Winter Solstice - December 21, 2020 |
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Goodbye 2020, Hello Returning Light...
and a Celestial Promise Remembered
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Today, at the end of nine months of quarantine and forced hearth-tending, we arrive at the darkest, longest night of the year. On this Winter Solstice, a planetary conjunction not seen in 800 years is being hailed as the “Christmas Star” and, from the looks of weary journalists desperate for a good news story, the symbolism of the celestial event is building expectations of hope for change worldwide (just Google “Christmas Star 2020”).
Have we gestated our own consciousnesses enough during these nine months of confinement to birth a post-COVID world? Or are our closets just cleaner?
In preparation for watching the planetary conjunction tonight with my family by a bonfire, I wondered how many of us are aware of the ancient family drama we will be witnessing? In between prayers for our suffering world and gathering sticks for firewood, I feel the edges for a story to guide us. For this is what stories do. Especially archetypal myths…
How about the story of a Greek goddess who was firstborn of 12 Olympians, devoured by her Titan father, Kronos (named Saturn by the Romans) only to be born again when the monstrous patriarch was forced by her brother Zeus (named Jupiter by the Romans) to regurgitate her? Get your popcorn, kids...
In ancient Western mythology, Hestia, the Greek Goddess of the Hearth, was first to be honored when new cities or homes were built. She was the goddess of the fires that kept humanity safe, able to find our way home, and connected to the sacred in all life through altar candles and ceremonial bonfires. Her half-brother is Chiron – the wisest and justest of all the centaurs in Greek mythology and the teacher of heroes, including Achilles, Ajax, Theseus, Perseus, Hercules, Jason, Aeneas, and Odysseus.
In modern Western mythology, Hestia’s wallflower reputation relegated her to a dusty collective consciousness closet. (Her brother is played by Pierce Brosnan in the Percy Jackson movies.) Hestia’s archetypal energy – the quiet, grounded, hearth-tending goddess whose inner life connected her to nature and spirit – is not valued in our brash, manic, externally-focused world. Until now.
During our forced hearth-tending quarantine, we’ve lit candles, cooked home meals, reckoned with our housekeeping skills, and awakened to the sanctuary of home as millions of Americans face losing theirs just days after our holiday celebrations.
On some days, like Hestia, many of us feel like this madman, power-hungry patriarchy and its Dominator Culture has swallowed us whole. But on other days, many of us are cleaning out a forgotten closet and finding ancient, archetypal energies within ourselves, energies that remember how to create sacred space, sit in stillness, and light our own way home.
It may feel like humanity’s story is dark and violent in the moments of being devoured by a monstrous Dominator Culture, but 99% of humanity’s existence over billions of years has been peaceful and collaborative. In this newsletter issue, Kindred’s contributors explore our new story, which is also an ancient, mostly forgotten story: from Darcia Narvaez’s award-winning science on the Evolved Nest, to Michael Mendizza’s path to sustainable human identity, to Kelly Wendorf’s reminder of Mary Magdalene’s gospel on anthropos, and Pam Leo’s suggestions of getting our post-pandemic stories together for our children as a holiday gift!
For a quarter century, Kindred has shared our human family's new story, championed counter-culture thought leaders, created resources, and found inspiration to help us author our new story. Please support our nonprofit work, or volunteer with our initiatives. The light is returning, and we have work to do!
Warm, fire-lit holiday greetings,
Lisa Reagan
Editor, Kindred
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A Sustainable Identity For Humanity |
By Michael Mendizza
When the energy of attention suddenly stops feeding that virtual-reality, when that noise and its distortion in consciousness ends, a completely different reality-identity grabs the wheel just inches from the cliff. This new ground, this new reality, and identity, what Star Wars called The Force, “the sky-like nature of our mind. Utterly free, timeless and fun, so simple and natural that it can never be complicated, corrupted or stained, so pure that it is beyond even the concept of purity and impurity, our flawless, present awareness, cognizant and empty, naked and awake,” true spontaneous intelligence – changes everything from the inside out.
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Trapped – The Spiritual Awakening Of Confinement |
By Kelly Wendorf
So much captivity and limitation…do we work ourselves into a lather? Do we shatter the boards? What a perfect holiday invitation––to simply stop and turn in towards the Christ-consciousness that abides within each one of us.
The Gospel of Mary Magdalene describes an alchemical nexus between limitation and limitlessness, between being human and being divine. She uses the term anthropos which translates as ‘someone who is fully human AND fully divine’. “He has prepared us so that we might become fully human,” she says. To become fully human is a modern translation of the words “to become an anthropos,” a completed human being, meaning someone who is fully awakened into their divine nature.
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By Pam Leo
The season of giving is upon us and, since you’ve likely spent more than the usual amount of time with your children in recent months, you have lots of stories to tell. I found it easier to write out my stories before I tried telling them, but stories can also be told completely on the fly. As all parents know, desperation can be the mother of creativity. Writing down my stories gave me an exciting new gift-giving idea for this holiday article.
What if you looked through the million pictures on your phone and picked a few favorites to turn into short stories? Then, using a pretty journal or a photo album, you created a book for each child making a collection of their personal stories? The cost would be minimal, it would be fun to create, and it may well be the favorite gift they treasure forever.There is also a bonus for you in giving this gift. By the time you’ve read those little stories to them dozens of times, you will know them by heart, and you, too, will be a “for-real” storyteller, as well.
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The Evolved Nest Explained: Self-Directed Play |
This week's Pinterest post, to the left, broke 50,000 views, a record for us and an indicator we hit a nerve: maybe quarantine is breaking down our resistance to play and we're trying to remember how it's done?
Here are resources and articles from this month's Evolved Nest series on play, for children and adults!
Social Play: A Longstanding Way To Cope
Why Do So Many Adults Resist Play?
How To Play As An Adult
Sociodramatic Play Is Healing At Any Age
The Evolved Nest is a sister initiative of Kindred Media under our parent nonprofit, Kindred World. Read more about Kindred World and Narvaez in the press release below.
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Principles Of Indigenous Child-Raising: Our Ancestors Were Smart And Good |
By Darcia Narvaez, PhD
For each of us to have been born, our ancestors had to be smart and good. I am referring to our ancestors who lived outside of civilization (civilization only arose in parts of the world during the last 1% of human existence; Fry, 2006) because they raised children differently than civilizations and we have reason to believe that their child raising practices (most 20-40 million years old among mammals), had been “optimized” to foster child wellbeing (Konner, 2005). Factors retained from long ago are typically indicative of optimization (Sterling, 2020).
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Capitalism Is A Parasite On Motherhood And The Earth: The Maternal Gift Economy Movement |
The video above is from the Maternal Gift Economy’s international gathering and online conference on November 27, 2020. Darcia Narvaez, PhD, presented in this conference, and video. Narvaez is a contributing editor to Kindred Media and the new president of Kindred World.
Drawing on Maternal Gift Economy theory, the suppressed wisdom of women, and the traditions and ethics of Indigenous societies, this integrated programme of presentations sponsored by the International Feminists for a Gift Economy Network will offer new insights, perspectives, and challenges to the underlying market-based mentality of the dominant world order.
The conference featured Vandana Shiva (India), Darcia Narvaez (USA), Heide Goettner-Abendroth (Germany), Sherri Mitchell (Penobscot Nation), Mary Condren (Ireland), and Genevieve Vaughan (USA/Italy).
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Russell Brand Asks: Is The Pandemic Being Used To Mask A Wealth And Power Transfer? |
While most of us are in a daily survival mode during quarantine, there's a shift, or intentional transfer, of power and wealth taking place globally under the guise of protecting us from ourselves. In less than ten minutes, Russell Brand takes us through the current transfer in headlines, known investigations, and public displays of Kabuki theater by politicians who are creating our post-pandemic world for us in plain sight. What will it look like?
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We Are All In Shock: Energy Healing for Traumatic Times |
By Stephanie Mines, PhD
The practices in this book turn on the capacities to take these steps. One of the significant differences between when I wrote the first edition of We Are All in Shock and now is that the combination of the advancing climate crisis and the Coronavirus Pandemic, which are one and the same thing, has illuminated the lesson of our global overwhelming experience. The urgency to find whole body, heart centered intelligence is unavoidably, unquestionably upon us. The future of humanity depends on this.
Ten Steps to Resolving Shock
- Identify the lesson in the overwhelming experience.
- Sustain this awareness.
- Establish a strong relationship with your body.
- Develop an inner witness.
- Make a bond with nature.
- Know that laughter is the best medicine.
- Use language as a healing tool.
- Use touch to heal.
- Separate past from present.
- Address shock immediately.
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Early Partnership Childhood Care: What Should Centers Provide? |
We are excited to unveil Evolved Nest’s Child Care Center Checklist. The Checklist has been created to help parents and guardians determine how well a child care center matches up with the components of the Evolved Nest. The checklist is intended to be supplemental to the other protocols a center has (e.g., infection prevention, abuse prevention, diaper change frequency).
This version has been updated to include music and art!
Please share widely.
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A Worldview Poster for You |
Old Story or New Story?
Left Brain or Right Brain?
Industrial or Holistic?
Dominator or Indigenous?
Disconnected or Connected?
Keep this chart handy over the coming months, as Kindred's editors and contributors are going deep into the territory of reclaiming our humanity as indigenous Earthbeings.. As a preview, you can read excepts of Kelly Wendorf's new book, Flying Lead Change, on Kindred that speaks to this integration process – with guidance from the horses she lives with and Kelly's moving stories of self-healing through indigenous wisdom. The chart was created by our new contributor and advisory board member, Four Arrows.
Download the worldview chart as a PDF or JPEG.
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28 Days of Self Calming for You |
Why is it important to be calm and learning self-calming away from fear, panic, anxiety or anger? Fear, panic, anxiety and anger are survival-oriented emotions that we are born with but can take over our personality, making it hard to get along with others or even feel well. They are distressing emotions and can put us in mindsets that leave us vulnerable to harmful attitudes and behaviors toward ourselves or others. They are also not good for physical health as they promote inflammation, an underlying cause of many diseases.
These daily practices are intended to give you ways to calm yourself down. You may find that some work better than others. These are ones that you should continue to do.
Enjoy the 28 Days of Self-Calming prompts on all of the Evolved Nest's social media outlets, or at the Evolved Nest's website. The Evolved Nest is a sister initiative of Kindred Media through Kindred World.
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Ray Castellino, baby whisperer and prenatal psychology pioneer for 45 years in the conscious parenting movement. |
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Ray Castellino, International Renown Baby Whisperer, Transitions |
We are heartbroken to learn of the passing of our beloved baby whisperer, Ray Castellino, on December 13, 2020. His immense legacy of pioneering prenatal psychology research and teaching over 45 years lives on in our hearts, the many people he touched, and at Kindred. Please join us in honoring his memory, and sharing his work, with our collection below:
The Blueprint: Our Unifying Field’s Potential for Connection and Wholeness
Creating Harmonic Family Resonance With Birth Psychology: An Interview With Baby Whisperer, Ray Castellino
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WELCOME NEW BOARD MEMBERS |
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From left to right: Darcia Narvaez; Mary Tarsha (top); Laurel Wilson (top);
Reshma Grewal (bottom center); and Jamie Grumet with her sons.
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Kindred World Welcomes Darcia Narvaez, PhD, As President; Meet Our New Board Members |
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“It’s an honor to take up Kindred’s presidency. I’ve been an admirer for years, even before Evolved Nest became a nestling in Kindred’s family,” said Narvaez. “I am thrilled to be able to work with Lisa Reagan, who is enormously capable, along with the other dedicated staff and board members of Kindred. The great turning of society toward nurturing is upon us, and Kindred, which has been building its strong leadership capacities, is ready to link arms with fellow organizations to lead the way forward.”
Kindred World also welcomed Laurel Wilson, Mary Tarsha, Jamie Grumet, and Reshma Grewal to the 2021- 2024 board of directors. See all of our board members here.
About Darcia Narvaez, PhD
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 baseline is imperative at this time as the United States ranks 41st out of 41 developed countries in public policies that support families.
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In a 2020 analysis of top scientists, Narvaez emerged in the top 2% of scientists worldwide. Of the eight million scientists in the world, the analysis concerned those who had at least five articles published in scientific journals between 1996 and 2017– over six million scientists. Individuals were ranked according to various criteria, including number of citations of their work.
About Kindred World
Kindred World began as a grassroots initiative in 1996 by American parents who envisioned creating a holistic, sustainable, and wellness-based culture for their children. A quarter century later, the United States ranks 41st out of 41 developed countries for family-friendly policies, continuing the decades-long decline of population health and decreasing lifespans. Kindred World’s board of directors, its thought leaders, and multiple initiatives, seek to educate, support and inspire all Americans to envision and build a wellness-based culture and Caring Economy.
Kindred is an educational initiative and alternative media outlet of Kindred World.
Read more about Kindred World’s grassroots history supporting a consciousness-raising movement here.
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The human species seems to suffer from a collective amnesia at times, one that disallows us to remember our connection to life and our love for living: our unbrokenness. Do you remember the first time you walked on the earth, said hello to the sun, played with greatness, believed? How will we restore and nourish our connections to ourselves, family, community, nature and spirit in the coming year? Help us bring forward stories of connection this year with your donation today. Let's remember we've always been Kindred.
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We Won Great Nonprofit's Top-Rated Award, Again! |
Thank you to everyone who has supported Kindred's work over these many years. Read 74 five-star reviews from parents, professionals, and fans at our Great Nonprofits' website here. Kindred is an educational initiative and alternative media outlet of Kindred World.
"Kindred World is a unique voice in the arena of child and family advocacy. Their work brings a much needed perspective to the public. They invite needed exploration and discourse. This organization promotes a peaceful world that values child safety and families that thrive."
– Sarah MacLaughlin, October 6, 2020
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Kindred | www.KindredMedia.org |
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