I’m just back from a short trip to Beirut to help launch the Awakening the Dreamer work in the beautiful country of Lebanon. I’m moved, delighted and so, so happy to have seen Beirut for myself and felt the incredible warmth of its people.

Beirut has such a tortured history, over centuries of occupation, through a civil war between 1975 and 1990 and bombarded by its southern neighbour, Israel, as recently as 2006. Its difficult for me to imagine what mindset is needed to live within this sense of insecurity. Before I visited, as I skyped with my Lebanese host, the wonderful Rony Mecattaf, there were some loud bangs in the background at his end, “Just fireworks Jon” he quickly interjected.

So last Wednesday Rony had organised a symposium for over one hundred folks, running immediately after a short conference to bring awareness to the environmental movement in Lebanon. This was hosted by BankMed, a local organisation already running a series of projects in their own Happy Planet campaign.  I shared a stage with the Minister for the Environment in Lebanon, just 2 weeks in office and with a budget no larger than the Pachamama Alliance for all that needs to be done in a country where the famous cedars are disappearing and the view of the Mediterranean reveals a yellow haze and unregulated development has allowed an ugly sprawl of buildings out into the countryside.

Some peple had reservations about how ready Lebanon was for the message of change carried in the symposium – and once again the event worked.  I’ve had the privilege now to take this into a whole range of cultures, different countries, varying levels of education and awareness and the symposium continues to do the job, reacing people’s hearts and helping them to choose response-ability and action over denial and distraction.  Rony and myself, plus our wonderful  sister Aline Wauters, a facilitator from Belgium, had the fun of leading the symposium, the first public outing of V-2 anywherein the world.

Over 40 of the 100+ people present want to be further trained by us to help spread the message and of these a dozen beautiful souls were able to join us the very next day for a one-day training.  Outside Beirut, up in the mountains, we were able to help this new group, Dream Green, to step even more fully into an active role as change agents in the world.

And we met wonderful people elsewhere too.  A local Sufi group organised a zikr and invited us to join them.  Here we were introduced to this powerful and very beautiful prayer ceremony in which the word of God is repeated over and over aloud as a means of experiencing the presence of that which is called God, Allah, the Source or Creator. Thank you to Sheikh Wassim and to my new friends, Sirine amongst them, for tis beautiful invitation to see that the divine connects and unites us accross traditions rather than divides.

The Name of Allah

The hospitality I enjoyed, the welcome I felt and the warm hearts of the Lebanese are all saying “come see our country, see our culture, see we are your brothers and sisters.”  I am delighted to do what I can from now to help to bridge these two world, the Anglo-Saxon and the Arab, to overcome and set aside the misunderstandings and division which have bedevilled us and to awaken together into a world which needs us all to collaborate as never before.

Today, 25th of September 2009, is the first day of the Global Gathering of Awakening the Dreamer facilitators around the world.  On 5 continents there are groups coming together to celebrate all that we are doing in 40 or more countries around the world spreading the message of awakening.  So there is no better day than this to share the latest news from China.

United International College in Zhuhai, China , is the first full-scale cooperation in higher education between the Mainland and Hong Kong. Its mission is to build a new model for liberal education in China and to nurture talented future graduates with international perspectives so it is just thrilling to know that the school is beginning to embed the Awakening the Dreamer symposium in its Whole Person Education curriculum.  The inspiration for this is Paul Wong, a faculty member with a strong background of activism within China.  Paul was introduced to the symposium in Hong Kong and trained there as a facilitator so that he could take the message back to his work at UIC – Paul, we salute you.

So the symposium is alive and growing within one of the most innovative approaches to tertiary education in China, and through this will become available to secondary and maybe even primary education there.  The approach is also a model of what’s possible in every other country in the world, so please feel free to spread this inspiration far and wide.

UIC students engaged in the symposium

And here are some of their comments, which just remind me of our shared humanity, regardless of nationality, race or other differences;

这节课印象最深的事一段十分钟的视频，沉重的话题，令人震撼的画面与数字令我不得不反思“Where are we”和“How did we get here”, 令我不得不思考那些我以前觉得不关我事的问题。很高兴有这次机会给了我思考环境的问题。

——冯叶 文化产业管理 大二

今天看了不少Video, 对其中一个讯息有很深的印象，“我们以为科技可以带我们做更多，处理问题，怎料在过程中也给人类带来不少的麻烦。”会把这个当作提醒，今天享受的时候也要记得自己为地球也要负上责任。

——Lam Lok Yan 社会工作与社会行政管理 大二

In today’s class, I’ve seen many ruthless truths from the 3 steps of topics. I got shocked every time I see the videos. To me, and also to human beings, environmental protections should be an obligation.

——冯羽 会计 大二

Through this workshop, I knew more about danger of the environment and the earth. We not only need to know the impact, but also need to do more and make a contribution to the earth.

——陈欣 会计大二

For the environmental sustainability on this planet, I realize I can protect the trees, avoid using one-used products and encourage more people to protect our earth.

——陈欣 会计大二

For the environmental sustainability on this planet, I realize I can change the life style of mine and try to do more good things for our earth.

——Peng Cheng会计大二

For the environmental sustainability on this planet, I realize I can cherish the resources surrounding myself, meanwhile, I need to encourage other people beside myself to do something for our planet

——马可 会计大二

I’ve just got back from an extraordinary trip to Tamale, a town in northern Ghana, taking the Awakening the Dreamer message to the less developed world for the first time.

The trip was made possible by the vision of Mohammed Awal Yakubu, a young Ghanian determined to end the deforestation of the country he was witnessing in his Agricultural Studies.  Of his own initiative he had reached out to the Awakening the Dreamer Iniative and we had supplied him with the means to produce an Awakening the Dreamer Symposium, which he took, by 6 hour taxi ride, right out to the rural communities where the deforestation was a way of life.  You can see more of this story here.

So it was with excitement and some trepidation that I set off to Ghana from South Africa.  Arriving late at Accra I was met by Awal’s brother Hassan and his buddy – they took me to the nearby airport hotel because I needed to be back at the airport early the next morning.  My travel options to get to Tamale were the 75 minute internal flight or a 12 hour journey on the bus, and I can tell you much as the bus would have allowed me wonderful insights into the country and a chance to get to know, I mean really get to know,someone else’s chickens I was up for the flight.  Trouble is I was told in advance I could only buy a ticket at the airport, so I needed to be there 4.30 am to try to get a ticket.

“The flight’s full” was the first response I heard, my heart sank, not only the chicken run but a vital days planning with Awal missed.  “I’d really lke to be on that flight and I am only now arriving in Ghana to buy a ticket” curiously enough seemed to be all I needed to say for the charming check-in lady to decide the flight was no longer full and indeed before 7.30 I was arriving in Tamale to be greeeted by Awal and Torfik, his ever-smiling buddy and fellow change-maker, here are the pair of them with Selima, Awal’s beautiful girlfriend who was also on the team.

Awal, Selima and Torfik

We had a day to plan the final details of the events and for me to look around some of this amazing town, trying to get a feel for the people, the culture and how people live.  One of the beauties of travel is that we get taken to perspectives we’ve never had before, here some of the statistics of the symposium rang true – there were few folk I encountered who could count on running water and a sewage connection and electricity.  We seemed to be exactly where the tarred road ran out and the red dirt road started, the end of western-based lifestyles and the beginning of something simpler and more authentic.  But the modern dream is moving in; this town of devout worshipers (Muslims in this part of Ghana) still beams in US TV, how clear in this context to see the conditioning effect at work, and Vodaphone’s arrival as a mobile phone supplier was heralded by the countless newly red-painted houses and shops, free house paint, free advertising, English colonization in another form 52 years after we were booted out.

The Symposium was a great success, the crowd was somehow smaller than expected but commited, interested and of the 80 or so people, 50 came back the next day for the training.

As people around the world begin to wake up and commit to help build a sustainable, peaceful and just world the single most-often asked question is “So what should I do?”  Answering this head on is to fall into a trap, because helpful as it seems to offer suggestions this immediately limits folk from using the full range of their own creativity and individuality.

The compromise I chose in writing Your Planet Needs You was to point out some key principles which can steer us, but still offer plenty of scope for interpretation; one of these is the subject of this post, Just Shine.  Here’s an extract from the book

What a wonderful force of positive energy we are in the world.  We already know the power of positive thoughts when we are optimistic, helpful and encouraging to others; we know how good this makes others feel.

So every day is a chance to shine and to see this light reflect back in other people

Just Shine starts with being constructive, always finding the good in people and situations, however difficult this might be.  It means celebrating Possibility as well as Success; it means the glass is half-full

Just Shine is role modeling the good humour, kindness and courtesy that we enjoy so much in other people

Just Shine means being a source of love and encouragement in the world, leaving others feeling better than you found them

Imagine how far the ripple spreads when you smile or show a simple kindness to someone else.  Imagine a room chock-full of smiles, a town brimful of kindness or a world overflowing with love.  Isn’t that the Future Worth Choosing?

I know the power of a smile, no-one I know practices smiling better than my wonderful wife, Sand and I get to constantly see the effect that oh-so-simple gesture has on people.  So gather yourself, be prepared for people to assume you are i) on drugs, ii) in love or iii) not from round here, and go for it.  Just shine.

August will see the Awakening the Dreamer message in Africa, and there will be facilitator trainings in Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa, the first in each of these countries and the first on the continent. This posting is a request for help, but first let me tell you about the people who have laid the foundations for this;

• Awal, a young guy in Ghana, horrified by the deforestation he sees first hand, contacts us in San Francisco and receives the Presenters Kit so that he can take the Symposium into the very communities where they are chopping the trees.  He has since presented the Symposium to other communities and his fellow students; this visit will allow me to train up some of these folk so that a community of facilitators rises up around Awal.

• Tracy-Kim, a proud South African, resident in Hong Kong and trained there as a facilitator, delivered 7 symposiums in different cities in her homeland during her recent holiday, exciting over 60 people to now want training.  We will be delighted to oblige.

• the other key has been the people in the ATD community world-wide who have brought their connections and contacts in to support the expansion of this message.  That’s how we have a large and enthusiastic group awaiting our arrival in Nigeria, consisting of people already in action through NGOs addressing poverty issues, climate change, children’s rights and more; this ensures we will already be landing amongst friends

As a result of this I will be heading for Africa in just a couple of weeks (schedule below), joined for the South African trainings by my friend and colleague Ruel Walker; it promises to be quite a trip.

So here’s 2 ways you can help today.

1. Please let your friends, contacts and extended communities in Africa know about the events below.  Please invite them all to consider attending one of these events or to contact me to meet during this time.  Another highly valuable resource as you invite people is the Symposium trailer here
2. The other help we need is money.  We are normally able to cover the local costs of events like these with income from symposium attendees and training participants.  But this model simply won’t work in Nigeria and Ghana, where our local contacts impress upon us that any kind of charge, however modest, will exclude lots of people and my budget is overspent just getting the air-tickets to Lagos and Accra.  I’ve been blown away by the generosity already exhibited by friends from Hong Kong, the US, Japan and elsewhere with who’s help we have been able to gather some funds to support the trip to Awal’s home in Tamale, and even to take him a laptop. There is still a need for more funds in each country, which means an opportunity to be one of the people making these trips possible, to help spread awakening in the world.  Please let me know if you would like to help, by emailing me here., any amount will make a difference, perhaps allowing just one more person to hear this message of hope and possibility and to themselves become ambassadors of a new dream for Africa and the world.  All funds will be administered through The Pachamama Alliance, as US-based not-for-profit.

The Itinerary

22 August                 Symposium                           Abuja, Nigeria

23 August                 Facilitator training              Abuja

24 – 26 August         Available for meetings       Abuja and Lagos

27 August                 Symposium                           Cape Town, South Africa

28 – 30 August        Facilitator training              Cape Town

31 August                  Symposium                          Plettenberg Bay

1 – 2 September       Facilitator training              Plettenberg Bay

4 – 6 September      Facilitator training              Johannesburg

9 September            Symposium                           Tamale, Ghana

10 September          Facilitator training              Tamale

Once again its my pleasure to announce that the symposium has arrived in a new country, this time South Korea. This is our last morning in Seoul before heading home having been here an intense, enjoyable and ultimately hugely successful 6 days.

Day One saw the team assemble, Hide Enomoto arrived from Japan, Sand and I had flown in from the USA, and we were helped enormously by the very professional team at the venue, the Korea Leadership Resort in Anseoung. We ran a symposium for 15 people in a mixture of English and Korean – you can guess that HIde and I contributed the English bit and Helen, one of the participants translated for her compatriots. This pushed the 4 hours version out to 5 but the extra time made for a complete experience for all and the symposium worked its magic once again. How do we know? Because 4 people who hadn’t planned to decided there and then that they wanted to stay for the subsequent Facilitator Training.

That evening and over the next two days we ran a Basic Training for the same 15 people, and by the end of Day Three “Hosanyaksu” had completed the training and named themselves [there is no simple translation for this word, it means a combination of Healing Spring and Hospice Hands, I think].

This wonderful new group includes Kayeon and her two sons Ben and Brian, 16 and 17 respectively and then a large group who work together in the Korea Leadership Center and its associated companies. This last grouping particularly gives the Korean facilitator community a powerful capacity to organise and deliver events, that is their day job with programs like 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. Indeed it was Ken Gimm, CEO of this company who had the vision to bring the Symposium to Korea after he attended it at the Montreal meeting of the International Coaching Federation last November. Now he envisages the Symposium reaching 15% of Korean’s 48 million population by 2015, so we can expect to hear more from this ambitious new community very soon.

The last couple of days have included press briefings, a company-wide Q & A event, other meetings and time for some sight-seeing, hosted by a number of the wonderful young people from Ken’s companies; thanks particularly to Jun, Eunice, Jay, Jessie and Karen. How we ended up in Korean national dress banging the big drum outside the palace at Deoksugung is another story . . . . .

As some of my recent posts show, I’ve just spent a remarkable month in South East Asia, conceived and organised for the largest part by Jo Fok.  Here’s my conversation with her and hubby Paul as I’m about to head for home.

Jo, I acknowledge you for the fantastic results you’ve achieved; thank you for being you.

What a joy it was to visit Manila and witness the birth of another new community of soul brothers and sisters committed to help ring in a new dream for the human family.

And what a pity to visit the Philippines for the first time and be there but 72 hours.  I arrived to a wonderful greeting from the Philippines Tourist Board and was promptly escorted by the helpful and gracious Jo-Jo to a waiting car, and whisked safely off (thanks Vic) to Tagaytay, a volcano within a volcano just south of Manila.  Although an afternoon of site-seeing was on offer all I could do was fall into the hotel bed for a long-postponed sleep.  Hours later I woke up, enjoyed a massage and went back to sleep for another 10 hours.  That was my chance to see something of the country.

Returning the next day to Manila I met with some of Earthwards, stewards for a sustainable world, a newly formed group in Manila who had organised my entire visit: hotel rooms, symposium venues, professional A/V and meeting production staff were all arranged, and funded, so my thanks go to this group for their vision and their generosity.  You can find out more if you find the Earthwards page on Facebook.

The symposium on Saturday afternoon was quite a blast.  There was a full and enthusiastic crowd, lots to eat (remind me never to mix food and symposiums again) and a brown-out half-way through (yep, a black-out in that part of the world is called a brown-out!)  So the second half of the symposium was delivered by yours truly into a gloomy room as our A/V team worked to restore power.  And by a mix of means we got to the desired end-point, a crowd of folk awake and inspired to see what (more) they can do through their own lives to bring about an environmentally sustainable, spiritually-fulfilling and socially just human presence on Earth.

The very next day 18 enthusiastic souls gathered again to train as facilitators, here they are with their message to the world.

So I’ve just returned from a month long,4-country trip taking the Awakening the Dreamer message around South East Asia.  The results are new or enlarged communities of active citizens committed to amplifying this message in Hong Kong, China, Malaysia and the Philippines.  The further ripples from these same folk are already being felt in South Africa, India, Singapore and doubtless other places too.  In the context of our work, awakening the citizens of the world as a an environmentally sustainable, spiritually fulfilled and socially just human presence, this seems quite a result.  But there is always a cost to consider in this, the cost of all this travel.

For the flights alone I have caused 4.41 tonnes of carbon dioxide to be emitted into the upper atmosphere through my 19 866 miles of flying. There are several ways to look at this; one is to consider what an annual carbon ration would be per person, and estimates here are mostly in the range 1.5 – 3.0 tonnes per person – yikes.  Another view posits that if we are to collectively emit no more than 250 billion tonnes of carbon in order to reduce the probability of a 2 °C warming to 25 per cent, then for today’s population we each have only 36 tonnes left that we can ever emit . . . ever!  So I’ve used up 12.25% of my lifetime’s carbon ration in just this one trip.

A couple of questions remain

Is this justifiable? There is no way to answer this objectively, we can only weigh the balance between the value to our long-term future of this process of awakening and linking active citizens and the environmental cost of so doing.  What do you reckon?

Can I offset this environmental damage? Yes is the answer.  In fact one of my flights has already been off-set as a generous donation by Gregers Reimann in Kuala Lumpur – thanks Gregers.  And the work of the Pachamama Alliance helps to preserve nearly 2 million acres of pristine tropical rainforest, a valuable carbon sink as well as the forest home to the Achuar people.

Today as we are ever more acutely aware of the health of our planet home any active that isn’t directly restorative to the environment can be called raise questions for which there are no easy answers. I’ll leave the last words to Seize the Day, a radical British folk band . . . . . and to you, what would you do?

Am writing this post rather breathless after a whirlwind 3-day trip to Malaysia and an astounding couple of events in Kuala Lumpur.

June ‘09 is dedicated to supporting the growth of the Awakening community in South East Asia, and this has occasioned a tour of the region. One of the stops was KL where the World’s Greenest Man lives.  Matthias Gelber, who won this acolade in a worldwide search, is also an entrepreneur, the founder of Eco Warriors Malaysia and a trained facilitator for the Awakening the Dreamer symposium.

So you’ll guess that Matthias is a make-it-happen kind of guy, and he was delighted to create both a symposium and then a one-day training in Malaysia this past weekend, and what events they proved to be.  On Friday evening 180 people gathered in the Grand Millennium Hotel (Matthias had exchanged his time as an eco-trainer for use of this venue!!!!).  What followed was the most spirited symposium I have ever been involved in; the crowd was with us, and vocally so, from the outset as Matthias, Jo Fok (remember Jo as the force of nature organising the whole June trip) and I lead the event.  At least three wonderful possibilities emerged; the first was a grouping of the many people there working in the field of education, the second a collection of committed and active young people and thirdly the a group who wanted to attend the Facilitator Training the next day.  The crowd was eventually dispersed (by the cleaners I think) over an hour after the event had formally concluded and it was clear that this first event had been a huge hit.  The people who attended were almost all already active in some way, but as is so often the case, were galvanized into new levels of activity and collaboration by the ATD message.  And, demonstrating a real opportunity for other groups around the world, the crowd had been assembled almost entirely on Facebook (no trees were harmed in the promotion of this event).

And then . . . . . the next day 47 of these people came together to train and form MY Awakening, the first group of facilitators in Malaysia (which is MY for short).  Ranging in age from 13 (is Liam the youngest facilitator in the world?) to much older, speaking Malay, Tamil, Hindi, Cantonese, Danish, German, Spanish, Japanese and English (I probably missed a couple too) this group really represents the diversity of Malaysia and the natural joy and exuberance of its people.  24 hours later there is already a Facebook site, a nominated Youth Officer (Liam’s older brother Stephane) and a series of meetings in the diary.

I left the post-training celebrations in time to get 4 hours sleep and catch the first flight back to HK where we’ve just run another symposium . . . . . but that’s another story, for another post.

What I’m inspired to understand and pass on for other facilitator communities around the world is how tools like Facebook can be used so effectively, and what is it that Matthias is doing that has such a large and willing group ready to mobilise in support of symposiums, tree-plantings or other events. But for now, bravo Matthias and welcome to MY Awakening.