‘The First Law says that Change is From Within. The meaningful change comes from right within us. As we continue to develop, we always keep that in mind.
It’s about people changing themselves. The law is, change is from “within-side”, not primarily from outside. Change first in the spiritual world. It will then manifest itself in the outside world.
In the Second Law, they told us that In Order for Development to Occur It Must Be Preceded By a Vision. If there’s no vision, there’s no development.
The universal principle is that the human being, because we are created with free will, has to work with thought. The principle is that we move towards and become like that which we think about. We move towards and become like that which we think about whether it is good for us or not.
If it’s really true that we move towards and become like that which we think about, then it is important to be thinking about what we are thinking about.
Are we thinking about wellness? Violence-free communities? Are we thinking about healing? As we start to create a vision, from mini-visions to big visions, then things start to happen. The Law says if you start to think abut it, you move towards it.
The Third Law says that a Great Learning Must Take Place. We soon found that a lot of things that were happening in our healing work needed to be connected to one another.
We tie the Great Learning into the cycle of life - Baby, Youth, Adult and Elder - from the Medicine Wheel. In order to change the youth, the adults and the Elders have to change simultaneously. It’s all interconnected.
That’s why we have the Seven Trainings program. That’s why we have the girls, the boys, the adults and the families as seven linked trainings so that the youth are not as separated.
If the adults and Elders are not changing, the youth won’t change. It’s all interconnected. The entire cycle of life must be in the Great Learning.
The Fourth Law of Change says You Must Create a Healing Forest. The Elders said suppose you have a hundred acre forest that has a disease or sickness. In other words, it is a sick forest.
But then suppose you go to the forest one day and uproot a sick tree and take it down the road and temporarily plant it in a nursery. This is like taking a person out of the community into treatment.
So out there in the nursery you give the tree good soil and minerals, water and sun and all those things to make healthy and natural and how it was intended to be.
One day the tree is healthy again and you bring it back to its community. You bring the well tree back into a sick forest. What will probably happen to that well tree? It gets sick again.
So the entire community must be working on its own healing so that individuals won’t get sick again. The entire community must know itself to be part of the healing forest in order for sobriety and wellness to take root.
The Fourth Law is the basis for the Healing Forest Model we use in the Wellbriety Movement.’