May 12-14, 2006
Your Money or Your Life, the best-selling book by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin, gave people tools to achieve financial freedom but didn’t teach anything about freedom itself. What is freedom for? What are limits for? When I’m tied up in knots, how do I cut through? When I lose my sense of freedom, how do I get it back? Can I feel free sexually and still be legal, moral, and married? When I’m swamped by possibilities, how do I direct my life? Why do so many Americans not feel free?
Freedom in America is truly at a crossroads. Our old understanding – freedom as no constraint – worked when resources seemed limitless and technology was limited. Now cowboy freedom is a formula for global disaster, yet the urge to feel free is so very strong in every one of us. How can we feel free in a full, finite world, in a time of diminishing resources and expanding population?
The workshop will draw on all three of Vicki’s core teachings: 1.) For the first time publicly, Vicki will present the ideas in her new book on freedom, which is being published in 2007; 2.)Vicki developed the Conversation Café, as an organized, structured way to shift from small talk to BIG talk, which will be taught and used in the workshop; 3.) She will review the basics of Your Money or Your Life, her pioneering work that taught people to be free of money-madness.
The most powerful part of this workshop will be what arises within us and between us as we listen, talk, and engage together in free and playful inquiry. Once we get the hang of freeing ourselves – again and again – in a complex world, we will truly merit living in “the land of the free.”
Vicki Robin is a true pioneer who’s been exploring freedom her whole life. Her favorite pastimes are writing, listening, reflecting, painting, singing, dancing, walking, laughing, and exploring. She gave up a successful but stressful career and became financially self-sufficient in 1970, living primarily off her modest investment income. With Joe Dominguez, she wrote the all-American, ground-breaking book on financial emancipation: Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship With Money and Achieving Financial Independence, which has sold close to a million copies in ten languages. Vicki and Joe taught ordinary people to win in a capitalist system by accumulating wealth rather than debt. She helped found Sustainable Seattle, the New Road Map Foundation, and the Center for a New American Dream, organizations that promote the necessity and the pleasures of lowering consumption. She is Founding Chair of The Simplicity Forum, Co-Founder of the Turning Tide Coalition, Co-Founder of Conversation Cafés, and we are honored to welcome her back to Rowe.
“I am delighted to be alive and to feel, even at 60, so fresh, new, and curious. I have given my life to healing the rifts and tears in this world. Now, having healed my own cancer, I emerge knowing that life is a mystery to be lived, not solved. It is simply about receiving and giving and touching with reverence this amazing thing called living.”
— Vicki Robin