Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/mikikashtan/page/2/)
What’s most pressing for me is to hold in the foreground two realities simultaneously. One is the red alert danger of erupting violence leading to serious harm to people who are already vulnerable… The other is the commitment to humanize everyone, including the brutalizers.
I see this as the core source of violence: the physical, emotional, and spiritual brutalization of boys and men.
After posting my recent post, I received a comment that completely surprised me, in which I was challenged about what I thought was the opposite of what I said.
When I manage to enhance my capacity to hear the contents of what people from marginalized groups share about their experiences, regardless of how it’s presented, two things happen…
In short, the practice of vulnerability has given me peace and less helplessness; it has given me more freedom to be myself in a simple way; and it has made me more accessible.
What is it that makes the existing global system continue to function with our ongoing participation, when so many of us know how close to the edge of catastrophe we are?
…this is something all of us can do: align our actions with our values, even when it means stepping outside our comfort zone, and reaching out to others.
…as a person with wealth, with little direct experience of the kind of hardship that is the daily experience of the vast majority of the world’s population, I would want to come together with people very different from me, and listen.
We can always hear and understand each other’s deeper purpose. Once we know this and integrate it fully, I trust that we will approach confrontation differently, and I then have more hope that miracles of transformation can happen.
I have more faith in actions that arise from a context of inner peace and acceptance than in actions that are fueled by fear and anger, the hallmarks of non-acceptance.