Have you started preparing for the Era of the Virus? Assuming you love your children and families and desire a life of accomplishment, health, joy, and security for them, start now! Let us explore how to make it our Era for Positive Change.
Our Opportunity: Porvida Living
Regardless of our experience we all have big choices to make. We can ignore the evolving realities and trust all will be fine, or allow ourselves to become overwhelmed by our current circumstances. Or, a more positive and responsible choice is that we seize the opportunity to prepare ourselves and families to survive, maintain our health, and even thrive during these changing and trying times.
Despite the optimistic forecast by some national leaders, COVID19 is bringing forth a new reality of foreseeable and unpredictable challenges. Presently, some of us live fortunate lives and are even able to enjoy this stay-at-home period, yet many of us are working-class people feeling the challenging impacts of the virus. We are worried about possible illness and are already experiencing isolation, job loss, more tasks and less time, depression, frightened young people, even the dying of loved ones.
It is time to draw upon our love and history of perseverance and prepare ourselves and our families. We can be more courageous, hopeful, and skilled at being positive and collaborative, and so can our families.
My Recommendation: Porvida Living
I am a futurist, therapist, leadership trainer, and indigenous healer, and I recommend that we choose love, hope, and power in meeting our challenging and begin creating a life-style of conscious choices to create good for ourselves, our families and communities.
Over 40 years ago, I cofounded one of the first mental health centers in the country, drawing upon indigenous and working-class wisdom to nurture individual and family healing. Shortly after, I did my doctoral studies in public health with a focus on our future and on people empowerment. Based on this study and experience, I came to the realization that the virus epidemic and other social calamities would occur, and also developed a deep commitment to create personal, family, and organizational tools to prevent the worst scenarios of these transformative times and prepare us to live as courageous healers and movers of positive change.
To become our best and meet the challenges, I developed the practice of proactive leadership and porvida living. Proactive leadership is based on radical love and the commitment to advance a world of justice and respect for all people. Porvida is choosing a lifestyle committed to becoming your best person and advancing life, love, and positive change in all our intentions and interactions.
Three Essentials to Survive & Thrive
My intent here is to urge you to become the person and leader your family needs to survive and thrive; and to consider three essentials to reaching this outcome.
1. Become the family facilitator. First, realize you cannot survive on you own. You will need your family, which includes everyone you regard as family, whether blood-related or not; and they will need you. For this reason, consider stepping up to serve as the family facilitator, the person who initiates, encourages, and makes easier the conversations families need for them to connect, coordinate, heal, problem-solve, and plan.
Already, many of us are experiencing the strains and trials of living closely together during this stay-at-home requirement. Many of us made this period bearable, and even enjoyable, by engaging in active communication. As we move forward, the demands and stresses will become greater, and we will need to be even more proactive, caring, and involve ourselves in intelligent communication. Therefore, one or more people are needed in our family networks to serve as family facilitators.
The word “facilitator” comes from the Latin word “facil” meaning “easy.” The facilitator recognizes the need for communication and responds. The need may be for parents to express the financial burdens the family is facing, for children to ventilate their fears and disappointments, or for the group to feel hope, love, or mutual support. Recognizing these concerns, the facilitator responds by initiating one-to-one conversations or organizing family or household conversations.
There are simple and advanced tools you can learn to be the family facilitator. I include many of these in my book, Family Activism, written several years ago to aide activists advance the positive changes we desire in the world beginning with our own families.
2. Develop your personal health and power. To fully be the ideal facilitator for your family, you need to develop the practices required to become your best, be healthy, and know how to create accomplishments. You need to commit to personal development to become more confident in being yourself and trusting your loving instinct.
The porvida perspective includes at its foundation several of the big truths of our universe: We are all spirits in this human journey; our inherent spirit is “for life, love, and positive change,” and our life purpose includes maturing our potential to be and create love. Recognizing or deciding to accept these truths takes us a long way forward in developing our confidence and inherent wisdom to make good happen.
When we grow to accept and embrace our love energy as our spirit essence, we raise our energetic vibration to become more open to an array of practices to revitalize ourselves, access our wisdom, strengthen our positivity, and optimize our ability for accomplishment. We more readily accept the use of breathing, dialogue, physical exercise, yoga, tai-chi, meditation, prayer, and reflection to achieve the strength, intelligence, and wherewithal to better achieve our goals.
3. Expand your survival wisdom and action. Survival will require not only making the most of the energy of love to lift ourselves and others, it will also entail that we find ways to consume less, build our survival skills, and take personal and group action to care for and protect our families and communities.
Start by doing self-care for your body and emotional wellness. Learn and adopt practices to increase and maintain the health of your body, mind, emotions, and spirit. Essential is healthy food, water, exercise, inspiration, and quality relationships. With your partners or family, find ways to support personal and mutual care, perhaps by learning and engaging in activities together.
Turn away from senseless news and video games to learn skills to aide your survival, such as growing food, cooking, sewing, repairing, exercising, using computer technology, or developing highly desirable skills, etc. Survival will also require us to elect and support thousands of leaders who are committed to the well-being of all people and our Mother Earth, so decide how you can step forward or elect the people we need.
Start by bringing your family or support network together and planning for survival. Clarify what survival and success means for your family and develop plans and commitments for learning and mutual support. Remember that survival also requires being joyful and happy, so identify those practices you can use to support your group’s positivity and hope. Plan for and celebrate the wonderful qualities of life together, like accomplishments, anniversaries, birthdays, new births and honorings for those who have passed to spirit life.
How to Begin
There is much more to be said about preparing to survive and thrive, and porvida living. It begins with you courageously deciding to increase your leadership to battle for what is good for you and your family. Do this and your mind begins to recognize what needs doing and the wisdom you possess. You might decide to begin with your personal development or by being the facilitator that brings your family together for necessary and meaningful conversations.
What is essential is to begin taking positive action toward positive ends!. Blessings for you and your family.
Porvida 