Joy as the Compass (eBook)

Freeing Yourself from the Seven Activist Addictions

Edveeje Fairchild (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
213 Seiten
Green Fire Press (Verlag)
979-8-9899452-6-9 (ISBN)

Infos

In this honest, hard-hitting book, Edveeje Fairchild shares her story of walking away from her successful career as a non-profit executive to become the CEO of her own life. As she recovers from her addiction to activism, Edveeje learns several important truths: • Leadership and activism do not require sacrifice, suffering, and hard work. • We must first become the change before we can lead the change. • Nature and the world don't need saving. We do. • Joy is the only meaningful life GPS. Joy as the Compass explores seven 'activist addictions' that lead to inner ecological burnout while offering seven 'wild remedies' that illuminate the path of soul restoration. Join Edveeje on her personal soul safari as she learned how to root her life, leadership, and activism in joy rather than suffering and sacrifice. Dare to make Joy your True North.

As the founder of A Woman's Nature School, Edveeje inspires and encourages women leaders to follow our deep joy and desires as we collectively conceive, gestate, and birth The Great Work in service of the Sacred Feminine and the restoration of Nature. Edveeje holds a Master's degree in Education with an emphasis in Sustainability and Women's Studies and has midwifed hundreds of women and countless projects, organizations, and businesses at the regional, national and global levels. As the founding Chief Operations Officer of TreeSisters.org, her unique Nature-based Feminine Wisdom retreats have inspired thousands of women to craft and live soulful, wild, and authentic lives rooted in rest and grounded in joy. You can find her at joyasthecompass.com.

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"e;I hold Edveeje as a true life guide for following your bliss. She will leave youmore deeply in love with the gift of being alive."e; Clare Dubois, founder, TreeSisters"e;A deeply touching book with soul-deep revelations."e; Pia Bjorstrand, attorney and Board Chair, End Ecocide Sweden"e;This book is a roadmap for the wild woman in all of us."e; Jodine Turner, Ph.D., founder of Visionary Fiction Alliance"e;A vital blueprint for navigating life's thresholds with purpose, joy, and renewal."e; Sarah Drew, author, Gaia CodexIn this honest, hard-hitting book, Edveeje Fairchild shares her story of walking away from her successful career as a non-profit executive to become the CEO of her own life. As she recovers from her addiction to activism, Edveeje learns several important truths: Leadership and activism do not require sacrifice, suffering, and hard work. We must first become the change before we can lead the change. Nature and the world don't need saving. We do. Joy is the only meaningful life GPS. Joy as the Compass explores seven "e;activist addictions"e; that lead to inner ecological burnout while offering seven "e;wild remedies"e; that illuminate the path of soul restoration. Join Edveeje on her personal soul safari as she learned how to root her life, leadership, and activism in joy rather than suffering and sacrifice. Dare to make Joy your True North.

Textauszug

My Journey to Joy

Joy does not simply happen to us.

We have to choose joy and keep choosing it every day…

—Henri J M Nouwen

As a young woman, I longed to move at the pace of my soul. Tune into my wildness. Embody my instinctual feminine wisdom. Make joy my life’s GPS. Most women I know do too. In the pages that follow I share why—and how—I did it.

I recognize that many people often feel a need to compromise about many things. For most people, life doesn’t offer many opportunities to say Hell yes! and saying Hell no! is an unaffordable luxury.

But I have learned that often the major barrier to joy is the belief that “It isn’t possible in my situation.” I recognize that some life choices are not easy to reconcile with joy. I’ve been there. Many times. Real life includes a lot of messy choices, phases, and jagged transitions: divorces, young children, caretaking elderly parents, and juggling precarious finances in a post-pandemic world.

In these pages, I share everyday wild remedies and root medicine that most people can apply easily. My ultimate rewilding, however, came in the form of choosing to take a sabbatical and leave behind the nonprofit world in favor of homesteading. I acknowledge the privilege that allowed me to make some messy but necessary choices, enabling me to craft a life of radical joy.

The ability to say Hell no! is a muscle I developed through consistent use. For me, it began with small choices, which created momentum over time. The stronger my initial discernment became, the better choices I made (or remade). Like a river, momentum began to naturally flow my life towards joy.

This book offers raw and real reflections that jump back and forth across the timeline of my life. By their very nature, my confessions and journal entries are tender, fallible, and vulnerable, filled with many questions and few answers. In contrast, what I learned along the way and share as a roadmap of possibility will sound and feel blunt and bold.

That’s because there is more than one of me. In these pages, I am both seeker and guide, student and educator, ego and soul. I have written what I needed to learn. If there is judgment, it is reserved for me alone. The tone and voice of this book reflect the complex and contradictory reality of being human and having a learning conversation with oneself across time.

These experiences happened mainly between the ages of twenty-eight and forty-five as I was still climbing the nonprofit leadership ladder in predominately middle-class Caucasian communities. Millennials (born between 1981 and 1996) who are women executives, founders, and leaders, have the most to gain from my high tuition lessons because there is more time in an activist or corporate career to course correct from the seven activist addictions. And yet any activist, of any age, has much to gain from recovery from the seven activist addictions.

For decades I have journaled my life experiences as a way of making sense of them. Here I share my private diary of how I made joy my GPS by becoming the Chief Executive Officer of my life. May my honesty and vulnerability encourage hope and possibility. Something can and will collectively change once we individually admit to our activist addictions and fall in love with a wild kind of sanity.

The Shoulders of Giants

The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us, thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fibre and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. The trees wave and the flowers bloom in our bodies

as well as our souls, and every bird song, wind song, and tremendous storm song of the rocks in the heart of the mountains is our song, our very own, and sings our love.

—John Muir

I didn’t get to a life of authentic joy overnight or by myself. It took years of reading hundreds of books and making intentional small changes that added up over time. My personal journey (and thus this book) is deeply influenced by them and I would like to acknowledge a few of those seminal voices: Clarissa Pinkola Estés (Women Who Run with the Wolves); Sharon Blackie (If Women Rose Rooted); Esther Hicks (Ask and it is Given); Red School (Wild Power); Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth); Margaret Wheatley (Leadership and the New Science); and Robin Sharma (The Leader Who Had No Title).3

Throughout this book, I reference and cite some of their language and phrases directly and I also use some of them as springboards to introduce my own unique application. It is my way of continuing the conversation begun with them and then applying their thoughts in interesting new ways. I have included a Glossary of Terms at the end of this book to help define and clarify some of this key language and also a Recommended Reading List at the end.

I wrote this book as a field guide for women of all ages who long to embody their Nature-based Feminine Wisdom as the basis of their activism and leadership. While the Feminine Mystery Teachings of the Menstrual Cycle are seminal to my cosmology, women who are no longer menstruating—for whatever reason—will also benefit from this soul safari because it touches the heart of what it is to be a human living in joyful alignment with one’s soul.

The Path Ahead

Stop trying to change the world since it is only the mirror. Man’s attempt to change the world by force is as fruitless as trying to break a mirror in the hope of changing his face.

Leave the mirror and change your face.

Leave the world alone and change your conceptions of yourself.

—Neville Goddard

What I call “activist addiction” includes seven states of being that are pandemic in our current culture: sacrifice, suffering, control, busyness / overwhelm, struggle, drama, and hard work. While I find powerful parallels between addiction and these harmful chronic states of being, I am not a mental health professional, and this book should not be misconstrued as advice about how to overcome addictions.

Some of the descriptive language in this book references and is inspired by the classic feminist treatise by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype. You will recognize it in such phrases as “stepping in leg traps, eating poisoned bait, polluting my creative river, and injuring my instincts,” which Estés originally coined and introduced.

While I use confessions as part of my literary narrative style, I do not mean them in the religious sense. Think of them instead as part of an intimate conversation under the stars. The confessions sections of this book are truths uttered under Moonlight; thoughts spoken from so deep within the soul that they cannot bear the starkness of sunlight. As in the ancient Wise Woman Tradition, I share a soul story that allows me to unearth what I know to be true for me, in the hope that it will perhaps nourish others.

These confessions are filled with what I call “high-tuition lessons.” You know the kind: wisdom earned the hard way, with significant and unexpected costs, such as broken relationships, illness and disease, loss of purpose, and shattered dreams. My failures, more than my successes, have made me wise.

Part One of the book is an overview that sets the stage for the seven activist addictions, which I explore in Part Two. Each chapter in Part Two includes:

• A personal confession and flashback to a specific activist addiction;
• A reflection and exploration of that addiction;
• The wild remedy that healed me and what I learned in recovery;
• The root medicine that skyrocketed my life from excruciating to extraordinary.

The wild remedies of which I speak are like herbal tinctures— psychic and soul nourishment taken in daily doses over time to heal us physically, emotionally, and spiritually. These wild remedies are holistic life hacks that counteract the seven activist addictions.

The root medicine are daily practices that combine various components of the wild remedies into a lifestyle rooted in joy. At the end of every chapter, I invite you into a personal exploration of how to apply the root medicine to your own life so that you can begin to experience the power of the wild remedies directly.

Part Three of the book, “A Sabbatical Field Guide,” is where I get incredibly practical and share the Nature-based Feminine Wisdom that came to me when I resigned my title and left my activist career. Sabbatical allowed me to deepen into daily and monthly practices based on seasonal, lunar, and cyclical wisdom, transforming my life from burnout to bliss.

Yes, I said—and meant—bliss. When I have shared this with some, they think it is clever hyperbole language or that I am being self-congratulatory. I am actually being quite vulnerable and revelatory knowing how this statement will be received by some.

Nonetheless, a life of bliss is possible, and each of us experiences bliss in a unique way.

Bliss to me is waking up when my eyes open rather than to an alarm clock. Bliss is taking long mountain walks and soaking up sunshine at the creek on Monday mornings. Bliss is putzing in my herbal garden and apothecary,...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 21.5.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• ISBN-13: 979-8-9899452-6-9 / 9798989945269