Culture

Power and Grace

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When you think about power, what are some of the words or images that come to mind? More often than not, I’ve heard people associate power with domination, coercion, or extreme force. For many, their relationship with power is at best ambivalent. What if you were to think of power as the capacity to mobilize resources to attend to needs? What happens when you imagine increasing your internal resources, bringing more choice, decisiveness, and resilience to your life and work?

Culture

What Is “Nonviolent” about Nonviolent Communication?

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Crossposted from The Fearless Heart:
One of the most frequent questions I hear when I talk about Nonviolent Communication is “Why Nonviolent?” People feel uneasy. They hear the word nonviolent as a combination of two words, as a negation of violence. They don’t think of themselves as violent, and find it hard to embrace the name. For some time I felt similarly.

Health

Two Medical Moments

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Crossposted from The Fearless Heart. On Tuesday morning I had the unusual opportunity to offer coaching and support to two women, one from Egypt and one from Sudan, who are heading a unique program in cultural competence for medical students in one of the Persian Gulf Emirates. Across cultural differences (I am, after all, from Israel), without any training in NVC [Nonviolent Communication], we connected, and they learned how they could change outcomes by imagining from the inside the experience of people with whom they were in conflict. Why were they here? The students in the program they teach are generally open and receptive.

Culture

Making Empathy Concrete

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One of my biggest passions is finding ways to make what I do teachable, especially in the area of empathic presence. It’s not only a passion, but a necessity. Our times, more than ever, require empathy to become widely accessible to people. I want to find a way to replicate what I do, to build capacity for the work necessary to create a world that works for all. Could this blog be a way to do that?

Culture

About Gratitude

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Despite years of knowing that gratitude contributes to life, and suggesting to people in my workshops to start a gratitude practice in their lives, it is only in the last couple of months that I was finally able to start my own practice. In the past, using gratitude as a PRACTICE instead of just when it arose spontaneously (which I am blessed to have happen often) just wasn’t working for me. But the times were hard enough in my life, and the draw strong enough that I started. So, for a couple of months now, during a period that included some of the most challenging times in many years, I end each day lying in bed, breathing fully and slowly, and reviewing my day, looking for everything that could possibly be a source of gratitude. Not as a check list, but really pausing with each one, putting my attention again and again on the mystery, wonder, magic, and awe that is the experience of whatever happened, whoever contributed to it.

Culture

Why Write A Blog?

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I have started a new blog, The Fearless Heart, and am going to crosspost to Tikkun Daily. This is my introduction. One of the biggest treasures I have is a diary that my mother kept about me when I was a child. Most of the entries are from when I was about 5. I love it, in large part, because I so completely recognize myself in that girl.

Culture

Town Hall Blues

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“I don’t want this country to become another socialized country like Russia.” These were the words of a woman in a Pennsylvania town hall meeting with Senator Arlen Specter. What is important to this woman? What is behind her concern? What are the dreams and aspirations from which this statement arises?

Politics & Society

Empathy and Good Judgment

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President Obama ignited controversy when he named empathy as a necessary quality in a supreme-court judge. Wendy Long, legal counsel to the Judicial Confirmation Network and former clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, said, “Lady Justice doesn’t have empathy for anyone. She rules strictly based upon the law and that’s really the only way that our system can function properly under the Constitution.” Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) referred to empathy as “touchy-feely stuff.” Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) asked Sonia Sotomayor during the hearings, “Have you always been able to have a legal basis for decisions you have rendered and not rely on extralegal concepts such as empathy?”