Changing World Lessons
Paint your own life, not by the numbers, but with simple guidelines!
Seventeen years ago, I started writing the changing world handbook. While the new world is now here, know that all the lessons in the handbook still apply to us today. I want to add some important details to help the dragons be stronger for our new world.
A simple truth: Many people will refuse to see or live in this new world. It isn’t your job to bring people across into the new world. Focus instead on these 20 points of life. Only try to help a little at a time, dance around, and avoid getting stuck at one point.
This is the fast version of everything you need to do. Remember that each sentence in the following list can turn into a decade-long learning process!
I made a video of a class based on this post. Watch the class here: Working with Changing Times
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Evolving in Life as a Dragon in Our Changing World
#1) Live with kindness. (Work toward the essence of the situation or relationship)
#2) Simplify your life to be more flexible and adaptable.
#3) If you find yourself in conflict, then find the judgment in play to release or work around that judgment.
#1a) Avoid living in the wrong places. Instead, seek the best-fit places with the problems you can grow against. (P.S. There are no right places, but wrong places abound! Also, what is wrong for each person is different) Hidden Lesson: This is actually point #1. See point #8
#1b) Practice being healthy and comfortable in your body. Hidden Lesson: This is actually point #1.
#1c) Explore Spirit (Move in life, connect with others, and see the bigger picture). Yes, again, this is point #1. Now a more profound lesson, we often have to expand something into several different perspectives in order to really learn the lesson.
#4) Practice expanding your awareness. We need awareness to work with essence. Without awareness, you will react against the times rather than evolve through the times.
3a) You are not the editor of other people’s stories. (note this is an extension of #3 practicing nonjudgment)
5) If something doesn’t bring you joy, change it up or make the situation into training or a learning experience. This is a merging of #1 and #4. If you are not touching upon joy you are moving away from your essence. Without expanding your awareness our society will numb you to the point you cannot feel joy (or anything else for that matter).
6) Discover love is being more. Evolution requires a person to change and, over time, become more in that change. Love of oneself and love from another helps us support our process of evolution over time. Beware of others who hold you back in love because then it isn’t love if they are holding you back from being yourself.
7) Don’t focus on what the world is becoming; focus on what you are becoming. This is a merging of #1, #4, and #6. Now, an interesting truth: simple steps can merge together to form unique and newer insights!
#3b) Don’t save others, yet kindly support others in nonjudgment. If they can’t embrace and return nonjudgment, then give them space. (This will save you and countless more souls than if you worked at it more forcefully.
6a) Build / Reinforce / Be active in 1-3 communities. We are wired to be social as much as individuals. We need love to be more, and all our communities should help us be more!
1d) Empower yourself. (Be aware of how you define yourself.) If possible, relative to your essence, strive to be the author of your own story. (This is exploring Mind.) While this stems from lesson 1, we practice it later since we have to account for many factors in our lives, such as our community. This is why working to evolve is complicated and a back-and-forth process. Empower yourself too fast, and others will hold you back, or you will find unnecessary conflict.
1e) Release abuse. Abuse is when someone or an organization takes away your power. If you try to resolve the abuse before you empower yourself, the abusers will always win. Why? Because they will steal your power for themselves or break you down to prevent you from using your power to escape. So the first step of empowerment is releasing the abuse de-powering you. This step has many hidden truths buried in it for how to accomplish releasing abuse.
7) Focus on your own hidden truths to build upon. You don’t have to share everything with everyone; you are allowed to have a private side.
1f) Stand behind your own public truths with finesse. You are allowed to have your own public appearance. People have a terrible habit of giving up their power. People get killed for not fitting in, which is more true than ever.
8) Most things that seem different will fall into one of these bullet points. By expanding your awareness, you will learn to spot patterns and condense the million things of life into this easier short list of things to work on.
Is doing all this complicated? Actually, yes, it is. You have to do it all, or you are missing something in your life.
I spent the last 20 years actively refining and exploring each point. It’s a lifelong process, but dancing between these points makes life worth living. The trick is you do it all, but not all at once/ At times, you focus on one point. At times you juggle 3 points. At times you dance and switch points around.
Also, each of these bullet points expands into a book’s worth of material. Each point can look different for each person and evolve over time to mean so much more than what it meant when you were younger.
This month’s Tao class will examine using the Urban School of Taoism to complement and support these 10,000 actions. I left two blank spots out of 20 so I can put in an extra 2 points for the class.
10,000 actions? Yep, 10,000 actions. In Taoism, when something becomes infinite, we call it the 10,000 things. In reality, these 8 points can expand out in countless ways. That is part of the problem: so much is changing, and we can create an infinite list to track how to change. At some point, it overwhelms a person, and they stop evolving in response. At that point, abusers will step in to define you.
These 20 (yes 18) bullet points are enough of a template to get you through any rough moments in life or social challenges you may face in these changing times.
Finally, notice that most of the steps are 1x variations of the kindness rule, which means the root truth is to be kind. Learning to understand the essence of each situation will give you the keys to evolving with grace.
2024 Additional Retreat Details
In June, I announced Summer Dragon Retreats only for dragons through October.
Historically, our retreats are personal retreats, meaning a retreat is only you or you and your family.
Julie and I also decided to offer two group retreats for a community-style retreat if enough dragons want to come together. This will give dragons a chance to come together in-person.
Here are the two group retreat options we will offer for Dragons.
Couples Group Retreat for Relationship Play.
One group retreat option would be for couples. If enough couples want to retreat together, we can coordinate a group relationship retreat with several couples. This retreat would be for 3-5 couples.
General Group Retreat for Everyone.
The topic would be everything we teach (except relationships). We would focus the retreat on what people specify their interests towards. As you know, our teachings cover everything, yet it’s the same teaching of kindness, awareness, and empowerment. So, the retreat will focus on how to use these teachings across one’s entire life; topics can include Work, Family, Spiritual Exploration, and Personal Improvement. This retreat would be for 8 to 16 people.
Retreat Details
We may only do one of these two retreats, depending on your interest.
Timing would be based on everyone’s availability. We could hold this retreat any time between October 2024 and April 2025, so we have enough time to put it all together.
The cost will be reasonable since it will be a larger retreat, and we can balance out the costs for everyone to make it more affordable. But we won’t know the costs until we determine how many people are actually interested in each option.
Location: The retreat is open ended right now and the goal is to hold it somewhere accessible to the dragons interested. We are thinking about renting a place in Sedona or somewhere similar where we could host a group.
Contact us for either retreat option.
The challenge will be coordinating it with everyone!
Awakening Dragon Lineage
Last Month’s Urban Tao Lesson
Class 3 – Urban Tao & Living in 2024 and Beyond
This class will use Urban Tao teachings and apply it to today’s topic of Changing World Lessons.
We will talk about how Taoism traditionally handled changing times and how to use the 20 points of change in your life.
Taoism succeeds in four ways:
- Living a healthy, long lifestyle.
- Surviving repression and social unrest.
- Helping individuals empower their personal lives.
- Teaching spiritual practices
Taoism fails in three ways.
- Taoism failed to improve government and large-scale systems despite being very political in its core teachings.
- Taoism did not promote or work with social change. We can simplify it as follows: classical Wu Wei attitudes actually helped stagnate China.
- It couldn’t create a larger more unified community based in kindness. It’s hard to unify together overly individualist souls living kindly. While Taoism succeeded at the individual level, it failed at the community level. But to be fair, Buddhism and Christianity also failed in China.
Sadly, Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be) attitude doesn’t help people or society evolve.
It also turns out that trusting people to do what is best through acts of kindness doesn’t work as a basis of government. A few abusive people can quickly accumulate power and undercut people living with a Taoist baseline. The problem is that Classical Taoism skips a few of the steps I outlined (such as releasing abuse) as a path for evolving through times of change. There is good reason for this, as the Yellow Emperor destroyed many religions and groups 2000 years ago. Ironically, Taoism only survived the massive purges by removing these teachings to survive!
These facts are part of the reason I started Awakening Dragon Taoism, as I didn’t want people to get trapped by some of the flaws in Classical Chinese Taoism. I truly believe the older base of Taoism is solid but the Chinese political modifications of Taoism over the last 2000 years was disastrous.
As more and more people are pulled to Taoism to survive the repression of our times, I think it is very important to teach people to not only make Taoism their own, but to learn of the social failures of Taoism.
It is time to learn from this 2000-year-old experiment and make changes so we don’t leave our descendants in a bigger mess.
The video for the class can be watched here:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/online-retreat-3-108395136
Upcoming Community Live Streams
Join our Personal Tao Membership for monthly live streams via Zoom! Join and be part of the creation of the our new School!
- Sept 6th (Friday) @ 8:30 am HST / 7:30 pm London~ Tao Talk Learning the New Taoism Teachings from Our Urban SchoolThis will be lesson #4 Personal Life Destinations
- Sept 8th @ 9am HST ~ Dragon Writing Group (Closed Group)
- Sept 14th (Sat) @ 8:30 am HST / 7:30 pm London~ Relationship Corner Dragon Buddies / Relationship Corner coming together to talk about relationships. This month we will focus more on a relationship talk.
- September 22nd @ 9am HST ~ Dragon Writing Group (Closed Group)
- Sept 24th (Tuesday) @ 1:30 pm HST / 9:30 am 25th Sydney ~ Community ChoiceWe are changing this live stream to be a community choice. If you want meditation we will do meditation, if you want party we party… Email us or comment below for your choices
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