Can the Social Order Be Transformed through Personal Practice? The Case of Nonviolent Communication – Part 2
In September of last year, I posted the first part of this piece in response to an article questioning the potential of personal practices like mindfulness to transform, or even challenge, the existing social and economic structures of our social world. I explored three deep questions I have about why …
Liberation Lessons from the Desert: Choice, Togetherness, and Flow
On November 19th, three of us: Emma Quayle, Erin Mychele, and myself, embarked on a journey to a remote part of the California desert for four weeks of what I envisioned would be a restful, relaxing time enjoying the natural hot springs present there. I was longing for a spiritual …
Cuba: the Tragic Beacon of Imperfect Possibility
In 1992, at what is often known as the Rio Earth Summit, I was stunned to read that Cuba emerged as a leader in sustainable development. In 2006, I watched the Salud! movie about Cuba’s freely-accessible, community-based approach to medicine and its contribution to the health of untold number of …
Can the Social Order Be Transformed through Personal Practice? The Case of Nonviolent Communication
Some years ago, I was asked to write a review of a book about which I loved everything except the title: Toward a Socially Responsible Psychology for a Global Era.[1] What I most appreciated in that book was that psychologists were taking to task their own profession, delving into …
A Window into Structural Power Differences
Oakland has a long and fractious history of difficult relationships between the school district and the community. A few months ago, at an Oakland school board meeting, my friend and colleague Lisa Rothman spoke passionately about Convergent Facilitation as an alternative method that the district could use to make decisions …
Reckoning with Collapse: Living into Community from Warsaw to Stroud
This post is the third and last in my May travelogue collection.
Following the NGL (Nonviolent Global Liberation) retreat in Poland, eight of us, in various configurations, went on the road via van and train, offering various events over the course of sixteen days. This trip was conceived last August, …
How Far Can We Go Together? Nonviolent Global Liberation Retreat, Poland
This post is the second in my May travelogue collection.
Some years ago, when the number of retreats and intensive trainings that I had led or co-led was well over 100, I stopped counting. Each one is its own unique configuration of purpose, players, relationships, content, context, location, and even …
Living Wealth: Provision, Romania
This month, I am in Europe, in six different places. I am planning to write bits and pieces about the different parts of my tour. Here is the first installment:
Robyn is from the US and Lars is from the Netherlands. Some ten years ago, life inexorably called them to …
The Powers No One Can Take Away From Us
Over the course of the last several millennia, more and more power and wealth have been concentrating in the hands of fewer and fewer people. In a very literal sense, this currently deprives the vast majority of the world’s population of the capacity to truly shape our lives. Without enough …
Restoring the Flow of Gifting in Community
A little over a year ago I wrote a piece about how humans, historically, have broken off from the flow of energy and resources that the web of life both nurtures and relies on through the mechanisms of exchange and accumulation. I also included in that piece a range of …
