The New Paradigm
A few years ago, I attended a Cultivating Compassion course to deepen my understanding of Indigenous peoples' history in Canada. The course was taught by a Metis man, but wisdom was also shared by Indigenous elders. In one of the sessions, the instructor had a slide of a medicine hoop up on the screen. He pointed to the four quadrants of the medicine hoop and explained that each quadrant represented a direction, an energy, and a stage of life. He began in the top-right quadrant, and as he made a clockwise motion with his finger, moving from one quadrant to the next, he said childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and elderhood. He shared how the sacred teachings of life were encoded within the medicine hoop, and it was the elders' responsibility to pass on these teachings. He then pointed back to the adolescent quadrant up on the screen and said, “This is where we are right now in Canada.” What he was insinuating was that we are living in a time when it is not true elders guiding us, but mainly adolescents disguised as men in suits.
For Indigenous people, the phases of life are not solely governed by age, but determined through rites of passage, life experiences and wisdom gained. Therefore, he wasn’t saying that there were physically adolescent men running our countries, but rather men who had psychologically not gained the wisdom that comes with adulthood and elderhood. We only have to look at the state of the world to know this to be true within our bones.
For the majority of my life, I felt like everyone else had been given the manual on how to do life, and somehow I hadn’t received it. It seemed like every time I tried to do things the way we were told, I found myself feeling anxious and depressed. However, I realize now that I was not alone in this! In 2022, data shows that 16.5% of Canadian’s were taking antidepressant medication! Many of our souls long for so much more than what has been presented to us by our culture.
Right now, the dominant culture is operating in a paradigm that has been envisioned, built and run by mainly adolescent men. It is a paradigm that is completely disconnected from the interconnectedness of life. However, it is breaking down, and we are witnessing the suffering that has been caused in its wake. This is not about shaming men or men hating, not at all! However, it is about recognizing the harm that has been caused to all of us, by the patriarchal system that governs us. However, there is another paradigm that is simultaneously being envisioned and woven into being, one that is egalitarian, biocentric and interconnected with the pulse of life.
When we are caught up in mainstream media and culture, this new paradigm may almost seem invisible to the naked eye. However, if we are present and watchful, we see its emergence and existence, like a transparent spiderweb gently being woven in the empty spaces of the world we currently see. People, like spiders, are using their unique gifts and talents to fill the gaps and needs that are not being met, and as a result, a new, more beautiful world is emerging.
For the past nine years, I felt like one of those spiders, slowly but gently using my gifts and talents to spin a new world into being. However, after losing my way this winter, I doubted myself, my gifts and the emergence of this world. I felt the painful emptiness of my bank account and the pressure to just go and get a traditional job. I felt like I had failed and fell into fear and scarcity - the sustenance on which the dominant paradigm thrives. We collectively stay trapped in this paradigm that is killing our souls and destroying the earth, exactly for these reasons: fear of failure and fear that we won’t be able to survive otherwise. The devastating irony is that as a collective, we won’t be able to survive if we don’t risk failure in order to weave a new way forward.
The word failure comes from the Old French word falir, meaning “to be lacking or not succeed”. So when we ‘fail’, we are just lacking something, whether that be knowledge, resources or skills. We can take our failures as an opportunity to look within ourselves to see what we are lacking in order to move forward in a better way. Failure is simply an opportunity to gain knowledge, especially about ourselves. However, we were taught not to fail, and therefore have come to fear it. Many of us internalize failure as a personal attack upon ourselves and our worth, and therefore give up too soon, maybe even when we are on the verge of greatness.
In the last few months, I thought about giving up. However, the thought of giving up was emotionally devastating. I knew deep within my soul that the solution wasn’t to go back and get a ‘regular job’, but I couldn’t see the way forward.
The word courage comes from the word corage, which means heart. Courage is to be guided by one's own heart. So, when we feel we have failed, and are lost and without direction, the answer is to return to the wisdom of our hearts and the subtle knowing of our bodies. And it takes incredible courage to be guided by our hearts and the knowing of our bodies, especially when we have spent the most impressionable years of our life being taught to override them.
At five years old, when most of us begin school, we are in one of the most impressionable, imaginative and active phases of our lives and yet we are told to sit still and be quiet for extended periods of time while we are talked at and told what to do. Simply, by the structure of our education system, we are conditioned not to listen to our hearts or our bodies. Think, we cannot even express ourselves freely, get a drink of water or go to the bathroom without asking permission!
I know we all know this! But I feel like we need to repeat it over and over again to ourselves. It is all this conditioning to fear failure and to not listen to our own hearts and bodies that makes it so hard for us to simply flip the bird to this old paradigm and set forth on our own authentic path and be a part of co-creating this new paradigm!
I repeat this because I know for myself that it takes great courage to dust myself off, get back up and begin listening to my heart and body once again. It takes courage to look within and see where we went wrong, without blaming and castigating ourselves. It takes courage to witness and heal the internalized voices of the rational world around us that tell us we should do otherwise. It takes courage to adopt new, encouraging voices to guide us. And it takes courage to fail over and over again and to still keep our hearts open.
Our inner child, our children, our friends' children, the children that we don’t know, and the children that are yet to come need us to be courageous. Mother Earth needs us to be courageous.
The path that I am encouraging us to walk, one that is led by the wisdom of our hearts and the knowing of our bodies, is not new; it is an ancient way of being that many Indigenous elders and wisdom keepers of the world over have known and taught about. It is a way that recognizes that we each came here with a unique set of gifts and a unique purpose that allows us to live in harmony with the rest of life. For some of us, this means stepping out of traditional job roles and creating new offerings and healing practices, while for others it means weaving our gifts and talents into more traditional structures, as we collectively make the transition to this new world.
For me, this ultimately means reparenting and reteaching ourselves by being the adult for ourselves that the little person we once were needed. This means letting the inner child within us do the dreaming and having our adult selves do the encouraging and the actioning.
I am scared to pick myself up again and be this adult for myself. And, I am going to do it anyway, because I believe in my gifts and believe that they can be used to weave a more beautiful world into being. I believe in your gifts, too and know the world needs them just as much as the world needs mine.
In time, by taking these steps, we will be the adults and one day the elders who lead and show the way forward. We will teach that the way is not one paved path, but made by walking our own unique path. I imagine that if we were to look over the world at this time, we would see interwoven pathways like threads of a beautiful spiderweb laid over the world. However, this time, they would be visible for all of us to see, as this would be the new reality.
Let’s envision and bring this world into being, together!
With love,
Laurel Birk
Translator of the Earth