Latest Adventures: Parliament of World’s Religions, IDGs summit, and more

Dear friends,

As war is now raging in the Middle East, I feel very saddened and more worried about our future. Before looking for any solutions, I just want to invite you like I did to just feel the pain on both sides and send compassionate and healing energies. 

Like many of you, I have asked myself what I can do about it and it just reinforced my motivation to keep spreading the Politics of Being message, planting seeds of peace, even if they have to take decades to ripen.

I also needed to take care of my well-being and had a good break in August, in which I was able to let go of my work and touch deep peace in the vast plain of the American middle west. 

Indeed my wife Emelina and I went to the Parliament of World’s Religions in Chicago, where we offered a session on “Sacred Ancestral Sites : The path to energetic balance”. It felt good to share almost for the first time publicly this part of our work and opened a space for that discussion in this event, together with our panelists and friends : Ejna Fleury, Steven Newcomb, Mindahi Bastida and Ken Kitatani. As always - it is my third in-person parliament - it was an opportunity to meet great people - like candidate for US president Marianne Williamson, or  world’s leading researcher on compassion James Doty -  and share my work with them. I was also moved personally with my encounter with a Sufi Teacher Sheikha Maryam Kabeer, through which I could feel new perspectives for my own path. 

We then embarked on a  8 day road trip with our Lakota relative Ejna Fleury - whom my wife dreamt about 30 years ago - across South Dakota (through Wisconsin and Minnesota). We went to her Crow Creek Sioux reservation where had the chance to be part of a Powwow, and met the reservation chief, Peter Lengkeek, who shared with us a beautiful story he received from his grandmother on our relationships with Mother Earth and the plant and animal nations. After a sweat-lodge, we were then able to travel to different Lakota sacred sites such as the Badlands, the Black hills and Bear Mount. It was also a healing journey, from the trauma we could see in native communities to Wounded Knee, where an important massacre occured in 1890 I was able to personally relate to. 

On behalf of my work with the UNDP-convened Conscious Food Systems Alliance, I also made my way to the Inner Development Goals summit in Stockholm at the beginning of this month, which was another opportunity to meet like-minded global leaders, and share my work. I had in particular a beautiful connection with Nipun Mehta, who, I felt, has an important piece of the puzzle I am trying to put together, in particular on how to design institutions that  bring out the best of everyone, our intrinsic motivation to serve, as he does with his organization Service Space. It was a month after I recorded with his team a beautiful podcast which allowed me to reconnect with some lovely memories. 

I am also honored to have contributed a chapter “An Upshifted Development Path: The Politics of Being” to the book The Great Upshift: Humanity's Coming Advance Toward Peace and Harmony on the Planet edited by Ervin Laszlo and David Lorimer which just came out. In this publication, the world-renowned scientists and visionaries who contribute to this book focus on the most burning question of all: how can we upshift ourselves - our ways of healing, of thinking and feeling, and even of intuiting - to respond to the pressing requirements of our time? You can find your copy here!

Finally, Emelina and I are about to head to India with a small cohort where we will meet the Dalai Lama. I am so honored by this opportunity and will certainly tell you more about it in the next Newsletter!

Stay tuned, with love!

Thomas