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Part 1

Dear Friends,

Two days ago I returned home after an amazing five days of teaching, learning, and connecting with kindred spirits at the Rethinking Everything conference in Dallas, Texas. The gathering brought out so much from within me that I'm still "grokking" the experience!

Since returning, I haven't sent out the usual Daily Groove — partly because I was catching up on sleep :) but mostly because it just felt right to suspend the familiar while making room for new insights and greater possibilities to come into focus.

Over the next few days, I'm going to share pieces of a new vision that has been percolating since even before last week's conference. It's not only a revision of my work, but also of what we can accomplish together — as parents, as partners, and as visionary "cultural creatives."

The good ol' Daily Groove will return soon, though it too will see changes. I think you're going to love where we're going!

If you're a member of the PATH Program, watch the PATH Forums for an upcoming announcement about some exclusive opportunities to participate in the Next Big Thing. (To become a member, click here.)

In Part 2... The ONE thing most of us are sorely missing.

Stay tuned...

Part 2

So... What is the one thing most of us are sorely missing?

In a word: tribe.

While I am always the first and last person to say that the problems we face are best solved from the inside out, I keep bumping into an undeniable fact: Our biggest problems are made bigger (if not caused) by the social structures and norms that arise from our culture of alienation.

We are "social animals" living in artificial environments that are antisocial by design. From housing to commerce to family structures to legal systems, too much of modern life reflects the values of separation, competition, suspicion, and "every man for himself" instead of connection, creativity, trust, and partnership.

We've come to accept this as normal. It's "just the way things are." And most of us are able to adapt well enough and make the best of it... That is, until we have children!

Children come into the world biologically pre-programmed with a lot of needs that were easily met in the social environment to which our species adapted — the tribe. But children's needs (and thus parents' needs, too) are extremely difficult to meet in a society where isolated nuclear families are expected to substitute for the village it takes to raise a child.

Nice try... but one or two parents do not a village make.

Now imagine a community where you not only know your neighbors, but you know them intimately and you feel safe being completely authentic with them. Where you never feel the drain of being "social" because the social you and the real you are one and the same. Where everyone feels relaxed about giving and receiving support — including parenting support — which flows and balances organically without keeping score. Where the desperate need for "time to myself" disappears as evolved social structures eliminate the need for self-sacrifice.

You may now be wondering if I'm going to start advising people to don loincloths and relocate to the nearest jungle, or form communes, or build "intentional communities." The answer is no, no, and no. Those paths may be right for many families, but I'm still committed to the process of transformation from the inside out.

I will continue to promote inside-out strategies -and- I'm going to start integrating the vision and spirit of tribe more directly into my teaching and support services.

(More to come...)

Part 3

Perhaps you've had this experience before: You awaken from a dream that FELT incredibly clear, vivid, and detailed, but when you try to describe the dream you can't seem to recall ANY of the details!

That's sort of what I've been experiencing with the new vision that inspired this series of posts. I can FEEL it as a whole, but many of the particulars have been eluding me for several days. So I've decided to stop "pushing the river" and just wait for the answers to flow to me. Meanwhile, I'll share a few pieces of the picture, with the caveat that it's still very much a work in progress...

The biggest change in the focus of my work will be a shift from parent-child relationships to ALL partnerships: including adult partners (married or not), intimate friendships, extended families, and "tribes" of every kind, from informal community groups to schools, businesses, spiritual groups, etc.

The common thread is what I am calling "The PATH Vision" -- a model for relationships based on Partnership, Authenticity, Trust, and Heart (PATH). Any group of two or more people can enact this model and experience profound benefits, including reduced stress and greater well-being, inner peace, love, freedom, joy, creativity, power, connection, and purpose.

Supporting parent-child partnerships will continue to be my primary concern because that's where the biggest difference can be made.

Any day now, I'm going to launch a new blog to write about and promote the PATH Vision, and you'll be able to subscribe to the blog posts by email. The writing will be reminiscent of The Daily Groove, philosophically, but it will be more personal, and it will address both parenting and non-parenting scenarios. For us parents, I believe this variety will help us internalize the PATH Vision as a whole-life mindset that goes beyond parenting.

The more we internalize the PATH Vision, the easier it will be to create circumstances that meet our need for tribe, as described in Part 2. Healthy tribes form naturally and more-or-less spontaneously when the PATH is clear, and life begins to work a little closer to the way nature intended.

~ Scott