By Laura Abruscato
Contributing Writer
At what point is it enough? When do you take an action step for yourself? What does it take to be brave and take a stand?”
These are the questions Palisadian writer and podcast host Sharon Weil answers with her new book, ChangeAbility: How Artists, Activists, and Awakeners Navigate Change.
Weil will host a panel at the Palisades Library community room on Thursday, Sept. 15, at 6:30 p.m., based on her book, which features 25 changemakers that she interviewed on her podcast, “Passing 4 Normal: How Artists, Activists, and Awakeners Are Seeding Change in the World.”
Photo: Natalia Knezevic
Joining Weil at the event will be five of those featured in the book: Palisadian Corinne Bourdeau, producer of social change films; Amanda Foulger, shamanic healer; Rachel Lang, astrologer and intuitive healer; Camille Maurine, women’s meditation mentor and Ann Gentry, founder and owner of Real Food Daily restaurants.
“The book is a recipe of how to meet change,” says Weil. “It has real tools for people on how to approach change in their lives.”
In Part One of the book, she discusses initiating change, adapting to change and inspiring change. “It feels like everything is moving so fast with technology. Most people are overwhelmed in their lives. How do you navigate a moving world?”
Weil lives in the Alphabet streets neighborhood with daughter Sophie Aaron, a senior at Marlborough, and she has two grown stepdaughters: Jenny Aaron, a middle-school teacher in Queens, New York, and Melissa Aaron, a Ph.D. candidate in British history at Kings College in London.
A screenwriter and filmmaker, Weil wrote Donny and Ursula Save the World, a comedic novel about unlikely lovers who become activists on the issue of non-GMO foods. “It came in a different form,” she said of the switch from screenplay to novel. “There was more room for internal dialogue.”
While researching GMO seeds for the book, Weil met environmental activists. For many years she had been a board member of the Lia Foundation, which made grants to over 100 groups that sought solutions to issues in the Bay Area, and she met many social activists through this work. She met artists through her years as a filmmaker. And she knew many bodyworkers and healers while teaching the Ageless Body class at the Continuum Movement Studio in Santa Monica.
Weil had never listened to a podcast before starting her own, on the suggestion of a publicist for her novel. She started interviewing people she knew from different fields: environmental activists, prison reformers, spiritual people and artists. “I was listening and I started hearing common approaches people had to change.”
This led to Part Two of her new book, where she outlines seven principles that are common to all types of change: bring awareness, listen deeply, find community, proceed incrementally, align with nature, have hope, and spark fire. She feels that finding community is the most important, and believes most people don’t ask for enough help and support from others while going through change.
The book contains excerpts from her podcasts and subsequent conversations she had with the change-makers, asking them questions such as “How do you sustain hope in hopeless situations?” Weil teaches “how we can align with change, not feel crippled in our resistance and maybe even enjoy change.”
Weil will moderate the September 15 panel and promises to have an interactive event. “I’m hoping people will come because they want to engage in conversation about how to approach change.”
The evening is hosted by the Friends of the Palisades Library. Admission is free.
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