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Register for the August 22, 2024 live
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Letter from the Editor
Read this issue in your browser here.
Read the editorial on Kindred here.
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Dear Kindred,
This summer, in preparation for multiple book writing projects, I began compiling all of the human consciousness books I have scoured on my decades-long Mother (of a) Quest, an instinctive drive delivered along with the birth of my son that charged me with stewarding not only his life, but all of Life.
Flipping through dog-eared, underlined pages of books I'd consulted for clues, I remembered how few of the authors viewed Life as a continuum, beginning prenatally, and through the lens of relational, intelligent interdependence. I remembered how confused and worried I became when I didn’t see myself reflected back from these books as a mother who struggled to keep my child whole in an anti-nurturing, fragmented world.
Many authors pointed to and described our interdependency with Life from a safe, academically-sanctioned distance. A few advocated for a shift toward a holistic worldview. Fewer took the next steps of revealing what creating a thriving, whole human while living from a holistic worldview involved.
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At one point on my journey, I sat in the garden of a prestigious institute in California and asked a well-regarded researcher pointedly: “Why do you only view humans as adults? What about Joseph Chilton Pearce's work that shows how we treat children is how they will treat the world?” She promised to look into my ideas. But earlier that week, when I stood before a group of 40 retreat participants and used the words mother, baby, father, family, children – I lost the room. Everyone’s seat became itchy and their toes extremely interesting. Some looked mildly embarrassed for me.
On my next go-around with the same group, I modified my language and simply stated: “When you decide, perhaps with a partner, to steward a new human life, you may find your worldview shifts in ways you couldn’t anticipate. That's what happened to me." I scanned the room and found I had not lost them. Interesting. Language matters in authoring a New Story of the Human Family. (We know this at Kindred which is why we maintain a New Story Glossary.)
While most of the beautifully-bound knowledge now stacked around my desk felt dead on arrival, the dynamic, grounded stories from self-identified Cultural Creatives, Trance-Breakers, Wayfinders, and New Cycle Makers, I found along the way imparted welcome wisdom, courage and hope. Identity is the basis for action, so it matters if we chose to identify as relational, intelligent, interdependent species, at one with all Life.
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And here we are today, with our little grassroots nonprofit still conducting a meta-inquiry into our meta-crises (asking Big Picture questions). More importantly, we're listening to you, our companions on the journey, for clues to where we’re headed as we author and live into our New Story.
Here at Kindred, caregivers, practitioners, and a few brave researchers continue to report back from the field how they are breaking cycles and creating counter-culture strategies for wellbeing and wholeness. These stories, including a new one in this issue, “go there”.
Our storytellers confidently sail past modern cultural bias blaring the ancient Rock of Gibraltar’s warning of Ne Plus Ultra (no more beyond) on the edge of the Mediterranean Sea: “Stop now! This is the end of the known world. Don’t find out for yourself. You’ll be sorry! Monsters ahead!”
Like indomitable wind blasts and sea currents, stories carry us forward on the elemental power needed to sail past self-limiting beliefs and unexamined cultural bias. The storytellers and stories curated here on Kindred attempt to answer those unasked questions in the well-crafted tomes of the human consciousness explorers who stopped and turned back.
We don't stop. We go there.
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This month, we're very excited to present two scholars who bravely lead science's current stream of thought into emerging, integrated fields. Darcia Narvaez and Four Arrows are beloved Kindred board members and contributing editors who go there.
What does it look like when we intentionally steward human capacities for intelligent relationship with Life? As Darcia Narvaez answers for us, it looks like our Evolved Nest.
In her transdisciplinary research, books, and films featured on Kindred, Darcia presents her award-winning, holistic theory of our evolutionary path for wellbeing and wholeness. The Evolved Nest brings into tight focus our work at Kindred, and our role as the praxis, the living story of the Evolved Nest.
We hear over and over again, including in the podcast interview below, how worldview literacy supports our deep dive into exploring our Evolved Nest.
Four Arrows' worldview scholarship reveals there are only two essential worldviews: our original, species-typical, Indigenous/Kinship Worldview, that views Nature as conscious and intelligent, and our Dominant Worldview that does not. (See Four Arrows and Darcia's book, Restoring the Kinship Worldview.)
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This summer, in an effort to bring more clarity and engagement with Kinship Worldview, Kindred World’s board members created the Worldview Literacy Project, featuring an updated and expanded Worldview Chart by Four Arrows. Because we are interested in gathering your experiences and insights – your stories – we created resources for self-study and community learning as well as a quick SURVEY on the new website, www.WorldviewLiteracy.org.
Four Arrows will launch the Worldview Literacy Project in his opening of the Veterans For Peace Convention on August 16, 2024. VFP and Kindred World are proud to announce their nonprofit partnership, made possible with a grant from Fielding University. Learn more about the event and this project here.
As we collectively face our planet's meta crises, we are calling upon our capacities for meta-cognition, worldview literacy, and as a result, begin to identify ourselves as one species, one human family. The language and insights from Kinship Worldview and the Evolved Nest support this emergence and its need for coherence.
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How grounded are our efforts here on Kindred? How capable of transforming our daily lives is our work?
Watch the interview with Andrea Dole, a mother of a disabled child, who found herself and her beliefs in nurturing reflected back to her through the Kinship Worldview and the science of the Evolved Nest. So much so, she recently presented to a group of Vanderbilt pediatricians her success in following her heart wisdom to nurture her son instead of abandoning him to recommended institutional care. You can watch her presentation of the Evolved Nest to the university physicians here.
Four Arrows and Darcia join us in the video podcast with Andrea and share their thoughts on what is possible when we reorient ourselves toward wholeness through a Kinship Worldview, and validate our nurturing instincts with Evolved Nest science and insights.
I’ve modified my original questions since beginning my Mother (of a) Quest from, "How do I do this?” to “How can we make room for what will seem like every day miracles to our old Dominant Worldview?”
Wholeness isn’t a miracle. It is our human birthright. Living stories, like Andrea and her son, James, show us what is possible in relationship with a living world.
Let's go there.
Onward,
Lisa Reagan
Kindred Magazine, Editor
Kindred World, Founder
editor@kindredmedia.org
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New Worldview Literacy Project & Updated Worldview Chart for Rebalancing Life Systems on Planet Earth
You are welcome to download the updated Worldview Chart by Four Arrows in color or black and white PDF here.
You can also purchase a poster of the chart here.
Learn more about Worldview Literacy and restoring our Kinship Worldview on the new Worldview Literacy Project website, a Kindred World initiative, here.
The Worldview Literacy Project offers self-study and communal learning resources and materials, as well a survey to share your experience and insights of working with the chart.
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New Video PODCAST Interview | |
How One Mother Defended Her Counter-Culture Choice To Nurture Her Disabled Child
Listen to Andrea’s story and later in the call, Four Arrows and Darcia Narvaez will join us to unpack Andrea’s experience with worldview and evolved nest framing. Most importantly, we are presenting Andrea’s experience to empower other parents who are struggling to make counter culture choices for wellness for their children and families.
Watch the video interview.
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Early Pathway To Adult Authoritarianism
By Darcia Narvaez
Over seventy years ago in reaction to the rise of Nazism and the resulting Holocaust in Germany, Adorno and colleagues (1950) studied and identified nine features of the “authoritarian syndrome.” Anyone watching the USA today can recognize most of these characteristics in political figures and in some citizens:
- Authoritarian aggression (aggression to enforce hierarchy and norms)
- Authoritarian submission (submissive to accepted authority figures)
- Support for conventional values (at least superficially and for others)
- Preoccupation with toughness and power (and fear of vulnerability)
- Cynicism about human nature
- Mental rigidity and a proclivity to engage in stereotypical thinking
- Reluctance to engage in introspection (low self-awareness)
- Tendency to project one’s undesirable traits onto others (scapegoating)
- Sexual inhibition
These are all species-abnormal traits.1 Interestingly, these also were characteristic of conquistadors, Victorian elite men, and many European colonizers. The syndrome seems to be spreading today.
Read the post.
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Reinvigorating Concepts Of Attachment Through A Matriversal And Indigenous Lens
By Stephanie Mines
I have been in the service of people recovering from, healing from, and transcending trauma for over four decades. When I reflect on the broad swath of this experience, I realize how misled all of us were to think that there was something wrong with us. There never was anything wrong with us. There was something terribly wrong with the systems that defined and labeled us.
Let me explain more about this revolution in understanding attachment and bonding and why it is surfacing now, at the virtual end of time.
Read the post.
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Getting Clear –
The Radical Choice To Wake Up In A Culture Obsessed With Numbing
By Kelly Wendorf
Living inside such a system makes us anxious, sick and fragile. It’s a system that holds us to unattainable perfection, unbearable pressures, and blames those who cannot, or will not, comply. Every time we contort ourselves or cut off a limb to fit into the square hole, it costs us. We tell ourselves it’s not that bad, or this is just the way things are. Or we blame ourselves for not adapting better. Something must be wrong with me, we reason. To endure the daily cognitive dissonance, we numb and self-medicate through imbibing the myriad substances available to us––alcohol, social media, drama, worry, pills, the news, shopping, or unhinged self-improvement.
But there is nothing wrong with you. The discomfort you feel, the lostness, the anxiousness, the anger, the relentlessness you sense, is a natural and healthy response to living inside an environment designed to limit or quash your spirit.
Read the post.
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August is National Breastfeeding Month
Breastfeeding is one of the nine components of our evolutionary pathway to wellbeing, our Evolved Nest!
This week is Indigenous Milk Medicine Week. Find Jasha Echo-Hawk's story of creating the original Native Breastfeeding Week here.
Black Breastfeeding Week is August 25 - 31. Listen to Kindred's oral history series with ROSE and ROBE leaders who broke barriers to serve the Black community here.
Watch the Meet the Wayfinders Oral History Series created by Kindred for the 65th International La Leche League Conference. Hear stories from nine wayfinders, leaders of breastfeeding movements in America, who broke barriers and created counter culture strategies to normalize breastfeeding.
See all of Kindred's Breastfeeding Resources.
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Darcia Narvaez, Kindred World’s President, To Receive APA Div. 24 Presidential Citation Award | |
Kindred World is proud to announce that Darcia Narvaez, PhD, our president and co-founder of the Evolved NestInitiative, is the recipient of the 2024 Presidential Citation Award from Division 24 of the American Psychological Association (APA). Established in 2019, the Presidential Citation Award honors a nationally or internationally recognized scholar who has made significant contributions to the field of psychology or to a body of interdisciplinary scholarship.
Narvaez was nominated for the Presidential Citation Award based on her work that supports the flourishing of theoretical psychology in both a distinguished record of publication and teaching and the educational outreach programs and events offered to the general public through the Evolved Nest Initiative. The 2024 Presidential Citation is awarded directly from the Society for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, Division 24, of the APA.
Read the press release.
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Veterans For Peace
“We are delighted to partner with Veterans For Peace and for the opportunity to work together to gather their members’ insights and stories,” said Lisa Reagan, Kindred World’s founder and Kindred Magazine’s editor. “Kindred World has focused on bringing worldview literacy to our followers for over a decade. Decades of human consciousness research show the critical need for worldview shifting. Four Arrows’ Worldview Chart and Indigenous Worldview scholarship reveal there are only two essential worldviews: one where Nature is conscious and one where it is not. The WLP can help us discover which world we want to live in.”
Read the press release.
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Four Arrows Opens Veterans For Peace Convention and Launches New Worldview Literacy Project & Collaboration
Four Arrows will officially introduce Kindred World's Worldview Literacy Project during his opening presentation of the Veterans For Peace Convention on August 16, 2024. (Register for the VFP Convention here.) The Worldview Literacy Project website features a dedicated page for VFP members to participate in the survey study.
Kindred World has partnered with VFP to create and distribute the WLP Survey to their members. Kindred World’s nonprofit partnership with VFP is made possible through a grant for the research project from Fielding University.
"Veterans For Peace is a global organization of military veterans and allies whose collective efforts are to build a culture of peace by using our experiences and lifting our voices. We inform the public of the true causes of war and the enormous costs of wars, with an obligation to heal the wounds of wars. Our network is comprised of over 140 chapters worldwide whose work includes: educating the public, advocating for a dismantling of the war economy, providing services that assist veterans and victims of war, and most significantly, working to end all wars," shares Susan Schnall, president of VFP.
"As military veterans of war, we have been witness to and experienced war and its destruction on all living things; we inform and educate people about its true nature and impact on the earth. It is an honor for us to partner with Kindred World View in this project which will help us both individually and organizationally to becoming nature-centered and interconnected partners with other beings that make up the world," says Schnall.
Read the press release.
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The Biology of Belonging
ACES Aware Scotland - May 7-8, 2025, Darcia Narvaez, Kindred's president, will be a keynote speaker.
ACE-Aware Scotland held our first major event in 2018. Nearly 2500 people came because they wanted to know more about the importance of relationships for human thriving. Every year since, we have hosted a major event, and every year we continue to be inspired by the public’s enthusiastic hunger for this information.
ACES Aware Scotland is a nonprofit partner of Kindred. Read their stories here.
Register for the event.
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PLEASE HELP: A Question from Our Community: | |
Kindred Community is a safe, kind, and vetted space to engage and connect with our Kindred Community through Mighty Networks!
This platform is ad-free, algorithm-free, and owned by us. You can download the app to the network and post and stay up-to-date with group discussions, research, and upcoming events. Join at www.KindredCommunity.org.
QUESTION: "I’m hoping this wonderful and inspiring community of change makers might have book suggestions that I could read with my middle school aged son? Specifically, I am wondering about stories that show and teach a worldview different from our WEIRD one 💕!" – Dara Schulbaum
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