It was best that, as a young mother, I did not realize the truth of a growing impulse to wade into the waters of activism alongside other fierce women and men, all committed to the counterculture act of making wellness choices in defiance of America’s freefall to the bottom of all developed nations’ health indicators. It was best that I didn’t know the historical truth: that institutional policies and cultural biases against biological imperatives and life itself began thousands of years before I gazed into my newborn son’s eyes, smelled his soft head, and marveled over his first belly laugh.

In the beginning, it was Joseph Chilton Pearce’s defining of the engineered Bio-Cultural Conflict that helped me to clear my head, to name and shake off the cultural imperatives of conformity and, instead, attune my awareness to biological imperatives, life’s innate intelligence humming in my bones and living connections with other activists. Paul Hawken named this joining of hands across diverse conscious-raising movements as “humanity’s immune system response to political corruption, economic disease, and ecological degradation”.

However, during these past few years at Kindred, a few streams converged and provided us with fresh insight into our strategic vision and planning for our future as a nonprofit hub for the many activists, organizations, seekers, and new cycle makers we serve. These streams were the introduction of Darcia Narvaez’s Evolved Nest, Four Arrows’ Worldview Chart and Indigenous Wisdom insights, and Kindred’s Meet the Wayfinders Oral History Series collected from nine advocates who shared how they created real and lasting cultural change ­­– with divergent thinking, relational awareness, and without billionaire funding.

First, Darcia Narvaez’s award-winning research into humanity’s evolutionary pathways to wellness – our Evolved Nest– restores our species’ downshifted baselines to lifelong flourishing. While 95% of human history valued a Cycle of Cooperative Companionship, the last few thousand years of a Cycle of Competitive Detachment has morphed us into an atypical species who subjects its young to “Undercare” to induct them into normalized transgenerational trauma. While the trauma-informed movement takes off in the US, and thankfully so, the Evolved Nest provides us with the seeds of a wellness-informed movement.

Second, if our worldview creates our world, and it does, why don’t we create a nurturing culture? In his scholarly studies of worldview, Four Arrows shared with us this past year his Worldview Chart, a remarkable cheat sheet that helps us to identify the precepts of Dominant and Indigenous (Kinship) Worldview, as well as their cultural manifestations.

Third, the Meet the Wayfinders Oral History Collection presented nine stories from activists who utilized, intuitively and organically, divergent thinking, relational activism, and parallel structure creation to meet their wellness needs in their communities, and often beyond. These wayfinders employed relational intelligence right where they were in their day to day lives to break through institutional and cultural barriers. Listening to their stories with worldview awareness, we discover wayfinder wisdom for changemaking, and its correlating values, are not found in our Dominant Worldview.

While the Evolved Nest guides us out of downshifted wellness baselines and back toward flourishing, the Worldview Chart helps us discover, at a glance, why we do not manifest flourishing in our Dominant Culture: we can’t. That’s right, even when we say “yes” to life, we will not be able to create a Wisdom-based, Wellness-informed Society with the values and precepts of a Dominant Worldview. This is why it is critical for self-identified Trance-breakers, New Cycle Makers and Wayfinder to understand how our worldview is contributing to the creation of our world, or keeping us stuck in traditional Hamster Wheel Activism.

While Four Arrows cautions us to view the Worldview Chart not as a binary, but as a continuum, the Dominant Worldview – born of Western emphasis on “left” brain, rational reductionist precepts – is overly emphasized in modern culture. This imbalance appears as separation consciousness, with a disconnected disregard for life. Study the Worldview Chart with the cause of your choice in mind. See your heart’s calling (where you take your stand in the world) then practice seeing through the metacognitive lenses of Dominant or Indigenous (Kinship) Worldview. Which lens moves you into relationship with yourself and others? Which lens moves you toward joy?

“To shift from the dominant worldview to the original Indigenous worldview takes some ‘decolonizing’ of the mind. Our minds have been suckled on the milk of civilization’s domination and coercion of life with industrialization and capitalism increasing disconnection and alienation from earth consciousness. This book is planting the seeds for decolonizing your mind.” (From the introduction to Restoring Our Kinship Worldview, a book by Four Arrows and Darcia Narvaez that explores the Worldview Chart’s precepts.)

See the Evolved Nest's six minute film and discover resources, including a film guide and a Spanish version of the film, at www.breakingthecyclefilm.org 

January 23, 2023 from 12 - 1 p.m. ET, REGISTER

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