Zone X Resilience: Flood Preparedness

I just conducted a quick assessment of a cute little 2.5 mile brook in Portland that's popular with birdwatchers. 

Capisic Brook flows through residential areas just east of Portland and it's lower area includes a half-mile trail and 18 acre nature preserve. It's Portland's largest freshwater pond, although it used to be twice as large. The Capisic Brook's 1400 acre watershed (82% of which is developed and 31% of which is impervious), even got a $100,000 grant in 2009 for restoration and to address storm-water pollution issues. The city promised another million for restoration efforts. (Source: City of Portland, Trails.org). The Brook's TMDL Assessment is also useful because it describes the watershed and pollution issues.

 

My analysis is from red pin on this map at the outlet of Capisic Brook, up to Interstate 95. 

I included houses on Brigton, Harmon, Violette, Raymond, Dennett, Poe, Taft, and Holm.

Risk Analysis

There are at least 60 residential homes in what's called Zone X, above the official flood hazard area (the 100-year flood zone, or special flood hazard area (SFHA)). However, these houses are likely at significant more risk than what the official maps suggest.

In the final analysis, this situation represents $1.6 million of property value at significant risk. This is based on about $27,000 at risk per home from a one-foot flood, for the average 1,000 sq-foot house, according to FEMA's Flood Smart Risk Tool, and the primary damages are to floors, walls, insulation, kitchen, furnaces, and furniture. I used Google's elevation tool, town maps, and FEMA maps to conduct this assessment.

Capisic Watershed from the TMDL Assessment.

If you went to the city, the official response would be that there is a very low risk of flooding for these 60 houses. They'd explain that the USGS has determined there's less than a 0.2% chance each year that 18 of these houses will be flooded (a 500-year flood), and there's a 0.1% chance that the other 42 houses will be flooded in any given year (the 1,000-year flood). They'd say there's no cause for concern.

 

City of Portland's GIS Maps (source)

Proposed Preliminary Flood Zones 2013
The 500-year flood zone is the dotted blue area.

Compare the above map, the official proposed flood zone (which is essentially the same as the 1986 FIRM), with the map below, from the Flood Tools website, which shows that this area is at very high risk, based on the above flood zone, plus flood history, elevation, and "unique characteristics."

Flood Tools estimates a $170/y flood policy in this red zone. 

 The average claim in this county is $20,500.

Why the disparity? Official Flood Maps (FIRMS) assume that flood flows "are not affected by climatic trends" (Bulletin 17B, USGS). Observations and experience are to the contrary and official policy is not supported by the best available science. And I even talked with the people who are tasked with the flood zone determination updates and revisions, and there is no plan to amend this policy. Plus, the FIRMS are based on historical floods that are assumed to represent current and future floods (they assume flood frequencies are consistent over time, despite contrary evidence of increasing frequencies). Plus, FIRMS adjust the data for very large floods, considered "high outliers." So, they might not consider that last big flood. They're also based on old data, and are restrained by government reviewers with an incentive to underestimate predictions to avoid land takings.

If I were your consultant, I'd advise you that the best available evidence shows that the real risks are far greater than the officials estimate. The second map is more accurate. First of all, the city's flood zones were designated in the 1980s and do not reflect a flood of new information, increases in risk due to development, or big advances in our understanding about flooding risks. And even the proposed revisions that might come out by 2020 will be based on old data from 2010 or before and explicitly excludes the best available science about climate change predictions and the increasing frequency and severity of flooding due to climate change.

More importantly, big floods are not a low likelihood or low consequence risk. Realistically, what officials call a 500- or even a 1,000-year flood is very likely (great than 90% likely) to happen with in the next fifteen years. And the frequency and magnitude of flooding is increasing significantly, with the risk of a major flooding event now over 30% more likely than in the 1980s, so even these even these estimates are conservative.

The city and nation's proposed 500-year flood zone maps are very inadequate.  For example, one house within the Capisic Brook's proposed 500-year flood zone is 1.63m (5.34ft) above the Capisic Brook while several  homes that are listed as outside the 500-year flood zone is less than  0.3m (1 ft) above the Brook. In reality, all of these houses should be within the 100-year flood zone and the homeowners are almost certainly unaware of their risk. This is why over one-third of flood insurance claims are filed from outside the 100-year zone. Official estimates are very misleading.

Maine has seen major floods in the 500-year magnitude every 13 years and so the official estimates for only a 0.2% chance are wildly inaccurate. The USGS, which facilitates flood zone determinations, reports that Maine saw record floods in 1987, 73, 73, 69, 54, 36, with a cumulative cost at over $426m or $72m per event. The previous big flood were in 1896, 70, 69, 46, 26, for an idea of frequency.).

This years snow, over 50% above average, is cause for concern for spring flooding, especially if there's a combination of high-temperatures and rain in March or April. Historical evidence suggests that the cost-risk for big floods in Maine is: 8.5% in December, 70% in March, and 33% in April.

Flood zone assessments are demonstrably inaccurate, incorrect, misleading, and flawed. The official methodology fails to meet the legal quality, utility and integrity standards and this results in many residents with a false sense of security. However, they are exempt from liability. People don't want to be in flood zones because it increases their insurance rates. But it also increases their risk of property losses. These homeowners are unaware of their true risk to the next big flood, and they should be notified, to have an opportunity to mitigate against property damage. I wrote about this in the paper, Zone X: Catastrophic Flooding & Flood Frequency Determinations in an Era of Climate Crises (PDF, 32p), which I summarize in Unity (pp.413-19). 

The 100- and 500-year floods disregard their statistical mandate. There were recently two 500-year floods on the Mississippi in 18 years, two in 15-years on the Missouri River, two in 11 years in North Carolina, two in 5-years in New York, and Tennessee was just one of a dozen places with a 1,000-year flood. Flooding records are being shattered all around the world. Over 40 million Americans were affected from these unprecedented extremes in the 2000s. Globally, there's a threefold increase in losses from floods since the 1980s.

The energy captured in our atmosphere by greenhouse gases has resulted in about 5% more water in the atmosphere, resulting in 8% more precipitation and a 30-40% increased risk of major floods in the past few decades. There's a 38% increased risk of 1,000-year floods! But this increased frequency and magnitude of flooding contradicts official policies for flood zone determinations.

Flooding is reported by insurance companies as the most extreme event, but the 500-year flood zone is given a low priority relative to other issues confronting local and state governments. The risk is not well recognized and this undermines good policy and public safety. Flooding hazards are significantly underestimated and the result is inaccurate flood maps, misled landowners, and ever-increasing damage.

The top eight floods in 2010 and 2011, combined, caused over 8,000 deaths, displaced over 85 million people from their homes and livelihoods, and caused over $180 billion in economic damage. 

Mitigation 
In Unity (p.403, citing Stein's When Disaster Strikes), I write about how preparedness should be guided by questions such as

• What hazards are in my area?
• What is my potential for being caught in a flood, storm, or fire?
• How long do I anticipate being without access to utilities or supplies?
• Do I have supplies and training?
• What do I do in an evacuation?

I recommend preparing a "grab and go" bag for a 72-hour emergency, and ten other actions.

I also recommend assembling a "Life-in-a-box", including emergency information, personal information, legal information, insurance policies, real estate information, investment information, and personal information such as computer back-ups.

Homeowners have several options to prevent or reduce damages and it all begins with being aware and educated of the risks. The problem is that because the government puts them in Zone X, they are not aware of their risks.

Relocation is the most effective option. The best-case scenario for homeowners involves an organized community effort for a map revision (LOMR), for the flood insurance rate maps (FIRMS) to reflect the reality of the risks, which would help residents get state and federal grants to facilitate a land acquisition and to compensate the landowners' relocation expenses. When the inevitable big flood comes, the taxpayers end up saving significant amounts of money from these types of land acquisitions. On average, for every $1 spent on preparedness and prevention, about $4-6 are saved.

Insurance is another option.  Because homeowners outside the official hazard areas are not considered at high risk, their insurance rates can be very cheap, as low as $120 per year for about $20,000 in building and $8,000 in content coverage, which is what would be damaged in a 4-inch flood. This can be acquired by the National Flood Insurance Program's (NFIP's) Preferred Risk Policy.  Note how 25% of people outside the NFIP file claims and get one-third of NFIP assistance.  And, homeowners could be qualified for a 45% discount through participation in the Community Rating System (CRS). Just being educated about flooding risks can reduce insurance rates over 10%.

Insurance on the private market, the alternative outside the NFIP, is way more expensive. For example, rather than a $120/year policy, a policy premium may be $1,175 (for a below-ground foundation, $100K building coverage, $50K contents coverage, $2K deductible).  However, this is in Zone A, in the 100-year flood-zone, because there was no option to calculate a flooding policy in Zone X. Therefore, it's possible to negotiate a dramatically cheaper plan, especially if it's part of an organized community effort.

Sandbag protection is another great option that's relatively cheap. A $500 to $1,000 sandbag wall could prevent over $30,000 in damages and property loss.  This type of preparing for the next big flood is the most likely palatable and preferred response, although it has significant limitations. 

If I were living in this Zone X in one of these 18 to 60 houses along the Capisic Brook, my minimum preparedness would involve protecting my house with sandbags. Depending on elevation, I'd want to protect against a two-foot high flooding event, but considering the relatively small size of this watershed, I would probably build a one-foot sandbag dike. A two-foot dike would cost about $1,100, for about 2,100 sandbags ($800) and 20 cubic yards of sand ($260) to build a 100-foot length dike. A one-foot dike would cost about $600 (for 600 bags with 10 cubic yards of sand). And any dike would also necessitate a few shovels, buckets, 6 mil. plastic, and baggers to complete the project.

I would also integrate this into a cool permaculture and edible landscaping project, which may cost another $500-700 for plants and soil, blending it into an aesthetic landscape and creating a mico-climate for a diversity of valuable food crops and protective perennials. (See, The Resilient Gardener).

Additional Resilience
PreparAton!, FEMA's national campaign for action, recommends that community teams help their communities prepare for disasters by doing a 20-hour basic CERT training and going to Ready.gov to become aware of possible hazards, and how to prepare—how to make a plan and build a kit. (The comprehensive CERT PDF (322p) Training Manual is on the Course Materials website.) CERTs help plan and organize drills and community preparedness. This helps keep yourself, families, work, schools, and community safe in an emergency. It also involves practicing and participating in drills. FEMA also encourages CERTS to engage individuals and families in conversations about local hazards and appropriate protective actions. They suggest a door-to-door canvassing campaign to talk about preparedness, local hazards, how to stay safe, and the role of CERT in the community. 

FEMA also recommends downloading an  app (with safety tips, kit list, meeting location, shelters, and FEMA centers) and signing up for an alert and warning notification. 

If you're not prepared, the recovery will be harder. I've helped people with this process and dealing with FEMA is a pain. The biggest issue I saw was a failure of people to take photos or document damages to file claims with FEMA or their insurance.

For an idea of what disaster response looks like from an attorney's perspective, check out this legal manual for disaster assistance services that got developed after Hurricane Irene, on issues of Household and FEMA programs (pp.8-21), insurance (pp.24-34), small business loans (SBA) (pp.37-41), recording damages (pp.42-52), mortgages (pp.53-56),  landlord/tenant (pp.69-76), taxes (pp.79-81), labor and employment (pp.82-89), public benefits (pp.90-99), lost documents (p.107), and other issues.

Conclusion

Floods are the most common type of disaster. Over 90% of disasters involve flooding. Official estimates for risk are inadequate underestimations and so most people are unprepared and unaware of high-probability and high-impact risks. (Less than 40% of houses have discussed an emergency plan and less than 50% have emergency supplies set aside.)

Typical emergency management and disaster planning—which includes risk analysis and assessments, mitigation, response and recovery planning, and preparedness training—costs about $300 for a two hour consultation.  If you read this free post, you just got a $300 education: you're now empowered to prevent over $30,000 in flooding damages to your home. You're welcome: I probably saved your life, as well as your child's and pet's life—but only if you acted on it.  Be safe.

Vegan Meetup

I just went to an amazing vegan Meetup in Maine. I love vegan groups like this because they're so inspirational and filled with energetic, compassionate, healthy, brilliant, and beautiful people. When I became vegan in 2007, I began participating in Boulder's Vegan Meetup (with over 900 members!) until 2009. I met some of my best friends there, including the organizer, Lisa, to whom I dedicate my book, so I'm very excited to get plugged into this community again.

This Portland group with over 580 vegans (or aspiring vegans) is Amazing!  Our gracious hosts at the Cancer Community Center prepared and demonstrated the making of a delicious bean burger. We listed to a great talk about the wonderful work at Maine's chapter of the Humane Society, and we signed up for the next lobbying day to encourage better animal welfare standards.  We had a fun "show-and-tell" discussion about cooking, nutrition, food processors, cookbooks, opportunities for volunteering with Vegan Outreach at schools, and animal cognition in cats and fish. And one member passed out bumper stickers: "PLANT TREES." We also did a fun interactive activity where we talked about how to encourage someone to try preparing a vegan meal.  I love it! 

On the issue of animal cognition, I didn't get an opportunity to mention to the group three things: (1) Drawing the Line: The Science and Case for Animal Rights by Steven Wise, discussing the intelligence of animals; (2) Steven Wise's Nonhuman Rights Project and lawsuits to get animals legal "personhood" status (see, In Re Kiko, especially the Memorandum of Law describing the frontier science of animal cognition); and (3) telepathic communication with animals, which I explain in Unity (pp.308-22),  based on one of my favorite books, The Language of Miracles, co-authored by a quantum physicist to describe how it's based on concepts such as "signature frequency," "resonance matching," and a specific way to develop the ability.

And, of course, I was enthusiastic to talk about my book Unity, which includes a chapter on the Vegan Healthcare Standard (pp.76-160). I mentioned how veganism is essential to achieving higher consciousness and the "yoga of climate change" project that I'm working on to solve the climate crisis. Beyond the fact that the meat and diary industry consumes about 33% of fossil fuels and is responsible for over 50% of greenhouse gases, vegan nutrition is essential to raise our consciousness, vibrations, and ability to literally reduce greenhouse gas emissions through focused concentration. It takes a while to describe how this is possible, which is why my book is 630 pages!  I was enthusiastic to also share how vegans can grow their own B12 (p.142). There was far too much to say, so I'm looking forward to giving a more complete presentation in the future. And I had wonderful conversations afterwards about possible collaborations.

The vegan community is absolutely inspiring and I always feel so fulfilled and honored to be in the presence of such wonderful souls. I'd love to encourage everyone to reach out to their local Vegan Meetup group. These groups make it so fun, easy, and delicious to be part of the rapidly expanding local and global transformational community. 

The Manifestation of Unity

Organizing a Food and Energy Cooperative and Emergency Response Team

One possible synthesis and implementation of the transformational changes in my book Unity is to organize an interconnected global and bioregional grassroots community network that integrates the food, agroecology, spiritual, environmental, and revolutionary imperatives.

Background

Although we're all on different paths, we're united by fundamental desires and needs for health, food, comfort, and safety. UNITY is about achieving a high quality of life while unifying around higher values such as leadership, commitment to self-mastery, higher consciousness, and daily excellence.   

UNITY is also about addressing the problems with the consensus reality that involves a global and local communities at very high risk due to the crises of conflict, water, food, unemployment, the environment, climate, fiscal affairs, asset bubbles, diseases, infrastructure, and so on.  Therefore, we need community groups creating peace, harmony, and healing; being climate smart and developing immunity to diseases; and creating food, soil, and tree cooperatives for water and food security, and ecosystem rejuvenation.  

Unification 

There's a unifying need and opportunity for creating model community organizations around a simple three-fold approach with small groups of about 10-30 people—with the guidance of a shaman, yogi, or energy healer grounded in higher consciousness. 

1. Food Cooperatives

2. Energy Healing Centers 

3. Community Emergency Response Teams (CERTs)

This combination prioritizes the biggest opportunities for accumulating significant value and accelerating transformational change. A 10-Member Cooperative could create over ten million of dollars worth of value within a year.

1. A Superfood Cooperative with 10 Members could create over $200,000 in revenue, with each Member's income over $10,000 per year ($200 per week) for about 6-10 hours of work per week. This model also creates over $60,000 for Cooperative operating expenses, to create value-added products, and deal with issues such as distribution, marketing, regulatory compliance, and to achieve higher standards of excellence, such as becoming 100% local-organic, zero waste, and fossil fuel free.  It's a multi-stakeholder coop that integrates farmers, aggregation, processg, distribution, retail.

"Superfoods" are foods that are nutrient dense and with significant health benefits. The Coop could specialize in products such as sprouts, kombucha (a probiotic tea), vermicomposting, mushrooms, algae, herbs, greenhouses, tree nurseries and so on, For example, each Member could turn $1,000 in seed into about $7,500 sprouts per year. Plus, each Member household could also make Kombucha tea, turning about $1,000 of sugar and tea into about $12,000 worth of probiotics.  

2. Energy Healing Center: The average person that commits to a WFPB diet prevents approximately $200,000 in lifetime medical costs. (Equivalent to about $11,400 per year.) If ten Members commit and only help forty others to transition and commit to this new healthcare standard, then this creates over $10 million in total lifetime health value (about $570,000 per year  health care costs avoided).

The largest health maintenance organization (HMO), Kaiser Permanente, recommends that all physicians should encourage a whole food, plant-based (WFPB) diet to all their patients because it is cost effective, it treats and prevents chronic disease mortality rates, and it is easier to meet all nutritional needs with WFPB nutrition than with any other diet. A whole food, plant based (WFPB) diet addresses the leading causes of death: it can prevent over 90% of all cancers, prevent nearly all heart attacks and strokes, reverse severe heart disease, and prevent and reverse Type 2 (90% of) diabetes.

3. CERTs: For every household that prepares for the next big flood, over $100,000 in property loss is avoided.  If the CERT team only helps 10 households prepare, this would create over $1 million in property loss avoided (valued at about $57,000 per year). A door-to-door campaign to talk about preparedness in a neighborhood can save many millions of dollars—and even reduce insurance rates hundreds of dollars a year.

CERTs are integrated into local and federal (FEMA) emergency management services as the official way for community groups to help save lives, reduce suffering, protect and restore livelihoods, and reduce risks. CERTS are essentially the first step in climate change adaptation. CERTs are trained by the local emergency management professionals in CPR, first aid, shelter operations, search and rescue, and providing home prevention assistance.  The biggest opportunity for CERTs is to help households in the so-called "500- or 1,000-year" floodplain because the actual risk is closer to a 50- and 100-year event.

~ ~ ~ 

The magnitude of the challenges that our communities face necessitate an organizational capacity commensurate with that challenge. Therefore, a cooperative network with ten 10-Member Coops would be a good start for a mid-sized city such as Portland, Maine (population 66,300).  This network could thus produce $2 million in superfoods for institutions such as hospitals, senior housing, or schools; could help over one hundred people transition to the new whole food plant-based standard, preventing $20 million in healthcare costs; and can help at least one hundred people in flood-zones prepare for the next big flood, preventing over $10 million in properly loss. And all of this is accomplished with a part-time commitment to community service. There is obviously great opportunity to dramatically expand the impact of this type of organization. Achieving transformational change and a culture of commitment and excellence suggests that there should be 10X or even 20X effort. 

Even if the valuations are off, creating an asset bubble in health and black gold from vermicomposting would be far more beneficial than the asset bubbles of death and Wall St. bullshit. And there's obviously room to dramatically expand. This assumes that each Member household is only working for the Cooperative about 10-hours per week for 50 weeks, is only interested in producing sprouts and kombucha, and only helps five people per member transition to the WFPB diet and prepare for the next big flood. 

This model is very flexible. It's a blueprint for transformational change and creating community resilience through identifying the needs, vision, plan, and communication. It's about providing energy healing, lifestyle, disaster preparedness, and food services and products in a way that is cheaper, faster, better, and more convenient. It's possible to rapidly expand these groups to create a billion-dollar business based on  noble cause, exceptional customer service, consumer control, high technology (including wireless sensors for gardening efficiency, mobile devices for emergency alerts, big data, etc.), and completely redefining the industries of health, climate adaptation, and agriculture. It's a big idea, deliverable, economically viable, adaptable, and transformative. (These are the elements for building a billion-dollar business, according to John Scully's Moonshot).

There are unlimited possibilities for the creation and accumulation of value with the coordination of  knowledge and effort, in a spirit of harmony, for the attainment of these types of definite purposes. 

The Possibility and Vision

Summary

1. Food Cooperatives (1) WWOOF & Shared Earth style small-scale backyard gardening; (2) Institutional Selling, (3) Spiritual Gardening, and (4) accelerating a re-localized food system. 

2. Energy/Spiritual Healing Centers: (1) spa, AirBNB, detox, and Center for Awakening; (2) an evolutionary Mystery School; and (3) global environmental healings ("spiritual geoengineering") to diffuse the $60 trillion arctic methane bomb.

3. Community Emergency Response Teams (CERTs): (1) community preparedness campaigns, (2) emergency management, and (3) forecasting and preventing disasters.

1. Food Cooperatives

Food coops can participate in the Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms (WWOOF) network, a place where workers on organic farms volunteer 5-6 hours a day for food and accommodation. Another option for attracting workers is Shared Earth, the largest community of gardeners connecting people with land with gardeners. During WWII, over 50% of people's produce were produced in backyard gardens and the local food movement is expanding this type of home-scale revitalization with models with agroecology, permaculture and biointensive methods such as SPIN ("small plot intensive"). 

At the next level of evolution, the Findhorn and Perelandra models have developed thriving gardens with guidance from devic and spirit realms to produce energy-enhanced food and healing. Peer-reviewed scientific studies show that focused meditation and consciousness enhances the growth and nutrition of plants.  These models inspire and facilitate transformations in consciousness and include holistic learning centers in their ecovillages, with regular workshops and events such as a raw detox week, equinox retreats, and singing and dancing for unity.  The primary purpose in combining a food cooperative with an energy healing center is to train cooperative members to work with plant-spirit consciousness, described in Unity, pp.308, 323.

Strategic Plans, Visions, and Goals  for Local Food

The local food movement is about planing and analyzing the whole food system, from inputs (land, soil, fertilizer, seed, labor, equipment), production, processing (value-added), wholesale distribution (aggregation, delivering), retail distribution (coops, consumer purchases, stores, institutions), nutrient management (food waste, manure, fertilizer), and consumer demand (for food and food products). There are jobs at every level: services, store, farm operations, hired workers, manufacturing, storage, distribution, and inputs.

It's based on values of community (belonging, trust, engagement), the environment (stewardship, working landscape), hard work (agrarianism, "agripreneurialism", resourcefulness, creativity), independence (individual freedom and self reliance), privacy (respect toward others, tolerance, open mindedness about lifestyle and beliefs), and small scale (accessible businesses and community). 

The vision is for cooperation to advance independent family farms, united in diversity, advancing innovation, leading renewed vitality of agriculture as a key foundation to the economy and communities. For a region where agroecology and permaculture revitalizes the landscape and communities, fulfills traditions and values; where family farmers earn a good living in a food system driving the economy, providing more jobs, expanding the region's identity in national and international markets, with fresh local foods dramatically improving health and community; where all have access to high-quality foods, with security in the face of challenge; to be a national and global leader in food systems vitality and innovative best practices. 

The goals are to increase local food consumption, less health issues, improved environment, more profitable farms, local foods at all food outlets, organics diverted from landfills to compost (zero waste systems) for agricultural products, increased food system education workshops, programs and certificates; access to capital for food entrepreneurs; and a minimization of fossil fuels and an overall positive ecological footprint.

2. Spiritual Healing Centers

One excellent model for a Spiritual Healing Center is the Tree of Life Rejuvenation Center run by Dr. Gabriel Cousens, author of Spiritual Nutrition.  Joining the Tree of Life requires a very high standard of excellence (described in Unity, p.252, 593, requiring members commit to a raw, vegan, drug free lifestyle plus Dharma, the Six Foundations and the Sevenfold Peace).

The vision is to support and inspire a holistic lifestyle through education and life-changing experience. It's dedicated to healing and the transformation of the world. It's about healing and harmony with self and society and creating an "Awakened Normality" and an "Oasis of Awakening." It involves pure agriculture, personal health, spiritual vitality. The evolutionary programs and practices involve a 21-Day Transformation (including three meditations daily, fasting, yoga, spiritual discussions, nutritional workshops, cooking classes, and so on); Spiritual Fasting Retreats (7-Day green juice fasts for detoxifications and cleanses); and Energy Healings.

The Center includes a Cafe (raw, vegan, organic, local, gourmet); a spa; an Oasis Shop (with foods, herbs, supplements, body care products and energy healing technologies); and greenhouses, a sprout house, and gardens. The Centers could also sign-up with AirBNB to raise money by renting lodging to guests.  The Center could provide anything from luxury spa amenities to  hostels (which could be turned into emergency shelters and part of the CERT infrastructure).

Other excellent inspirations and models include the Omega Institute—dedicated to developing people's extraordinary potential, innovative education at the frontier of development, and healing—and the Modern Mystery School. The Mystery School educates the next generation of healers and light-workers with wisdom from shamanic traditions and other ancient knowledge, for evolution and awakening.

A 20X vision involves teaching students to develop latent yet innate abilities for healing, genius, psychic powers, remote viewing, precognition, weather working, telepathy, collaborating with interstellar civilizations, and working on creating free energy and other advanced technologies. I describe these mental technologies in Unity, pp. 264-366. These schools will be on the leading edge of the revolution of consciousness in education.

The Healing Centers can be a type of Tirtha, a pilgrimage place that's storied (with gods, heroes, myth, and legend), connected with the landscape, symbolic, and a place for liberation (moksha) within a larger network of association, in a 10-mile zone and also within a 5-day pilgrimage. Ancient and modern Tirthas ("crossings") have temples, bathing tanks, cold springs, mountains, forests, and villages. The Centers could network with the New Earth Communities project.

The Healing Centers would also engage in a global energy healing, peace, and coherence project to hep revitalize, detoxify, and harmonize our inner and outer environments. The Healing Centers could be on the frontier of climate change mitigation and adaptation through a focused effort on resolving the arctic methane crisis, through "spiritual geoengineering" or "the yoga of climate change," described in Unity, pp.465-89.  Even if all emissions were to stop tomorrow, the climate system has already past tipping points such as the arctic methane bomb that threatens the existence of civilization and the human species. Spiritual geoengineering is a way to deal with this existential crisis, which involves a network of organizations training thousands of people who commit to a focused meditation on environmental harmony every day.

3. Community Emergency Response Team (CERT)

I discuss the integration of the lower and higher levels of environmental consciousness, adaptation, mitigation, and preparedness in Unity, p.400 et. seq., and I give extra attention and focus to flooding preparedness, pp.413-419. I wrote a full legal and policy analysis of FEMA's disastrous flood zoning in an award-winning paper called Zone X: Catastrophic Flooding & Flood Frequency Determinations in an Era of Climate Crises (PDF, 32p). 

The next level of disaster preparedness is at intersection of Energy Healing and CERTs, where we'll see a very high demand for forecasting and preventing "natural disasters." The Spiritual Centers can train groups with the extraordinary shamanic ability to forecast storms and provide community protection (and agricultural protection), described in Unity, pp.453-64. This is a multi-billion dollar opportunity to significantly help communities.

Accelerate Your Life Purpose

The following is my summary of Mark Divine's The Way of the Seal: Think Like an Elite Warrior to Lead and Succeed (2013). This is the platform and foundation for the 12-day SEAL-Fit Academy Course ($7,200). These are exercises for defining your mission (life goals), targets (sub-goals), planning, visualizations, and developing mental toughness.

With exercises, meditation, and focusing techniques to train our mind for intuition, we can reaffirm our ultimate purpose, define our most important goals, and take steps to make it happen. Make a commitment to personal excellence. Simplify and clarify life to drive forward with purpose, mission, focus, and values. Be a leader who is authentic, respected, trustworthy, and persuasive. Transformation doesn't come overnight, though you start to notice changes in how you feel and respond to things as soon as you begin working on these principles. The key to extraordinary results is to replace old habits with one ones—thinking, acting, and believing. Achieve a new career, diet, fitness, home life or marriage.  Operate daily at the highest levels of performance. Be a Spartan: train harder, work smarter, and be courageous for inner and outer victory. For leadership and excellence, embrace the core values of honor, courage, and commitment to self-mastery. 

If you're looking for a big opportunity, seek out a big problem. 

Five Mountains: Physical, Mental, Emotional, Intuitional, Spiritual.

The world needs leaders who will stand up and step out. Risk more to enforce integrity at the self, team, and organizational levels—the "three spheres" approach—plus in our skills, tactics, and strategies. 

Think like an elite warrior to lead and succeed. Warriors have the courage to step up and do the right thing while serving one's family, community, and humanity. Establish a deep sense of values and purpose and goals. Have focus, discipline, patience, and humility. Make a stand, find a purpose, and embrace risk, loss and failure.  The US Navy SEALs values are loyalty, honor, leadership, responsibility, discipline, innovation, and daily excellence. 

Purpose: "Why am I here?"
Stand: "If I had one year to live..."
Values: "What do I want more of in my life?"
Passion: "Who am I at my deepest level?"

Discover your passion: Fantasize. Put energy toward it! Make a commitment to start or deepen in activities for success and significance. What books, movies, art, or music gets you pumped? Who inspires you and why? What characteristics make you feel great about yourself? What activities would you do if you had more time and no barriers? What's meaningful about these activities? What benefit would the activities provide? Could you change the world by focusing more on this? What would it take to step into the arena for just one of these activities? Uncover your purpose in life for self-actualization, flow, and to be a channel for truth, wisdom, love, and peace. Visualize yourself in your ideal state, powerful, living in alignment with your purpose. Visualize yourself one year out. Three years out. Collapse these visions into the present moment. See yourself now as that person as if you have already accomplished your goals. Own it. Breathe into the vision. Impring your subconscious and vibrate the energy to attract the circumstances.

Develop focus, single-mindedness, and awareness. Identify a goal and achieve it. Tick off targets with focus. Avoid distraction. Success will skyrocket. 

Four-Prong Approach

1. Prepare your mind with sacred silence. Align with your unique purpose in life. 
2. Envision your goal: use mental projections and daily visualizations: seeing, believing, and making it happen. Create vivid images of what success looks like.  Fantasize with purpose: see it. Focus on defining the end goal. Imagine it as if it's already achieved (grounded with real photos and experiences). Practice it: play it out daily, with belief, expectation, intense desire to bring it to life. Prepare the mind.
3. Define your mission: What's your Life's Purpose? Plan. Focus. For clarity, ask "Why am I doing this? Is there a higher priority? Who else is involved in this project? What is expected of me and any others who may be involved? How and when can I count on them to fulfill their commitments? What other sub-tasks are required before I can fulfill what's expected of me?
4. Simplify the battlefield. Eliminate distractions. See the elegant solution. Know your unique offer as an individual to identify what you must do and what you can delegate to others. Declutter your internal and external environments. See simple solutions easily. Use the 80/20 Principle to identify and prioritize the 20% for the most productive actions. 

Define the mission, implicit expectations, team, and high value targets.  Plan. Refine the execution strategy. Explore options. Communicate the vision to others. Drive the mission. 

SEALs Analytical Tools

• SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely. 
• SWOT: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. (for evaluating a mission).
• FITS: Fit, Important, Timing, Simple: (Fit your skill and team; Important to successful mission; Timing optimal for this target; simple and clear—to identify the best targets for the mission: score 1-5 for each target, add and compare.) 
• PROP: Priorities, Realities, Options, Path (Select high value targets to explore options.)
• SMACC: Situation, Mission, Action, Command, Communication (Create a visual story to see roles clearly, what happens when things go wrong, to brief the team's mission, to make it real.) 
• OODA: observe, orient, decide, act. (for rapid planning and quick decisions: Observe your position relative to the competition—the big picture; Orient yourself to the new reality you've observed, analyze, get information: goals? create value?; Decide on an action: a campaign emphasizing quality; Act and seek instant feedback from thought leaders.)
• KISS: Keep It Simple. (Every day, move toward your goals, super-focused on the top three things connected to your passion, purpose, and mission. Alight your thoughts and actions, get victories, and simplify efforts.)

Do today what others won't. Find your 20X factor. Embrace the suck. Build discipline, drive, and determination. Seriously challenge yourself—physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Perform at the 0.1% with new habits. Be a disciple to a higher purpose: train hard every day, developing yourself fully. Have DRIVE: connect a major life interest to your purpose and define a mission around it. Have GRIT: mental toughness to control your responses, control your attention, develop emotional resilience, set effective goals, visualize powerfully. Control your attention on success. Change your future by changing your attitude. Interrupt any negativity. Bring awareness to the moment. Re-frame arguments or problems to the positive.

Set effective goals: something to strive for, something to visualize and focus on. SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely; they're precise, positive, written, uplifting, and realistic with your skills and resources. Journal your passions, values, and purpose. Consider all the things you'd like to do, be, or have in your life. Next year? Next five years? List all of them.  Identify three life goals that most excite you and move toward fulfilling your purpose. Visualize and live this reality right now as if they have already happened. 

Try something new. Fail. Analyze. Change. Try Again. Failure is growth. 

Analyze your routines: your physical trainings, food (types, quantity, time), vacation, meetings (annual retreats), mental and emotional challenges, and playtime activities.

DAY/WEEK FOCUS FOR______________

The one thing I will achieve:

Priority tasks I must complete:

Projects to work on: 

Contacts: calls, e-mails to people I need to connect with:

Habits I'm working on and how:

Notes, Ideas, Inspiration: 

QUARTERLY FOCUS PLAN FOR______________

The one thing: 

Top 3 Targets:

Top 3 Tasks for Each Target:

Top Contacts to Make:

New Habit to Integrate:

Notes, New Ideas, Inspirations:

ANNUAL FOCUS PLAN FOR______________

Purpose/Vision for my life:

Vision for my life:

Top 6 Values & What I can do to get closer to them:

Top 3 Mission Goals for my life:

Top 3 Mission Goals for next 3 years:

Top 3 Targets for this year: 

Must-dos for reaching my Top 3 Targets:

Top 20 Contacts to make:

New Habit to Integrate:

Notes, Ideas, Inspirations (Have/Be/Do List): 

Do the unexpected: to get unconventional and extraordinary results, push the edges of acceptable behavioral rules and norms (ethically). Break rules that are outdated, impractical or unethical.  

Refresh your plan. Put in perfect effort. Spice it up with variety. Re-energize it with new skills, routines, schedules, and goals. 

Elite Teams have a synergy with shared accountability, mission focus, culture, and spirit.  Teams fail because of a lack of commitment to self-mastery. Communicate a powerful vision, a BIG shared vision to build team culture. Hold briefings to convey critical information and ask questions on the mission and individual's roles. Debrief with a facilitator at the completion of the mission, for feedback, to improve individual behavior and team performance, to address issues of organizational structure. Everyone says something. Everythings on the table for discussion: personal and team performance, lessons learned, screw-ups, breakthroughs. Agree not to take anything personally. Check ego at the door. Analyze to improve. Maintain harmony and have positive energy: "We can do it if we do it together."

Lead with your heart. This is the path of self-mastery, truth, wisdom, risking loss and failure. The global paradigm change we face, the work required to steer the ship in a new direction, will take spiritual, political, academic, and warrior leadership to rise up and lead us through the mess. It will take systemic team level efforts where we all unite for an upwelling of honor, courage, and commitment. This time it's for the team of our human race. 

Affirmations (Create Affirmations that Work).

1. I know why I am doing what I am doing. I embrace risk, loss, and failure.
2. I will win in my mind before seeking to win in the arena. I'm committed to self-mastery.
3. I embrace challenge. I embrace the Suck, the 20X. 
4. I display integrity in words, deeds, and thought.
5. I never shy away from hard leadership roles. I step back when it's someone else's turn. I am not after power, glory, money, fame; rather, experience to lead and serve.
6. I am driven by my passion and purpose, not titles or accolades.
7. I go to the challenge and strive for self-control.
8. I never quit in training or on an "op." I never leave a teammate behind.
9. I acknowledge and am open to my inner wisdom, to expand awareness with strong mind-body-spirit connection.
10. I strive to remain innovative, creative, to learn and grow.
11. I train realistically. I work tirelessly to have my skills for extraordinary results. 

Power Rituals

•  Morning: Large glass of water, journal to reflect and visualize. Questions: "What am I grateful for today? Excited about? Looking forward to? What's my purpose? Plans for today? How can I progress toward my goals? To who can I reach out to serve or thank today? Are my goals still aligned with my purpose?"  Then, spend 5 minutes breathing, with mindfulness meditation or yoga. Review your Daily Focus Plan.
• Evening: With your journal Questions: "Was I in or out of the zone and balanced today? What contributed to this? Top 3 positive things I accomplished/happened? What did I learn? What went wrong today and what's the silver lining? Unsolved challenges for my subconscious to help me with tonight? Then: Meditate. Review major goals.

~ ~ ~ 

Furthermore, consider the major lessons in Robert Greene's Mastery (2012). 

Mastery is a function of time, intense focus, and the X-Factor, the mystical inner guidance.

The ultimate power, the high point of human potential, the source of the greatest achievements, comes with ension, urgency, and crisis. We feel energized and focused, absorbed in the task. Have intense concentration. Practice. Aprentice. Immerse yourself actively. Achieve mastery. 

Discover your calling, your life's task, your inner calling, drive and love. It's your inner force guiding toward what you are meant to accomplish in the time you have to live. It was clear to you in childhood. It faded and became a source of unhappiness and lack of connection. The first step of Mastery is learning who you really are, knowing it with clarity. You'll find the career and everything will fall into place. It's never too late to start. 

Awaken your mind. Your action is a function of your attitude. Be increasingly bold. Experiment. Be original. Be obsessive. Let go of comfort and secuirty. Creative strategy involves a narrow focus with effort and alternative thinking. Creative breakthroughs come with tension and insight, intuition, and excitement. Have very high standards. Detect flaws. Work through blacks of frustration. Letting go for a moment can lead to peak creativity (a subliminal uprush). Create deadlines for pressure, tension and intensity. 

Fuse the intuitive with the rational. Access higher intelligence to see more of reality, to anticipate trends, to respond with speed and accuracy, with deep immersion. Intuit and expand the outer limits of your potential. It's the realm of the mystical and genius beyond rationality. 

~ ~ ~ 

Consider also the Akashic Record (Andrews, 2010):

The Akashic Record is also known as the all-pervasive field of consciousness, the vibrational imprint of everything that has ever, is, and will ever happen. It's known in the Bible as the Book of Life, bythe Egyptians as the Hall of Two Truths; it's known as the quantum hologram, the morphic resonant field, universal consciousness, and the Spiritual Internet.  The Akashic Records also has awareness. It changes, grows, and evolves with consciousness. It's the matrix interconnecting everything.

Everyone is capable of accessing the Akashic Records. It's a function of focused meditation (with theta brainwaves) with love and compassion. (eg, w/ HealingTheta or Theta). Access is considered a psychic ability, through lucid dreaming (see lucidity.com and world of lucid dreaming; it's relatively easy), channeling, remote viewing (see RV practice tests), hypnotherapy, and so on. It's a call to develop your mind and expand your consciousness.

Today's Challenge: We're living in an exceptional time in history. There's a re-evaluation of humanity's core values. It's one of the most significant, pivotal times in history by virtue of the magnitude of the the danger or good that can come. It's a time to shift to higher frequency, wisdom, and upliftment to shift the current paradigm—the assumptions, concepts, values, practices, way of viewing reality. We're seeing leaps in consciousness. The new frequency is our perception: our perception is limited by our level of vibration and compassion/love.

• Economy: opportunity to eliminate dynamics that no longer serve: it's a cleansing process to eliminate waste, dishonesty, and greed, to restore the planet, to grow and change.
• Ecology: to create a positive ecological and carbon footprint, with sustainable and humane lifestyles.

The Past: Healing is the process of becoming hold. The essence of wholeness and being is love. Health is inner peace. Giving and receiving are the same.

The Present: Discover your path and purpose for focused actions, for expressing core values, for a meaningful career and partnership. Be engaged in the now and in the flow. (See, Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth: Awakening Your Life's Purpose). It's about answer the questions, "What's most important? What are your deepest values and beliefs? What gives you joy? What would you do if...?"  Spend thirty minutes journaling about your talents, your intrigues or curiosities, what causes you feel strong and passionate about, your strengths or inner resources. Write a mission statement. 

Awaken the giant within. You have the power right now to control how you think, how you feel, and what you do. The only limit to your impact is your imagination and commitment. Demonstrate what's possible by being an example. The hardest step in achieving anything is making a true commitment, a specific action. 

Summary: Our purpose gives us motivation, commitment, direction, and guidance. Discover it by examining your strengths, talents, and key life events because your purpose will utilize your past experience, skills and abilities. Flow, synchronicity, resistance and instinct help you know if you're working with your highest intention. As you fulfill your purpose, you open the door to meet your soul mate. Success is measured by internal and external confirmation, not material success. Overcoming your greatest challenge can be your greatest gift to the world.

Challenges, suffering, pain, loss, tragedy, victims of natural disasters, torture, disease, and so on. These can be powerful teachings and motivation to go on a different paths, to follow our dreams, to move toward our life's purpose. It's about growing and healing. Suffering is a result of separation from our essence, our spiritual alignment. Transform fear, anger, or anything that keeps you separated from unconditional love by focusing your life on finding the edge of growth. Awareness will bring fulfillment, meaning and purpose to living.

Do you have a duty to an ideal, group, or lifestyle? Do you sacrifice to help the growth of others (with calmness, acceptance, and courage)? Are you on the path of service to bring Enlightenment to the planet, releasing personal attachments and focused on the masses, motivated by love? (All are in service to the Divine. Examples include Churchill, Gandhi, Mandela, Dalai Lama, MLK, Mother Theresa). Natural disasters and war involving masses of people are an opportunity for service, sacrifice, re-balancing, and learning.

The future in the Akashic Record is written in sand. It changes with conditions, decisions, and choices. Today, the world is focused on change. It's predicted to be cataclysmic, cleansing, and transformative. Prepare for difficulty. There are possibilities for marvelous gifts, great opportunities, higher consciousness, wisdom, balance, and harmony. Reaching to higher ideals is essential at this time to achieve the Golden Age that's prophesied by ancient wisdom. It involves pushing beyond our limits and into our higher abilities, surrendering to a higher good, and mastering the physical continuum. The lesson of quantum physics is that we create reality with our thoughts and our thoughts interact with matter, making it capable to transmute pollution, stabilize the climate, and accelerate ecosystem rejuvenation through intentional visioning and action.  Surviving the change involves staying grounded, centered, developing intuitive capacity, trusting your senses, and growing your love—the spiritual force of universal consciousness. 

Unity or singularity consciousness is a shift from knowing we are connected to knowing we are one; from being part of the whole to being the whole.

 Find a path with heart that excites you, opens your energy flow, and represents your purpose and mission in life.  Trust heartfelt experiences and move forward with confidence. Personal responsibility is the challenge of this moment. Be loving, without fear, with compassion, without attachments. Be at peace. Enjoy the beauty of life.

Peace & Blessings to You and Your Journey

An Introduction to Conscious Eating

I've modified (edited and added to) the Introduction from Conscious Eating by Dr. Cousens:

Conscious eating is the awareness of how the food we eat affects our bodies, emotions, mind, and spiritual life. Our choices reflect the state of harmony with ourselves, the world, all of creation, and the Divine. This synergistic view of nutrition is part of a core understanding of what it means to live an integrated, harmonious, and peaceful life on this planet. Conscious eating involves understanding how to develop an individualized diet, how to eat to enhance your psychophysiological constitution, balancing pH, in-depth spiritual aspects of an optimal diet, transition phases, and so on.  There's no "best" diet for everyone, but there are guidelines for developing a diet that's individualized to your needs.

Unhealthy eating is a way of numbing oneself to life. Conscious eating is about glowing with life and joy rather than attempting to gain this joy through food. It's about eating to further enhance communion with the Divine. It reflects and supports one's realization of the highest state of awareness.

To make the shift into harmony is a matter of making conscious lifestyle changes. To do this and to depart from the disease-generating practices of our culture, is considered abnormal and heretical to our current fast-food lifestyle. Though it's difficult to change one's old habits and belief system, this must be done if one values living a healthy spiritual life. Social forces are powerful excuses for ambivalence.  Nevertheless, for a totally functional diet, one needs to be willing to examine these patters and abandon what is no longer appropriate. Eventually, one begins to make food choices on the basis of what maintains and enhances the blissful communion with God, as well as the feeling of well-being in mind and body.

Even upon realizing the benefits of changing one's diet, it can still take years to complete the full transition. To make stable and lasting changes, it's best to make step-by-step changes, incorporated in sync with the overall context of one's life. Ideally, one has a solid support system for a successful, sustained change in the direction of high-level physical, mental, and spiritual health. Making idealistic yet drastic changes often creates imbalances which reverse themselves in short order.

The art of conscious eating is learning how to eat just the right amount of food to maximize every aspect of our lives. It's not a deprivation or minimal-eating diet. It does require some sensitive attention to the details of our daily activities. Our hunger for the Divine becomes the overwhelming appetite and guide to our choice of diet.

In developing a diet, clarity of purpose is necessary. (1) Developing a diet as an aid to spiritual unfolding, one that maintains, purifies, and honors the body as a temple for the spirit in a way that keeps the mind clear, balanced, alert, and elevated. (2) increasing the ability to assimilate, store, conduct, and transmit spiritual energies, to activate and increase one's potential for awakening. (3) Developing a diet that balances all our subtle energy centers on a daily basis (the "rainbow diet"). (4) Developing a diet that brings us into harmony with the principles of ahimsa, non-cruelty to animals, the universal laws of nature, and food-related ecological issues, thereby enhancing peace on our planet. Many factors play a role in how one goes about individualizing a diet, such as biochemistry, lifestyle patterns, how well one digests proteins, carbs, and lipids, the degree of physical activity, how much one meditates or prays each day, the enzyme system, and one's present level of health, vitality, and detoxification. Essential factors are also the seasons, the political and social context.

The diet changes with the seasons and with the maturation of our emotional, mental, and spiritual state. These shifts are guided by intuition. As we become healthy, we often require less food because the body is better able to assimilate the physical aspects of the food and more subtle energies from which the food is condensed.

To successfully make the appropriate adjustments, we must be free enough psychologically to distinguish between healthy intuition and the drives of our habitual eating patterns, peer pressure, or unconscious needs. The key is identifying nonfunctional food patters and being able to let them go if they are detracting from our love communion with the Divine or from our physical, emotional, or mental well-being.

If the process of letting go of certain food habits were always easy our culture would not have such a high percentage of the population eating such poor diets and living in such poor health For many people, overcoming their food issues can require intense and difficult work that takes them to the very core of their psychological beings. In the US it is staggering how two-thirds of people are overweight and obese and how almost everyone (about 97%) is addicted to meat and dairy. The more common negative beliefs and fears associated with being overweight have to do with the consequences people fear if they, in fact, lost weight and returned to normal body shape. People have fears related to sex, intimacy, rejection by jealous peers, or receiving too much attention. For others, food means love and attention: it's a way of feeling loved or to get approval. For others, it's a way to suppress feelings of sadness, anger, rejection, fear, anxiety, or loneliness, or to numb themselves to feelings and life in general. No eating at all or overeating are ways to oppose people who want you to do the opposite because it's the one thing we control. It's a way to punish or be angry with oneself or as a compensation for or avoidance of starving again. (People may subconsciously know there are severe food shortages on the horizon and this is related to the obesity epidemic.)... It's apparent that the negative thoughts that people have created in relationship to food contribute to the problem, not just the actual eating habits. These disharmonious thoughts maintain inappropriate eating patterns.

When these thoughts are released, a lot of blocked energy is simultaneously released. Thoughts filled with light and love add lightness and fluidity  to us. While eating it is important to be joyous and to think positive thoughts. Food is love. Life is love. Heavy thoughts block us from the experience of love in our lives.

A vegetarian, vegan, and particularly a raw-food diet, can be threatening to many people because it directly forces them to face their food issues, and indirectly, their life issues. Live foods have so much nourishment in them that considerably less food is needed to get the same amount of nutrition. (cooked food loses about 50% of its protein, 70-­80% of its vitamins and minerals, and close to 100% of its phytonutrients and biophoton energy).

Needing less food for optimal nutrition, however, forces us to observe whatever food compulsions we may have. The highly energetic qualities of raw food make it harder to suppress feelings when eating compared to overeating cooked or animal foods to numb ourselves to life. On raw foods, repressed emotions and thoughts seem to be more easily released. Sweet foods create the illusion of fullness and false contentment or good feelings. When people are feeling bad, empty, or depressed, they turn to junk food, especially sweets, in a misguided attempt to create feelings of fulness and happiness. It's similar to an alcoholic's illusion of drinking troubles away, eating away sadness and emptiness. Many people are addicted to this double, two tiered illusion: junk foods are an illusion of real food and thinking we can eat our troubles away is also an illusion. Living foods brings us immediately into awareness of it.

Self-healing is about identifying limiting, negative thoughts; witnessing these thoughts, and then dissolving them. Once these thoughts are identified and dissolved, they no longer have any power over us. It's a powerful and simple technique. To be successfully, one must get in touch with both their desire and resistance to lose or gain weight, or any aspect of food which is an issue to them. Some level of desire to change is usually found. Do not deny resistance with avoidance patterns - they're interpersonal manipulations around food; fears of change, self-mythologies, limiting self-concepts, and negative self-images, unwillingness to give up family and cultural images. Once the limiting thoughts are dissolved, one is free to become health.

Rigid diets can be a form of punishment in themselves, potential traps for being wrong and guilty. Once the blocks are removed, one is free to eat those foods and live in ways which bring health, love, harmony, and communion with the Divine. Unhealthy habits naturally fade when there is a reorientation toward eating to enhance health, joy, and communion. The joy of Divine communion helps decrease our physical appetite because we are already feeling satisfied from within. The body's desire for food has its roots in the soul's need for spiritual substance. When one is in touch with the Divine, there is such a sense of contentment, joy, peace, and fullness that food has no power to throw one out of balance.

If one surrenders to the divine unfolding, slowly and gently, harmony with the diet and body also happens. One spontaneously moves to a positive self-image. Trust the unfolding and one's observations and intuition.  When the habituating thoughts that distort our eating patterns are dissolved, the balancing process is delightful. One feels free to eat or not to eat. One is attracted to certain foods that one intuitively knows are appropriate. The joy of eating increases. One actually pays attention to food. The energies and flavors of the food are more sensuously experienced.

Related: Rainbow Green Live-Food Cuisine by Dr. Cousens

The Next Step beyond Conscious Eating: Spiritual Nutrition by Dr. Cousens

            

The Turning Point: Creating Resilience

These are notes from Greg Branden's The Turning Point: Creating Resilience in a Time of Extremes (2014).

We solve our problems based upon the way we think of ourselves and the world. From peak energy and peak debt to failing economies and climate change, everyday life is showing us we've outgrown the thinking of the past. It's also showing us where big changes in the world mean big changes in our lives. Through dramatic shifts in our jobs, our relationship to money, and even our homes, it's clear that our lives are changing in ways we've never seen, to a degree that we're not prepared for, and at speeds that we've never experienced. A new, healthy, and sustainable world is emerging, and our ability to accept what it offers begins with our willingness for honestly acknowledging the facts of what we're up against, embracing the new discoveries that reveal the role of cooperation in nature and communities, creating resilience in our lives, families and communities through proven sustainability principles. 

We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely. - E. O. Wilson. 

Our journey is past the limits of what we thought was possible. Our Destination is a world where we've raised the standard of living for everyone, where war is obsolete, and where our love of cooperation is greater than the fear that drives violent competition. We're living in a time of extremes where we can expect big things to happen. Everyone is on the journey. It's a big journey and a short trip: the world we're traveling to is already here.

As a realist, one must have no illusions when it comes to the huge amount of work that it's taking to give birth to the new world that lies before us. Our ability to successfully meet the challenges that are converging in our lives begins by acknowledging what may be the most difficult questions. How can we deal with the issues if we're not honest about the issues.

Global Risks Report 2015 (WEF)

Risks with the greatest likelihood and impact include: Interstate conflict, water crisis, unemployment, failure of climate change adaptation, fiscal crises, cyber attacts, asset bubbles, biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, energy price shocks, spread of infectious diseases, critical information infrastructure breakdown, food crises, and profound social instability.

 We already have solutions to big problems, such as food, energy, and a sustainable economy. Our problem is a crisis in thinking. The oil-based economy is giving way to a new economy based upon forms of energy that are cleaner and more sustainable. The centralized production of food is giving way to healthy and sustainable production from small farms that invigorate local economies. The practice of creating wealth from industry that destroys the planet is giving way to socially responsible investing. 

The greatest crisis that we face in our times of extremes is a crisis in thinking. Our thinking is the very key to the way we deal with the needs of the emerging world. We already have the technology, the solutions, the healthy food, the necessities for a comfortable and meaningful life: it's the thinking that makes room in our lives for what already exists. Embrace the thinking that makes such possibilities a priority.

Worldwatch Institute's Plan B 4.0 includes solutions, such as:

• Designing cities that support people's lives rather than supporting industries.
• Implementing changes can immediately raise the energy efficiency of homes, offices, buildings, and public transportation.
• Establishing an economy based on a cyclic use of materials rather than the one-way, linear model that dominates today
• Making a shift in government spending: reallocating a portion of the massive military budget for the use of building sustainable infrastructure. 

David Gershon's Social Change 2.0 recommends: 

• Making changes in communities that are relevant to people's lives.
• Organizing citizens to take greater responsibility for issues like health, safety, and beautification.
• Empowering local civil servants to take greater responsibility and accept greater accountability for the changes that are affecting their neighbors and families.
• Designing and implementing a whole-systems approach to community change.

A turning point of hope can be created intentionally. Our turning point must fit into our own worldview of possibilities. Nature's simplicity promises that turning points are simple as well. 

Sunrise and sunsets are the doorway to a mysterious period. It's not really daytime, yet it's not quite night. It's this space between day and night that was called the crack between the worlds. From the descriptions of ancient Egyptians and Peruvian shamans to those of healers from America's Desert Southwest, the theme of these turning points is the same. Twice each day, nature gives us a time when our prayers may be offered with the greatest potential to shift our lives. It's a turning point in nature that allows for change. The beauty in knowing that a turning point exists is that it holds the opportunity for us to change before we experience something that we don't want in our lives.  We can create a turning point with a single choice.

Ask yourself what you can offer. How can your knowledge, skills and passions be used to fill the needs of today? 

It's possible for individuals, families and communities to create turning points of resilience that minimize the impact of abrupt change and shorten the time it takes to recover when hardship does occur. 

Resilience means different things to different people, varying by culture, age, and the way the word is used. Resilience is often used to describe someone's ability to recover from something like a devastating setback or traumatic loss. There's also resilience in attitude and physical fortitude of entire communities as they recover from the devastation of hurricanes or terrorist attacks. Complex ecosystems develop resilience in adapting to dynamic shifts in Earth's climate. Resilience is the process of adapting well int he face of adversity. It's the capacity of a system to continually change and adapt yet remain within critical thresholds. We're talking about a way of living and being that gives us the flexibility to change and adapt to new conditions, which is the key to transformation in our time of extremes. What does it take to create, develop, and sustain a resilient lifestyle, to live in a resilient way?

Personal resilience involves knowledge of ourselves, a personal sense of hope, the ability to cope in a healthy way, strong interpersonal relationships, and finding a personal meaning in life.  Healthy coping strategies include making sure you're healthy, scaling back on commitments, exercising regularly, preparing for situations, setting goals, making sleep a priority, connecting with other people, relieving stress, and professional help. 

The elements of resilience:

The language of the heart: the quality of our emotions determines the instructions our hearts send to our brains. The psycho-psysiological coherence between the heart and brain is important. The greater our level of coherence, the greater our resilience. Coherence is achieved through "attitude breathing." Recognize unwanted attitudes (anxiety, sadness, despair, depression, gilt, anger, or anything distress), and breathe in a replacement attitude (neutral, revitalize, calm, balance, ease, peace, appreication, compassion). The steps to coherence are as simple as focus, feel, and breathe.

Turning Points of Community Resilience

"For a community to be whole and healthy, it must be based on people's love and concern for each other." -Millard Fuller, founder, Habitat for Humanity

Community is about living, working, and sharing with other people in ways that make life, and bearing life's responsibilities, easier. There are many variations and expressions of community. The glue that holds them together is a common vision and a common bond. Regardless of a community's size or its reason for forming, the existence of a shared vision and a common bond are essential to success.  

We've lost a big part of what made our communities so successful in the past: the personal connection of knowing our neighbors and being aware of their lives and their needs. This is precisely where our lives are about to change quickly and in a big way. 

"We are one" means We Share Everything: The human family is one big, diverse family sharing one planet. Beyond the ideologies, politics, cultures, and religions that sometimes tear at our unity and make us feel separate from one another, the fact is, we're a single family. One of the consequences of globalization is that we share everything, including the hardships of an unsustainable community. Entire ecosystems can be destroyed when the needs of a globally connected market are filled from a limited source. 

Five key elements or core principles of resilience are:

• Spare capacity. (Expect periodic and temporary disruptions in the serves that we've taken for granted, such as electricity, fuel, and food.)
• Flexibility - the ability to change, evolve, and adapt in the face of disaster.
• Limited or "safe" failure, which prevents failures from rippling across systems. (Build backups as safeguards, and redundant backup systems.)
• Rapid rebound - the capacity to reestablish function and avoid long-term disruptions.
• Constant learning, with robust feedback loops. 

 Principles of Resilient Communities:

• Every community is filled with leaders.
• Whatever the problem, community itself has the answers.
• We have many resources with which to make things better now.
• We need a clear sense of direction, and we need to know the elegant, minimum next step.
• We proceed one step at a time, making the path by walking it. 
• Local work evolves to create transformational social change when connected to similar work around the world.

A Template for Community Resilience

Our willingness to recognize the need, our choice to make a positive shift, our promise to commit to the work it takes to see it through, and the discipline that such a journey requires gives credence to the idea that every journey begins with a single step. The Berkana Institute has a template for beginning the journey (in their toolkit, which also includes a Women's Leadership Circle).  The steps must work for everyone. 

1. Identify the needs of your community. Why have you chosen to come together? Identify the common needs that you hope to fulfill through your shared efforts. 
2. Identify the vision of your community. Identify the goals of your community, what success will look like, and how you will know when you get there. Are your goals specific for a one time need or designed to become a way of life? Are the goals sustainable, and can they be accepted by the greater community or society at large? Be specific about what you hope to accomplish and the milestones that tell you when you're successful ... This ignites the imagination with many possibilities and opens the floodgates of communication and deep sharing of people's thoughts, attitudes, experiences, loves, and desires for themselves and their families, particularly their children.
3. Identify your plan. Identify the specific steps that lead to accomplishing your goals. Determine realistic timelines, and assume roles and responsibilities to accomplish each step of the plan. ... This involves pushing the edge of people's comfort zones, as people make commitments and accept responsibilities for the steps that would need to hapen to ensure the success of the plan.
4. Communicate. Identify a way to share thoughts, ideas, feelings, and concerns that will inevitably arise with any community process. This can be as informal as an agreement to share such concerns when they come up or as formal as a specific time to meet for just such a purpose. In this way, the community is constantly informing itself of what works, what doesn't, and where there's need for a rethinking of the methods and processes.  ... Staying in touch with members of a community while you're working toward a specific goal is the key to coordinating everyone's efforts. Maybe agree to meet on a weekly basis for a number of weeks. Maybe share phone numbers and physical addresses and e-mails. Maybe meet over tea, dinner, or potlucks. This develops a close-knit community involving lasting friendships.

This is an example of the kind of template that you may want in order to get your community up and running.  The minimum framework for successfully building a resilient community includes: (1) identifying why your community is forming, (2) identifying the common vision for your community, (3) identifying your community plan, and (4) identifying how your community will communicate feedback.

The 100 Resilient Cities Centennial Challenge:

100RC is dedicated to helping cities around the world become more resilient to the physical, social and economic challenges that are a growing part of the 21st century.  100RC supports the adoption and incorporation of a view of resilience that includes not just the shocks – earthquakes, fires, floods, etc. – but also the stresses that weaken the fabric of a city on a day to day or cyclical basis.  Examples of these stresses include high unemployment; an overtaxed or inefficient public transportation system; endemic violence; or chronic food and water shortages.  By addressing both the shocks and the stresses, a city becomes more able to respond to adverse events, and is overall better able to deliver basic functions in both good times and bad, to all populations.  Cities in the 100RC network are provided with the resources necessary to develop a roadmap to resilience along four main pathways: (1) financial and logistical guidance, (2) support for a strategy, (3) access to solutions, service providers and partners, and (4) membership of a global network. (Job Positions for Strategic Director and Manager)

Additional projects to create resilience on the larger scale include Philadelphia's Reinventing Older Community's conferences, San Francisco's SPUR project The Resilient City, and New York's Resilience Agenda. Books include Voluntary Simplicity (Elgin, 1998) and Global Shift (Bourne, 2009).

"Transformation in the world happens when people are healed and start investing in other people." - Michael Smith, Musician.

One of the most remarkable consequences of various forms of transpersonal experience is the spontaneous emergence and development of genuine humanitarian and ecological interests, and the need to take part in activities aimed at peaceful coexistence and well-being of humanity. -Stanislav Grof. 

The journey of humanity is leading to a transformational convergence point where the crisis in thinking, the extremes of the world, and the principles of resilience all come together as one big turning point on a global scale. 

The Catastrophic Transformation is when the world as we know it abruptly comes to a halt due to global war, pandemic disease, or collapse of the world economy. Afterwards, the old system could be replaced with new, life-affirming and sustainable ones. It's the one that's most often talked about but it's unnecessary and would cause undue hardship on the most vulnerable and least prepared. These people rely each day upon the timely delivery system for food, fuel, and life necessities. We can transform the world without a catastrophe.

A Planned Reset is another possibiity for an abrupt shift on both a personal and global basis. The leaders of the world recognize that the very foundation of civilization is no longer sustainable. By agreement, the world's industries and businesses would temporarily stop and then rebuild for new, sustainable infrastructure. 

An Evolutionary Transformation is the one most likely, as well as being the healthiest of the options. The unsustainable systems of the past buckle and break, replaced gradually with new systems that ultimately lead to the kind of future we all know is possible.  (It's incremental and gradual.) Our communities recognize the need for change, rather than reacting to an abrupt shift. 

The key is bringing a better quality of life to eight billion people without wrecking the environment. Information, ideas and policies flow in communities by a core value of quality of life and working together (not wealth/materialism) and decentralized organization (not centralized). Core values are a common vision, the shared idea that holds any community together.  For organization, we need locally supplied food, locally based energy, people excited for civic participation (not powerless/apathetic), and a diversity of ideas and innovation.

National Intelligence Council's Global Trends Report:

• Megatrends: individual empowerment, diffusion of power (to networks and coalitions), demographic patterns (aging), and the food, water, energy nexus (substantial growing demand for resrouces).
• Game-Changers: crisis-prone global economy, governance gap, potential for increased conflict, wider scope of regional instability, impacts of new technologies, role of the U.S

United Nation's My World Report & Post-2015 Issues:

Categories include: a good education, action on climate change, reliable energy at home, support for people who can't work, protecting forests, rivers and oceans, affordable and nutritious food, an honest and responsive government, better job opportunities, better transport and roads, equality between men and women, phone and internet access, better healthcare, freedom from discrimination and persecution, political freedoms, protection from crime and violence, access to clean water and sanitation.

Advanced Technology & Sophisticated Wisdom

Indigenous people tell of time when people of the earth lived very differently from those of today. The people lived close to the land. They honored themselves and their relationships to one another and to the elements that gave them life. During this time, people were happy, healthy, ad lived to advanced ages of hundreds of years. 

Then something happened. The people of the earth began to forget who they were. They began to forget the power they help within themselves to heal and work together. And they forgot their relationship to Mother Earth herself. They became lost, frightened, and lonely. They longed for a deeper connection with the world. They began to build machines outside of themselves hat could duplicate the powers they dreamed of. They build machines to enhance their senses of sight and sound and other machines that could send healing into their bodies just the way their bodies used to create healing from within. 

We continue to be lost, frightened, and lonely. Until we remember who we are, we'll continue to clutter our lives with machines that mimic our greatest powers. The elders are describing our world today. Our civilization focuses more on the world around us and less on the world within us.

Once we remember who we are, we will no longer need the machines and our lives will become simple again. But here's the key: our lives will become simple because we've achieved the sophistication that frees us from the technology.

Resources

Berkana Institute: Berkana.org - community

Bioneers: Bioneers.org - holistic education

Institute of HeartMath - HeartMath.org - research

Post Carbon Institute - PostCarbon.org - local resources

Resilient Communities - ResilientCommunities.org

Transition Towns - TransitionUS.org