Institute For Global Transformation™ 20 Year Anniversary, September 2022
Thank you for the last 20 years and here’s to 20 more! This year the IFGT is celebrating its 20th Anniversary and it’s been a wonderful and exciting journey. Meeting, making new friends, and working with my IFGT teammates have been some of the fondest memories and biggest rewards of my entire life –I lovingly refer to them as my soul family.
Together, we’ve weathered all the struggles of a startup non-profit. Back in 2002, the internet was in its infancy and was certainly nothing like what it is today. In 2002, there were only about 38 million domain names world-wide and most of them were not being used. For several years, the IFGT didn’t even have a website so publicizing ourselves and carrying out our vision and mission were done only by word of mouth and in-person meetings that required us to fly to different cities.
All along the way, the inspiring dedication of our all-volunteer staff and the excellence with which they perform all of their responsibilities made the Institute what it is today. They have helped create a one-of-a-kind success story. I’m also happy to say that all of our founding Board members (except for Matthew Miller, Jim Elliott, and Sheila Regueira who passed through transition), are still with us. C.J. Mulkerrin, Kristie Knutson, and Lou Domenech are still creative geniuses that add valuable insight and support.
My husband, Dr. Matthew Miller was my rock all along the journey. When we encountered obstacles that could have caused us to give up, he always encouraged us to be strong and never give up. He was so wise and always had just the right way to instill, in me, the fortitude needed for the journey. Matthew was an integral part of the IFGT’s everyday effort and success, and we have much for which to thank him.
Our team shares their thoughts about the IFGT:
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Our team wishes the IFGT Happy 20th Anniversary:
The Story of How It All Began
It’s interesting how life unfolds. For whatever reason, I’ve never taken the time to share with our IFGT family and community how the Institute came into existence and how, next to my family, it has been the single most important thing in my life. Every time I think of each of you, my heart truly overflows with love and gratitude. I could never express just how important you are and how being part of this truly wonderful organization and community is a lifelong dream. I say a dream because that is how it all began.
1988, September, Fort Bragg, a city on California’s Mendocino Coast, with a shoreline full of colorful glass stones that glisten like a rainbow of colors as the sun dances upon them. Ft. Bragg is a great place to relax, think, and meditate on life and one’s future. My husband, Matthew, and I were both going through some deeply troubling times with the company where we both were employed. You know the old saying, the higher the pedestal, the farther the fall? Well, it was an unfathomably steep fall so we decided to take a three-day weekend to restore balance to our emotions and lives. Each morning we walked on the beach, watched the seagulls forage for food, and worked on seeing the sunshine through the cracks in the clouds.
The evenings produced beautiful sunsets and as we continued to walk along the beach we both became peaceful within and balance was once again restored. One evening, as I went to bed, I asked my Higher Self to share Its wisdom and show me a way I could still be of service in the world. That night I experienced the first of three consecutive, conscious, and profound dreams that laid out a blueprint that became the Institute For Global Transformation™ (IFGT).
After falling asleep that night, a blueprint began to be fashioned by a spider[i] spinning its web. The spider worked meticulously giving great attention to each section of its web. It was as if the spider was sharing with me the secret of how to design a strong and lasting web, one that could stand the test of time and that I was to pay very close attention. When the spider finished spinning its web, I immediately awoke and arose to write down all of the dream’s details. I wasn’t sure what they meant, but I knew they were important.
In the morning, I told Matthew of my dream and that I knew it had to do with our future. We again spent the day walking on the beach, going into town, talking, and just relaxing. The second night, as I fell asleep I centered my mind and did a meditative relaxation exercise. Sometime in the wee hours of the morning, I became aware of a second dream, which was a continuation of the previous night’s dream. This time, words began to appear on the spider’s web along with explanations of each of the sections. I could remember the details word for word, and the ideas, meaning and foundation were very clear.
The next morning I again shared the dream with Matthew and we discussed it in depth. We wrote notes and created drawings to make sure we had captured all that we could. We spent the remainder of the day again relaxing, meditating, and taking long balancing and renewing walks on the beach. That night, my emotions were at a high pitch with excitement and possibility so it was difficult to fall asleep, but sleep eventually arrived.
Then again, in the wee hours of the morning, the third and last down-load came to me. In this dream, the mission of the previous two nights’ dreams was revealed. I was to manifest, in physical form, the blueprint that had been given to me in the three consecutive dreams and I was to devote the remainder of this incarnation in service to this mission for humanity and the planet. So together, Matthew and I began the journey.
We both resigned from our positions with the company that was going through its private turmoil and spent the next several years moving around the country doing consulting jobs. Matthew’s background gave us many opportunities to assist companies with re-organization, stability, and growth and my background assisted with personnel planning and procurement. It was a busy but productive time and being able to help small businesses was not only fun: it was also very rewarding.
We eventually settled in North Hollywood, CA, for several years. It was there, that we discovered a spiritual teacher, mentor, and wonderful friend, Georgia Lambert, that greatly added to the metaphysical knowledge and spiritual practices we both had studied and practiced for several decades. Southern CA was a breeding ground for metaphysical organizations back in the early 1920s and is still fertile ground for what has become known as the ancient wisdom.
At last, we began to take up the vision of the three dreams I had experienced. At the same time, the company I had previously left back in 1988 again offered me a Regional Director’s position with them in the Pacific Southwest. Their company culture and leadership were greatly improved so I accepted the position. Looking back, I know this competed for my time in establishing the IFGT. It was, however, a great learning experience as I encountered situations I otherwise would never have come across.
So, along with my other duties, Matthew and I continued working on manifesting the IFGT as outlined in the three dreams. We began reconnecting with spiritual friends from back in the 1970s and we all settled on a city where we would meet and discuss the formation of the organization. We met many times over the next few years and plans began to take shape. It was difficult because the internet was in its infancy in the early 1990s. There were only 130 websites in 1993 and only about 10 million global users in 1996. This required all of our plans to be discussed on landline phones and we needed to pay for all long-distance calls, which was not inexpensive at that time. Adding to the challenges, we all had to travel to a distant city to meet in person.
However, life sometimes has a way of pointing you to your next step in ways you wouldn’t imagine. Circumstances in my personal life regarding my children and the births of my grandchildren soon pointed out that a move to Georgia was necessary. So another major move presented itself.
We finally settled in Georgia for good. But even in 1997 the internet was still just beginning to take off and there were very few websites except for very large businesses. Added to that, Matthew and I had no spiritual friends (actually no friends) in GA at the time, so we wondered how we could possibly continue our plans to manifest the IFGT. Then the company I had worked with three previous times again offered me a position with them as Director of the Southeastern US, and I again accepted. This offered us the opportunity to meet some truly wonderful and amazing friends. And, as it turned out, it was just the impetus that was needed to successfully bring the IFGT into physical form.
On January 1, 2002, a soon-to-be very close and dear friend, Terre Minus, invited us to her house to celebrate the new year. Unknown to me at the time, Terre, was an amazing clairvoyant and during the party, she pulled me aside and told me she had a message she needed to give me. Along with some personal information, Terre told me I had three huge boulders that were roadblocks to the successful completion of a major project in my life, and they each needed to be removed before any success could be achieved.
That evening I began to contemplate what the three roadblocks were. One by one, they became apparent. They were, however, not small roadblocks; they were, in fact, major and life-altering. Because of this, they weighed heavily upon my mind. So I went over them one by one and one by one I removed them. Then, shortly after that a very dear friend, Carolyn (C.J.) Mulkerrin called and told me she was in town and asked if I wanted to have lunch. We set up a lunch date and as we discussed old times, she began to somewhat casually talk about organizational plans I had shared with her several months earlier. It was a very creative conversation and before I left, with her promptings, I committed to pulling together a few friends whom I felt would be interested in pursuing the formation of the IFGT.
After that lunch, things moved very quickly. I called C.J. Mulkerrin, Kristie Knutson, Lou Domenech, Joyce Muraoka, Sheila Regueira, and Jim Elliott asking if they would like to meet and continue our discussions from years earlier, on the formation of the IFGT. They all answered in the affirmative. Our first official meeting was held in Atlanta, Georgia, on June 30, 2002. We voted upon Corporate Officers, a Board of Directors, and an Advisory Council. During that meeting, the Institute For Global Transformation™ was carefully chosen as our official name.
I filed for incorporation status for the IFGT on September 10, 2002, in Atlanta, Georgia. During the next months, we discussed the vision, mission, values, and principles of the Institute and its corporate culture. We knew we were a new and different type of organization and would not fit nicely into the recognized norms of the time. We were, however, committed to the vision given in the three consecutive dreams back in 1988, even recognizing that the symbology of the web might have been an indication of the true timing for IFGT’s birth. By 2002, the world wide web was well established, which made everything much easier.
From its inception, the IFGT has been devoted to being of service to humanity by hosting classes and developing a model for the transformation of consciousness that each person could incorporate into her/his daily life. By striving to become our very best selves, live our highest values, and work toward self-mastery, we simultaneously help make the world a better place for everyone.
We knew it was important to reach everyone with our message and disseminate this information to people and organizations in every area of life, thus were the IFGT’s Departments formed according to those indicated by the spider’s web (business, healing arts, sciences, the arts, philosophy, youth, and public services). These original Departments were changed to Branches, and then IFGT’s Areas of Focus. We then began contacting individuals, course instructors, and organizations, in alignment with our vision and mission, to establish relationships and uplift consciousness in each of these seven areas of focus.
Though some of the Department’s titles have changed and we also combined the activities of the Youth Department into each of the other Branches, we still try to communicate how higher consciousness can be obtained and made practical within our individual lives through each of these areas of focus.
The IFGT recognizes the importance of not only individual creativity and wisdom, but also group creativity, wisdom, and the power of inclusiveness to create new paradigms in all areas of life. Through an ingenious and progressive process of self-discovery, the IFGT offers our members a blueprint for the attainment of self-mastery. Why is this important? By discovering one’s true nature and reconnecting with one’s unlimited self we, in turn, are creating a better world for everyone. As a person expands her/his consciousness, one becomes much more aware of life’s true meaning and purpose. The IFGT’s blueprint for self-mastery contains natural laws and principles that, when executed, generate an environment of interconnectedness, purpose, wisdom, and love that produce new ways of thinking, seeing, feeling, and acting. This is the underpinning of all activities of the IFGT. To Know One’s Self is the most important and valuable thing one can ever accomplish.
You are and have always been One with the Unknowable-One. You are a leading-edge extension of the Unknowable-One and are here to expand, experience, actualize, and know your vastness, and to live in the joy of knowing your Oneness.
[i] Spider Symbolism: Creativity and the Weaving of Fate: “The spider symbology is extremely old, having shown up in myth and lore throughout the ages. To the native American Indians, the spider is grandmother, which is the link to the past and the future.
Because spiders have a two section body geometrically, they form a figure eight, which is the symbol of infinity. “This symbolizes the difficulty of keeping your balance, learning to walk those circles, or even holding your position within the middle between the two. Therefore, the spider teaches you to maintain a balance between past and future, and physical and spiritual. The spider teaches you that everything you now do is weaving what you will encounter in the future. In the tarot deck is the Wheel of Fortune. This is a card that has to do with rhythms, the rise and fall, the flow and flux. It is linked to the energies of honor and favor, and the sensitivities necessary to place ourselves within the rhythm of Nature.
The spider awakens creative sensibilities. It weaves a web of intricate and subtle fabric as if to remind us that the past always subtly influences the present and future. Often the webs will take a spiral shape, the traditional form of creativity and development. The spider found within the web reminds us that we are the center of our own world, The ancient mystery schools had one precept inscribed above their portals: ‘Know Thyself and Thou Shalt Know the Universe!’ A Spider reminds us that the world is woven around us. We are the keepers and the writers of our own destiny, weaving it like a web through our thoughts, feelings, and actions.
The spider, because of its characteristics, has come to be associated by mystics and in mythology with three predominant expressions of magic. The first is the magic and energy of creation. It is a symbol of creative power, reflected in its ability to spin a silken web. It is also associated with the assertiveness of that creative force, of keeping the feminine energies of creation alive and strong. The third predominant magic of the spider is associated with its spiral energy, the links with the past and the future.” ANIMAL SPEAK – by Ted Andrews
