Preparing for the Journey Ahead: A Conscious Approach to Becoming A Nesting Ambassador
By Lisa Reagan
Note: The following insights are distilled from over 20 years of direct, living experience. AI did not contribute to its creation, nor could it. This post is the opening letter to Nesting Ambassadors in the online classroom.
Before setting out on the journey of becoming Certified Nesting Ambassadors, we need to take a moment, many moments, to consciously prepare for the road ahead. The orienting insights below are intended to help us understand the embedded trajectory of the Nesting Ambassador Program. This trajectory, and approach to the science of our Evolved Nest, has been consciously and conscientiously created to gently move us into position to encounter what most modern humans have not witnessed or experienced: our millions year-old communal evolved developmental niche.
What first emerges from the Nesting Ambassador Program, and its trail markers, is the need to recenter our Evolved Nest (EN) and its Kinship Worldview (KW) in our consciousness, families, communities, and world. Second, and intentionally embedded in this program’s learning processes, is the knowledge and skillset of how to step into a role of ambassadorship while re-learning the ancient wisdom of our Evolved Nest and Kinship Worldview.
This part is important. Don’t skip it.
Before we begin our NAP journey together, we need to understand the difference between humanity’s Lived Experience of the Evolved Nest and our Learning Experience of the Evolved Nest. Few of us have a lived experience of our Evolved Nest. Some of us have witnessed remnants of a lived, whole Evolved Nest–think of siloed social movements to support natural birth, free play, attachment parenting, or normalizing breastfeeding.
In our original, species-typical Lived Experience, we would receive all of the components of the Evolved Nest together.
Because our ancestors lived in connection to life and all of our kin (e.g., plants and animals), babies and everyone else would have received all of the Evolved Nest components simultaneously. Our innate wholeness, belonging, and connection to life were recognized and honored from the beginning. Our Communal Evolved Nest, and its welcoming community of bonded nurturers was, therefore, prepared to keep us in alignment with a life-affirming Kinship Worldview and Lifeway.
The interconnected, interdependent components of the Lived Experience of the Evolved Nest for a child include Soothing Perinatal Experiences, Child-Directed Breastfeeding, Multiple Mutual Nurturers, Welcoming Community, Positive Moving Touch, Responsive Relationships, Self-Directed Social Play, Regular Restorative Healing Practices, Nature Immersion, Connection, and Partnership.
Today, our world is upside down. We are no longer guided by the holistic, life-affirming worldview required to create a Lived Experience of the Evolved Nest. Today, we are governed by a Dominant Worldview, mired in a Cycle of Competitive Detachment.
Where to begin?
When we take into consideration the fragmented state of our own consciousness and culture, we realize we need to talk, first, about how we can restore our life-affirming Kinship Worldview. Yes, it’s possible and yes, we have the tools!
Next, with the cooperative and compassionate values of our Kinship Worldview to guide our good intentions as ambassadors, we need a trauma-informed and wellness-informed approach to talk about the science of the Evolved Nest.
With these considerations in mind, in the Nesting Ambassador Program, we follow the Learning Experienceof the Evolved Nest, a trauma-informed and wellness-promoting approach. We encounter the nine components of the Evolved Nest, beginning with an overview of the Kinship Worldview and Lifeway which follows the wellness-promoting pathway of our ancestors. We move into: Nature Connection, Regular Restorative Healing Practices, Self-Directed Play, Responsive Relationships, Positive Moving Touch, Welcoming Social Climate, Multiple Mutual Nurturers, Breastfeeding, and Soothing Perinatal Experiences. For teaching purposes, we reverse the order of our Lived Experience of the Evolved Nest.
Through our consciously guided NAP journey and integrative Learning Experience of the Evolved Nest, we discover:
1. How Worldview Literacy, as context for our journey, and the first three components – Nature Connection, Restorative Healing Practices, and Play – prepare us for a deep dive into the next six components, and building blocks, of our Communal Evolved Nest.
2. How Worldview Literacy helps us develop the discerning wisdom needed to identify cultural biases and mythologies generated by the Dominant Worldview.
3. How beginning our Learning Experience of the Evolved Nest with Nature Connection, a component of our Evolved Nest, helps us stay oriented in our Kinship heritage.
4. How moving into the second component of Regular Restorative Healing Practices, helps us prepare to return our minds, bodies, and spirits to a state of connection and compassion when we feel triggered, despairing, or confused.
5. How the third component of the Learning Experience of the Evolved Nest, PLAY, in childhood and adulthood, helps to engage our neurobiology in re-imagining humanity. Play fuels and builds our imagination muscles at all ages.
6. How we can recognize and carry into our lives the components of Responsiveness, Touch, Welcoming and Multiple Nurturers.
7. How learning about the Evolved Nest, and sharing the science of nestedness as an ambassador, requires deep compassion and forgiveness for our woundedness as individuals and as a species/human family.
8. How the trauma-informed Learning Experience of the Evolved Nest prepares us to present to others the science of the Evolved Nest with the values and life-affirming orientation of our Kinship Worldview: compassion, cultural sensitivity, and personal integrity.
By the time we reach the components of Child-Directed Breastfeeding and Soothing Perinatal Experiences (Birth), we understand HOW humans are designed as a species to welcome new life as a community. And WHY the millions-year-old neurobiology of human babies expects to be welcomed by a conscious community. The future of the human community for thousands of years, and our human family now, depends upon our capacity to preserve and protect the innate brilliance and wholeness of our young.
But we’ve forgotten how. Until now.
Over the next few months, we will explore and reclaim our human family’s birthright to living connected, peaceful, and thriving lives. We will support one another, care for our hearts, bodies, minds, and spirits on the journey and prepare a plan for sharing, re-centering, and bringing to life our communal evolved nest. By the time we become Certified Nesting Ambassadors, we will be resourced and ready to inspire others to re-imagine our world.
Throughout the course of the program, we develop the capacity to steward a new future of humanity, with agency and knowhow based on Evolved Nest science, integrity based on Kinship Worldview values, and compassion based on the integration of EN/KW’s ancient wisdom. As Certified Nesting Ambassadors, we are ready to author a New Story of the Human Family.
Watch Lisa present the history/context/framing of the Nesting Ambassador Program with Darcia Narvaez during the Nested World’s launch: https://youtu.be/SNDLTmAZ9Gk?si=kVw7WckX3z-KIEZO
Lisa Reagan is the co-founder of the Nested World Initiative, the founder of Kindred World, and the editor of Kindred Magazine. Read her work and listen to podcasts here.