Jon Young - Learning from our Ancient Past MP3 & Slides PDF

Learning From our Ancient Past:

Revitalizing our Modern Experience

The Art of Mentoring Model was named in 1995 but was initially activated after Jon Young’s years of research in anthropology to understand what connective practices cultures have in common all over the world. Jon’s search focused on the peace-time activities, the connective things that people did when they were happy and healthy and in a good way with each other with their neighbors – the people in these conditions were living a life that was not just sustainable, but regenerative.

In other words, everybody within the village had a meaningful role to play, they were all fully activated, excited, and joyous. Together, they created an ecology of human interaction that essentially made for the most powerful welcoming environment for the children, allowing them to flourish in connection with nature, self and others.

How did people achieve this? What elements are found around the world, common to the human experience that we can learn from to enhance our own lives wherever we live? These were Jon’s research questions. The measurement of the effectiveness of this was: How deeply did these people connect to nature?

Looking at the most deeply connected cultures of the world, Jon began focusing a lot on the San Bushmen. He realized while studying these effective cultural routines of people and place, that when something was effective on multiple continents, the Bushmen were also doing it. There was nothing that was effective that the traditional Bushmen weren’t doing as a core cultural practice.

Jon was really trying to answer these questions:

How do we effectively connect people to self, in a powerful way so that their genius and brilliance shines? 

So that they play a meaningful active and engaged role within their community, and their family?

So that they feel fulfilled and powerful, and deeply connected to the natural world around them?

So that they are able to represent and lead a regenerative model for the future generations?”

When Jon moved Wilderness Awareness School to Duvall, Washington in 1995, he had to look at how to start an intergenerational mentoring community from scratch, and train people from the beginning to understand that the mentoring process was different than the western educational model. At that time many of the processes that form the core of the Art of Mentoring became formalized and shared.

Reflecting back on the 4 quadrants approach that will be shared on the free webinar, we’re now looking at how the Art of Mentoring evolved to solve the problems mentioned above. This will give a good historical perspective of the AOM as a connective model, but also will help you to understand why this model matters and what your role is going forward and applying this within your own life.