I’ve been facilitating groups for as long as I can remember, going back probably 20 years to high school when I ran both informal and organized youth groups with my peers. It has probably been about twelve or thirteen years ago that I started to actually pay attention to what I was doing. But only in the last five or six years, as I have been facilitating full time, have I noticed a deepening in my practice. Work as practice. And by practice I mean something akin to a spiritual practice, whereby one undertakes a life of value and meaning …
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Lifting this right from Adam Kahane’s book Solving Tough Problems: We get stuck by holding on tightly to our opinions and plans and identities and truths. But when we relax and are present and open up our minds and hearts and wills, we get unstuck and we unstick the world around us. I have learned that the more open I am – the more authentic I am to the way things are and could be, around me and inside me; the less attached I am to way things ought to be – the more effective I am in helping to …
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Today Dave Pollard reprints a recent speech by Bill Moyers in which he implores the world to use its heart to see what is unfolding around us. Moyers ends the speech thusly: On the heath Lear asks Gloucester: ‘How do you see the world?” And Gloucester, who is blind, answers: “I see it feelingly.’”I see it feelingly. The news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that as a journalist, I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that sets us free – not only to feel but …
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With thanks to new friends met through the Art of Hosting this week: With regard to external factors, I don’t envision any other single factor like friendship with admirable people as doing so much for a monk in training, who has not attained the heart’s goal but remains intent on the unsurpassed safety from bondage. A monk who is a friend with admirable people abandons what is unskillful and develops what is skillful. From the Itivuttaka collection of Pali suttas.
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My friend Toke Paludan Moller gave me a huge gift at the Practice of Peace conference. He issued a challenge and an invitation to work at a deep, deep level. Since I heard him speak these words, my work has changed measurably. After the conference was over I asked if he could remember what he said and asked him if he could write it down. He did his best to put the ideas in an email, which I have recast as the poem that it is. it is time!the training time is over for those of us who can hear …