Many years later, I found out that those talks and listening to wisdom had sometimes kept my delusion alive. Spiritual connection is the most adult part of us. We cannot approach it like a child clamouring for more candy or a new toy. Healing my inner child that wanted magical solutions to problems I had created, helped me a lot. I saw that being spiritual wasn’t about adding more knowledge. Rather it called me to peel off the layers of conditioning I had plastered on my lonely, hurt and fearful self.
- Family – My siblings, my parents and my children have so much to give and share with me. I love them dearly. I know that this love grows stronger when we push limits and so conflict can be a good thing. Growing up in an environment where everything was about being sweet and compliant and never disagreeing was unrealistic and set me up for many rude shocks. I had a huge resistance to conflict, I thought it was bad and unnecessary. This work showed me that people who love and care for each other don’t have to agree all the time. Each conflict has so much potential to learn about my patterns that I am, honestly quite okay with conflict. And when it happens outside family, its always healthy to ask what was this about, for me? What part of me is getting triggered? And if i accept that nobody can live conflict free forever, I learn how to be during conflict, and learn valuable lessons that apply in every area of my life.
The detailing above is very much intended to give you a context of why this work is so important in my life. It is at the core of my transformation and who i am today. It supports me every day and every moment to deal with challenges, regulate emotions, be assertive with myself and others and really keep growing to my fullest potential. So yes, this is why i am doing this workshop – I would like my participants to receive what i received. I am passing on every lesson I have learnt, every book i have read, every teaching that still motivates and inspires me via this work. This work is a living, breathing entity and always “in progress” for me. So no two workshops are alike. The examples I share so the principles come alive are from my life and the stories I hear everyday. They change too. I find better examples everyday to illustrate the core principles of this work. It is my gift to those who choose to work with me.
Why you should participate in this workshop?
Quite honestly, because you simply must. You have been hurt in childhood and didn’t know it. And if you don’t take responsibility for healing yourself, you continue hurting yourselves or worse hurting the ones you love the most.
Here is something that came from my heart, check if it resonates with you –
Our bodies change,
Our minds cope,
Our caregivers have a hundred worries.
Their lives are chaotic or difficult at best,
They don’t know anything about being parents.
At their core, children themselves,
How can one child parent another???
For when you were falling off the bed,
Your father caught a soccer game after a hard day’s work.
When you bit your tongue while chewing too fast,
Your mother was stirring the boiling milk.
They did what they did,
That you could have,
What they wanted you to.
So much got missed,
So much.
Therefore little one, now big and strong
You need to pause, to see how now,
Its up to you really, to care for yourself –
Hold your inner infant and croon soothingly..
Take the toddler you by your hand
to swing in the park,
To kick the ground with their toes
Soar higher holding tight.
No one is there to push you, nor steady a wobbly ride
If you just breathe you’ll come down
All in one piece to be sure.
To be continued
Brief Program Outline
Setting the context for the workshop. Taking on some goals to accomplish. Contract for confidentiality. Who is the Inner Child? When is the Inner Child visible? What happens to suppressed emotions? The three ego states in TA as applied to Inner Child healing. How a wounded inner child hijacks your best laid plans. Disorders arising from childhood wounding. Questionnaire on impact of childhood damage.
What is wounding and kinds of wounds? Understanding the brain’s response to trauma – the Triune Brain, the Adaptive brain and Neuroplasticity. Understanding psycho-social development in Infancy and Toddlerhood. Questionnaire on impact of damage in infancy, toddlerhood, pre-school, school years and adolescence. Guided visualization to revisit and bond with inner children through the stages. Writing letters to and from the inner children to the adult you and to your biological parents. Feeling the feelings, sharing. Anchoring Affirmations.
How to identify emotions and practice EFT tapping to accept and integrate difficult emotions. Understanding dysfunctional family roles, loss of identity due to role diffusion.
Integration of Inner Children from all stages via guided meditation. Championing your Inner Child. Working with Power, Permission and Protection. Looking at Love Languages. Learning to care for your inner children.
Course Fee
Rs 20,000
You also receive –
Membership to a community that supports Inner Child Healing
Rs 25000
Two one-on-one coaching sessions with me
Rs 6000
Monthly guest sessions with coaching and healing experts
Rs 50000
Opportunity to attend the workshop two more times
Rs 40,000
Total Value 141,000/-
Why you should sign up now?
- This is a special offer valid only for this month.
- If you have read the entire page to get here, it means you are ready to sign up for this workshop.
- Of all the work you have done to motivate yourself, this workshop fills the deepest longing of the child in you that you need to take care of.
- This workshop will impact every area of your life – work,relationships, money, health and spirituality too. Don’t delay your journey of transformation.
- You will make a beginning to treating yourself with compassion and understanding what it is to truly know and love yourself.
![Workshop Dates: 8,9,10,11,12,13,15,16,17th July Timings 6pm to 8 pm](https://www.meenaiyer.in/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/4.png)
Meena Iyer
Email :- meenaiyer99@gmail.com
Mobile :- +91 99999 66540
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