Movie Review: Thrive

by Katherine Willow ND

(ed note: see David Shackleton’s post this month– it’s another interesting take on Thrive)

On Saturday, Jan 14, we had our first movie & potluck evening after the monthly open house talk, this time on holistic dying — which was well attended by an open-minded group who offered much touching and inspiring input.

The movie we chose was Thrive, made by Foster Gamble of the rich and famous Proctor and Gamble company, and he spent almost 10 years making it.  His original question was why we weren’t thriving as a species in spite all of our creativity and potential.

Well. . . turns out we were in for a classic conspiracy theory presentation, how the richest families in the world control everything from money to energy to agriculture, education and medicine with the goal of ultimate world domination, complete with eugenics and plans to deplete much of the world’s population.  Not to mention the suppression of all challengers to the status quo, including alternate energy systems and alternate healing.   It ended with the thrivemovement.com website and suggestions for nonviolent change in the world.

Over our potluck we had a discussion about the movie and our responses to it.  Interestingly enough, no one doubted that this scenario was true, however there were varying positions on it, from having to fight back to realizing that we are all part of the picture and needing to take responsibility for our piece of the puzzle first and foremost.

Personally I have been aware of this hidden agenda since I was a teenager.  I remember being in Chile teaching children to ski the summer I turned sixteen, when there happened to be an armed coup, which I got to see first hand.  On returning home, I was shocked to read a totally different story in the media and through some adults who had connections beyond the mainstream, was able to discover why the United States would manipulate the news in this direction, in their favour.

This was in combination with being aware of how modern medicine totally ignored and suppressed natural medicine in the name of profits and control — given that there were three generations of homeopaths and naturopaths ahead of me — and already some pretty clear exposures of this situation in German, my first language.

This early awareness led to an existential crisis, depression and not knowing where to turn as a young person.  Everything seemed to feed back into the system!  It took a decade or two to develop my own strategy of how to rally myself in the face of what looked like a hopeless situation.  A big part of that was my spiritual training, which taught me that the most important thing I could possibly do was to develop my higher and deeper faculties.

So I see working at creating the EcoWellness Centre as a framework for doing my personal work, purifying my ego and allowing some deeper wisdom to emerge.  I must say that the outside work is a lot easier than the inner, however the glimpses I get of the light behind the clouds convince me of the strength of our inner selves.  As long as we are still living from a position of fear and competition, we are affirming the powers that be, no matter how we might clothe ourselves in alternative philosophies and lifestyles.

And the movie reaffirmed this position.  But it was based on escalating the “Us versus Them” opposition that is getting us in trouble in the first place.  I agree that it is important to be aware of how things work and don’t work in order to guide us in our choices of how we vote, school our children, heal ourselves and even contribute thoughts to the human mind field.  However, I still maintain that the most effective action we can take is to open our hearts.  This is contagious and helps to move our species closer to the tipping point more than anything else we can do, at least in my humble opinion. . .

The movie yet for next month’s Free Events Open House Day, Feb 25, is Food Matters, starting at 3:30 — before then will be a natural health talk on Osteoporosis from 1-3pm — we  hope you’ll join us for an entertaining afternoon/evening of sharing food and good talks!