Moving Toward Wholeness: Are We?
Letter from the Editor, March 2024
Read this month’s issue of Kindred here.
Dear Kindred,
Happy Spring for those in the Northern Hemisphere. As always, our consciously curated offerings for you in this issue are intended to move us toward wholeness, worldview-shifting, and wisdom, a vision that may land as utopian from our Dominant Worldview, but as inevitable and our birthright from our Kinship Worldview. Why do we lead with worldview literacy at Kindred? Because forty years of human consciousness research at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, IONS, found that a worldview shift was the only catalyst that made change possible. (Find our worldview resources here.)
This week a New Hampshire minister I met in our monthly Breaking the Cycle LIVE Discussions called me with an update on how his church’s study of Restoring the Kinship Worldview and now, The Evolved Nest: Nature’s Way of Raising Children and Creating Connected Communities was going. He said that because his congregation started with worldview, they were better able to move into and support parent groups studying The Evolved Nest. His experience points to an important insight.
Restoring the Kinship Worldview, by Kindred World board members, Four Arrows and Darcia Narvaez, takes us through 28 of 40 precepts of the Kinship Worldview presented in Kindred’s Worldview Chart by Four Arrows. Darcia’s book with ecologist, Gay Bradshaw, The Evolved Nest, takes us into our own evolutionary pathway to wholeness by discovering how our kin, that we share DNA and the planet with, raise their offspring. The minister told me he discovered organically what we know to be true here as well: a deep dive into worldview literacy prepares us to understand our potential for wholeness, both how to restore ourselves to our birthright, and hopefully, how to protect our children’s wholeness preconception throughout life through species appropriate nurturing and nesting.
Here’s where the holotropic (moving toward wholeness) skill of worldview-shifting emerges: when we receive our species-typical nurturing in early life our neurobiology remains intact making a Kinship Worldview our default state of consciousness. This is the work of the Evolved Nest Initiative, to explore how we can transform our culture to support our true baselines for wellbeing.
Does this sound a little like the separation consciousness trick question, which comes first, the chicken or the egg? The worldview shift or the experience of wholeness? That’s because it is. From a holotropic worldview, the chicken and egg are never separate, one is always carrying the codes, even cells, from the other in its corporeal form, just like humans do with our ancestors and offspring. Our quantum entanglement explains our relational capacities for intuition, attunement, prayer, healing, and even the unifying field of love.
So, how did we get here? In this issue we discover how our Old Story, and its fragmented worldview, is learned in babyhood. These early rituals of separation negate both our belief in our connection to life and our capacity to return to wholeness. As Darcia Narvaez shares, “Most of us, who have been raised in industrialized-capitalist cultures carry the ‘separation story’ in our biology, passed on for multiple generations through the parenting our parents and grandparents and we received.”
Suzanne Zeedyk and Darcia take this discussion further in their podcast, asking and answering, What are the Origins of our Moral Capacities?
How can we heal these early rituals of separation? Kate White, in celebration of March as Birth Psychology Month, shares with us trends in pre- and perinatal somatics (healing modalities) that also move us toward wholeness through our “Blueprint-Imprint” connection. Kindred’s exclusive video of Kate talking with the beloved baby-whisperer, Ray Castellino, is also featured in this post.
What are daily practices to return us to wholeness? In her heart-warming story of Inter-being and Slow Movement: What My Grandfather Knew, Spring Chen shares Indigenous Dancing Dao practices to move us out of rigid, Old Story narratives residing in our tissues and into alignment with life’s nurturing flows. Spring also demonstrates this Dancing Dao practice in a video she created for us.
I share a review of the book, Unshakeable: Trauma-informed Mindfulness for Collective Awakening, an integrative overview of 2,600 years of Buddhism practices to restore wholeness with the latest “neuro-informed” science. Note: do not have AI create a bullet-list for this book, or you will miss the abundant somatic gifts presented by its wisdom-distilling storyteller, Jo-ann Rosen.
Who better to ask for insight into worldview shifting than a poet? Stephanie Mines, PhD, is an 80-year-old wisdom keeper, healer, neuroscientist, and embryologist, whose first major collection of poetry was released through Kindred World’s Publishing House this month. In The Great Physician: Medicinal Poetry for the Anthropocene, Stephanie unflinchingly and soul-fully moves us beyond transgenerational trauma, war, oppression, and planetary collapse, toward the truth of our birthright: our “Original Brilliance.”
Poetry, Stephanie says, helps make possible “the spaciousness needed to match our inner experience to the outer catastrophe that is accelerating before our eyes. It helps us to understand.” In the podcast, Stephanie reads her poem, The Texture of Oppression, which describes her healing experience of witnessing the holding and release of separation beliefs in our tissues.
Please save the date for Kindred’s Earth Day Celebration, book launch, salon discussion, and poetry reading with Stephanie Mines on April 22 at 3 p.m. ET.
What about that Old Story generated by our Dominant Worldview? Systems and institutions based on our Dominant Worldview will continue to compost themselves, as their time is passing. Evidence of this breakdown is especially abundant when we look at the suffering of mothers and infants, and other vulnerable communities. In this issue, we gently present Adrienne Griffen’s post on maternal mental health with a trigger warning. Griffen is the executive director of the Maternal Mental Health Leadership Alliance, and this month I spoke with her about studies revealing suicide as the leading cause of death in new mothers. This post and its insights, along with a forthcoming series and podcast interviews, will lead us toward Maternal Mental Health Week, held the first week of May.
Are we moving toward wholeness? If wholeness is the capacity to be in relationship with yourself, others, and all of life, then yes. The language, the stories, the insights we’re sharing and relationships we’re building at Kindred point to an emerging New Story of the Human Family, a story that arrives at a Wisdom-based World on the other side of individual and collective experiences of wholeness and worldview-shifting.
How can you participate in our collective healing? You can contribute to this transformational work with your financial support here, or support one of our many projects and initiatives listed here. You are also invited to join us for our monthly live calls at the links in this month’s issue of Kindred and on the front page of Kindred’s website. And our Kindred Community’s dedicated Mighty Networks platform provides avenues to connect with other wayfinders and new cycle breakers.
There are more resources listed in Kindred’s March issue, and more events and learning modules scheduled for April and May. We hope you’ll reach out and tell us your stories of how you are using the materials and projects created for you and your community to move toward wholeness, worldview-shifting, and wisdom.
Warmly,
Lisa Reagan, editor@kindredmedia.org
