Resources to Nourish & Support You Through the Holidays

Dear friends and allies of The Shift Network,

It’s hard to believe that the holiday season is already upon us again. And we want to take just a moment to slow down and bask in the appreciation we are feeling for the people who are part of our extended Shift Network — and that includes YOU!

You are an essential part of our community — and we are thankful for your patronage, your desire to grow and evolve, and your willingness to “be the change” that’s needed on our planet.

We recognize that this past year has been filled with both beauty and hardship. There have certainly been unexpected gifts that have emerged, as we’ve traveled less and spent more time with a more intimate circle of connection.

But we cannot deny that so many people have felt deeply challenged by the combination of the ongoing pandemic and the environmental disasters — not to mention the continual political and racial tensions, which are complex and can seem too difficult to navigate.

We also know that holidays can also bring painful family wounds to the surface.

But if navigated with skill and care, the holidays can potentially provide opportunities for deeper connection — and even healing.

In the video below, you’ll hear a story about how two brothers, estranged for 20 years, were able to reconnect and find a healing path using some of the wisdom shared in this year’s ancestral healing offerings. And we know that healing, when needed, is possible for you too... in addition to cultivating a nourishing and joy-filled holiday season.

So we’ve put together a special edition of Catalyst to share a variety of resources — and we hope at least some of them will deeply serve you during this holiday time.

For those who are navigating through some challenging terrain with family or friends, we suggest the session with Miranda Macpherson on “Navigating the Holidays With and From Grace,” which includes a lovely, brief meditation. Suzi Tucker also has a powerful session on “Healing Family Wounds Using Family Constellation Work.” You might benefit from the “Lineage Clearing Ritual” that I co-created with my priestess sister Isis Indriya, or Reverend Dr. Tirzah Firestone’s powerful “Ancestral Help and Healing Tools for an Anxious World,” which was an important factor in this brief video story from Jeff Arch, Shift’s Archivist.

Below, you’ll find a potent “Family Conversation Toolkit for Racial Healing” designed by Aliah MaJon, our Chief Inclusion Officer (and her “Brain Trust” of allies) — as well as a accessable “Tip Sheet” to guide powerful conversations on political or other charged conversations (thanks to our allies from Living Room Conversations).

You’ll find a handful of other resources that we hope will nourish your heart and spirit, including a session on “Boosting Immunity Through Herbs and Essential Oils” with David Crow... “Transforming Anxiety Through Breathwork” with Anthony Abbagnano... “Qigong for Warmth Wellbeing” with Daisy Lee... and “Mindfulness and Meditation Practices for Families” with Mallika Chopra.

If you’d like to learn more about the impact work Shift is doing for social change, and about our philanthropic offerings as well, you might enjoy my recent interview, “Social Impact Heroes” with Authority magazine.

Also, did you know that about 20% of the gifts given at holiday time reportedly end-up in a landfill? Most people just don’t need more stuff!

So, as you are thinking about holiday gifts, please consider giving your friends and family a gift of TROPICAL TREES planted in their name! Shift is partnering with TreeSisters on a campaign to plant one million trees to help reforest the global tropics. A $25 donation from you would plant about 50 trees for your loved ones.

We hope these resources will support you and your loved ones to have an easeful and nourishing holiday season.

Please feel free to share the contents of this ezine with anyone who you feel might benefit. We are offering these resources as a “care package” from the heart of Shift Network into the heart of our global community.

Many blessings,
Devaa Haley Mitchell

P.S. We welcome your feedback on these resources as well as any stories that might emerge from engaging with them! We also invite you to share your ideas about what else would serve you in the future. You can reach our Impact Team at impact@theshiftnetwork.com.

Ancestral Help and Healing Tools for an Anxious World
Rabbi Dr. Tirzah Firestone

In this session, you’ll explore:

• How to call on your ancestors for wisdom and guidance regarding your current life issues
• How trauma works and how to address it in your own body... so you can help calm the current strife and turbulence in the world
• How contact with our ancestral allies can increase your sense of purpose and belonging in your life, as well as new channels of energy

Lineage Clearing Ritual
Devaa Haley Mitchell & Isis Indriya

In this session, you’ll explore:

• Ritual to bring in creator and destroyer energy, and a shake to lose everything from this year that has been challenging
• Ritual to call upon our highest self for forgiveness
• Meditation using the light of the sun to transform the heart

Silent Legacies: A Family Constellation Lens
Suzi Tucker

In this session, you’ll explore:

• Personal issues can be better understood and thus resolved within the larger context of the family lineage and the historical events that impacted it
• Our so-called patterns are usually connected with hidden loyalties that create the condition where we have one foot in the present and one in the past
• Family Constellation is a gorgeously democratic work in which people find in themselves what they may have always looked to others for

Boosting Immunity Through Herbs and Essential Oils: Formulas To Use At Home
David Crow (audio only)

In this session, you’ll explore:

• Primary herbs and oils for protecting the lungs and relieving digestive symptoms
• Enjoyable ways to relax the nervous system using herbs and oils
• Combining herbs and essential oils for musculoskeletal pain and inflammation

Qigong Practices to Generate Warmth & Wellbeing
Daisy Lee (audio only)

In this session, you’ll explore:

• A quick, easy Qigong technique to warm the body in a pinch — Hint: pinch!
• The one article of clothing that every Qigong practitioner has in his or her closet to protect their health — Hint: NOT hat, gloves, or boots!
• How to tap into the mind’s powerful force to warm or regulate the body

Navigating the Holidays With and From Grace
Miranda Macpherson

In this session, you’ll explore:

• How to tune in to your deepest intention
• The importance of an orientation of unconditional acceptance, for self and others, and of service
• A prayer and a meditation to support yourself and invoke grace in relationships, even if you’re alone for the holidays

Listen to the meditation from Miranda’s beautiful talk.
 

Transforming Anxiety through Breathwork
Anthony Abbagnano

In this session, you’ll explore:

• How to witness anxiety as an external force
• The Coherence breath technique
• The Transformer breath technique

Mindfulness and Meditation Practices for Families
Mallika Chopra

In this session, you’ll:

• Learn practices to help you feel more grounded, aligned, and centered
• Discover ways to use breath for more peace and clarity
• Explore how to use the I AM mantra and the simplicity of practice with mantra for children

Social Impact Heroes: Devaa & The Shift Network
By Yitzi Weiner

As part of my series about “individuals and organizations making an important social impact,” I had the pleasure of interviewing Devaa Haley Mitchell, the co-founder and Chief Impact Officer of The Shift Network, where she guides and oversees Shift’s social change initiatives as well as its philanthropic activities, leveraging its educational and network assets for the greatest public benefit.

Wopida Tanka: A Great and Living Thanksgiving to All!
Chief Phil Lane Jr. and Shannon Lane

Chief Phil and Shannon invite us to make our lives a “living Thanksgiving,” or Wopida. As we are filled with Thanksgiving and gratitude, our lives also naturally become filled with compassion, love, understanding, forgiveness, joy, happiness, and oneness.

Cultivating Indestructible Gratitude
Mark Matousek

Mark shares how we can have enough, be enough, and cultivate indestructible gratitude... which is a powerful antidote to the myth of insufficiency.

The Holidays, Racial Healing... & Our Gift to You of a Family Conversation Toolkit

From Rev. Dr. Aliah MaJon:

Family... This beautiful word has likely grown in its importance for you since the experiences of the pandemic. I know that for me during the times of COVID lockdowns, my family literally became my whole world. I would imagine that this was true for many of you reading this as well. For this issue, I’d like to take the importance of our families even further by pointing out that the people in our families can be powerful partners for engaging in racial healing work.

At this time of year, as we all come together with “love” in our hearts and goodwill in our minds, we can engage with our family and close friends in an intentional exploration related to healing the racial divide. Of course, I am smiling because I realize that a suggestion like this is a bit of a departure from our customary holiday activities, and maybe even a big ask. Which is why we have created an actual Family Conversation Toolkit to assist you and your loved ones to carry this out within a prescribed context and with key tools and an abundance of guiding questions. In other words, we thought it through for you so that you can just follow along.

The Family Conversation Toolkit was developed by myself and three of my colleagues who collaborated with me as Brain Trust members for The R.A.C.E. Project. Each of us took a section of the Toolkit to capture what we have learned as longtime professionals in the field. Meaning that each one of us as facilitators provides a different perspective, but the four offerings fit together to form a whole that is full of insights, suggestions, and easy-to-follow tools. We hope that the Toolkit serves you now and in the future. Please consider using it throughout the year.

By the way, you will be meeting the Brain Trust members shortly — just open the link to find us inside! We hope you enjoy exploring the gift of this Toolkit, and Happy Holidays to you and yours...

Family Conversation Toolkit: To Bring About Genuine Racial Healing Using Tips From 4 Seasoned Facilitators & the Power of Their Questions

Indigenous Heritage Month
From Rev. Dr. Aliah MaJon & Joy Donnell

November marks Indigenous Heritage Month in the United States, yet a majority of Americans still remain unaware of the reverberating trauma Indigenous people have suffered in the past and still endure today. "Honoring Race" is a special episode of Shift's Liberating Race podcast in which we make a humble contribution to this vital and necessary conversation. Special guest Dr. Joely Proudfit joins our hosts Aliah MaJon, Nick Mattos, and Joy Donnell to discuss land, America's complex founding, and the rich restorative opportunities that present when we maintain Native American futures as intrinsic to our global future.

Related References:

• Native Land Digital, a Canadian not-for-profit organization, strives to create and foster conversations about the history of colonialism, Indigenous ways of knowing, and settler-Indigenous relations.
• Native Time, an app that brings together complex historical information and Indigenous calendars, so that you don’t just read about Native American history through the app; you feel it.
• Sogorea Te' Land Trust, an urban Indigenous women-led land trust that facilitates the return of Indigenous land to Indigenous people.
• Land Acknowledgments Meant to Honor Indigenous People Too Often Do the Opposite
  By Elisa Sobo, Michael C. Lambert, and Valerie Lambert of Pocket
• To find out more about Dr. Joely Proudfit, click here.

The Shift App is here for you this holiday season! Never further than your phone and full of just-right bites of wisdom, relaxation, and insight, the Shift App helps you with all aspects of growing your best self and upleveling the world around you. Find tools to help you succeed in a way that’s aligned with your most audacious vision for your life. Whether you need help managing anxiety, want insight as you meet family members with differing opinions, or just want to relax with some of the most inspiring content on earth, we’ve got you covered.

The Shift Network partners with wisdom keepers from every lineage and every school of personal development, spirituality, and consciousness — to tune you in to the most enlightened teachings in the world. The app makes it easier than ever for you to access on-demand, life-changing content when it’s convenient for you. It’s rich in variety and depth, and is easily accessible to everyone — anytime and anywhere. Featured teachers and experts include Michael B. Beckwith, Marianne Williamson, Sandra Ingerman, Deepak Chopra, Dr. Judith Orloff, Bruce Lipton, Dereca Blackmon, Lee Holden, and many, many more.

With new content released each week, the Shift App is the perfect companion for Shifting your mindset with a morning meditation, midday pick-me-up, or evening gratitude practice. It’s the place to go to explore fresh perspectives on how we can change our world together — and put it into practice in the real world.

Are you experiencing stress or anxiety this holiday season? Or expecting to?

Often, we can’t control or even change our uncomfortable situations. However, we can learn to have power over how we react to them. Let the Shift App be your guide... helping you dive deeper into learning how to be mindful, calm, and happy in a stressful environment.

We invite you to access the app and claim more truth, beauty, and goodness in your life. When you shift your world, the ripples go everywhere!

First... Access the Shift App

Then... Do you need some support and insight about familial healing? This Ancestral Healing Journey will give you fresh insights and new ways to approach longstanding hurts.

AND... get insight on the power of care and curiosity with this mini-course on Radical Healing & Truth Telling from our very own Rev. Dr. Aliah MaJon.

The Shift Network is proud to support and partner with TreeSisters, a UK registered social change and reforestation charity that places tropical forest restoration into everyone’s hands. At our September Shift Music Festival and Visionary Summit, we kicked off our initiative to plant one million trees with TreeSisters — and we’re already a quarter of the way there!

Founded in 2012 by Clare Dubois, TreeSisters has so far funded the planting of over 20 million trees across 12 locations in Brazil, Borneo, Cameroon, India, Kenya, Mozambique, Madagascar, Nepal, and West Papua.

Yet, TreeSisters is so much more than funding trees. TreeSisters combines four of today’s big-ticket issues — gender, climate, behavior change, and ecological restoration — through large-scale tropical reforestation. They are unique in their grass roots, ethical, and holistic approach. They fund a diverse portfolio of tropical reforestation projects that are community-led, that expand natural forest cover, and that aim to avoid further deforestation. Projects are designed to support local communities and improve livelihoods, protect critically endangered species, and focus on gender parity and the participation of women. Their activities and methods offer a direct and measurable way to restore the web of life and mitigate climate change. Together, we are actively encouraging the cultural shift required to grow from a consumer to a restorative culture.

We invite you to JOIN and GROW the Shift Forest as a monthly donor with TreeSisters to stay in contact with their important work and avail yourself of their wonderful content.

Every donation is welcome, just as every tree counts, and every breath is a gift!

Trees make a great gift for those you love this holiday season!