Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/mikikashtan/page/21/)
I am writing from New York, a city I love, at the end of a 5-day visit. I lived in Manhattan for 6 years in the 1980’s, and I come back as often as I figure out how. Here are some moments that stay with me from this visit. Energy
I’ve been walking around the apartment where I’ve been staying in short sleeves. I’ve been sleeping with only a light blanket.
What is it that makes us so attached to privilege when we have it? I have seen a lot of polarity in discussions about privilege, with people who have little access to class, race or gender privilege often having disparaging views about those who do have such access, while those who do have the privilege feeling confused, ashamed or guilty, but nonetheless unable to make a decisive stand on it in terms of their own lives. I remember in particular a striking example that happened in 1994. I was at the time part of a group of people who were very committed to a shared vision of a transformed society, similar in many respects to the vision that I am working towards these days. At one point in one gathering of the group, the person who was facilitating the gathering asked the people present what would get in their way of committing a significant portion of their income or savings to the joint project.
Yesterday I came back from 9 days of teaching in a yearlong NVC leadership program. This was the last intensive of the year, and the 9th year of the program. As is often the case, I came face to face with the limits of my own leadership capacity. Specifically, I was grappling with my aversion to imposing anything on anyone, an ongoing challenge of significant intensity for me. Based on observing myself I am confident that because of this aversion I regularly involve groups in decisions that reduce efficiency of functioning without adding much empowerment value or meaning.
In my last post on The Fearless Heart I alluded to having discomfort when asked by a group of people on a conference call to share my own vision. I said I was planning to write a post about the incongruity of that discomfort. Now, sitting down to write about it, I am feeling it. I chose to write about this for a variety of reasons. Primary among them is the desire to make my humanity, fallibility, and limitations known to you who read this blog, so as to increase the possibility that you would trust yourself to take on more visibility.
This is a response response to Michael Lerner’s comment about NVC (Nonviolent Communications) and progressive politics, which he posted here. Dear Michael,
I have been sitting for a couple of days now with the comment you posted on Sunday, reflecting deeply on how I want to respond. I am glad, first of all, that you and I have had sufficient connection and trust between us to continue this conversation personally if we wanted to. This is not the first time these topics come up, and I imagine we will continue to engage on them in the months and years to come, hoping that we are both well enough for long enough to do so. For now, I am writing this publicly because I want the readers to have the opportunity to understand how I see the issues you are raising.
Part 1 of this topic was posted on Aug 8, and links are provided below to all the other parts of this mini-series. This is the last segment. If you would like to participate in a real-time conversation with me about these topics (this Sunday, 9:30 – 11:00am Pacific Time), see below for more details, or go here to register. I started this mini-series with noting that none of us ultimately knows what would (will? could?) bring about significant change, beyond our experiments with alternatives, beyond a vision absent material resources, beyond the smallness of our efforts.
This mini-series started on Aug 8, and this is the seventh post so far. The previous post was on Sep 24. Each of the posts can be read separately. Example: Gift Economy
Because I have such a deep longing for a gift economy, so deep that truly every day hurts in seeing how far we are from such a system, I continually look for examples of gift economies already operating so I can sustain and expand the solidity of my faith in this possibility. I am less interested in hunter gatherer societies that still have gift economies than in examples within the existing modern capitalist economy.
I heard about Maureen McCarthy and the State of Grace Document about seven years ago, and I quickly knew I wanted to connect with her. The bold claim that we can create and maintain a state of grace in our relationships intrigued me. The simplicity of the tool – a few essential questions that help spell out nakedly and gently what it would take to maintain a state of grace between two people – won me over. I wanted to learn more, and to explore the parallels and complementarities I saw between this work and Nonviolent Communication. To cut a medium-size story short, Maureen and her partner Zelle just left my house a few hours ago, after visiting the Bay Area for nine days, including teaching a workshop that BayNVC hosted this past weekend.
When I was a young girl in Israel, in the early 60s, one of my favorite days of the year was Yom Kippur. For a full 25 hours a great silence descended on the Jewish parts of Israel. No traffic, radio, or commercial activity of any kind took place. For many families, including mine, this was the one time a year we went to synagogue. In the silence I could hear everyone’s footsteps echoing in the empty streets.
This mini-series started on Aug 8, followed by part 2 and part 3. After posting a response to part 3, I now return to the next section – what actions can we take towards creating the world of our dreams that works for all? Joanna Macy has been urging us for some time now to operate simultaneously in three directions to move towards a sustainable future: “Holding Actions in defense of life on Earth: actions to slow the damage to Earth and its beings; Creation of Alternative Institutions: analysis of structural causes and creation of structural alternatives; and Shift in Perceptions of Reality, both cognitively and spiritually: a fundamental shift in worldview and values”.* I would like to address and provide concrete examples to how each of these could be done in a manner that is fully consistent with principled nonviolence, the Gandhian approach. The list below is far far from exhaustive, and I only mean it to be an illustration and food for thought for those who want to take action. Obstructive Action Done with Love
Acts of civil disobedience have been a mainstay of nonviolent social change movements for a long time.