Is your contribution to regeneration for humans and Earth based in resistance or co-creation? Do you discover your next-level contribution from your mind or your heart? These are questions I’ve been exploring with mentoring clients, as well as in a vibrant podcast conversation with mindset coach Lana Shlafer.
Recently a client and I explored how to stop trying to identify the rationally correct ‘answers’ for her life. Instead we engaged with the body-centered process of letting her desires indicate her next stage of contribution to renewing the human-Earth relationship. We talked about how it’s possible to get trapped in continually looking for a rational solution, which often can be based in resisting what we don’t want—environmental problems, leadership we disagree with, or life situations that don’t feel aligned with our purpose. What helps you step out of resistance and into dynamic creation of your life (which, ideally, is co-creation with the natural world) is to focus on your heart-based desire for the solutions that feel good: cleaning up and preventing toxic emissions, making time to connect with nature, or designing your life so your contributions to the world bring you joy.
Instead of worrying about the world’s problems or your personal problems, and thus feeling resistance to them, how can you be EXCITED to discover, and then co-create with Source and the natural world, your next level of fulfillment and contribution?
In this week’s Humans and Earth podcast interview, mindset coach Lana Shlafer offers brilliant insights on why worry, resistance, and pessimism won’t bring us the regeneration we desire for people and planet.
Lana is the author of the best-selling book Manifest That Miracle and her energetic personality and no-holds-barred coaching have been featured in Forbes, TVOne and NPR. Lana studied at UC Berkeley and the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. In this interview, she discusses how her childhood in Siberia was the source of her practices of connecting to nature for comfort, what it’s like to be raising children in beautiful Puerto Rico, and why we need to feel safe inside ourselves in order to feel safe being optimistic about the human future on Earth.
Tune in to hear Lana’s sit-up-and-take-notice statements on:
- How “it doesn’t cost you anything to change your pattern of thought. Think of the plastic in the ocean and how it’s suffocating the turtles…or go out to the ocean and thank it for the life it provides. It doesn’t cost me anything to choose one thought over the other. One adds more momentum and impact: it makes me value the ocean so much I will go and do the clean-ups…and the other one leaves me powerless and hopeless. And I think we each have a choice in how we approach our mindset and our life.”
- Why realism isn’t a good standard. “Realism is taking past experience and making an assumption that it will continue…All of the most impactful people have been unrealistic because they dared to look at what is happening and then inspire themselves and everyone around them to move toward what they want to be happening. It’s ‘be the change you want to see,’ not ‘sit here and complain about the fact that things are the way they are.’ “
- How viewing pessimism as the more intellectual stance may be self-delusional: “It’s a defense mechanism, where you think you’re smarter than hope, but it ends up costing you more than anyone else.”
- Why she recommends not seeing our creative, change-making efforts as counter-cultural, which is a view based in resistance to something: “no great person … created change by trying to be counter anything. They created it because they were pro something so strongly that that’s all they saw, all they did, all they focused on. That’s what creates the kind of focused flow of energy that can move mountains…If you’re spending your energy fighting, you’re not using that energy to create.”
- Why your activism needs to be “additive and life enhancing for you. If it isn’t, then for you to delude yourself by thinking this will be life-enhancing for the planet is inaccurate.”
- Her childhood in Siberia. Having grown up atheist before she developed her spirituality, the only paths she knew into comfort were seeking connection with other people and seeking connection in nature, so nature has always been an important presence in her life. Lana asks, “If you’re not connected to nature, how could you be connected to yourself?”
Find Lana at www.lanashlafer.com and her new book at www.manifestthatmiracle.com
Do you need support with moving from resistance to the world’s problems and into co-creation with the natural world? Are you ready to be unrealistic about what’s possible and thus contribute to dynamic regeneration for people and planet? Access my support here.
Moncef Akir interviewed me recently on his Mothers Voice podcast. Tune in to hear me discuss:
- How parenting changed my professional focus from scholarship in the history of religion to many kinds of teaching work on the human-Earth relationship
- Helping children to deepen their connection to Earth
- Turning to nature for grounding, stability, and encouragement
- Guiding teens in finding who they are on this ever-changing landscape
I know you’ll find my interview with Lana, and Moncef’s interview with me, nourishing.
Join me in being unrealistically hopeful about the future for humans and Earth. We can shift our resistance into creation of what we desire: a flourishing life for all beings.