Indigenous teachings speak of transcendence as realizing the subtle nuance of relationships. Our contemplative traditions have been tested and refined for their environmental, communal, and individual benefits for millennia. Our traditional knowledges are grounded in principles of embodiment and action-oriented practices that aim for collective well-being. I call these principles: Kin Relationality, conceiving all of existence as kin, and Ecological Belonging, the understanding that we are each part of a cooperative system and life cycles. Humans flourish as we awaken to our responsibility as caretakers of the ecosystem. Our life path is the opportunity to sublimate a collective mind made of relations—a new, radical way of being based on kin relationality and ecological belonging. Thus, through connection, we start our journey through the Indigenous foundations for collective well-being.
Flourishing Kin is at the heart of cultivating an insightful, collective, practice-based, flexible identity. As such, storytelling, cultural tradition, and other forms of enhanced contemplative practice, like ritual, music, movement, and art, support our journey through this section. The following principles are the seeds we will be watering to let our sense of kin flourish in the following chapters:
Kin Relationality is our ability to perceive all living beings as Relatives—a perspective shared by Indigenous Peoples worldwide.
Body Seed explores the body as a vessel of experience and as an expansion of the roots that connect us to a sense of place and our shared Lands around the globe.
Senshine, a playful coming together of senses and sunshine, looks at how we use our senses to brighten our life experience. It nurtures the observation of direct experience as a source of traditional wisdom.
Heartfelt Wisdom focuses on the power of emotions to orient our skillful action for planetary flourishing. Here, storytelling compels positive, other-focused transcendent emotions such as reverence, gratitude, compassion, kindness, awe, love, and sacredness.
Ecological Belonging renews our awareness of being part of the extensive Earth system, eliciting a commitment to care for it and raising nature-based contemplation and narratives of belonging.
Reparations Through Right Relationships offers engaged ethical principles suggesting pathways for reparation, restoration, and the return of benefits to Mother Earth and Indigenous Peoples.
Reemerging is the next cycle of the spiral path of collective well-being, returning to the observation, embodiment, narrative, and reflection of shared experience.