Co-creating Healthy Communities

At the center of Life is Learning for me and this is why I put LifeLong Learning as the number one priority in creating Healthy Communities.  I also do this because as I reflect back over my best memories, I'm reminded of the comfort in the small village of Ole Alexandria where I grew up and then of the campus life at St. Luke's School of Theology back in the day when it was fifty years ahead of its time.  To synthesize the profound meaning of both would be the natural environments and experience truly rich in shared ‘working’ wisdom that has the most reality to me.

In both Ole Alexandria, the village, and St. Paul School of Theology, the institution, the people were about interpreting 'life lessons'.  Value was placed on our environment, experience, shared stories based on knowledge gained for certain, but more importantly good deeds done (meaning more giving and less talking or taking for that matter).  Therefore, because both illustrate ‘healthy’ in the truest sense of the term today, it would be my intention and attention to recreate more of this locally. 

As I began to search out similar communities, as to not reinvent the wheel, what was showing up with the greater resonance with me today was: Bravewell Collaborative that embraces the top ten teaching medical institutions such as:  Duke Universities Integrative Medical Center or Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at UCSF.  Then adding: the Fetzer and Omega Institute, Noetic Science (Living Deeply and Worldwide Literacy Projects),  P. Senge’s Society of Learning,  M. Wheatley's Berkana Institute and her most recent work Walk Out, Walk On, just to name a few of the many places that I love. 

Now having said this I'm a huge Walt Disney fan, and like Disney growing up in a small rural area of Missouri, have a similar dream of recreating this ideal culture through a highly planned community concept to celebrate health.  Where Walt and I might do this differently from his Celebration Health creation, is the focus on what Daniel Goleman has labeled, Social Intelligence.  To create a sustainable, authentic culture it must be balanced wholistically from an emotional/heart center or it becomes 'unreal' which becomes ‘unhealthy’.

Peter Senge says this, and want to leave on this note "When we give up this illusion (referring to our separate, unrelated force fields) -we can then build "learning organizations," organizations where people continually expand their capacity to create the results they truly desire, where new and expansive patterns of thinking are nurtured, where collective aspiration is set free, and where people are continually learning how to learn together.” 

Wellness Without Walls, Creating Healthy Communities

In the beginning of evolving Wellness Without Walls, there was total chaos in my attempt to synthesize whole health into my work.  Chaos theory, fortunately, was introduced to me through the work of Tom Peters over 25 years ago.  I was creating a comprehensive residential rehab for battered women and children where recidivism was high.   What was needed was both another way to break the cycle of family violence, and heal it.

People often resist change because it is messy and chaotic.  However, here it is twenty-five plus years later and I'm creating a comprehensive approach to healthcare.  The process is the same only with more complex systems, but not more complex than when I was working to build United Methodist Churches back in the late 70's and early 80's.  Back then my brilliant McDonnell Douglas engineers would say something like, "When things aren't going well, we've had to resist the temptation to fall back to the perceived safety for our old, rigid, structures.  But we know that the growth, the creativity, the opening up, the energy improves only if we hold ourselves at the edge of chaos."  These executives were genius for certain.

This would have started my compelling call to create community from the edge and I'm still doing it today.  Why, because once we become clear about 'the call' there is a Self, capital (S) that gets in motion.  Within the motion, is a need to find meaning and there is a desire to have our life be the message of that meaning.  Living systems thrive on the stability and chaos.  Too much chaos and it can't take root and grow, too much order, it atrophies and dies.

In creating health communities we focus on LifeLong Learning, Authentic Lifestyles, Integrating the meaning of our Life as our Message.  You are invited to experiment with us on these three principles: you try on a new approach, ask questions, learn, and see what happens with who you become.  Fritjof Capra, author, physicis writes, "A Living system is a learning system."  If we are serious about creating a future worth living, we need to get serious about what we are learning.