No Thanksgiving

I know this is the season for giving thanks, but I’m of the frame of mind to suggest that we also need a season of not giving thanks. How often do we say “thank you” not because we are really grateful for the life sustaining actions of others and a desire to celebrate that appreciation with others, but instead say thank you from a place of politeness or wanting to make sure that others accept us? Sometimes when we say “thank you” I imagine that we do so to manipulate the other – to get them to keep on meeting our needs with their actions or words. Others do the same to us, and with every “thank you” heard it’s as if it is a demand to get us to do what some one else wants and not what we want. We oblige because we wish to stay in relationship, never questioning shared practices that do not strengthen relationships and can foster resentment. Often these practices are subtle and we don’t realize how we are like an army recruit at basic training that after being punished by the drill sergeant, we are trained to say, “thank you sir, may I have another?” To the practices of oppression and violence that induce individual and societal suffering, isn’t it time to say, “no thanks?”

How do we say, “no thanks?” I believe we can do this by telling others how we feel based on life sustaining needs met (or not). We don’t mindlessly offer up thanks or ignore chances to share gratitude, but honestly and courageously express the true desire of our hearts and minds, which are based on a dream of loving and empowering relationships, and equality.

It can be challenging to express our disappointment with others in an empathetic way. So start small and practice with easy things. Perhaps when offered this week a second helping of candied sweet potatoes, which you don’t really like you can say “no thanks, I’m quite satisfied with the wonderful meal we’ve already shared.” With practice we can from candied yams to saying no thanks to poverty, to lack of health care, to domestic violence, and to anything that does not say yes to life for all beings.

Mighty Mouse

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The mouse soul is nothing but a nibbler.

To the mouse is given a mind proportionate to its need,

for without need, the Almighty god

doesn't give anything to anyone.

Need, then, is the net for all things that exist;

man has tools in proportion to his need.

So, quickly, increase your need, needy one,

that the sea of abundance may surge up in loving kindness.

Rumi, Mathnawi, II 3279-80: 3292

Perhaps one of the kindest, most compassionate gifts we can offer ourselves and others is to recognize the great need in each of us. We all are needy - we long for love, community, health, beauty, safety, and peace. If we recognize the greet need in our species, and indeed of life on this planet, I believe that we open up the doors of love and power to flow through us. It is not us who own the needs, but interconnected life. To deny our needs, then, is to deny life. I believe that if we can make friends with the needs pressing around us, we ease up with the exact strategy to fulfill these needs, and this brings compassion, empathy, and healing into our relationships.

Where in your life, perhaps as parent or teacher, do you deny that you have needs and that life is inviting you to open to this so that you may fully live?

Certifiably Crazy

Tomorrow I travel to Seattle, and then on to Vancouver Island for my final step in Nonviolent Communication Certification as a Trainer. I wonder now what it means to be "certified?" In some ways there is a contradiction here - to use labels to categorize oneself or others can shut down an openness to learn about the other and to listen to them. Isn't Compassionate Communication all about not using labels or categorizing people? Perhaps, except when labels, positions, or categories can meet needs. What we long for in our lives is choice - and to have total choice this means that we can opt for judging others to meet needs. In my case, to be a "Certified Trainer" opens up doorways to support others within Unitarian Universalism and peace and multispecies activism, and this means a lot to me. I long for harmony, choice, and beauty and if being labeled as a "Trainer" helps others feel supported and have confidence in compassionate communication, then I will gladly wear that label. Perhaps I'm a bit certifiably crazy to dream of such a world where choice, interdependence, peace, and autonomy are the hallmarks of relationships. How about you?

What labels do you use on yourself? What needs are met by being "certified" as a parent, teacher, student, or spouse?

When is a Jerk a Jerk?

In recent conversations I have heard others argue, "sometimes you just have to call people jerks." They aren't saying that you need to say this out loud to others, or that the people whose behavior doesn't meet your needs aren't children of God or the Universe. What they are trying to communicate to me is that certain behavior is "not acceptable." By calling people a jerk you have passed a judgment on the actions and not on the people themselves who of course, according to our Unitarian Universalist principles, always have inherent worth and dignity. So it's okay to let the inner chatter label people as jerks, right? Or to use this label or any other label as a short cut to trusted friends to speed up and clarify communication, right?

I've been thinking about this and here's what goes on for me. If I use the word "jerk" or categorize people in any way, even just in my thoughts, I shift. My heart constricts and I am less open to listening, empathizing, and connecting to other people and the dream of the way I wish to live. As a practitioner of Compassionate Communication therefore I attempt to identify the needs of what others are attempting to meet and let that be both the inner and outer conversation. In this way my heart opens to life and possibility and what we might do together.

Practice: One time today, observe when you label someone and she how you feel with this. Then identify the needs the person is pursuing and attempt to empathize with them. Does this make a difference in how you feel?

You Lie

In recent news we heard how Representative Joe Wilson from South Carolina shouted, “you lie” at President Obama during his speech on health reform to the joint congress. In the days to follow I heard much talk about this, and in people’s sharings there was a sense of despair and hopelessness that we will not be able to work things out with such disparity of views and incivility in the public realm. How can we work towards the common good if we can’t even talk to one another?

I’m guessing that if you are reading this you aren’t a member of Congress, so let me bring this sense of “name calling” to our own lives. Where do you assume bad intentions of another person when their words or actions don’t meet up with your needs and expectations? I’m guessing it’s rather often. How can we work towards the common good if we in our own lives can’t talk to another without “name calling” and assuming we know what the other person means and what they intend?

Perhaps in your own life it might be like this. A friend of yours did not show up for a date you had set to go to dinner. You think, “she doesn’t care for me enough to call,” or “she never really wanted to be with me, I’m boring. I just wish she wouldn’t lie to me.” What if you checked out your paranoia by calling her and saying that you were disappointed that you didn’t have a chance to share this planned meal together and would she be willing to tell you what happened, why she didn’t show up?” You might get responses such as “My child was sick and we had to go to the emergency room,” or “I was so depressed I could not even get to the phone to call you.” This might be an opening for honest communication and a deepening relationship, or perhaps a deepening connection to life for both of you.

If we can hold onto this dream of how to communicate with one another, maybe one day, an angry and frustrated Representative might instead call up the President and say, “I am do disappointed with the process of legislation and I wonder if you’d be willing to talk with me about your values, views, and strategies so that we might come up with a plan that serves the common good and not just our individual or party agenda?”

If we could do this, we as a people would shout not “you lie” but would shout with gladness.

I Want Both of Us

I Want Both of Us
Hafiz

I want both of us
To start talking about this great love

As if you, I, and the Sun were all married
And living in a tiny room,
Helping each other to cook,
Do the wash,
Weave and sew,
Care for our beautiful
Animals.

We all leave each morning
To labor on the earth’s field.
No one doesn’t lift a great pack.

I want both of us to start singing like two
Traveling minstrels
About this extraordinary existence
We share,

As if
You, I, and God were all married

And living in
A tiny
Room.

In Compassionate Communication, this heart-warming poem is a wish, desire, or longing and may invite empathy and dialog. For me it is a profound invitation to engage with the wonder and awe of life, and extend as much kindness as I can out towards others because we are all so precious and all struggling so. There is a difference, however, between this poem’s wishful qualities and a specific request. A specific request goes like this: would you be willing to tell me what comes up for you when you read this poem and read my words of reflection? I may want both of us to live a life based on love, but until I ask with concrete, doable, in-the-moment possibilities, I have not made a request.

In your day-to-day life, what would a request look like that asks someone else to talk with you about a great love?

We Are Of Love

We are of Love

In Gainesville, Florida there is a congregation that posted a sign that says, “Islam is of the Devil” on their lawn. This raised public outcry, which was further inflamed when the school year began and the children from this church were sent home from school because they wore t-shirts with the same message on them. My son who works at a local market was sitting outside during break this week when a woman wearing one of those t-shirts came up to him and asked him if he was a Christian. The woman said her message spoke the truth and the only way to God was through Jesus. My son, a devote evangelical Christian, countered that we humans cannot know the truth of how to bring people to love and to God, but we can only let love and God live through us. He said that the woman, with her two young children, would stand a better chance of witnessing for God if she didn’t wear such a t-shirt. Instead, as she spoke to him people who walked by told the woman she was racist and wrong.

This incident is perhaps a more extreme example of how we all tend to get hooked on specific strategies or outcomes. Is this true for you? By setting our sights on our way of doing things, or of being right, do you find that you lose sight of the original dream, value, or need? In this case this woman is saying that the only way to love and to transcendence is through Jesus, and anything else is wrong. Do we in our own ways feel that there is a specific path for love, compassion, and community and judge others if they don’t agree with us? What if we just set our sights on love, connect to that energy, and let go of how we do things? For instance, what if in your congregation you let love flow through you and let go of the kind of music sung, the length or tone of the sermon, or the specific methods used in faith development for children and youth. I imagine that in my own congregation and it is how I wish to live in community – not idolizing my own perspective or even that of humanity, but instead looking inward and outward towards the dream of the community forming power of love, which some give the name of God.

With this potential within us all, I believe that we as a species are not of the devil, but of God, and when are not of evil, but of love.

What bedevils me is when I get stuck in the details of what I want, instead of what sustains my family, my friends, my congregation, this earth, and me.

What sustains you? What devils are in your details?

(Tasmanian Devil)