A month before the Centers Gathering at Hollyhock in B.C. Canada, 12-17 May, I received an email from our friend and HCN Board member Sean. “Bene Wellness is going to hold a new product launch on May 20th in Beijing,” he wrote. “Songlin sends his invitation to you as VIP guest for the ceremony. We totally understand if you can’t make it.” The invite to return to China in a few weeks came as a surprise.

Although I knew the date clashed with our annual HCN Board meeting I was intrigued to find out more. “It’s a new program series that’s been inspired by our experience at Findhorn last year,” Sean explained and I smiled at the news. He’d already booked his flight which meant missing the HCN Board meeting and I knew that wasn’t an option for me. I had a week in my diary where I could potentially travel though and knew I wanted to support our partnership with Bene Wellness. [Read more…]

Separating and Uniting:
The Haven and the Art of Self-Responsible Relational Living

Rachel Davey was the Executive Director of The Haven on Gabriola Island, BC, Canada for ten years. Now a Board member of HCN she offered this keynote during our Holistic Forum in Beijing last year. During the talk she demonstrates how the underlying philosophy of The Haven, a Centre for Transformative Learning, has contributed to the increased wellbeing of both individuals and societies throughout the world.
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Transformative Programs: The Omega Institute & the Art of Inspiring & Educating Audiences

The Omega Institute for Holistic Studies in upstate New York has created innovative programming for more than 40 years. Founded by Eastern scholar Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan, holistic medical doctor Stephan Rechtschaffen, and educator and author Elizabeth Lesser, Omega was conceived as a university for lifelong learning and serves as a gathering place for great thinkers, creatives, spiritual teachers, and social visionaries. [Read more…]

Esalen was started in the 1960’s when the two founders, Michael Murphy and Dick Price, realized that the exploration of human potential was being constrained in the academic world and there needed to be a place where people could explore the edge of what was possible for humankind. Today Esalen has a long legacy of exploration, creation and research on the edge of what is possible. Names like Abraham Maslow, Alan Watts, Joseph Campbell, Ida Rolf and Fritz Perls have birthed ideas and movements at Esalen. [Read more…]

Peter Moore is a practical idealist and successful entrepreneur who works ardently over time to bring principle-based projects into reality. He helped found the Holistic Centers Network and has attended the annual International Holistic Centers Gathering for many years. In 1978, Peter co-founded Breitenbush Hot Springs Retreat & Conference Center, and is its current Business Director. “Together we create the world we want to live in through linking up holistic centers the world over. I think of holistic centers as conscious communities whose mission it is to evolve and reify human potential, while having fun.” [Read more…]

The last 40 years have seen an explosion of interest in the West and worldwide in consciousness, personal growth, holistic practices, and green and sustainable values. This profoundly creative impulse of renewal, with its many positive consequences in wellness, psychology, meditation, ecology and the embrace of a globally interconnected future, has had an invigorating effect on a society that might well have continued on a course of decline and empty materialism. [Read more…]

Paul O’Brien, author of The Visionary I Ching: A Book of Changes for Intuitive Decision Making, announces that Huaxia Publishing House, a state-owned publisher in Beijing, China will publish and distribute a Mandarin translation of his modern version of the great Taoist classic. The contract was signed September 2017. The projected date of the Chinese book’s launch is January 2019. [Read more…]

By Werner Brandt

As a Board member of HCN it was a privilege to offer the Work That Reconnects in China last month. All six board members were invited to participate in the first Holistic International Wellness Forum in Beijing both as keynote speakers and faciliators of experiential workshops.

I arrived at Beijing airport in the late evening and was welcomed warmly by the translator. Quickly ushered off to meet our driver, we merged into a sea of late model cars that clogged the roads. 20 years ago roads in China were absent of automobiles; only bicycles and motorcycles were the primary mode of transportation. But this is modern Beijing, a city of twenty million, living in dense clusters of high-rise apartments throughout the city. [Read more…]

By Dan Hines

“We all have an inner wise navigator that is reliable and trustworthy. Our mystical traditions are unanimous that we all have a still point: a raised perch on the boat from where our soul-navigator can calmly whisper to us… where we are… and describe the vision of the island beyond the horizon, even when we are voyaging through rough confusing seas.”

Last month, I was graciously invited to speak for an hour to a crowd of over 700 leaders, entrepreneurs and community activists in a remarkable hotel complex just south of Beijing, China. These were some of the words that I voiced as I shared a set of stories, reflections and a guided meditation on the theme that was entitled “Holistic Navigation”. The gathering was given the hopeful title of the ‘Holistic Wellness International Forum’. The forum was co-hosted by both an inspiring organization I have visited in Beijing- Bene Wellness– and also by the global Holistic Centers Network. It lived up to the billing of being holistic and international. [Read more…]

Reflections from Mr Yu
Project Manager of Find Wellness Ecological Villages.
In partnership with Songlin Liu, Founder of Bene Wellness.

The following reflections were inspired by our visit to emerging ecovillages on Hainan Island after the Holistic Wellness International Forum in Beijing. After our first evening and a sharing of values and ideas, we invited Mr Yu to share his philosophy in writing. He embraced the opportunity and later said he hadn’t thought about the subject as deeply before.

Let me talk about something that has not been discussed on other occasions – the Chinese people’s thinking about why we need ecology in the world today. Environmental issues are one of the greatest concerns. Human beings face an extreme ecological crisis related to their own survival and development.

People began to wake up and reflect and the global movement for environmental protection developed. Ecology is of great significance and value to society in the 21st century, mainly manifested in the re-shaping of human values and the redefinition of the relationship between man and nature as a harmonious unification.

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