"Reaching back to antiquity, but intensifying dramatically the last fifty-years, a dark spell has been cast, trapping and enchanting parents, children and their cultures, in a false vision of who we are together. Realizing that adult development is the prerequisite for child development, Kindred breaks that spell, awakening a completely different way to relate to each other, and to all of nature." - Michael Mendizza, Magical Child, Magical Parent
"Wisdom is the experience of wholeness. To become a wisdom-based society, we must first become a wellness-informed society." - Lisa Reagan, Kindred World, Co-Founder; Kindred Media, Editor
Connection
Wholeness
Wellness
Wisdom
Sovereignty
Integrity
Diversity
Inclusion
Service
Sustainability
Peace
Heart-centered
Authenticity
Courage
Innovative
Empowerment
Community
Stewardship
Equality
Human Rights
Flourishing
Thriving
Wisdom
Generativity
Worldview Shifting (To Wisdom-Based)
New Story Sharing and Exploring
Wellness-Informed Education
Champion Wellness Science
Collaborative Networking and Project
Relational Activism
Community ARTivism
Communal Imagining
Centering Childhood in Social Justice
Kindred Activism Awareness and Training
Sustainable Advocacy
Champion Wayfinders
Nature Connection/Eco Attachment
Re-Wilding/Re-Indigenizing
Re-Enchantment
Ecocentrism
Kindred world is Committed to serving everyone inclusive of race, ethnicity, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, age, marital status, physical or mental ability, socio-economic status, political views, gender identity, sexual orientation, family structure, or other protected status.
New Story Sharing and Exploring
Worldview Shifting
Wellness-Informed Education
Trance Breaking/New Cycle Making
Champions Wellness Science
Wellness-Informed Education
Worldview Shifting (To Wisdom-based)
Thriving, Wholeness, Flourishing
Kindred Activism Awareness and Training
Roots of Social Justice Education
Sustainable Advocacy
Service, Stewardship, Human Rights
Community Empowerment
Wellness-Informed Education
Sustainable Advocacy/Kindred Activism
Community, Empowerment, Service, Human Rig
Champion Wayfinders
Sustainable Advocacy
Kindred Activism
Trance-Breaking/New Cycle Making
Wellness-Informed Education
Champions Wellness Science
Nature Connection
Sustainability, Wisdom, Connection
Champions Wellness Science
Wellness-Informed Education
Trance-Breaking/New Cycle Making
Thriving, Flourishing, Wholeness
New Story Sharing and Exploring
Wellness-Informed Education
Worldview Shifting
Wholeness, Wellness, Connection
Worldview Shifting
New Story Sharing and Exploration
Roots of Social Justice Education
Trance-Breaking, New Cycle Making, Wisdom
The Old Story of Separation that dominates our culture and conditioning today is entering a natural composting stage... it doesn't work anymore. The New Story of Connection, who we'e always been, is emerging in our consciousness. We are all in the space between these stories, exploring the possibilities, deciding what our new narrative will be...
Kindred World is proud to launch The Evolved Nest’s educational short film, Breaking the Cycle. The moving and inspirational six-minute film illustrates our capacity for breaking our current Cycle of Competitive Detachment and returning to the pattern of 95% of our human history: a healthy, peaceful Cycle of Cooperative Companionship. Breaking the Cycle is based on the multi-award-winning book, Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture and Wisdom, by Darcia Narvaez, PhD. Visit the site for a film discussion guide, more educational materials, and science references at www.BreakingtheCycleFilm.org
The Meet the Wayfinders oral history collection of empowering, personal stories features video interviews with nine professionals, parents, and scientists who found ways around breastfeeding advocacy barriers, or just broke them! The series was created at the invitation of La Leche League International in celebration of their 65th Anniversary Conference held October 15-18, 2021. While the series was presented live in October, the public can still view the collection at www.MeettheWayfinders.org.
The video above is from a Monday LIVE Lecture delivered to the international PPNE students of the Association for Prenatal and Perinatal Psychology and Health. In this presentation, Lisa condenses her three hour workshop lecture on the New Story of Childhood, Parenthood and the Human Family in to an hour long overview for APPPAH students who are focused on the emergence of birth psychology into this New Story paradigm. In sharing her own story, she reveals unfolding historical events over the last four decades that coalesced into an ongoing and growing Conscious Parenting Movement in the United States. Lisa acknowledges that most people, like herself, do not realize they are participating in meta story lines that form a continuum of human consciousness. However, with this missing context, our lives shift out of an enculturated and constricted Old Story to the expansive and self-authoring potential of the New Story.
In this presentation to APPPAH, Lisa Reagan, Kindred World’s co-founder and Kindred Media’s editor, shares the organization’s grassroots history as context for understanding and appreciating the award-winning nonprofit’s approach to creating initiatives and projects. She shares the consciousness-raising strategic vision of Kindred World and its initiatives, including the Evolved Nest Initiative, and Breaking the Cycle, based on Darcia Narvaez's award-winning science.
Kindred World (formerly Families for Conscious Living) began as a grassroots, consciousness-raising organization of parents and professionals in 1996, twenty-five years into America’s decline to the bottom of all international indicators for family, maternal, and child health. After a total fifty-year race to last place of every family wellness indicator, today, Kindred World’s mission and vision are more relevant and important than ever.
During the current climate crisis, pandemic, and political upheaval, Kindred World’s quarter century of investigating and sharing a New Story of Our Human Family is a blazed path to wholeness and wellness ready for others to follow. For a quarter century, we have explored the interconnectedness of all of the “categories” you will find on this website. This holistic approach – looking for the connections between all of life’s interdependent and diverse forms – has allowed us to discover integrated insights into creating lifelong wellness.
Below, in the Our History section, you can discover how and when we learned what we’ve learned in this past quarter century. But first, we will get to the heart of what we’ve learned so far. The New Story requires new language, so be sure to follow the highlighted words and phrases to our New Story Glossary for help in shifting your perspective and grasping these insights clearly. You are also encouraged to consider the Worldview Chart, created by Four Arrows, an International Advisory Board member, to see at-a-glance the worldview shift needed.
Kindred World began as Families for Natural Living, and then Families for Conscious Living.
Why do we need a New Story? Because the roots of human wellness and planetary sustainability do not exist in our Old Story. And as Einstein famously said, we cannot solve a problem at the same level it was created... therefore... the quest is now: What's the New Story?
What if everything we thought we knew or believed to be true turned out to be a story, a tale passed down from parent to child through daily informal habits to ceremonial traditions designed to help us understand our world?
What if the chaos we are witnessing in the world today is a symptom, evidence even, of our collective Old Story - the belief in our separateness - breaking down?
Would our fears be lessened and our curiosity piqued if we made a conscious choice to turn our attention toward an emerging New Story? Could an expanding sense of wonder allow room for questions like:
What if babies are conscious? What if sustainability begins with conception? What if Womb Ecology Becomes World Ecology? What if Worldviews Create Worlds?
When we consider the way we make sense of our lives has always been through stories, other questions arise, like:
Who wrote these stories? Can they be changed? What steps can we take toward shifting our current, industrial story of humanity to a life-affirming and empowering narrative, authored by, well, US (humans, not corporations).
Our daily choices and habits are informed by the context, the Big Picture, whether we are aware we even hold a worldview, a personal mythology or a story of our own being and becoming.
For over 20 years, Kindred and its initiatives have been exploring this New Story from the ground up, in grassroot's communities, and from the top down, with frontier science researchers and social changemakers. Kindred’s nonprofit work has been led by diverse and brave humans who have sought out insight and solutions to shifting their own awareness from the limits of the Old Story to the practical wisdom for conscious living emerging from a New Story.
This New Story comes with its own language, phrases like Cultural Creatives, Grounded Expansion, Mindful Parenting, and the Ecology of the Child. You can see our collection of New Story language on Kindred's New Story Glossary.
What is needed at this time is a gathering place, a sanctuary, created with great compassion and willingness to call upon our imaginations, to engage in open dialogue, to create community and to identify resources that support an adventurous exploration of holistic, peaceful and sustainable living.
Below are the educational and outreach initiatives Kindred World has created to meet these needs for ourselves and our children. Please support our work with your tax-deductible donations. And thank you for believing...
What an innocent beginning Families for Natural Living had in 1996, when mothers and fathers began to gather in parks and homes in Virginia, USA, to support each other’s wellness choices. Inspired by their love for their children, FCL families grew strong and confident with the support they found and gave to one another. We did not know we were in the middle of America's 50 year decline to the bottom of all health and wellness measures for adults and children among all developed nations.
Because these were the early years of the internet, parents gathered in FNL groups with lending libraries of hard-to-find wellness books packed in their car trunks and Xeroxed hand-outs to share for discussions. Organic food drops were arranged through a handful of co-ops, naturopaths were novelties and homeschoolers defied truant officers. Home-birthing families back then, the core of FNL’s founders, were subjected to routine threats by social services for using direct-entry midwives.
And then, surprisingly, the world became interested in discovering the roots of wellness too...
In 2005, nearly a decade later, thanks to hundreds of families who would not abandon their right to make informed choices and a handful of legislators who listened, direct-entry midwives were legalized in Virginia. By this time, regular grocers carried organic produce, homeschoolers received Ivy League praise, and naturopaths, homeopaths and chiropractors were easier to find. In fact, Americans are three times more likely to see an alternative practitioner than a medical doctor these days.
What changed to allow this cultural shift in awareness? Someone’s mind.
And this is the way it has been up until now. Parent-activists who are consciously shifting their personal way of thinking, or paradigm, to a holistic paradigm, know it is their individual actions and beliefs that can and will create lasting change in our world. This commitment to change begins within ourselves, and is a marathon, not a sprint. The masterful balancing act of going the distance of decades by holding ourselves gently while holding our ground firmly allows us to avoid burn-out and despair. Instead of caving to social pressures to conform to a disease-model culture, together as The Regeneration, we have found the strength and collective wisdom to create a solid foundation of wellness for our children and families and it is our own ability to create community.
Today, twenty years after those first gatherings in Virginia public parks, parents who want to find like-minded families, access trustworthy information and supportive holistic practitioners, need only to turn on their home computers. And yet, even with faster access to one another and information, the same questions are being asked all along the airwaves of emailing and texting and blogging:
Kindred's mission, born of our experience in empowering ourselves through a nascent consciousness-raising movement, continues to create opportunities for Cultural Creatives to find one another and engage in enlightening discussions and supportive networking to help ourselves “shift” out of our cultural conditioning, or industrial paradigm, our Old Story, and into a wellness-based, holistic paradigm, the full potential of our human birthright, our New Story.
While we no longer sponsor community groups, currently, our Gathering Guide has been distilled into a turn-key outreach program, Pathways Connect, that is available through collaboration with the quarterly, print and digital magazine, Pathways to Family Wellness.
More than ever before, the resources, tools, information and support for conscious living exist for us when we are ready to create the world we want to live in, one day at a time, one choice at a time, and together, as The ReGeneration!
See our resource pages here.
For more of a glance into our history:
Do you feel like a weirdo? Do you feel driven to change the world around you, but isolation and fear of rejection prevent you from speaking up? You're not alone. In fact, you have a quarter of the world's population back you up, but you wouldn't know it, because lack of visibility and coherence are the twin challenges of being a Cultural Creative!
Thanks to the book, Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World, by Paul H. Ray Ph.D., Sherry Ruth Anderson in 2000, four short years after FCL began, we now know that Kindred's founding families and social changemakers like them today are Cultural Creatives – and that we are not alone. We just feel invisible in our industrial culture and its reality-defining media machine. As Ray and Anderson state, we “care deeply about ecology and saving the planet, about relationships, peace, social justice, and about self actualization, spirituality and self-expression. Surprisingly, they are both inner-directed and socially concerned, they’re activists, volunteers and contributors to good causes more than other Americans.
“However, because they’ve been so invisible in American life, Cultural Creatives themselves are astonished to find out how many share both their values and their way of life. Once they realize their numbers, their impact on American life promises to be enormous, shaping a new agenda for the twenty-first century. What makes the appearance of the Cultural Creatives especially timely today is that our civilization is in the midst of an epochal change, caught between globalization, accelerating technologies and a deteriorating planetary ecology. A creative minority can have enormous leverage to carry us into a new renaissance instead of a disastrous fall.”
Thanks to many researchers and authors who are pioneering new edge science, we also know that our individual actions and beliefs have a direct effect on our communities and world – and therefore, our smallest efforts, from comforting our children to taking on institutions, make a difference beyond our ability to measure.
As Paul Hawken has stated in his book, Blessed Unrest: How The Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming, 2007, our individual choices to consciously create a peaceful, sustainable world are the immune system of the planet at work!
The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World is a nonfiction social sciences and sociology book by sociologist Paul H. Ray and psychologist Sherry Ruth Anderson, first published in 2000. The authors introduced the term "Cultural Creatives" to describe a large segment in Western society who, since about 1985, have developed beyond the standard paradigm of modernists or progressives versus traditionalists or conservatives.
Above: Listen to Lisa Reagan, Kindred's editor, interview Paul Ray, PhD, about his research findings on Cultural Creatives, and how this social science insight applies to Kindred supporters.
Find out if you are a Cultural Creative with this quiz here.
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Subscribe to Kindred World's newsletters below:
Kindred Media: Monthly e-zine highlighting the previous month's posts, podcasts, and interviews
The Evolved Nest: Monthly newsletter featuring the latest science, research papers, and presentations from Darcia Narvaez on the Evovled Nest
Book Fairy Pantry Project: A bi-annual newsletter on Pam Leo's work with family literacy and bonding.
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"Serving the Re-Generation Since 1996"
The Old Story of Separation that dominates our culture and conditioning today is entering a natural composting stage... it doesn't work anymore. The New Story of Connection, who we've always been, is emerging in our consciousness and marrow. We are all in the space between these stories, exploring the possibilities, deciding what our new narrative will be...