A Consciousness-Raising Movement Begins...

---

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.

• We are endangered. Humans are an endangered species because so many are disconnected from being, including ourselves (we are nature), each other, our children, and the living environment. Darcia Narvaez’s (Kindred World’s president) award-winning research shows that we are now “atypical members of our species” who have created a culture of competitive detachment that ignores biological birthrights, causing lifelong suffering.  In order to restore our connection to life we need to challenge our millennia-old industrial programming with our million-year-old biological intelligence. The Old Story should be replaced with the Ancient, Connected Story that characterizes durable societies tens of thousands of years old.
• We are traumatized. Our enculturation into a Dominator Culture, and its patriarchal, industrial, materialistic cultural imperatives is, as Riane Eisler says in a Kindred interview, “a trauma factory.” 
• Our disconnection began long ago, generations ago. The trans-generational trauma, and patterns of dysfunction and disconnection snowballed from a cultural split from nature and being, into a species atypical state of consciousness. Our deep insecurities fuel racism, misogyny, sexism, white supremacy, racism, and adultism (childism), systemic manifestations of dysregulated individuals and communities. 
• We are an indigenous species to the earth. With a return to our indigenous species’ worldview  and species-typical practices for raising children and one another, we can revamp ourselves by healing our neurobiology and our spiritual intelligence. We can restore a culture of cooperative companionship.
• We are built for love, compassion and peace–when our basic needs are met. More importantly, we can foster human beings built for optimal health, sustainability, and peace by providing our original million-year-old “evolved developmental niche” – Evolved Nest – to pregnant mothers, babies and young children, but also to everyone at every age.
• We can heal. In summary, with great self-compassion and love for one another, it is possible for us to wake up from our entranced state of disconnected consciousness and its identification with Dominator Culture values and beliefs (see Four Arrow’s worldview chart). We can break cycles of family trauma, heal ourselves and our world with the Connected Story of who we really are and what we’re really capable of to guide us. We can learn what durable sustainable cultures have always known, a process called decolonization and indigenization.
• We can act together to create a Partnership Culture and Caring Economy. In a healed, whole state of being with our indigenous worldview and its values of connection to guide us, we can then, through conscious activism, move to create a Partnership Culture and Caring Economy. 
• The USA’s global last place ranking and epidemics of illbeing, will not reverse without the New Story. The United States currently ranks 41 out of 41 developed countries for family friendly policies that would support species typical, early life optimal wellness and wholeness. Epidemics of depression, addiction, chronic illness, and gun violence are all hallmarks of a failed, disconnected population. (See United Nations chart below.) 
• We have much work to do. And in our current trifecta of pandemic, climate change, and political crises, there is a growing public interest in understand how we got here as a species, and how we are going to get out. Kindred World, and its 25 years of experience in gathering researchers, thought leaders, and activists and in serving those interested in self and cultural transformation, stands ready to help. 

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:

• How can we, as parents, begin to discuss the many issues of conscious living and informed choice without capitulating to paralyzing fear of cultural backlash that would prevent us from taking wise and peaceful action? 
• How can we move from fearful victim thinking, for example, blaming “Corporate America” for our disease model culture, and instead begin a true revolution for wellness within ourselves? 
• How can we train our minds to seek and find the good in ourselves and the world and to bring this story of who we are to the forefront of cultural consciousness? 
• How can we be The Re-Generation for our children and model for them this way of mindful and conscious living? 

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:

• Read a 2006 E-Newsletter here.
• Read our 2011 Annual Report here.
• Listen to FCL co-founder, Lisa Reagan, share the history of FCL's roots on a international teleconference with practitioners and parents here.
• Read about FCL’s history by social anthropologist and university professor, Crista Craven, in her book, Pushing for Midwives: Homebirth Mothers and the Reproductive Rights Movement.

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!

• Watch the documentary on Cultural Creatives below to explore the social science and implications of the mostly unacknowledged population of social change makers worldwide who are committed to a peaceful, sustainable world.
  
• Read the interview with Paul Ray, PhD, author of the book Cultural Creatives here and below.
  
• Take the quiz to see if you are a Cultural Creative here.
  
• Watch Lisa Reagan's presentation on The New Story of Childhood, Parenthood and the Human Family to see how the Cultural Creative phenomenon has played out and driven the Conscious Parenting Movement in the United States.
  

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!