Nelson Mandela didn’t always look like a visionary. For 27 years, he simply looked like a prisoner, locked up for antiapartheid activism. What seemed like a long exercise in futility is now legend: after his release, he became his country’s president, and today is an icon of commitment and compassion. Fortunately, visionary thinkers aren’t always imprisoned, but they are often ridiculed, marginalized, or just plain dismissed for proposing big ideas that sound outlandish to others. To prove that dreams are possible, Utne Reader highlights a few of the lofty, laudable, and reachable goals of 25 visionaries.
Using a YouTube music video as his transmission vehicle, Bostonian Garret John LoPorto is speaking to conscious free spirits everywhere and connecting them. It will be interesting to watch how this video moves through the culture, if it gains traction and goes viral, and inspires and builds a community of activists and artivists. Stay tuned and sign on if you are called…
My friends Gordon Davidson and Corrine McGlaughlin have been on the front lines of social transformation for many years from their work at Findhorn, to starting their own community in Massachusetts, to working with leaders in Washington to catalyze transformational politics. In their inspiring and empowering new book, The Practical Visionary: A New World Guide to Spiritual Growth and Social Change, they offer shining examples and supportive tools that anyone can use to join the ranks of the practical visionaries around the world by playing our unique role in accelerating the new paradigm’s emergence.
“Practical visionaries Corinne McLaughlin and Gordon Davidson offer the most inspiring, comprehensive and practical guide to spiritual growth and social change yet written. This remarkable book includes everything from practical tools to help us clarify our vision and chart our own path, guided meditations that can help us deepen spiritually, examples of innovative solutions that highlight what is possible, different ways that practical visionaries transform problems into creative solutions, and much more. The book gives us a wider sense of what is possible and offers hope for the future – so important in these times. The book inspires, and even challenges, us to find our part in creating the kind of society we wish to see, offering the tools to make our own vision a reality. Bravo!” –Kim Weichel, co-author, Healing the Heart of the World
To order a copy for yourself or as a gift for a budding Practical Visionary, visit Amazon. Amazon has both the book and a Kindle version.
In the midst of financial crisis, personal and/or collective, how can you change your consciousness and weather the storm? How can you attract or protect financial resources and be prepared for any future upheavals? Here are some spiritual approaches that are always important but especially needed in times of crisis:
Deepen your trust in a Higher Power and in your higher purpose. Putting God or Spirit first is the best insurance policy—the ultimate safety net. Prioritize what’s essential in your life. You’ll attract the resources you need to fulfill your soul’s purpose and make your contribution to a better world. Meditate to calm your subconscious fears, invoke creative solutions, and make wiser financial decisions.
Stay present in the moment. Not even the best financial experts know what will happen to the economy in the future, so the best approach is to stay aware and awake in the present so that you can be flexible and respond as needed. When fears of the future arise, focus your intention in the present and allow your intuition to guide you.
Focus on emerging opportunities. Be alert to new doors opening as old ones close. Crisis can sometimes bring wonderful surprises and much needed changes that are blessings in disguise.
Be practical, and do your financial homework before investing in or buying anything of significant value. Don’t believe everything you see or hear. If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Despite all the corruption and deceptions coming to light recently, there’s still more corruption in the system that has not been exposed. So it’s important to research everything as thoroughly as you can, using alternative as well as mainstream sources.
Invest some of your resources in the New World. Find quality companies that are ahead of the curve in honoring the triple bottom line—people, planet, and profit—as they’ll do better in the long run. Keep a very diversified portfolio so that all of your eggs aren’t in one basket.
Welcome change, and embrace it. Explore where you may be stuck in old patterns—physically, emotionally, mentally—in relation to money, and release these patterns through conscious awareness and choice. Invoke your spiritual will to help release the old patterns and strengthen more positive patterns.
Practice detachment from personal comfort, and release the need to be in control at all times. Be flexible and flowing so that you can adapt to any personal or collective upheavals that might emerge. The world is undergoing rapid change right now. Let go of needing any particular outcomes for yourself personally.
Transform anger into forgiveness. Acknowledge any strong feelings catalyzed by recent crises, such as anger toward greedy or dishonest bankers, corrupt government regulators or anyone who contributed to your financial problems. Then work on releasing anger at your mistakes and the mistakes of others and embrace forgiveness.
Uncover and explore the deeper fears behind your worries. Honestly face what you most fear—poverty, bankruptcy, etc.—and understand what fear can teach you. Is there any rational basis to your fear that you need to face squarely? Keep a larger perspective so that fear doesn’t overwhelm you.
Appreciate the many wonderful things you already have. Avoid focusing on your impoverishment and what you lack, and give thanks for what you have—the many blessings in your life, such as family, friends and good health.
Simplify your lifestyle to reduce your spending. Do you really need all of that stuff? The planet could certainly use some lightening up and reduction of energy use. Go deeper and explore what quality or experience you are trying to satisfy with a material product, and discover a new way to draw this quality into your life.
Develop practical self-sufficiency. It’s empowering to know how to grow food in your backyard garden, collect rainwater from roofs and create independent sources of water and heat. In this way, you know you can survive any problems without the systems you usually depend on.
Be a producer, rather than a consumer, of energy. Like the sun, your soul is a creative generator of energy. Your ego, on the other hand, often seems like an endless, hungry, black hole needing to be filled. Invoke your soul, and get juiced up so that you can give energy to others.
Create community and networks of mutual support. Good relationships help you get through all kinds of problems and bring you new, creative solutions. Overcome isolation through connection with others, which will help you attract what you need.
Be generous to others as an act of confidence in an abundant universe. There are always others in greater need than you, and what you give from your heart will return to you a hundred fold—it’s true! When you help others, you experience a “helper’s high” that is spiritually more satisfying than any material reward.
Although you might feel fearful about facing tough economic times, in reality the economy isn’t a monolithic entity. It’s a financial climate influenced by our collective consciousness, as Eric Butterworth noted in his brilliant Spiritual Economics. So work on transforming any negative attitudes about money and appreciate money as simply a flow of energy and life force. Donate and/or invest in the New World as a vote for a positive future for yourself and for humanity.
Interested in participating in Visionary Leadership Training with Corinne McLaughlin to be held March 19 to May 15, 2011 in the San Francisco area and by Video Teleconference? Click here to learn more.
Corinne McLaughlin and Gordon Davidson are co-authors of Spiritual Politics (Foreword by the Dalai Lama), Builders of the Dawn, and The Practical Visionary, from which this article is excerpted. They are co-founders of The Center for Visionary Leadership in CA, and co-founders of Sirius, a spiritual and ecological community in MA. Corinne coordinated a national task force for President Clinton’s Council on Sustainable Development. Gordon was the Founding Director of the Social Investment Forum and of CERES, The Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies. They both are Fellows of The World Business Academy and The Findhorn Foundation. To contact the authors: corinnemc@visionarylead.org; www.thepracticalvisionary.org; www.visionarylead.org.
I just received this event alert from my friend Kate. It promises to be an historic gathering so if you are in LA that night, perhaps I’ll see you there.
IMMERSE IN THE FUTURE:
A 3D VISION OF ARTS, MEDIA AND ENTERTAINMENT
IN THE 21ST CENTURY
The c3: Center for Conscious Creativity and GATE (Global Association for Transformational Entertainment), in collaboration with Creative Visions Foundation and IMERSA (Immersive Media Entertainment, Research, Science and Arts), invite you to an evening of light, sound, and art.
Monday, November 16th, 2009
6:30 pm Doors Open
7:30 pm Program
9:30 pm Dessert Reception
LA Center Studios Screening Room
450 S. Bixel Street
Los Angeles, CA 90017
Artists, musicians, media makers, entertainment and arts professionals, patrons, educators, city officials and anyone interested in the future of arts, media and entertainment are invited to join us for an enlightening evening of information, entertainment and networking. Learn about exciting plans for Los Angeles’ first citywide arts festival — the upcoming RING FEST LA and the c3: VisionLAB 2010: STATE OF THE ARTS symposium. Explore Dome Theatres, 3D, immersive media, virtual worlds and other cutting-edge media formats and their potential as tools for transformation. Enjoy presentations by the LA Opera; Kathy Eldon, Founder of Creative Visions Foundation; John Raatz, Founder of GATE; Ed Lantz, Founder of IMERSA and Vortex Immersion Media and the c3: Center for Conscious Creativity, followed by an inspiring keynote by noted author and futurist, Jerome Glenn, the Director of the Millennium Project. Jerome will introduce the “State of the Future” report and offer insights about the future of arts, media and entertainment and their effects on global culture followed by a brief Q&A.
Tickets are being sold as a fundraising effort for the c3: VisionLAB 2010 Symposium STATE OF THE ARTS. Visit www.c3visionlab.org or call 323/352-8300 for more information.
$50 special affiliate discount use code: c3special
$75 prepaid
$100 at the door
The price of the ticket includes a copy of THE STATE OF THE FUTURE 2009 (a $49.95 value).
Parking is available at the Athena Parking Lot adjacent to the Studio and is located at 1037 West 6th Street. The entrance can only be reached by heading WEST of 6th Street..
A nine day celebration in the heart of the Amazon, Convergence is a combination Ayahuasca Shamanism Seminar, Retreat and Visionary Gathering of shaman’s visionaries, leading edge thinkers, scientists, spiritual teachers, healers, filmmakers, and other artists. discovering common ground in multiple disciplines through presentations, workshops and ayahuasca ceremonies. Together, the group will explore it’s outer and inner worlds, push the limits of perception and challenge their consciousness through sharing individual and collective experiences, spirited dialogues, leading edge lectures, indigenous art workshops, traditional indigenous and “on the brink” music, visionary art exhibitions and ayahuasca ceremonies in the sensuous, vibrating rainforest of Amazonian Peru.
Convergence will unfold at Espiritu de Anaconda, a rustic and beautiful spiritual and botanical retreat center in the Peruvian Amazon. The center is a botanical sanctuary and healing center resting on 15 hectares where traditional shamanic medicine from the Shipibo culture is still practiced.
Using the ancient knowledge of Amazonian medicinal plants, the purpose of the Center is to teach, revitalize, disseminate, and preserve the ancestral practice of Amazonian plant medicine. The techniques practiced here promote spiritual, psychological, and physical well-being.
To learn more or to make a reservation visit www. http://www.amazonconvergence.com
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Nelson Mandela didn’t always look like a visionary. For 27 years, he simply looked like a prisoner, locked up for antiapartheid activism. What seemed like a long exercise in futility is now legend: after his release, he became his country’s president, and today is an icon of commitment and compassion. Fortunately, visionary thinkers aren’t always imprisoned, but they are often ridiculed, marginalized, or just plain dismissed for proposing big ideas that sound outlandish to others. To prove that dreams are possible, Utne Reader highlights a few of the lofty, laudable, and reachable goals of 25 visionaries.
