The Mindset and Posture Required to Engender Life-Affirming Transitions

By: Fit Associates (Hannah du Plessis)

This is an invited paper for the Carnegie Mellon University symposium on Transition Design. It has three parts. Part one looks at the difficulty of change, first through the lens of the tightly constructed and difficult to affect inner world of individuals and then the systemic patterns that repeat over generations. Part two takes a deeper look at the nature of the inner shift necessary to engender a life-positive society: shifting from unequal to equal relationships, from defensive to open communication; from being imprisoned by the past to integration; moving from being the expert that knows to a participant in the process of creating. Lastly, this paper discusses how we invite students to become their own “social workshops” where they can learn how to work with and shift their own humanity towards life-affirming habits.

Read the report here.