06 DomeGaia and the Power of Purpose w/ Hajjar Gibran

Announcer: Welcome to Sustainability Now, an exploration of technologies and paradigms to shape a world that works, designed for socially conscious entrepreneurs and individuals interested in responsible stewardship of the planet.

Sustainability Now covers food, energy, housing, water, waste, economics, and consciousness. Welcome to your community sustainability now with your host, Mira Rubin.

Mira Rubin: Okay, welcome everybody to Sustainability Now, technologies and paradigms to shape a world that works. I’m your host Mira Rubin. We’re thrilled to have you here today. And I’m so excited to introduce our guest Hajjar Gibran. Now I found Hajjar through the website for his company: DomeGaia. And on that website, I saw the most extraordinarily beautiful, structures – buildings – they’re these wonderful, wonderful domes made of foam-crete or aircrete, and they’re just spectacular. So you’ll be able to see images of these on our website at sustainabilitynow.global. We’ll have show notes for everything we reference in this interview. And we’ll have links to Hajjar’s website, and so Hajjar, welcome, welcome, welcome. I’m thrilled to have you here!

Hajjar Gibran: Well, thank you. I’m thrilled to be here too. Yeah, so great what you’re doing and I’m so happy to be part of it.

Mira: Well, this is just a dream come true for me. I’ll say. Please, let’s start off with just giving folks an idea about what DomeGaia is.

Hajjar: Well, DomeGaia is a company that I started to answer the demand for the low cost housing that I’ve been working on. We started out doing domes and one of our videos went viral and so we got a lot of interest in our domes. We’re building them out of aircrete, which is a lightweight cementitious material that’s really easy to make yourself. And it’s very low cost, but it has all the outstanding qualities of concrete: completely fireproof and waterproof, insect proof, very long lasting and low maintenance – just great material.

Mira: Can you tell us what makes aircrete, aircrete?

Hajjar: Yeah, it’s the air.

Mira: Obviously. [Laughter]

Hajjar: Yeah, it’s a real simple recipe. It’s, it’s just regular cement, powdered cement with water, and a foam that infuses infuses it with air. And we use dish detergent to create the foam.

Mira: Any particular brand? [laughter]

Hajjar: Well, you can use a lot of different brands, as long as it’s a really good quality degreaser. It’s the sodium lauryl sulfate that is the foaming agent.

We really like Seventh Generation. It’s a biodegradable natural dish detergent. And that’s the one we use mostly. But when we’re in other countries, we can’t find it. So we go to the restaurants and talk to the chefs in the kitchen and say, “Hey, what’s the best detergent to use for washing your greasy pots and pans?” And they tell us and then we go find it, and it usually works really well.

Mira: So how does the process work for making the foamcrete?

Hajjar: Well, we have our little foam generator, we call it the Little Dragon. And that works in conjunction with an air compressor. The Little Dragon has a high pressure pump in it that pumps the mixture of dish detergent and water. You mix the dish detergent with water: 40 parts water to one part dish detergent. And then the high pressure pump pumps that in line with the compressed air and forces it through an agitator which just turns it into a real thick lather. It looks like shaving cream. And then we mix that into the mixture of cement and water. And we have a new machine that’s just coming out. We’re calling it Puff the Magic Dragon.

Mira : We like that.

Hajjar: It’s not on the market yet. But it’s going to take everything to a whole ‘nother level. It’s a peristaltic pump that works in conjunction with a static mixer. So it’s going to eliminate the whole mixing process. It’s going to all happen inside the tube. It’s going to be pumped. It’s continuous. It pumps about 20 gallons of aircrete a minute.

That’s going to really take us to a whole ‘nother level. It’ll be probably two or three months before that will be ready. ,

Mira: How did you come up with aircrete or is this... This is an existing sort of thing, but you’ve made it accessible because of the technology that you’re using, is that how it works?

Hajjar: Aircrete’s been around for a long time. There’s even some indication that the Romans were using it during the Roman Empire.

Mira: Really?

Hajjar: They had some lightweight concrete. It looks just like aircrete, but we don’t know how they made it. There’s other ways of doing it with some chemicals that create a reaction that creates air bubbles. Aluminum oxide is the one that’s used mostly. But that’s an industrial process. It’s also called cellular concrete or foam concrete or aerated concrete. It’s been around for about 100 years. It was developed in Scandinavia and it’s been used extensively. It’s a big industry actually, and used in bridge building and mining industry. They build skyscrapers with it in Asia. It’s really a big industry. But it only seems to be being used in the big industry; it’s all heavy, really expensive industrial equipment to make it.

When I discovered it, I instantly realized that that was the material that I had been looking for, because all the other natural materials like adobe, cobb, papercrete hempcrete – I played around with a lot of them – compressed earth, rammed earth and even recycled styrofoam – they all head shortcomings to them that when I discovered aircrete –  it was called cellular concrete – I gave it the name aircrete just a couple years ago and now it already seems to be a household name; I’m amazed. But anyway, I got really excited about it. Wow, I had no idea! I’d been building all my life and I was in my 50s, and I’d never heard of this cellular concrete. So I started researching it and I realized that, wow, this is too simple. It’s just cement, water and a foaming agent.

And I was in Thailand at the time and I wasn’t interested in going the industrial route. I didn’t want it. I wanted to figure out... Well this is so simple. I know I can make this myself. And so I just started playing around. I got a hold of a foaming generator for washing cars and I made a mixer out of a 55 gallon drum. And I was able to get it to work. It all seemed really simple. And then I experimented with different types of detergents and found out that I could make a good foam with a good quality degreaser dish detergent, and then I’ve just been perfecting it and making it better all the time. And now with our new machine, this is really exciting.

Mira: It sounds like it. It sounds like you’ll just be able to pump that right into the forums. Now, you’re building these structures using forms, right, that you’re then filling with the foamcrete, is that correct? I mean aircrete.

Hajjar: The main way we’re building right now, we’re keeping it really grassroots, we’re basically building with blocks. And so we build forms. We’ll pour like a slab and then cut it up into blocks, and then stack the blocks.

Mira: Oh.

Hajjar: It’s, you know it’s fairly, you know, there’s quite a bit of labor that’s involved, even though it’s much less labor than a lot of the other natural building methods, it still is quite a bit of labor. And I thought that, you know, as an engineer, I was looking for much more efficient ways of building but what I’ve discovered in our workshops, building this method, that we end up building community at the same time; that it’s something really magical that happens when people come together and build together. And so having this really grassroots method that requires people to, you know, actually stack each block and work together and create teamwork, we’ve created amazing global community around that, and a lot of really inspiring friendships and connections have been made. And I just feel like it’s something super valuable that’s happening in that process.

I still want to develop more efficient methods and that’s why this new machine is really exciting. I’m really interested in fabric forming because we use fabric to reinforce the aircrete already because aircrete’s quite brittle, but if you put a reinforced layer over it, then you’ve got really strong composite material just like a surfboard. It has a foam interior that you could never surf on, but when you put a fiberglass fiber reinforced skin on it, you’ve got something really strong and that’s the way we’re building with that composite of aircrete with a tensile membrane over it.

Mira: You have a very interesting background. You are the son of an inventor and you have an engineering degree, so how about if you give us a little bit of an idea of your background and what brought you to be on your path to DomeGaia?

Hajjar: First of all, I just want to clarify, I actually didn’t finish my engineering degree.

Mira: Okay.

Hajjar: The last semester when everyone was interviewing with corporations for jobs, I had a wake up call and realized that, oh my god, I didn’t realize I was signing up for a career. So I actually left in the last semester and it was right during a time when I had a real strong spiritual calling. It was after my brother’s death and I wrote a lot about it in my book. And then I left that whole world and followed my spiritual calling. Am I answering your question?

Mira: Oh, absolutely! We really are just having a conversation, but let’s talk about your book and your spiritual calling. Because we were asking you about your history and what brought you to where you are now, and this is not a minor detail. So how about if you tell us more about your book and your spiritual path?

Hajjar: Okay, well, after my brother’s death, I went through a real dark night of my soul. And, and, felt like I didn’t want to live in a world without my brother. He was so important to me. And so I, I had to connect with him. And, and by chance, I, I ended up studying hypnotherapy. I can tell you more of that story, but anyway, I got, and I was able to contact my brother and also I learned how to connect with spirit guides, and the whole world that you can enter into when you start journeying to your inner world, going into past lives and future possibilities. And connecting with your spirit guides and your angels became just a really fascinating process for me. And it healed me emotionally and connected me with a lot of interesting inspiration.

And one of the connections was that Kahlil Gibran, my great uncle, came to me as my spirit father. And to me, you know, it wasn’t that mystical, because this is what you learn to do when you study this kind of shamanic hypnotherapy. And it made sense that he would be my spirit father because, after all, I loved him and I have a blood connection to him. But then the channeling that started coming through, I would meditate with him every day, and then do some channeled writing. The writing was so much like his writing that I started sharing it with people and it inspired people and one friend of mine really encouraged me, he wanted to publish it. And so that inspired me and I just really made a daily practice out of it, and ended up with all of this material that I then started compiling it into a book and it turned out...

During that time, there were some other things that went on... I don’t know how much I should...

Mira: Go for it. Go for it. It’s such an amazing story.

Hajjar: Well, I don’t even know if I told you this part, but I was living in Hawaii at the time and there was just so much going on in my life. I had sold my property in Colorado, was investing it in a property in Hawaii, had about a half a million dollars and ended up getting swindled out of it; lost my entire life savings. And, and at the same time, we had a meditation group and we were getting a little wild and my girlfriend I owned my home with started having a fair with one of the guys in the meditation circle.

Mira: Oh boy.

Hajjar: it was crazy. I was losing everything and then one of my good friends had hepatitis C and was dying. The doctors just send him home to die. They said there was nothing they could do for him. And he asked me to sit with him, like a group of us, to sit with him while, you know, he died. It looked like he had just a maybe a few weeks left. He was on insulin and morphine. He was just skin and bones. He had open lesions all over his body. He’d lost his hair. He could barely lift his arm and we would just meet with him a couple times a week. And anyway, we heard about this shaman that had cured people with hepatitis C and we called him. He likes to be called Shaman X because he doesn’t want to be known publicly. But he came in and I don’t know how to describe it really. I mean, he was, he was fierce. He just started yelling at everyone and said, “Break up this freaking sympathy group. This soldier doesn’t need your sympathy. Your sympathy is killing him!” And he started yelling at Kurt and said, “Get your butt out of bed soldier.” Because Kurt had been in Vietnam. “You got...” he said, “You just had half your body blown off and the enemy is coming in fast. And they’re going to kill everyone, all your buddies, unless you drag yourself through 10 miles of muddy trenches and get back to base camp and warn ‘em.”

Because he had hold Kurt that he would come on one condition: that he promised to die well. Yeah. And, and he said, “Okay, this is what I mean by dying well. You have to display... leave a legacy of courage to your family and friends.” He was using this story of the soldiers to inspire him to get up and he told him he had to go out in his yard, drag himself out of bed, go out in the yard and start a fire, and he had to keep that fire going for 30 days. And if he could keep that fire going, that fire was his life, that that would call his spirit back. And it did. He got him to get out of bed. He dragged himself out in the yard, gathered fire wood, started a fire. And then Shaman X said, “Call all your friends and family to come and we’re going to do a 30 day fire ceremony. And, you know, ask them to bring wood and put the wood in the fire and pray for you, and pray for themselves” whatever. And we built a lodge around the fire.

And anyway, it saved him. Like it was really wasn’t much more than about a week after the fire started that he had this complete purging. We all thought he was going to die and wanted to take him to the hospital but Shaman X said, “No way. This is the moment when you decide. Are you going to live, or are you going to die?” And Kurt said, “I’m going to live.” And after that he just started eating and gaining weight. By the end of the 30 days, he was pretty much completely recovered.

Mira: Wow, what an experience!

Hajjar: And so that was happening while I was going through all this feeling of loss. But Kurt’s situation was minor compared to mine. I was just losing a little money. Anyway, during that time, I asked myself this question. When I saw that, you know, anything is possible, miracles are possible, I realized that money wasn’t what gave me my life, wasn’t what gave me my possibilities. It was really my spirit, strength, and power of my spirit, if I could claim it. And so I said, “Well, what would I do if anything was possible?” And I instantly realized I would write The Return of the Prophet.

Mira: Well, I don’t think we said that your great uncle had written The Prophet. Khalil Gibran had written the book The Prophet. And so what you were doing was writing The Return of the Prophet.

Hajjar: Yeah, that’s right. I think a lot of people the listeners are aware of who Kahlil Gibran, is. And The Prophet. But it’s, you know, a really famous book. It’s considered a literary masterpiece.

Mira: Yes.

Hajjar: Kahlil was a dedicated writer and artist. You know, that’s what he spent his life with. So to me it was ridiculous for me to think that I could write The Return of the Prophet, but in that place of believing in miracles, and also The Prophet was so important to me, it was, it had really been the guiding light for my own life, and I had this inner world where I had a personal connection with him. And the very last words in The Prophet are, “A moment’s rest upon the wind, and another woman shall bear me.”

Mira: Oh my!

Hajjar: Yeah, those are the very last words,

Mira: Wow. I’m just gonna grab the book for a second, so that I can show people that are actually seeing this. Just give me one second. And I, I’ve had this, I can’t even say how many years. So this is the book The Prophet and I have not yet seen your book, but I am looking forward to it.

Hajjar: Okay.

Mira: So you decided to publish it?

Hajjar: Well, I didn’t really decide to publish it. I just decided to write it.

Mira: Okay.

Hajjar: And I didn’t know what, you know, it was just a labor of love. I was already doing the meditations and the channeling. So I, this material was all coming through and it was inspiring people. And at the time, after everything cooled off in Hawaii, I ended up moving to Thailand. And, well first I went and visited Kahlil’s tomb in Lebanon and had an amazing past life memory there. And then I was completely broke. I’d lost everything in Hawaii. And so I just, I went for a meditation course in Thailand. And the meditation teacher was leaving and asked me if I would take over for him, and I really needed to meditate. So I had a little bungalow right on the beach. It was awesome, on this little island; southern Thailand. And I taught meditation right on the beach every morning at 7:30 for about four years while I wrote the book.

Mira: Wow! I want to backtrack just for one minute, because you have hit so many hot buttons that connect to what Sustainability Now is about and my personal mission. You talked about hypnosis, and you talked about shamanic hypnosis? Is that what you called it?

Hajjar: Yeah.

Mira: I’ve never heard of that outside of our conversation. So that’s fascinating in and of itself, connecting with these other realms. But even most important of all the hot buttons is the one where you said, you asked yourself, if you could do anything from the space of miracles, if you could do anything, what would you do? And that’s so much at the heart of the course that I’m building to really help people connect to their mission and purpose, which you did. You were stripped of everything that you identified with in certain ways. And what you were left with was your soul, your heart; and you brought forth magic.

Hajjar: Yeah, yeah. It, sure was. To me, it was a miracle when that book was published. Anyway, it happened.

Mira: It happened.

Hajjar: I wrote the book and didn’t do anything to try to publish it. I was living in this little island, southern Thailand and was teaching meditation and very simple life and I didn’t make a single phone call, didn’t send a single email out. I just shared it with some people there as I was writing it, get their feedback and stuff. And when it was all done, I was... I used to teach this exercise I called the synergistic mantra. It was this idea that if you aligned yourself, there’s a quest , a question that will align you and when you become aligned, you become really powerful. It was an exercise of finding what is the question, what’s the quest that really turns you, that makes you smile, that brings you to life? And one of the questions that I used to hold was, “How can this book actually reach the whole world?”

So, anyway, right where I would teach this exercise that was kind of an exercise in the law of attraction... Yeah, I was in my bungalow right there. And this guy was standing right on the spot where I used to sit when I  would teach and he called up to me and said, “Hey, are you are Hajjar Gibran?”I I said, “Yeah.” He says, “Well, I hear you wrote a book.” And he was a literary agent. He had an office in New York, and publishing people and I gave him the book and a year later, it was in like 40 different countries and in over a dozen languages, and just pure magic.

Mira: Wow, it is. And that’s actually something that I’ve seen over and over and over, when you’re aligned with your purpose. Yeah, miracles happens all the time.

Hajjar: Yeah,

Mira: The world just opens up.

Hajjar: And to me, it’s not a mystery anymore. You know, it’s like, as soon as you connect with something meaningful to you...

Mira: Yes.

Hajjar: And you’re inspired.

Mira: Yes.

Hajjar:  You inspire other people. And people care about things like that. And they want to support you If you’re going to do meaningful, something that’s going to contribute something valuable to the world, you’re going to be rewarded. If you choose a mundane existence, where you just, find a job to pay your bills; what I like to say is, “You’re supported on whatever level you choose to play.”

Mira: That’s so true. And so the course that I’m building is called Rise To Your Greatness. And what you’re up to also is about having people rise to their greatness, to really epitomizing what they came here to be. That’s really what it’s about. In a way, it’s a hero’s journey. It takes stepping out of that cultural constraint that says we’re just ordinary; because we’re not. We’re all extraordinary, or we have the potential to be, right?

Hajjar: Yes,definitely.

Mira: Phenomenal. Thank you so much for sharing all of that. Because we’re talking about DomeGaia, which is an inspired mission as well – I want to talk more about that. But the fact that you have this very rich and grounded spirituality, at the heart of your successes and your mission, is really such a gift to share with others – that the magic is there, that everybody has that available to them once they connect, right?

Hajjar: Yes, sure.

Mira: Beautiful. So tell us more about what brought you to this path of sustainability and what your mission is with DomeGaia.

Hajjar: Well, I mean, it’s, you know, a continuation of the same story. You know, after the book was out and everything,I built Gibran center in Thailand. I was married to a Thai woman at the time who really wanted to do something in her village. I thought I was going to leave Thailand and go, you know, on a book tour or something, or whatever. But she really wanted to build a school for the girls in this poor part of Thailand, where so many of the girls become prostitutes. And she wanted to give them skills and help them have a better life. And I thought that was such a great idea, I decided to go up there before I left and I wanted to build her school for her and build a home for her and,  and...

But I thought I was through with Thailand. And anyway, we found this really magical property. It had a natural spring on it, crystal clear water and with an ancient remnant of the original jungle that was there with these giant trees. And we ended up with an organic mango farm. It was a really magical place. And her son and her son-in-law were both builders. And so...

Because I’d always wanted to build the Gibran center and I realized that, wow, this is the place to do it. So I ended up staying and building the Gibran Center there. And that’s when I started experimenting with building domes. And that’s when I discovered cellular concrete. We built nine domes there. And one of them was from my brother-in-law, Steve Varin, who’s a really great artist. And, yeah, he’s a really great photographer. And he published his photographs and produced a video of that dome and it went viral. And, at the same time, everything fell apart in Thailand and so I was called to leave. And so again, I asked myself the question, “Well, what would I do if I could perform a miracle, if anything is possible?” And I instantly just realized well I would develop a low cost way of building to solve the need for housing in the world.

And so that’s what DomeGaia’s mission is: is to teach and provide equipment and designs to empower people, bring people together. I mean, I feel like the world really is crying out for humanity to wake up and evolve into more healthy ways of living on this planet. And, we have to do that. It’s not going to be done for us. We need to come together to do that; pool our resources, pool our skills and our knowledge and learn how to cooperate and work together on this great mission that’s laid out before us.

So that’s really what DomeGaia’s about. We want to serve that emerging paradigm, providing housing for people who want to be part of that creative process, working as a global community to find a healthier way of being.

Mira: So I think it would be great to share what you’re actually doing with DomeGaia building these buildings around the world at different locations, and how that works, how you’re actually building this global community. Could you talk about that?

Hajjar: Yeah, , I mean, it’s all happening more or less organically. But what we do formally is, every month we teach a 10-day workshop. And then every few months we’ll teach a 30-day Teacher’s Training to share the methods that we’re developing. So there’s a whole community around that. Every month, we have between 30 and 35 participants come to our workshops and they’ll take what we’re teaching, and then take it into their communities. And, they connect with each other and do projects together. There’s something really exciting happening.

Mira:  And they’re coming from all over the world, right?

Hajjar: Yeah, all over the world. Our first workshop was in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. We had, I think it was 35 people from 14 different countries there. All over the place. 14 different countries. And then, when we were in the Philippines, we broke that record. There was only like, 25 people from 15 different countries.

Mira: [Laughter] And you have a big waiting list for your courses, right?

Hajjar: Yeah, we use we usually have over 100 people on the waiting list. Yeah, but we’re training more teachers now. And,

I mean, there’s so much opportunity for people who want to get involved in it, because we have people every day writing us wanting us to come and help them build their project, or we get applications for workshops all over the world, almost on a daily basis. And plus, once you learn this, you can just take it and run with it yourself outside of DomeGaia. But, you know, DomeGaia really has a lot of room to grow, and we could be doing like – just here in Hawaii, I think we could do a workshop every month on each island.

Mira: Probably. How could people get involved and support you and what you’re up to?

Hajjar:  Well, attending the workshops right now is the best way to learn because... We’re planning to have a video training course out, hopefully this year. Once we have that out, then that will be a really great alternative for people who can’t make it to the workshops. And I think it’ll spread it much better. Of course, at the workshops, you know, you make the personal connections with people, you get a lot of hands on experience, and we’re always introducing our new methods too which, you know... So ultimately, the videos will always be one step behind what’s coming,

Mira: Because it’s rapidly evolving, yes?

Hajjar: Yeah, it is. Yeah. Yeah, there’s so much more we can do.

Mira: I remember seeing forms that you also make available. So are you working with filling the forms for the domes with the with the aircrete? Or is that something...

Hajjar: We’re not offering any forms. You know, we teach people how to make forms.

Mira: I see.

Hajjar: And we’re always exploring new ways of making forums. You know, that’s really the secret because aircrete is a very liquid material. It just wants to slump, you know, and run on the ground. So you have to contain it in something, but it cures very quickly, just overnight, it becomes solid.

Mira: Does it need longer curing after the hardening overnight? Or is it really good to go?

Hajjar: It’s just a hardening process. And then,

Mira:  Okay.

Hajjar: Like concrete, it cures. They say, over a 28-day period, it becomes like over 90% cured, but then it continues to harden even more beyond that over time.

Mira: And at what phase do you add the fabric and what kind of fabric are you adding to strengthen it?

Hajjar: Yeah, well, it can be done different ways. Like if we’re building with blocks, we build the dome shape with the blocks and then we smooth it all off, and then we put the fabric on.

Mira: You smooth it off by sanding it or by adding more aircrete?

Hajjar: We make these special rasps. We use some diamond lath that we put over a trowel and then it’s kind of like sanding except a lot coarser. It’s so easy to work with. You can shape it very easily.

Mira: How big are the domes that you’re building?

Hajjar: All different sizes. The one we were, we were just doing a cluster of domes in Kalapana before the volcano erupted. The largest one was 32 square feet – 32 foot diameter – about 1000 square feet,  and then there was a 20 foot, a 17, and a 12. And yeah, so...

Mira: They’re so sculptural and really, really beautiful. I encourage everybody listening and watching to go and check out the podcast notes page and also DomeGaia.com. The podcast notes are at sustainabilitynow.global and DomeGaia is D O M E G A I A dot com. Extraordinary and you have a lot of videos there too.

Hajjar: Yeah we usually make a video of you know, not all our workshops, but a lot of them

Mira: So it takes about eight days to build one of these buildings?

Hajjar: Yeah and we get better and faster with every workshop. We were just in Costa Rica and we did an 18 foot diameter dome and it was pretty much finished in eight days. And then Rafa, one of the teachers, stayed after the workshop and taught the workers at the Finca Luna Nueva Lodge where we did it – taught their workers and they built another one right after. And that includes mounting the front door and the window, the exterior’s all finished, ready for paint. You need to let it dry a little bit. Now we’re exploring another method. Instead of painting, we’re going to add pigment into the final layer of cement when we put the fabric on. We haven’t done that yet, but I think that’ll even make it better.

Mira: You mentioned some kind of iron oxide?

Hajjar: Yes.

Mira: So that it would sort of matche the natural environment and age.

Hajjar: Yeah, iron oxide makes it kind of a reddish brown. It looks a lot like terracotta.

Mira: Sounds beautiful.

Hajjar: And it’s also the least expensive pigment that you can get.

Mira: Wow. So what would be the cost of building one of these homes?

Hajjar: Well, the material cost is very low. Like we just did two domes in Kalpana, a 20, and a 17 foot dome. And this includes the foundation, the sub-floor, entire domes with the front door on it, all the skin on. Two of them. So the total was I think that was probably around 500 square feet. And it was less than $2,000.

Hajjar: That’s extraordinary.

Hajjar: This is a permanent building that is not going to rot or decay or be bothered by insects, water won’t damage it, fires won’t damage it. So it’s  pretty, pretty remarkable. You know, of course, that doesn’t include the labor costs or the plumbing and electrical or, your finished floor and all your finished fixtures. You could easily have a building of that... It would only cost maybe 3 or $4,000 more to finish it with really nice tile and counter tops and all the bathroom and kitchen fixtures.

Mira: What a wonderful option. It’s brilliant. Brilliant.

Hajjar: Yep. And that doesn’t include the labor costs of course. You know, that can be considerable. But if you got together with family and friends and built for each other than you eliminate, the labor costs.

Mira: It’s kind of taking us back to barn raising days. And if we’re talking about sustainability, the community is one of the foundations of sustainability, right? Social sustainability.

Hajjar: Exactly,

Mira: Yeah. So now you also have a history of having worked with the rain forest preservation. So give us a little bit of background on that.

Hajjar: Well, that was back in the, 80s. I had a company called Life Designs. And at the time, I was a designer, builder and I was primarily working with wood. And I loved wood, I loved working with it. I love trees. I love the forest. You know, it all made sense to me, until I became aware that we were destroying our forests. And then I went out to the northwest and I saw it with my own eyes, how the lumber industry was clear cutting miles – and miles of pristine forest were just being mowed down. And they would leave, you know, like a quarter mile strip along the road so you couldn’t see it. But behind that was just devastation – and all the countless species of animals that were being you know, robbed of their habitat. It was it was a real wake up call for me, and I realized I needed to do something about it. And you know, I meditated on it and I realized that it was natural for trees to die in the forest; that it isn’t actually the death that’s so bad, but, when it’s not part of the life cycle, that link in the chain is being broken. And when it’s done on that kind of scale, you know, it’s just devastation. So I saw that what I could do was to create a company that brought that link back where we used what was being destroyed and created revenue out of it to finance forest preservation. And I knew down in the rain forest, were some of the most beautiful woods in the world, especially in Central America with cocobolo and some of the other really beautiful woods;  tulip wood. And so I went there to see if I could find a source of waste wood. I thought, well, I could make jewelry out of it or something. But at the time, a friend of mine was studying energetic healing with Barbara Brennan School of Light in New York.

Mira: I’m familiar with it.

Hajjar: And they all used wooden pendulums for doing their dowsing and monitoring the chakras and everything and they got their pendulums from this fellow in England. And he died. I guess he’d been doing it a long time, but they needed a source of wooden pendulums. And so I started making pendulums for Barbara Brennan School of Light. And then somebody asked me,”Well, could you make one of these pendulums where it would hold essential oils so I can carry my essential oil tincture in it? “ So I designed one that held a little vial that you could put essential oil in and we called it the Essendulum.

Mira: That’s great. [Laughter]

Hajjar: And it became really popular and because it was connected with, we were partnered with Rainforest Action Network out on the West Coast. And they used the money to fight legal battles to grant the indigenous tribes in the area title to the property.

Mira: Oh, that’s beautiful.

Hajjar: Yeah. So it really went a long way. Over the 10 years that we did that, we saved over 25,000 acres of rain forest. It was a real success. And companies that dealt in aroma therapy for instance, really supported us, and we ended up selling them all over the globe. Yeah.

Mira: You’ve had such a beautiful history of successes that have just happened almost magically, all of it it sounds like.

Hajjar: Yeah, I mean, I feel like it has to do with connecting with what is right, what wants to happen, or what needs to happen.

Mira: Being in service.

Hajjar: Yeah, being in service. Yeah.

Mira: Yeah, I think that’s key.

Hajjar: You end up just riding a wave. You don’t have to force it.

Mira: Yeah.

Hajjar: It needs to happen.

Mira: Yeah. Being in the flow.

Hajjar: Yeah. Being in the flow.

Mira: Yeah. This has been such a lovely chat with you. I’m so glad to have you. I’m wondering if there’s anything else that you’d like to leave us with, any resources that you could recommend? We talked about the DomeGaia website, but if there’s anything else?

Hajjar: Well, in terms of resources, we do have another website called DomeGaiaCommunities, which is our vision of – also sort of a lot of resource material on just how communities can function financially and socially, and how people can get involved and get out if they want, and just some of the guide guidelines. And...

Mira: There’s information there also about how people can host your trainings, is that true? Or is that on the DomeGaia website?

Hajjar: That’s on the DomeGaia website under the workshops. There’s something called Host a Workshop.

Mira: Okay, so people can take the courses, they can host a work shop, and potentially they could become a training center, yes?

Hajjar: Yes. That’s really what we want to see happen.

Mira: Okay.

Hajjar: We want to support projects that are already happening. That’s where we like to do our trainings. We want to go to places where people are already coming together, work together, you know.

Mira: Disaster zones...

Hajjar: Yeah, and that’s something I feel like we’re not quite prepared for, you know, because what we’re doing is still fairly labor intensive. We want to develop a model where we can put up a building in a day or two and have a whole division of DomeGaia that’s dedicated to disaster relief. So hopefully, that’s going to be coming here pretty soon. I also want to create a whole youth empowerment program. So by the time a kid is ready to leave his parents’ house, he already knows how build his own home. He just gets together with his buddies or her buddies, and they build homes for each other.

Mira: That would be transformative for the world.

Hajjar: Yes. And not only build homes, but collaborate with each other and get on board with what their mission is.

Mira: Exactly.

Hajjar: Life is short. You don’t want to waste it. A lot of times, youth is wasted in educational programs that don’t really take kids deep into connecting with their personal power and their personal mission.

Mira: That’s true.

Hajjar: There’s no reason to wait on that.

Mira: There’s no time to wait.

Hajjar: Yeah, exactly.

Mira: On that note, I just want to say thank you so much. This has been truly truly lovely, wonderful. And I also want to thank all our listeners for joining us. And let’s also thank our producer Scott Bille. And that’s it for today. I’m your host Mira Rubin and until next time, live your best life, love the world around you, and together we can save the world.

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