We were lucky to catch up with Ra James recently and have shared our conversation below.

Ra, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to have you retell us the story behind how you came up with the idea for your business, I think our audience would really enjoy hearing the backstory.

This will be a shortened version of the story, because it is quite long with many details. For some context, when I was 20 years old I began to travel around the world. My first stop was Hong Kong to study abroad. I experienced the vastness of the world living in Southeast Asia for the summer and my inner flame was lit! So, I continued to travel around the world for the next 12 years straight. I traveled to approximately 50 countries on 5 continents, learning, working and sharing time side by side with different traditional cultural elders around the world, from India to Australia, Alaska, Mexico and Hawai’i and Ghana. While doing this, I was as well looking to find solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems, such as plastic waste, degenerative tourism models and limited access to clean water and energy and working on these solutions.

What I learned is that, after these attempts at starting up businesses in emerging markets to stop the harm and find solutions that were regenerative, I found that the core issue of all economics and business was centered around worldview that created the harm in the first place. And the worldview was not only limited to business, but it was a phenomena that the overwhelming majority of people lived within! Worldview is the source of all mindsets and values. And, with these elders I was re-learning a worldview that was completely opposite to the worldview that all of our main stream ‘civilization’, business and economics operates on!

So, at that moment I realized that the shifting of the worldview through education and practical approaches is where my focus should be. FutureElders does that for the individual looking to step back into a remembrance of who they really are, their relationship with the Earth and the way that they view the world which creates the conditions for them to seek success, build relationships, et al. I also do that for businesses with something call (re)Biz and I speak and host workshops globally on these intersectional topics.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

My name is Ra and I got into this way of life through traditional cultural elders. These elders were leaders in their groups of people who still maintained a way of seeing the world that was in harmony with the natural world, in all of her respects. I have become completely reoriented to life in such a beautiful way with their wisdom and guidance, and through FutureElders, I bring in some of these elders to share their wisdom with other people as well so that others can experience what I experienced (without having to travel around the word for 12 years finding these people who hold this wisdom!)

The main problem here in the world is the WAY that we see the world. In the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) countries, we have a certain way of viewing the Earth, relationships, competition, women, time, and what we are meant to do and how we operate in the world stems from that. The problem is that this way of viewing the world creates polarization, it creates harm on the Planet (global warming), it creates violence, it creates sickness and disease, it creates scarcity, it creates suffering, it creates anger, it creates systems of oppression, you name it. The way that we view the world, from the dominant hegemonic worldview, is the core problem with Earth today because this way of viewing the world is causing all of the issues.

Many elders around the world hold the wisdom to bring us back into a way of seeing and being in the world that will make us much happier, more vital, more loving and more in harmony with the planet and each-other. This is what FutureElders does, it shares the process of arriving at this worldview with elders who hold the wisdom.

Let’s talk about resilience next – do you have a story you can share with us?

Sure. Well, as I mentioned before I was traveling around the world for 12 consecutive years straight. During a 3-year stint in there, I was living in Cameroon, in Central Africa. I was living in a rural farming village close to the border of Nigeria, and the roads there were absolutely horrific. In fact, you couldn’t even drive down them in the rain. At the time I was living there, only about 7% of the roads in the country were paved, imagine that for a second. So, synchronistically, I started to look up roads, and I found that most all roads are made of oil (bitumen), which is a horrible industry for the planet. And, soon thereafter, found a solution to pave rural roads that didn’t involve using oil, but recycled plastics in a polymer that were non-toxic and could seal capillaries in clay. I began my journey with my business partner at the time introducing this into the government of Cameroon seeking to build access to these rural farm villages so that food wasn’t going to waste, teachers could get to schools, medicine and medical equipment could get to clinics so that people weren’t dying from easily treatable diseases, you name it. A lot of the issues in the post-colonialist countries come from lack of access, which is crazy that it still exists at this time. During this time, we were working with the Prime Minister, looking to get our product approved by the civil engineering lab and all the other needs, The project took almost triple the amount of time to even get through the approval process, and during this time I ended up contracting typhoid and malaria and nearly dying in Douala. After recovering, I realized that I needed a shift, and decided to pull out of the project and move to a different place. Things like this were commonplace in my life, traveling to different countries and facing massive roadblocks and looking to overcome them. I had to learn the hard way that sometimes, resilience is a blessing, and sometimes resilience is a curse. It is all about discernment. Quitters never succeed is a false quote, it was probably mistranslated, it most likely means those without faith.

Are there any books, videos, essays or other resources that have significantly impacted your management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy?

There are too many books or videos! I’ll share the first three that were given to me when I was 23 years old living on a permaculture farm and artist village on the island of O’ahu. The first one was ‘Autobiography of a Yogi’, the second one was ‘The Magic of Findhorn’, and the third one was ‘The Celestine Prophecy’.

Management and entrepreneurial thinking and philosophy is quite a funny topic to me because of it’s myopia. In fact, we drastically need more creative and holistic managers and entrepreneurs who aren’t just building solutions into a system that is failing and who are building things that really matter, not like some additional plug-in to slack or a new and improved CRM. So, I always recommend books that are a bit off the radar of most managers because the whole point is to expand the mind beyond the thresholds of limits, and this takes curiosity and an openness that comes from living and learning in a certain way. It takes realizing that learning about yoga IS going to be beneficial for your management. It takes realizing that learning that Nature is a sentient, living being IS going to help you figure out what you want to do with your life. There is no separation, so begin to live into a world without boundaries in that way that shackle your creation.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.futureelders.co
• Instagram: @future_elders
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajames8/
• Other: www.rajames.co

Image Credits
Marisa Franco