THE POWER OF HOMES

To Become Launchpads

for Local and Global Transformation

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by Alexander Schieffer

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No word is more local and personal than “home”.

And no word is more global and shared than “home”.

For, at once, home points to our place of individual origin, the place of personal belonging, the place where we can “be who we truly are”, unmasked and unfiltered, while it also alludes to our home planet, as a whole, the planet of shared belonging – Earth as our common home.

At best, the home is the place where all our qualities can live and show up, where we can practice and manifest the fullness of our humanity – as a brother or sister, as a mother or father, as a grandmother or grandfather, as a friend welcoming friends, as a lover receiving the beloved, as a host to strangers.

It is from our home that we depart to engage with the world; it is to our home that we return, having discovered ourselves in the world.

It is in the home that our most intimate thoughts are entrusted, our persona can disappear, our personality can expand with ease. The home is a vital gateway to experience unity within ourselves and with others.

And it is in homes that many of the world’s most influential ideas and thoughts, innovation and initiatives have been seeded, cooked up, and birthed.

But then, for many people, home has no longer this quality. Or, if it has, home is no longer in reach. For millions have been dislodged – as migrants and refugees – and millions have disconnected – as uprooted global citizens with no place of true belonging.

Then, all of a sudden, Corona confined almost the entire world population to its homes. And people around the planet (re)discover the immense value of their homes as a place of retreat, safety, communion and solidarity – while others experience it as a place of terror and tension, domestic violence, loneliness and separation. But through it all, we are seeing the potential and possibility of our homes as places for personal and collective restoration – for ourselves, our social fabric, our humanity. 

As we reflect on the deeper reasons for the global crisis, in a time of standstill, we might recognize our personal response-ability to contribute to a more regenerative future for all of us – in that our personal lives and lifestyles move towards regeneration, in that our homes become learning and practice places for integral development.

In fact, in my own research and transformative educational work around the planet as co-founder of TRANS4M, a global community of “worldmakers” working actively with our Integral Worlds approach,  I found that many of the world’s most impressive role models for the emerging integral paradigm – from Sekem in Egypt to Sarvodaya in Sri Lanka, from Sinal do Vale in Brazil to Pax Herbals in Nigeria, all the way to Jean Houston in the US, who hosts salons for social artists in her own home cum “living museum of humanity” in Ashland, Oregon – have been started from a simple home of a committed visionary, often together with the family.

This insight guided me 12 years ago to ground my worldwork in my own home. Together with my wife and co-creator Rama Mani, we evolved our own home in the French Jura Mountains near Geneva into a living campus and practice ground for our current and future community of “integral worldmakers” – thereby centering our global work within the very center of our local lives – our home. A home that we named Home for Humanity. A home that has grown incrementally through each visitor-student-worldmaker into an integral sanctuary, a healing haven, a safe stage, a living-learning laboratory, and a catalytic launchpad for local and global transformation. A home where transformational journeys enable people to find, live and expand “home” on three interconnected levels: the “inner home”; the actual home or workplace; our home Planet.  

As we expand and reach out to others – from home to home – we recognize not only the value of each of our homes, but also, if homes become connected, our collective power to rebuild our societies and our value bases, our potential to participate and engage, our capacity to move from individual powerlessness to collective citizen power.

Yes, home holds power! Our homes are the foundational cells of our society. It is here – from our most intimate places – that the paradigm shift towards a regenerative future (for all humans and for all of life) needs to be rooted, practiced and lived. It is from here where we need to experience and embrace the ancient and now newly emerging knowing that “The Universe is a single Family”. It is from here that humanity can rise again, renewed, feeling itself as an integral part of the indivisible family of life, called to discover, also, the underlying unity of all life, and the unity embedded within our very name: humanity.

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