Date:

Sundays, July 28 - September 1
(Excluding August 18)
(5 sessions)

Time:

7:30 - 9:30am
Pacific (California) Time

Fee:

$325 - $407
First session is FREE!

  First Session FREE! - Sign up

Recordings Included

  Sign up for Full Course!

This course uses Zoom technology which allows everyone the choice of being seen or seeing other participants.
Recordings will display images of active speakers only.

We've chosen early morning Pacific Time sessions
because that supports accessibility for people on multiple continents


Listen to Mary Mackenzie discuss this trailblazing course with Miki:

 

Have you ever felt shame about how much money you have… or don't have?
What about any of the following:

If you answer yes to any of these questions, then this course might trigger a dramatic shift in your life.

This course is ambitious. Miki is committed to engaging with all these questions and more in only five sessions of two hours each.

Miki has been investigating money and economics since she was five and asked her mother a question no one has been able to give her an answer to, to this day: "Why do we need to pay money at the store? Why can't we just take what we need and go home?" Her studies, life experience, and experiments have left no doubt in Miki's mind:

We are designed to collaborate in small groups to care for each other's needs within the web of life.

Why, then, are we so far away from this vision?

This is one of the topics Miki's course is designed to address: how we broke from our evolutionary design and got to where we are now.

Great, you might say, but why does this matter? I want to just live my life. How will knowing this make a difference – in my family, in my work, in my community?

Understanding how each of us is affected can help you regain freedom and choice in your life.

By the end of this course, if you take seriously all the invitations to examine and challenge your assumptions and behaviors, and even question some of your wishes, you may never go back to living the same way. At the very least, you will know why you are choosing what you are choosing even if you don't want to make changes.

Seriously?

If you're not quite ready to jump into this, join us for the free first session whose design includes, in brief, much that the rest is designed to then unpack. You will know if this interactive, demanding, liberating, fun, instructive, humbling, terrifying, and exhilarating journey is one you want to take.

What You Can Take Away
The journey to where you are has taken thousands of years collectively, and many years individually. Changing what you believe, how you feel, what you do, and, eventually, what you want cannot happen overnight. The main thing you can receive from this course is new understandings and new practices. Over time, such practices can replace the scarcity, separation, and powerlessness that we have imbibed with flow, sufficiency, connection, and freedom.
Here are some aspects of what you can expect over time:  

Course Outline

Given the level of interest in Miki's courses across the globe, we are scheduling this course at a time that is most likely to be accessible to people in multiple continents: Sunday at 7:30am Pacific time, which is early afternoon in parts of South America, afternoon in Europe and Africa, evening in much of Asia, and later in Eastern Asia. We hope you will choose to support this commitment to global reach by waking up early if you are in the Pacific time zone.

July 28: Matching Resources to Needs: Money and the Vision of a World that Works for All

This session is an overview of the entire approach to money that Miki has developed over many years – with a particular focus on describing an economy that works for all that is based on 1) the core principles of having resources flow from where they exist to where they are needed; and 2) willingness and capacity, as well as what individuals can do to orient in this direction,even in a world based on exchange and accumulation emerging from scarcity, separation, and powerlessness.

August 4: Where Did Money Come from? How Scarcity Led to Patriarchy, States, and Loss of Flow

We can't change what we don't understand. The study of economics has been made obscure, inaccessible, and painted as boring to most. Most of us accept its assumptions without even knowing another world existed and can exist again. Are humans truly driven by the desire to maximize self-interest without care for consequences to others and to life, or even to our own long-term well-being? Do we really live in a hostile world of scarcity where we must compete with everyone else in order to attend to our needs? If not, why are we in the midst of environmental degradation, poverty, war, and individual miseries that are threatening our continued existence and possibly all life?

This session builds on many years of study, practice, and teaching to question the basic assumptions modern capitalism is built on and to offer, instead, a different understanding of how the practices of exchange, accumulation, and money – and with them notions of value, deserving, and fairness – came to be the dominant form of human engagement. Events and human history, rather than innate characteristics, brought us here. The stories we tell, collectively, have real life consequences for real people. This understanding can then point to the possibility of telling new stories and taking action, individually and collectively, to change the way we live.

August 11: Restoring Flow through Relationship: Uncoupling Giving from Receiving

In an exchange economy, others become objects; instruments for attending to our own needs. We give in order to get what we need without the shame of debt. Especially with money, when we can "pay" for what we need, we have the illusion of independence. True relationship is not an exchange. In true relationship we receive because others respond to our needs; we give because we care. We are the species with the longest childhood, depending for our very survival on the generosity and care of mothers and others. An economy based on care transcends exchange and restores free giving and receiving.

This session moves to practical reality to offer specific practices for freeing ourselves to restore relationship and flow. We cannot individually exit the world of money and exchange. We can, however, move ever closer to uncoupling giving from receiving. When we change how we think about money, how we ask for money, and how we choose what to do with the money we have, we shift how we relate to ourselves, to each other, and to life itself. Along the way we find new pathways to generosity and authentic relationships. 

August 25: Restoring Flow through Trust: Why No One Deserves Anything

In a world of scarcity, accumulation makes sense. For the last many thousands of years, with hardly any exceptions, more and more wealth and power have accumulated in the hands of fewer and fewer people. Both the powerful and the powerless are taught that wealth and power come to those who deserve them – because of divine right, karma, or merit. We have converted natural abundance into artificial surplus and manufactured scarcity. Some people have so much more than they need that they would never be able to spend their fortune even if they tried. Most others, at the same time, have no prospect of attending to their very basic needs, with many thousands of children dying every day because of lack of access to sufficient adequate food. We can do far better.  

This session continues and deepens the focus on actual practice. The key aim is to develop our capacity to make full contact with our needs so we can recognize what is enough. This means moving beyond the focus on money, which is not a need, to our actual needs and what's required to sustain our lives. Shedding excess, and redirecting our resources through care and trust, become foundational methods for restoring humility and freedom while allowing more resources to flow. This session also includes returning, with tenderness, to the recognition of how impossible it is to aim to make individual or organizational changes without way more support that we even know possible at present.  

September 1: Creating Islands of Flow: Principles and Practices for Communities of Flow

Individual actions are limited in their capacity to bring the transformation many of us long for. Even though the overwhelming majority of people on the planet don't possess sufficient power to shift the course of history, we can nonetheless increase our influence by banding together with others in creating communities that aim to live in flow. Before capitalism swept the entire world, much of humanity lived in the commons: integrated and sustainable ways of engaging with the natural world in care of needs. We can learn from the past and apply these practices to the present in ways that can gradually move us, collectively, from exchange and accumulation to a flow that cares for all life.

This session branches beyond the individual level to offer basic principles and practices that communities can embrace as a scaffolding to support a community-based recovery from scarcity, separation, and powerlessness. Key practices for this session are the establishment of conscious agreements about sharing resources, most centrally the principle of willingness, which honors both relationship and autonomy. Such agreements reduce the weight on each individual by offering support and feedback for collective commitment. The result can be resilient communities that, with some luck, can come together to form a global collectivity of care for all life on the planet.

Additional Opportunity:

Miki has selected a couple of assistants who will be available for some one-on-one support with witnessing in between sessions to help support your integration of the material even more!

About Miki Kashtan

Miki Kashtan is a co-founder of Bay Area Nonviolent Communication (BayNVC) and Lead
Collaboration Consultant at the Center for Efficient Collaboration. Miki aims to support visionary
leadership and shape a livable future using collaborative tools based on the principles of
Nonviolent Communication. She shares these tools through meeting facilitation, mediation,
consulting, coaching, and training for organizations and committed individuals. Her latest
book, Reweaving Our Human Fabric: Working together to Create a Nonviolent Future (2015)
explores the practices and systems needed for a collaborative society. She is also the author of Spinning Threads of Radical Aliveness: Transcending the Legacy of Separation in Our Individual Lives, and The Little Book of Courageous Living. Miki blogs at The Fearless Heart and her articles have appeared in the New York Times ("Want Teamwork? Encourage Free Speech"), Tikkun, Waging Nonviolence, Shareable, Peace and Conflict, and elsewhere. She holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from UC Berkeley. More...