Good evening.
Welcome.
The solutions we are looking for start within us.
This is the opening line of the film Living in the Future's Past,
Which is narrated by Jeff Bridges.
And he's talking about climate change,
That the solutions for climate change start within us.
It means that self-inquiry is the first and most important place we need to start in order to understand and then shift our behavior as a human race.
We somewhere got the idea that we are here to save the planet.
This line of thinking is flawed.
It stems from a belief system deeply programmed into the cellular structure of our beings,
That our value and self-worth is in our efficacy to fix or save something,
Also known as savior complex.
And through thousands and thousands of years of religious indoctrination,
This is something that has become cellularly ingrained in us.
And because we are constantly looking for a way to have impact,
We want to feel that we are making a difference.
It is our reason for being.
If we arrive at a problem that is too large for us to solve,
We will go find something else to be able to make a dent.
And if we're not able to make a dent,
We turn toward a fix or instant gratification,
Which is usually consumption.
We don't shy away from big things because we don't care.
I believe that we are overwhelmed by how much we care.
We want to turn our heartbreak into action.
And in order to be able to do that,
We have to reframe our language.
We have to really understand what the next right step is and how we as individuals can carve a path that is fulfilling and also offers contribution to the greater good.
So to go back to,
We are here to save the planet,
We're actually not.
The planet will far surpass us and our time on it as humans.
We are here recalibrating our human presence on this planet.
The invitation is to ask ourselves,
What do I need to heal and then shift in order to realign how I am walking on this earth?
It is always the case that we have to connect to our grief in order to transform.
Our childhood trauma will never be healed if we keep avoiding the pain.
And avoidance is cyclical and accompanies a feeling of lack,
Which undermines a basic need and then again drives us to consume,
Offering temporary refuge of external validation.
Our cerebral upgrade has allowed us the amazing ability to emotionally reason,
Create,
Build and develop the incredible advancement of technology.
It has also given us the motivation to manipulate our environment in order to give us an edge.
And there are times when we have actually forgotten that the human species is just one part of a larger ecosystem.
Daniel Christian Wall talks about our role here as a human species is only to evolve and mature.
And a big part of that is moving into a society which values social equity,
Community,
Grasslands,
Forests and biodiversity as equal to economic well-being.
In essence,
Changing our metric of success whereby GDP and profit does not determine whether or not we are successful as an individual or a company or a culture.
There's a beautiful analogy that the longest journey we will ever take is the 13 inches from our head to our heart.
And if that really is the case,
What is the programming and the belief system that we need to heal in order to transform and dismantle larger systems and where we find validation?
There's a beautiful course and phrase coined emotional permaculture,
And it aligns the principles of permaculture design as a frame for our inner landscape,
Offering a lens to understand the components which make up a human emotional system.
You know,
Permaculture is not just about the individual components of a system.
It is about the flows and connections between those components.
It's about relationships.
You can have a solar-powered garden,
An organic compost,
An electric car,
And a straw bale house and not live in a permaculture.
It is only a permaculture when attention is paid to the relationship between each component and among the people who work within the system.
And I think this applies very much to our own personal work and self-inquiry.
We live in a landscape where wellness has become readily accessible.
We can have a yoga teacher and see an acupuncturist and talk to a coach and own crystals and still not embody a spiritual practice because the success structure for personal transformation requires the connectivity of each of these elements,
Grounded in inquiry,
To flow through the people working the system,
Which would be us as an individual.
It's all of those components that connect together and create a symbiotic relationship to each other.
As we begin to reframe our language and turn this question inward toward our own healing,
It is then we can really begin to dismantle long-held belief systems of where we find self-worth.
And that then allows us to address much larger systems we currently have in place as to what the metric is,
Which determines the vitality of a community and a country and our world.
So if we're looking at recalibrating our presence on this planet,
You know,
Charting a course from sustainable,
Right,
Which is just maintaining or upholding to a truly regenerative society,
Which is rooted in renewal and resilient to natural fluctuations and restorative.
It allows us the opening to begin to really re-architect not only our own healing,
But healing within the collective society.
And this opens an enormous opportunity for a thriving relationship between our inner world and our outer world and allows us to create an incredible impact,
Much more so than would be if we were moving in the thinking realm of feeling that we needed to fix or save something.
You know,
When we can take our own responsibility of how we are re-architecting our relationship to ourselves and in turn our relationship to others and a return to stewardship,
This realigning with the natural cycles of the earth and of our planet becomes a symbiotic relationship.
