What is Nature's Paradigm?

A paradigm is a worldview, what you believe to be true about the world, the way it works, and your role in it. The curious thing about a paradigm is that we’re often unaware that we have one, or how we might articulate it if we did.  

Our current dominant cultural paradigm — what I’m calling the Conventional Paradigm —  is reflected in corporate capitalism, colonialism, and white supremacy.  This worldview is based on a belief in and valuing scarcity, individuality, competition, greed, resistance, and fear. This paradigm is what drives our behaviors and decisions when we engage with the “real world”.  It is the paradigm that allows us to more or less ignore the rampant exploitation of peoples and places all over the world that make our lifestyles possible, because we understand profit and growth to be imperatives. 

Most of us subscribe to this paradigm when we’re engaging with the world as professionals and as consumers. We may blame and complain, and even feel shame, but we adhere to its assumptions and rules. What else are you going to do? What else is there? That’s the bottom line, right?

But there is something else. There is an alternative worldview. That’s the paradigm that exists in Nature, what I’m calling Nature’s Paradigm. Nature’s Paradigm, which emerged over billions of years of evolution, is based on a belief in and valuing abundance, systems, synergies, trust, resilience, and curiosity. This is how life on Earth managed to diversify and spread from simple microorganisms in the sea to the millions of different species of organisms that now live across all continents and oceans. It wasn’t easy. There have been far more evolutionary failures than successes, so what has emerged not only follows Life’s Principles and Nature’s Unifying Patterns, but also Nature’s Paradigm. 

If humans want to survive on this Earth, then we have to re-learn how to follow not only Nature’s principles and patterns, but also Nature’s Paradigm. The wonderful thing is that we already know how.  Since humans are biological beings, Nature’s paradigm is our natural paradigm.  It is our worldview when we are not engaged as professionals or consumers, when we are being our authentic selves. The other wonderful thing is that living — and working and consuming — from our Natural Paradigm will allow us, individually and collectively, to create the kind of world we’d all love to live in.

If this resonates with you, I invite you to download the [free] Tiny Transformation Workbook which will give you tiny peeks into the “Conventional Paradigm” and the “Natural Paradigm”, and then a tiny experience of intentionally living from your Natural Paradigm.