By Bhavesh PATEL

Deep sharing and change starting with individuals in a family and leading to change in the world family...

I met Nandor Lim in Action For Life(AFL) 2 in 2003, he was learning English, came across a bit tough and serious, and during those 9 months presented a plan for the next 5 years of his life, which even included flight times ! The plan involved starting a family centre in Kuala Lumpur with no resources, getting married although to who he had no idea, and starting a national movement for family healing in the country. I looked it over quite impressed and thought it is a good idea, but come on….

5 years later I live in Malaysia, close to Nandor Lim. He is married with a lovely young son, he runs a Learning Community Centre where 100s have come, and he just ran his 5th annual conference on the family with increasing numbers each year ! The Learning Community Centre, known as AKASHA, runs purely on donations, given by people whose lives have been touched deeply through the courses and one-to-one counselling provided by the centre. Akasha is now running sustainably from a financial point of view. The Akasha team run weekly classes in family healing and personal change, and then provide on-going one-to-one support, there inspiration comes from John Bradshaw, Virginia Satir, Scott Peck, Bert Hellinger, and of course their grounding in IofC ideas and the work of Ren-Jou Liu and the EQ(Emotional Intelligence) Centre in Taiwan.

Over the years Akasha’s work has developed an interconnected web of people and families who have been helped and healed, and has led to the last family conference having more than a 100 people come for one day to share their stories and have fun together. Individuals, couples, families, young people, all shared how they have understood and changed their family stories to bring more healing and reconciliation. A lot of the participants were families, which can potentially have a bigger impact on society than an individual attending. People shared openly with courage and tears. Akasha has been in the newspaper as well in the last years and step by step a movement is growing that I have no doubt will become a national movement in the country.

Recently I have been meditating on Margaret Wheatley’s views on leadership, and thinking about the tasks of a Leader as 1) to know themselves 2) to create a team 3) to help each individual in the team to know themselves 4) to help the organisation know itself. This seems to have been Nandor’s journey. He has spent a lot of time working on himself, or as AFL states “Change Yourself”. Then he has spent time starting his work of family healing and building a team. The team has spent 2 years and 100 hours of training time together learning to know themselves. This could be what AFL calls “Engage Others & Create Solutions”. This has taken Nandor to a point where he can now step back from being the Leader, because the group now has an understanding of themselves and their organisation/mission, and what happens is that instead of a Leader – Leadership emerges as each individual feels empowered to take action when they want to ! AFL’s final stage is “To Give Hope To Humanity” which I believe this team in Malaysia is doing in ever increasing circles.

Their outreach is spreading out of the capital Kuala Lumpur, and Nandor has also been to China and the Philippines is coming soon. Having read a lot of the MRA history books, this story reminds me of those classic stories of following guidance, caring for individuals and helping them find change, resources coming to support the work, and individuals choosing to get involved, a growing team, and who knows where it will go !

Coming from IofC Europe, I have a feeling that what is happening in Asia is not fully known or understood. This may have been a good thing as it has allowed things to grow, however now may be the time for the world work to pay more attention to what is happening over here, I know I am!