Finally, at the starting line

Finally, at the starting line

Finally, we’re ready to launch A Whole New World. It’s been a long journey and, after three and a half years focused work, here we are at the starting line. Anyone who’s been involved in developing a similar project, transitioning from the old values to the new, will know how long it takes to bring a vision into manifestation and how much it’s a process of experimentation and feeling ones way step by intuitive step into the unknown.

But here we are: we have our website ready, our first series of six conscious e-books, three full-length soulful books and an exciting pilot programme poised to be a catalyst for developing Soul Cells or small local learning communities, linked up nationally and globally.

I’ve become very interested in grass roots community empowerment and how people change the world from the inside out, with shifts of consciousness happening alongside inspired action and heaps of experiential learning. Through the process of writing, Living your Passion: How love-in-action is seeding a Whole New World, I realized the innovative people I was interviewing in New Zealand represent the new emerging global culture of peace and unity. I became convinced that providing inspiring role models and linking up all the little lights into one big light, is an important part of my mission and Woods Elliott and other soul friends, were right alongside me encouraging me on.

For those of you who are interested in how life themes and passions develop into soul work, or our life’s mission, on the About Us page of the website, Woods and I have identified some of the life threads that have woven into the fabric of A Whole New World: www.awholenewworld.net/aboutus.htm In the free sampler, 8=1, HOW THE PILLARS OF TRANSFORMATION CREATE UNITY IN A WHOLE NEW WORLD, I identify more than thirty conscious decisions and actions that contribute to living a life with passion, purpose and meaning.

Here are some of them:
Open new dimensions of being.
It’s always difficult to know where and when a story starts but one starting place for me was in 1983 when I left a full time job in adult education to give myself time to write. I had fallen in love with poetry and was working on a long poem which was coming from very deep inside me. I was experiencing tension between the educational work I loved and the intense excitement of discovering the inner life for the first time. A whole new dimension of my being had opened up and it was very compelling. Later I came to understand this as the emergence of the spiritual dimension within me but at the time I didn’t have this understanding and writing poetry was the only way I was able to access and express these new experiences and contain the intense energy of this spiritual opening.

Leap into the unknown
Although I left my job in order to write, it didn’t turn out as I’d expected. I soon realized I needed to eat and keep a roof over my head and poetry couldn’t support me in that way. So I started working freelance as a personal and professional development trainer and went on to create my own business, which included being paid to write training materials in group leadership. When I took the leap from the security of the monthly pay check, I had to learn how to steer my own course according to my own creative rhythms and support myself financially at the same time. I had a lot to learn! It’s been a challenging, evolving process ever since and I love the freedom of it.

Follow your creative process
In 1992, I took a second leap when I made the conscious decision to follow my creative process wherever it led me. Despite everything I had achieved I felt empty, so I left my business, my psychotherapy practice, and my home and set off first to the North West Highlands of Scotland, and then to New Zealand on a soul journey adventure which has lasted for fourteen years and is ongoing. I soon realized following my passion, or my creative process, means allowing my unique path to unfold and being willing to go with it, even when it seems totally irrational or doesn’t make any sense in terms of material security. This has led to much learning and strengthening of my spirit as I’ve had to face the challenges of living such an uncompromising life. Over the years as my purpose here on earth has become more and more clear to me, I have found I am unwilling and unable to compromise this purpose; life seems far too short and the urge to evolve is compelling.

Find a consciousness practice to support you
The inspirational phase of the creative process calls us to flow with it, either as an inner journey from the safety of home, or as a physical life adventure. This can feel risky at times, whether the risk is leaving physical comfort behind, or dropping a belief system and entering the unknown. I’ve had to learn how to support myself through the fear and resistances which are a normal part of creative unfolding. Adopting various forms of consciousness practice such as meditation and journal writing has been an essential support for this.

Fall in love with your destiny and embrace it wholeheartedly.
When I left Scotland I intended to stay in New Zealand for four months, then return to join a new business but I fell in love with the beauty of the South Island, with the people, and with the way of life, and stayed for twelve years. New Zealand is a natural soul sanctuary and during my time there my spiritual journey deepened. After some adventures, including a Peace Walk around the South Island, and an experience of living in intentional community, I settled in Nelson and took a job teaching counselling theory and practice. This was perfect for me at the time; it enabled me to consolidate my psychotherapeutic experience, extend my teaching skills and make a contribution to the community. It supported me to get residency in New Zealand as well. Later on a friend came along and helped me to buy a house, so I became quite settled for a few years.

To find out more,if you haven’t downloaded your free sampler yet go to: http://www.awholenewworld.net/books.htm and you will find a download box under Living your Passion.

Conscious Eating 2

It was all over the Times that we should “Give up eating meat to save the planet”. Who knows maybe in twenty years it will be as socially unacceptable to eat meat as it is now to smoke cigarettes.

A few years ago I followed a “blood type” diet for a while. (see www.dadamo.com). I’m an A: a natural vegetarian and prefer to graze on fruit and nuts; meat feels heavy and hard to digest to me. For others, I know it is different. A few years ago I was running a soul retreat in an out of the way beauty spot and we had neglected to tell people we would be having a very simple vegetarian diet. After two days one of the men was desperate and drove a 50 mile round trip on unmade roads to forage for meat, he felt starved without it. So I acknowledge there are some people whose bodies need meat more than others.

But before I go further into meat production and the real cost of eating meat I’m going to report a little of my shopping adventures following my awareness being raised about the parlous state of fish. Right now, I’m staying with my father, the nearest shops are a mile and a half away and neither of us has a car. This makes sourcing local food difficult and the easiest way to shop is a once a week visit to the supermarket via community transport. Recently I visited a couple of small towns in the north of England and I noticed how refreshing it was to find small local food shops in the main street. It’s so unusual these days. Shopping in most towns in the UK or North America you’d think people really do live on air or the occasional vitamin pill. There’s no food in sight. The supermarket is convenient if you have a car.

So I decided to look at the fish and see where and how they had been caught before purchasing. I fancied a kipper. If they had been caught on line I would have bought a couple of kippers because at least line fishing seems to give the fish a chance. But it said: line fishing, seine fishing and trawling. Did trawling mean deep sea trawling, the kind where they destroy the sea bed? I didn’t know so I gave up on the kipper and went to look at the meat for my carnivorous father. I can’t bring myself to cook beef or pork, these big animals seem so close to us it’s almost like cannibalism, so I chose some lamb shanks to make a nice warming lamb stew. After all, I reasoned, sheep don’t generate as much methane as cows do they? Wrong. Here’s some facts, hot and steamy from the Times:

With the highest carbon footprint of all UK foods, lamb creates 17kg of Co2 for every kilo of product as compared to potatoes which creates 450gms of CO2 per 1 kilo. Flatulent farm animals create 14% of global emissions of methane.
The biggest meat eaters in the world – you’re right, the Americans, consume on average 123 kg of meat a year, as compared to Indians who eat an average of 3kg, or Japanese who tend to use meat as a flavor enhancer treat and eat only, 40kg a year average.

67% of the world’s agricultural land is given over to raising livestock. Direct emissions of methane from cows and pigs is a significant source of greenhouse gas. Methane is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a global warming gas.
Meat production is also responsible for the destruction of forest land for cattle raising and for animal feeds such as soy. It takes 7lbs of grain to produce 1kg of beef.

A typical UK diet including animal products providing 38%of calories requires 0.195 hectares of land and 535,000 litres of water. A vegan diet requires 0.065 hectares and 140,000 litres of water.

So what to do?

Becoming more conscious about the way we eat does require more effort. Fast foods and convenience foods are not called that for nothing. Barbara Kingsolver in a wonderful book called, “Animal, vegetable, miracle”, about how she and her family learned to eat consciously tells how big agri-business turns convenience foods into profit with obesity a by-product:
“...70% of all our Midwestern agricultural land shifted gradually into single crop or soybean farms, each one of them now, on average, the size of Manhattan. Owing to synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, genetic modification, and a conversion of farming from a naturally based to a highly mechanized production system, us farmers now produce 3900 calories per us citizen today. That is twice what we need and 700 calories a day more than we grew in 1980......Most of those calories enter our mouths in forms hardly recognizable as corn and soybeans... if every product containing corn or soybeans were removed from your grocery store, it would look more like a hardware store...”

The more I delve into the machinations of the food industry, the more it starts to make a lot of sense to:

Eat less meat and animal products.
Buy local and in season.
Cut down on air freighted food and packaging.

I’d love to hear about your experiences with conscious eating. Please leave a message on the blog.
Rose