Dear Kindred,
In keeping with the spirit of our nonprofit mission to envision and bring forward a Wisdom-based, Wellness-informed Society, we have curated for you a timely, helpful, hopeful, and practical collection of posts, podcasts, videos, and a joyful, often hilarious, 28 Days of Solo Play campaign (starts September 1).
The long anticipated and highly acclaimed book The Evolved Nest: Nature’s Way of Raising Children and Creating Connected Communities by Darcia Narvaez and Gay Bradshaw was released this month. You’re invited to join us August 22 at 3 p.m. for a LIVE discussion with the authors. Register here. We usually talk about the Breaking the Cycle and Reimagining Humanity films in these live monthly Zoom calls, so you are welcome to bring your questions to this August call as well.
This month’s resources for the new Evolved Nest book include Gabor Maté’s foreword, the first chapter of the book, and a very courageous and humbling video interview by a mother of a six year-old, Meghan Armstrong, who bravely asks Gay and Darcia, “How do we create nestedness in an unnested world?”
In addition to welcoming The Evolved Nest book to Kindred’s ecology of cultural transformation resources this month, I also met with Stephanie Mines, the founder of Climate Change and Consciousness and the TARA Approach, on the heels of her move to Hawaii days before the Maui wildfires broke. Stephanie brings her personal history with Hawaii and her extensive neurobiological research into trauma, shock, and regenerative health to help us connect our inner and outer climate crises in this podcast. Her phrase, Original Brilliance, found its way into Kindred’s New Story Glossary this month. Our interview covers the promise of our return to our individual Original Brilliance and its relationship to fostering our Advanced Resilience. We need new language to tell a new story, so please send me your suggestions, editor@kindredmedia.org.
Continuing down the path of our biology’s capacity for healing ourselves and our planet, Kindred’s brilliant and compassionate founder, Kelly Wendorf, shares with us ways to recognize the trauma of colonization showing up in our bodies and how we can decolonize ourselves as a step toward liberating our body’s intelligences.
And finally, please don’t mistake “healing” work for drudgery… it turns out that PLAY is one of the best healing practices for adults! We have some humorous suggestions for you starting September 1 with our 28 Days of Solo Play. But remember, we said SOLO PLAY, so check the hallway before “Making Your Grand Entrance” or "Talking Back To Your Hand Puppet" next month!
And as always, we need your financial support to continue our nonprofit work. Please take advantage of the red button below to keep our Kindred Community flourishing!
Warmly,
Editor
editor@kindredmedia.org
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Join a LIVE Discussion with the authors of the new book, The Evolved Nest: Nature’s Way of Raising Children and Creating Connected Communities. Darcia Narvaez and Gay Bradshaw will share insights from their acclaimed book and take your questions. The event is free, but you will need to register to join.
August 22, 2023 at 3 p.m. ET
Darcia Narvaez is a Professor of Psychology Emerita at the University of Notre Dame. She is the founder of the public and professional educational outreach project The Evolved Nest Initiative whose nonprofit mission is to share her science research into developing appropriate baselines for lifelong human wellness by meeting the biological needs of infants. This wellbeing baseline is imperative at this time as the United States ranks 41st out of 41 developed countries in public policies that support families. Darcia is the current president of the award-winning, venerable nonprofit Kindred World, who has been "serving the re-generation since 1996." The Evolved Nest is an initiative of Kindred World.
Gay A. Bradshaw is the Executive Director of The Kerulos Center in Jacksonville, Oregon. She is the author of Pulitzer Prize-nominated Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us about Humanity, an in-depth psychological portrait of elephants in captivity and in the wild. Dr. Bradshaw’s work focuses on trans-species psychology, the theory and methods for the study and care of animal psychological well-being and multi-species cultures. Her research expertise includes the effects of violence on and trauma recovery for elephants, grizzly bears, chimpanzees, and parrots, and other species in captivity.
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Repairing the Primal Tear: How Our Evolved Nest Heals Us, Our Animal Kin, And Planet |
AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHORS OF THE NEW BOOK, THE EVOLVED NEST
Lisa Reagan, Kindred’s editor, talks with Darcia Narvaez and Gay Bradshaw the authors of the new book, The Evolved Nest: Nature’s Way of Raising Children and Creating Connected Communities. Darcia is the founder of the Evolved Nest Initiative here at Kindred World and Gay is the executive director of The Kerulos Center in Jackson, Oregon. Gay is also the author of the Pulitzer Prize nominated Elephants on the Edge: What Animals Teach Us About Humanity. Their integrative efforts to produce this work is generating acclaim from many fields of science and sustainability.
Gabor Mate has written the foreword to the book, which you can read on Kindred. Gabor champions the book for being “rich in mind-boggling scientific observation, will leave the reader both humbled and grateful.”
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Facing Our Climate Change Fear With Our Original Brilliance: Stephanie Mines On The Maui Wildfires |
Stephanie Mines, founder of Climate Change and Consciousness and the TARA Approach, moved to Hawaii this summer, days before the Maui wildfires broke. The wildfire in Maui destroyed the historic town of Lahaina and killed over 100 people, making it the worst natural disaster in state history and the deadliest U.S. wildfire in over a century.
In this interview you will travel an arc from acknowledgement of grief, despair, and paralysis so many of us feel in the face of climate change to a practical, assessable plan of action ground in regenerative healthcare practices that can activate your own Original Brilliance. As Stephanie shares, “As our inner climate becomes congruent with Original Brilliance then our activism at this juncture, when all of us are needed, is in integrity to our Original Brilliance.”
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A Kindred EXCLUSIVE - VIDEO |
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How Do We Create Nestedness In An UnNested Culture? A Mother Asks Evolved Nest Book Authors |
The interview is by Meghan Armstrong-Abrami, Ph.D., a mother of a six-year-old child who shares her experience – and questions – about creating nestedness in an untested world. Meghan is the Graduate Program Director and Associate Professor of Hispanic Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In addition to talking to Gay and Darcia about their new book, Meghan bravely shares her personal experiences of raising a nested child in an unnested world.
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Decolonizing Our Bodies To Liberate Intelligence |
By Kelly Wendorf
Our individual experiences and stories of dismemberment may feel personal, but it is also collective. Colonization is a much larger systemic disease passed down for centuries. Resmaa Menakem, therapist and author of My Grandmother’s Hands – Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, has a powerful and compassionate perspective on historical trauma that leads to dismemberment. He writes that since the Middle Ages in Europe, powerful white bodies did unspeakable and cruel things to less powerful white bodies. “This created deep trauma in many, many white bodies. When some of those bodies came to the New World, they brought that trauma—and those cruel practices—with them. Today, we continue to carry that trauma in our bodies.”
This story of collective historic trauma explains why society is rife with so many forms of body abuse and why so many of us have had repeated experiences of not feeling safe in our bodies.
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Peaceful Co-Existence & Unity In Diversity |
By Pegi Eyers
As we continue to build resilient communities and shape a future in reciprocity with Earth Community, it may be helpful to engage once again with the directive “everyone needs to return to their own IK.” Both on a personal and a collective level, the reclamation of ancestor veneration and our IK/EIK are integral to earth restoration, and ancient knowledge and earth-based cosmologies can reunite humanity in the Sacred Circle. Diane Longboat (Kahontakwas Mohawk) confirms the vital importance of this task when she says that, “Indigenous wisdom is now called forth in the world to guide all sectors of human development to restore balance in the world, so that human beings can live by Sacred Spiritual Law and the Natural Laws of Mother Earth. The hoop of humanity is a great circle of seats for every human being.”
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Gabor Maté's Foreword To The New Book,
The Evolved Nest
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By Gabor Maté, MD
This gem of a book, modest in length but vast in eruditon and insight and rich in mind-boggling scientific observation, will leave the reader both humbled and grateful. Subverting our egoic self-satisfaction, it illuminates how humanity has forgotten its own nature, even as it has abandoned and turned against the Nature that formed and sustained us over millions of years. In doing so, our authors, psychologists Darcia Narvaez and G. A. Bradshaw, also point the way to redemption. No fanciful social utopianism here; only a profound understanding of what our core needs are, right from conception, and what we have to learn from the ancestral human and Animal ways of being as they were formed in the crucible of Nature.
Read the foreword to The Evolved Nest: Nature's Way of Raising Children and Creating Connected Communities.
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The Evolved Nest: Natures Way of Raising Children and Creating Connected Communities |
By Darcia Narvaez and G.A. Bradshaw
Foreword by Gabor Mate, MD
A beautiful resource for nature advocates, parents-to-be, animal lovers, and anyone who seeks to restore wellbeing on our planet, The Evolved Nest reconnects us to lessons from the animal world and shows us how to restore wellness in our families, communities, and lives.
Each of 10 chapters explores a different animal’s parenting model, sharing species-specific adaptations that allow each to thrive in their “evolved nests.” You’ll learn:
- How Gorillas Build an internal moral compass
- How Elephants foster a spirit of play in their children
- How Octopuses work through early life stressors and traumas
- How, when, and whether (or not) Brown Bears decide to have children
- What their lessons can teach you--whether you’re a parent, grandparent, caregiver, or childfree
Psychologists Drs. Darcia Narvaez and Gay Bradshaw show us how each evolved nest offers inspiration for reexamining our own systems of nurturing, understanding, and caring for our young and each other. Alongside beautiful illustrations, stunning scientific facts, and lessons in evolutionary biology, we learn to care deeper: to restore our innate place within the natural world and fight for an ecology of life that supports our flourishing in balance with nature alongside our human and non-human family.
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28 Days Of PLAY - Join Us In September! |
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28 Days Of Solo Play: Learning To Play As An Adult |
Join Kindred and the Evolved Nest Initiative on our social media platforms starting September 1, 2023, for 28 Days of Solo Play! Check out the collection of solo play prompts on the Evolved Nest website here. See the resources below for more ideas to keep spontaneous play going.
WHY LEARN TO PLAY? Adults often have a hard time being spontaneously playful. For many of us, physical, bouncy play was discouraged even in childhood. The older you get, the more it is perceived to be undignified, unless you are an athlete of some sort and are involved in sports (organized play). Organized play is great for exercise and team spirit, but it’s not the same as spontaneous play.
So spontaneous play is not just for kids. Spontaneous play nourishes your whole being, from growing the right brain hemisphere to building skills in getting along cooperatively instead of through domination-submission.
The 28 days of solo play are intended to help break the ice about playing as an adult. Each day you can take little actions that loosen you up. There is no right or wrong way to move. Just enjoy your body moving through space!
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Reimagining Humanity,
the Sequel to Breaking the Cycle
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When the Evolved Nest is provisioned to children and to adults, our full humanity is developed and expressed.
Through the Evolved Nest we develop the Kinship Worldview.
Reimagining Humanity, the film, gives us a taste of the kind of lifeways that nestedness promotes.
Kindred World is proud to launch the Evolved Nest’s educational, short film, Reimagining Humanity. The goal of the moving and inspirational 12-minute film is to expand human imagination, based in deep history and transdisciplinary science, about human potential. We have not always been so stressed, disconnected and mindlessly destructive. For most of our species’ existence we have lived in cooperative companionship. The film illustrates what this looks like.
Reimagining Humanity names and illustrates many of the Indigenous/Kinship Worldview precepts, from trust in Spirit to trusting the cycle of life, from respecting diversity to avoiding rigid hierarchy. Through our Evolved Nest, our evolutionary and neurobiological pathway to lifelong wellbeing, we develop the Kinship Worldview. When the Evolved Nest is provisioned to children and to adults, our full humanity is developed and expressed. Reimagining Humanity gives us a taste of the kind of lifeways that nestedness promotes.
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Join the Kindred COMMUNITY |
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Read 99 Five-Star Reviews of Our Work and Kindred World! |
Kindred Media is an educational initiative of Kindred World, an American 501C3 nonprofit that has Served the Re-Generation Since 1996.
Discover what we've learned in a quarter century of envisioning and creating a Wisdom-based, Wellness-informed Society, here.
Read our more than 99 five-star reviews here.
Our gratitude to everyone who has supported Kindred World's work over these past 25 years!
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