Episode 06: Restoring and remembering deep kinship

with Jamaica Stevens

Hello everyone, welcome, I’m your host Sheri Herndon and we’re here again for another inspiring conversation. I recorded this dialogue about two months ago to the day and for a variety of reasons it’s just now getting out.  And it’s perfect because some of the themes we’ve been seeing over the past 6 episodes there’s a weaving here and we’re seeing these themes being amplified again organically in this conversation.  I want to invite you into a kind of mini moment of sense-making, because when we are paying attention to the continuity of a conversation, like this podcast, this isn’t just a set of discrete conversations, they are telling a story, they are laying down a new pathway, we can begin to see emerging patterns, and discover that we’re learning and unlearning as we’re in the process of deeply listening.  The more we can actually engage in a quality of listening the more we are in the process of consciously evolving in the moment, you might say real time evolution or conscious evolution.  Conscious evolution is not the same as the evolution as we understand it scientifically, but we can actually take more quantum leaps in our attunement to life’s original instructions and breaking out of the matrix. So we’re going to hear about that and much more.  In one way, this podcast, these conversations, these pockets of inspiration and learning are all part of an evolutionary learning curriculum.  In this conversation, a core theme is how can we live in more aligned right relationship with life, how are we learning from the patterns of living systems, the principles of living systems.  My next guest, Jamaica Stevens, has been a friend for 11 years now, she’s a true inspiration, and I  see her as a wayshower and a guide and catalyst for us all as we walk this path together, since we’re all walking each other home. She’s the cofounder and culture officer of Open Future Coalition and she’s also the board member of Water Now which is bringing regenerative Water Solutions and sanitation solutions to indigenous communities.  She’s also working with the Water Regenerative Alliance, and she was an author and curator of Reinhabiting the Village, Cocreating our future.  She’s also a mama, and a conscious parent with beautiful daughters, she’s a social systems  architect and living systems geek like myself and of course an earth steward currently stewarding a 65 acre farm.  

Let’s hear a little bit more in her own words:  Her passion is catalyzing cultural shifts towards integrating regenerative principles to amplify social and ecological impact and guide systemic change. By leveraging cooperative frameworks, whole systems design processes, and transformative convenings, she works to empower people, communities, and companies to THRIVE as social ecosystems integrated as a part of a Living System.  She’s currently working on a series of articles for applying Living Systems to social Systems architecture.

Before we dive in, I want to name a few of the themes.   I want to invite you to place yourself in the story.  Feel yourself where you are like what’s that, oooh I don’t get that, oooh I want to know more.  Feel how the full range of listening is welcome.  Everything is welcome.  This is a field and an opening invitation.  We are practicing the art of hosting online in this podcast.  At some point we’ll have convenings and dialogues and we’ll engage you.  So be prepared for what is coming.  

Allow yourself to tune in as you are listening here.  We’ll talk about a deep sense of home, the inquiry around our deepest roots, where are they and where do we get to feel the wholeness of who we are and how that is a deep relationship to the earth.  We talk about the necessity of unraveling and unlearning and why this deep fracture with nature and what that did to our being and how so much of what we’re doing is healing by realigning with the natural intelligence of nature.  There’s an important exploration of the journey from the personal to the interpersonal and what scaling it looks like. How are we bringing the intimacy at the personal level and out to the social level - this rite of passage for us collectively.  And also an exploration of coherence.  Which is one of my favorite topics because it has such huge implications for us.  If we create enough coherence in individuals, we can then have coherence as a commons.  In the work of the GCI, we go from personal and social and global coherence.  From there we can see potent foundations of the superpower of we the people.  Ultimately we’re looking at a daily repatterning.  Then there will be a little exploration around her work and this Open Future Coalition platform.  So I invite you to enjoy yourself.  Enjoy yourself.  If you like what you hear please subscribe, please share, please comment, get in touch with me through the website or in comments.  Soon there will be ways of supporting in multiple ways.  We really want to take this conversation space to the next level.  So thank you for listening and being here.  PS: The internet connection where Jamaica lives was misbehaving the day we recorded so it’s not always a perfect visual, but the sound all comes through beautifully. 

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Bio

Co-founder and Culture Officer for Open Future Coalition, Board Member of WaterNow ( non-profit bringing regenerative Water Solutions and sanitation solutions to indiegnous communities) Steering Committee Member and Coordinator for the Regenerative Water Alliance, Author and Curator of "ReInhabiting the Village: CoCreating our Future".  Mama, Social Systems Architect, Living Systems geek, and Earth Steward on 65 acre farm. 

My passion is catalyzing cultural shifts towards integrating regenerative principles to amplify social and ecological impact and guide systemic change. By leveraging cooperative frameworks, whole systems design processes, and transformative convenings, I work to empower people, communities, and companies to THRIVE as social ecosystems integrated as a part of a Living System.

I believe in enabling the inherent intelligence of individuals and collectives to cultivate mutual engagement towards identifying and achieving shared goals and incubating the conditions for the implementation of large scale, global movements of Planetary Solutions. Like a mycorrhizal function in an ecosystem, I strategically node-work connections within networks, weaving webs of reciprocal value, strengthening the capacity for coordinating shared efforts.

Currently I am working on a series of articles for applying Living Systems to social Systems architecture.

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