Shift Happens: Journey to Sustainable Behavior

JEM is pleased to announce a new partnership with authors/trainers Lee Van Ham and David Miller that makes available a new program about the metanoia process, Shift Happens: Journey to Sustainable Behavior. In these times of rapid and disturbing economic and ecological change, the material looks at how each of us goes through the very personal experience of adopting a new world view, examines how the experience can disrupt all we have assumed in the past, and then guides participants on to making new personal choices and to helping change the institutions in which they have a role.

There is a movement building. The magnitude of this movement challenges us all to enact deep and lasting change. The need for this movement confronts us like never before. Our work is healing our planet and ourselves, moving into an era of cooperation with all of creation.

Our work needs to impact long-term structural change. The process for such change calls on us to discover our deepest values, applying them in our households, our organizations, and our communities.

Our work, then, is shifting our consciousness; shifting the world to operate from a different paradigm. We call the processes of such shifting "Metanoia," the Greek word for changing how we perceive things, our world view, and our resulting actions.

The following is from the introduction to the workbook:

"What shapes our lives? Listen to the stories that we tell, the symbols that attract us, and the metaphors we speak. All of these make the texture and weave of the paradigm that holds and guides our lives. A paradigm is like a set of eye-glasses, lenses through which we view our experiences in the world. We tell our stories from that perspective or paradigm whether we are conscious of our para­digm or not. But we know ourselves better, and we are more aware of why we do what we do when our paradigm is known to us and we use it with consciousness.

"Much of the power of paradigms comes from the way they function below the surface of our lives. We don't see them directly, which gives them all the more power over us. But the more attentive we become to the metaphors, symbols, and stories we use, the better we can come to know our paradigm. Knowing our paradigm can help us change to a different one as needed."

For a closer look inside this Workbook, see the sample pages.

Training sessions for organizations, congregations, and college campuses are available by contacting the JEM office. The program is presented in ten 2-hour sessions.

Four Elements Emphasized in the Metanoia Processes

The Metanoia Processes focuses on four elements that are essential in the changes now needed and already underway.

 Sacred — increasing our daily awareness that all things are sacred; that wonder, awe, and mystery abound, countering all efforts to reduce life to efficiency, formula, ideology, or commodity;

Otherness — encountering what isn't in our comfort zone, the inconvenient, the different, the unknown, ignored emotions, previously denied ideas;

Time — intentional time to be attentive to movement, to review change, to grow group consciousness; to be patient with the gradualness of change while paradoxically embracing peak moments of instant reorientation;

Open space — an invitation, a circle of gathering where the space is intentionally held open for all. Safe and sacred space where we can build a collective consciousness of what life commonly can often exclude.