Episode 065: Using Purpose to Design Our Regenerative Livelihood with Javan Bernakevitch

One of the most amazing things about permaculture is that it inspires us to channel our creative energy into everything around us. In this week’s episode of the Seeds of Tao Podcast, we’re talking with Javan Bernakevich about his amazing journey through natural building, permaculture land design, and eventually holistic permaculture life design. Javan is a big mover and shaker in the industry, we’re grateful to have him as our guest, with his extensive knowledge and experience. Let’s dive in!

First off, if you’d like to check out more of what Javan is up to and follow him along his journey, check out  All Points Land Design or follow him on Facebook or Instagram. 

We Are Life Creators

In this week’s episode, Javan shares his awesome journey through many jobs, cities, educational programs, and side quests as he sought to find out how to create a life that really resonated with him and made a positive impact. One of the big epiphanies that he had along his way was that we are life creators. We’re not just talking about human anatomy and biology, but also creating and facilitating the growth of life in our surroundings, and especially creating the life that we want to have. 

So often people are telling the world they don’t have a choice, and there are all these restraints in their way from living the life they want to live. We’re talking about people in the 3rd world countries that have more agency than they know what to do with. And yet they move through their life believing there’s only one or two paths to follow and duty and obligation at every turn. What mental obstacles are we putting in front of ourselves, and what excuses are we making that are keeping us from moving forward? And how do we move forward?

Moving Forward with Purpose

One fantastic thing about the people in the permaculture and regenerative realm is that we have all kinds of causes and purposes we can get behind, whether that’s improving our communities, reducing our footprints, creating a better world for our kids, or just generally saving the planet. But when we find one core purpose that resonates with us to our soul, we must hold tight to that and use it as a guidepost to move forward in our life.

Javan was talking in the podcast about how he holds tight to his personal purpose and values to make all kinds of decisions in his life, even the decision to be on our podcast. Having that anchor is invaluable, especially in a world that offers thousands of paths, but most of them will take us to places we don’t really want to go. 

This anchor can look different for different people. For some, it might be a purpose statement, or a power statement, for others they have a WHY statement or a specific goal of impact, the variations are endless and multi-faceted. The trick is clearly creating in your mind where you want to go, and then staying hyper-focused on getting there. However, as you move forward, it’s very important to understand that you’ve got to do a lot of experimentation with the paths available to see what will really move you forward or not. 

Experimenting Through Life

Javan poignantly brought up the necessity of looking at life as a big science experiment. We’re going to have a hypothesis we need to test to create the desired life we want to create, yet not all experiments will come out like we want them to. I’ve always drawn a lot of inspiration from Thomas Edison’s story about how he experimented 1,000 times to create the lightbulb. It’s crazy to imagine pushing through 999 experiments. But in our lives, we conduct way more experiments than that, and it’s important to keep that experimental perspective in mind. 

What if I start this business or take this job? That’s an experiment. Given, some experiments will lead to more permanent outcomes like having kids or getting married, but the idea is still the same, we’re experimenting through this journey called life, trying to get to our desired destination. 

If you feel like a lot of these experiments “fail,” take heart from Edison, “I have not failed 1,000 times, I have successfully discovered 1,000 ways to NOT make a light bulb.” (We’re not sainting Edison by any means, but like him or not, we can learn from his impressive amount of diligence and perseverance)

Fail Better

In the episode, Javan brings up a really important point of failing better. When we fail, we’re just getting tripped up a bit, but it’s important to keep moving forward. I love the synonym people attach to the word fail…

F- First

A- Attempt

I- In

L- Learning

There is so much more we actually learn from our “trip-ups” than we do from our successes, so it’s important not to get down-hearted when we feel like we’ve failed. Just like Javan, get back up and experiment with something else. 

We hope that after this episode you’re inspired to anchor tighter to your purpose, your WHY, and move fearlessly forward as you experiment and succeed in creating the regenerative livelihood of your dreams.

Keep Growing!

Previous Episode: People Care World Report: Facing Death in the Present