Flourishing Kin

A first-of-its-kind book that updates the Western paradigm of mental wellness with Indigenous wisdom for collective, sustainable happiness.

How do we cultivate happiness? When facing the monumental challenges of our world, it can feel natural to tune out the bad news and focus on our mental health. Yet Dr. Yuria Celidwen teaches that attending only to our own state of mind is precisely why so many of us struggle to be happy. “What’s been overlooked is the Indigenous perspective,” she says. “It is the understanding that individual happiness is not enough—we must expand our view to include our kinship with others, from our neighbors to the living Earth.”

While recognizing the gains made by Western positive psychology, mindfulness, and neuroscience, Dr. Celidwen’s research shows the tremendous benefit of integrating Indigenous approaches into our approach to well-being. In Flourishing Kin, she identifies seven key principles found in Indigenous cultures worldwide that embrace virtue, ethical living, and spirituality. Each principle reveals how we can overcome isolation and despair, nourish healthy relationships with our communities and environment, and build strong foundations of well-being that elevate our life choices.

Sustainable happiness goes beyond optimism or resilience. Dr. Celidwen invites us to experience a path to fulfillment that allows us to meet the world in all its complexity and imperfection with love, hope, and joyous participation in the flourishing of all living beings.

INDIGENOUS TRADITIONS

The Americas, Japan, the African continent, Oceania (Australia and New Zealand), and South East Asia.

7 FOUNDATIONS

The following foundations are the seeds we will be watering to let our sense of kin flourish:

Kin Relationality is our ability to perceive all living beings as Relatives—a perspective shared by Indigenous Peoples worldwide.

Body Seed explores the body as a vessel of experience and as the roots connecting us to a sense of place and our shared Lands around the globe.

Senshine, a playful coming together of senses and sunshine, looks at how we use all of our senses—heart, imagination, memory, reason, sound, sight, touch, smell, and taste—to brighten our experience of life. It nurtures the observation of direct experience as a source of traditional wisdom.

Heartfelt Wisdom focuses on the power of emotions to orient our skillful action for planetary flourishing. Here, storytelling compels positive, other-focused emotions like reverence, gratitude, compassion, kindness, awe, and moral beauty. These transcendent emotions enhance prosocial behaviors for our flourishing kin’s sustainable, collective wellbeing.

Ecological Belonging renews our awareness of being part of the extensive Earth system. Thus, it elicits a commitment to revere Mother Earth. This sense of devotion raises nature-based contemplation and narratives of belonging.

Collective Wellbeing offers engaged practices that raise pathways of reparation, restoration, and the return of benefits to Mother Earth for life’s generous and vibrant diversity and to Indigenous Peoples.

Re-emergence is a next cycle of the spiral path of collective well-being returning to the observation, embodiment, narrative, and reflection of shared experience.