How Did the Peace Institute Network Model Form?
In 1992 Vivienne Eggers founded a community healing centre that combined arts, cultural activities and what was reputed to be the first Australian natural day spa outside a hotel environment.
The Empower centre was founded on the principles of Sacred Feminine. It included gallery and functions, workshops and learning exchange of cultural activities. Advocates of local, national and international cultural sectors brought their knowledge and skills to those who visited the centre on situated on the beautiful seashores of Palm Beach NSW.
A resident meditation healing group with a core membership of 13 men and women of all faiths and spiritual truth were joined by visitors and people who travelled from all over Sydney to create the powerful and loving atmosphere that was then used to perform absent healing and prayer to all in the world. This group had clear vision of events that now face our contemporary society. The desire and intention was to send relief to suffering of those in disaster, conflict or hardship locations and to assist those mortally afflicted souls in passing over, while traumatised from shock and sudden calamity.
Facilitators of spiritual and cultural knowledge regularly visited the centre to impart their pearls of wisdom and to join practitioners in healing and transformation services. Vivienne also provided clairvoyant counselling, transpersonal coaching and facilitated healing workshops such as ‘Reclaiming the Goddess Within’ for those seeking to reconnect with Sacred Feminine. Regular centre events of Goddess nights for music, meditation and honouring cycled with the lunar phases, and were attended by men and women connecting with their MUSE. Often spiritual emissaries visited this little centre – priests, nuns and tribal elders from inter-denominational faith and creeds. Indigenous Australian residents often blessed the centre visitors with knowledge sharing and sacred walks in to Aboriginal rock carvings, and native flower walks in the National Parks.
In 1993 Vivienne and the Empower Centre were featured in a cameo on Australian television show ‘The Extraordinary’ and the profile of the healing performed and spiritual community continued to grow through press and word of mouth – despite the often disparaging paradox from mainstream attitudes to sacred spiritual values at this time. Vivienne was able to perceive how this seed of community service and sustaining knowledge community could impact a greater environment in the difficult times she knew would eventuate in this world.
At the turn of 1997, in her 33rd year Vivienne closed the centre and began an international mission to build a framework for PEACE from her ‘prototype’ experiences at the beginning of the decade. This activity coupled a personal journey of self discovery, in which Vivienne sought to retrace through intuitive research and reconnect the truths of her arcane legacy of Sacred Feminine still inherent in the threads of international culture. In this latter activity Vivienne began the long arduous task of practice based research for a trilogy of Goddess in ‘Sacred Songs from Silence’ – the books now being completed and submitted for publishing some 14 years later.
The challenges that evolved in developing a solution framework from the ‘love and light’ idealist model of the Empower Centre lay in the complexity of multi-culture and international societies. Much of Vivienne’s business career has been devoted to management consulting in strategy, change, culture and communications – successfully transforming major projects across governments and restructuring corporations.
Yet the idealist PEACE model was not robust outside of the privileged, democratic, rights based environment it had first been established. In addition to the original esteem building, recovery and transpersonal model, solutions had to be established that could integrate a centre framework in cultures and communities that were in third world poverty and suffering, wrought with disaster, conflict or pure disadvantage through deficit in democratic rights.
By the end of 1997 Vivienne published from Glastonbury, UK her first business philanthropy solution that incorporated the PEACE Institute model. Contributions and enthusiasm to its formation came from members in the music and literary publishing industries. Vivienne then continued into South East Asia to develop fair trade and incubator support of artisan and commodity product design and development.
By 2002 Vivienne had immigrated to London UK, and was consulting in Change Management and eCommerce. Here she completed the first full version of the Conscious Flow marketing services and sustainable business platform that could profit fund the formation and activities of PEACE Institutes. Vivienne attended World Peace and Prayer Day at Gandhi Temple of the Mother Returning in South Africa and later tabled the PEACE framework with Arvol and Coordinator Paula Horne Mullin of Wolakota Foundation. Paula returned with their own Dakota Sioux version of a single Peace Institute they had desired and planned since the early 1990s.
Vivienne saw validation in how the international framework she had since developed could find validation with individual communities. She returned to Indonesia where she had first formed the concept of Institute with the late Bernike Manurang in 1998 and later with Ian Rajuguguk of Batak Toba region who also desired an individual Peace Institute and cultural exchange network. She perceived the framework could align with the common principles of peaceful harmony and the PEACE heritage and eco preservation mission.
Vivienne continued to consult and liaise with members of this region while she continued to investigate and develop the model extended into communities of cultures who had survived conflict and natural disasters. Strategy required further validation and risk modelling was required after the experience of 2004-2005 Tsunami and other natural disasters. To continue the peace activity she perceived a need to extend her own academic and professional understanding of international law, international relations and areas of sensitivity such as genocide and crimes against humanity. At the same time she continued her legal studies of Native Title with investigative research into disadvantaged communities in first world – including those dealing with homelessness, migration assimilation and general Indigenous issues.
The journey of PEACE has been slow, due to enormity and other life endeavours competing for time and energy. Vivienne has concurrently had to address and deal with over past years a degrading crippling neuro-physiological illness that resulted out of attack and poisoning. The Conscious Flow Club sustainable profitability model was not able to be set up internationally until the advent of suitable technology infrastructure that could support its operation. In 2011 most of global society now has access to technology and bandwidth for the richness of media experience provided by Conscious Flow. The network of peace has been culminated in Bali where Vivienne intends a PHD to support the implementation of this model and its diverse, intricate components while continuing to expand and establish PEACE Institutes in global communities, uniquely tailored to the cultural requirements.
