Non-Violent Communication (NVC)

Holding Dilemmas Together in the Workplace: A Sneak Preview of the Future

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Throughout human history, stories have been a source of inspiration and bonding. Especially in these difficult times, when we need inspiration about what’s possible, when so many of us are hungry for some faith that collaboration can work, I feel so happy to have some examples that nourish me in my own work. This is, simply, about what work can be like when we embrace a deep intentionality of collaboration. (These are three real-life stories, two of which are changed in non-substantial ways to protect anonymity.) They all exhibit the path I think of as inviting people to hold a dilemma together. I have written about this path in other contexts, and I am truly delighted to share something that can offer a visceral sense of what the future could look like, however small the scale.

Culture

Last Night, the Second Holocaust Was Averted at Brooklyn College BDS Forum

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Last night, Brooklyn College hosted a forum on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement – a non-violent initiative targeting Israel’s suppression of basic political rights for Palestinians, particularly those occupied in the West Bank.
In the weeks preceding the forum, Brooklyn College was under intense pressure to cancel the event, pressure spearheaded by Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz, who curiously chose to argue against the concept of academic freedom by claiming the forum would be a “propaganda hate orgy” and should not be allowed.

Non-Violent Communication (NVC)

The What and the Why in Human Needs

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Anyone who becomes acquainted with Nonviolent Communication (NVC) quickly learns about the critical role that human needs play in this approach. In my own mind, placing human needs front and center is the core insight around which everything in NVC revolves. This is the aspect of NVC that challenges prevalent theories of human nature; the entry point through which collaboration becomes possible in groups; the engine of the kind of healing that happens through engaging with an empathic presence; the mechanism through which conflict mediation proceeds; and the path to personal liberation. Because of their centrality to my thinking, spiritual practice, and work, I almost invariably refer to human needs in my blog pieces and when I speak.

ESRA

What a Spiritual Progressive Agenda Might Look Like

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Neither the New York Times nor Zaretsky even comes close to dealing with what a spiritual progressive agenda would look like if we apply our (TIKKUN) call for “The Caring Society—Caring for Each Other and Caring for the Earth,” much less our call for a New Bottom Line of love, caring, generosity, ethical and ecological sensitivity, and awe and wonder at the grandeur and mystery of the universe, to the current realities of America, global politics, and the environment.

Culture

Feminist Spiritual Politics: Getting Personal About Gun Control

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The feminist mantra, the personal is the political, has always struck me as incomplete. It was Teilhard de Chardin who first said “we are not human beings having a spiritual experience, we are spiritual beings having a human experience.” The ‘personal is the political’ assumes an incomplete worldview, a cosmology of separation where the individual is forced to turn to the political as the end we seek – as though we were fundamentally political beings.

Culture

The Invisible Suffering of Children

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Even while writing this, I feel helpless, knowing that many who may read these words will see the world in the same way that he does, and not knowing how to make the plight of children visible and understood, how to help all of us see that this father’s emotions are the most reliable indicators of his own heart’s well-being, and that I wish so much that he listened to his heart instead of shutting it off to do what he fervently believed was the right thing to do. It’s clear to me that he suffered, too, not only his daughter.

Culture

What I Learned while Buying a Car

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We live an isolated individual experience, in which an extreme priority on money drives an overwhelming amount of our choices. This level of separation, mixed with the predominant sense of scarcity, so often leaves us susceptible to acting in our own self-interest to a degree that makes others disappear. That’s when we run the danger of cutting moral corners. I learned, again, how profoundly affected I am by all that happens to me, by all my interactions with and within the world.