At long last my book, Shift: Indigenous Principles for Corporate Change, is out and available for sale. Well, it’s actually been out for a couple of weeks now, but I haven’t yet had the chance to write a blog about it. So here it is.
Shift has been a labor of love, an evolving process, and an exploration both personal and professional. It is the culminating outflow of a lifetime of exploration into the nature of humanity and the way things work. Though, it is not that I had all the indigenous principles down pat and merely set myself to writing the book. It was more of a dynamically evolving and deepening exploration for me personally as I wrote, and then edited the book.
In Shift I have deeply explored thirteen indigenous principles and how to apply them to daily living, much of which leads us to a re-examination of our core values on an emotional, visceral and temporal basis. This is not a book about Native religion, rather about the principles that underlie Indigenous societies the world over which have kept them in a state of grace and harmony with nature for much longer than our recorded history can account.
The book itself has been written with the intent of taking the reader on a journey through a different set of cultural eyes, told from a person who’s come to live and work in two worlds, and who strives every day to merge the modern world with the ancient. It is my most sincere and heartfelt belief that if we are to continue to survive and thrive as a society, it will be because we have collectively adopted and infused our way of living, loving, and doing business with the value systems from our not-to-distant past—the time when our ancestors lived close to earth and embodied the values I’m referring to as the “Indigenous Principles.”
Our time for change is now. Most of us know this already. What we don’t necessarily know is how do we effect change on a mass scale that does not obliterate our economy and society in the process, but rather enables us to bring about radical change swiftly, and at the same time gently. A certain amount of gentleness is needed so that those who would go kicking and screaming have a chance to observe different paradigms for doing business before they are forced by changing conditions to make a decision about the direction they wish to go in.
In my reading of history I have never seen radical changes brought about forcefully as being an effective way of achieving a greater good, it only results in a changing of the guard. Real change that leads us in the direction of harmony with nature and with each other can only come about through the steady, consistent, enhancement and deepening of the value systems that underlie our society as a whole. This is the great wisdom that flows from the universal understandings of indigenous culture. Their way of life has a value system that places a high importance on values themselves. Their respect for elders and storytelling enables the passing of their wisdoms from one generation to the next without drift. Their respect for nature and ability to commune with her in an emotional visceral way enables a perpetuation of the single most important indigenous understanding—the interconnected nature of all life and the reciprocity with which we exist in balance with nature.
I invite you to journey with me, to purchase and read Shift, and to spread the word far and wide that we must return to the value systems that enabled our ancestors to live in harmony for eons of time.
You can purchase a copy online here. Or if you would like a signed copy we can arrange payment via PayPal or by check, and I will ship it to you personally—just reply to this email.
Also, April 24 is our first open-to-the-public culture workshop based on the work of Shift. It’s being held at the beautiful Laughing Waters Retreat Center in Gerton, North Carolina, just 30 minutes from downtown Asheville. Click here for more info.
I look forward to journeying with you.
