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Compassion Training for Dark Times
“Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination…from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and works, will kindle under almost all circumstances.”
Hannah Arendt
The United States has long buried its distortions and cruelties under more attractive sounding images. But we live in a time when our capacity for degradation has been allowed to enter the light of day. We look toward difficult times.
All You Need is Love
Kelly Conroy Moore, Ph.D. and Brooke D. Lavelle, Ph.D. talk love and transformation on the Integrated Health Podcast. Enjoy!
Leveraging the Contemplative Community for Liberation
How do we leverage the contemplative community into justice and liberation for all, not just the pursuit of liberation for ourselves individually? In this conversation, we explore issues around uncomfortable topics – race, systems of white dominance and our collective embedded-ness in these systems. We also explore how our contemplative practices must include looking at the suffering created by these systems in order to change them, and how Courage of Care Coalition is engaged in leading workshops, intensives and retreats to help bring us to these difficult and necessary conversations, and the sustained engaged practices of care.
https://soundcloud.com/user-618979570/brooke-dodson-lavelle-meditation-teacher-visionary-co-founder-courage-of-care-coalition
Enjoy this conversation hosted by Leslie Langbert, Director of the University of Arizona Center for Compassion Studies.
Original post: https://compassioncenter.arizona.edu/conversation-compassion-brooke-dodson-lavelle
A Call for More Compassionate, Equitable Education
What’s Equity Got to Do With It?
Recently I presented at a workshop for educators interested in the science of social and emotional learning (SEL) and prosocial education. After leading a half-day session on cultivating compassion, in which I also highlighted common blocks and obstacles — like stereotype, bias, prejudice and racism — to cultivating compassion, I asked the group somewhat rhetorically to consider what this material had to do with educational equity. The largely white, upper middle-class audience fell silent. Some looked confused; others seemed hesitant or reluctant to speak. Others seemed mildly irritated, perhaps by me, or by the topic itself.
The Power of Moral Imagination
In 2010, professors Sara Hendren and Brian Glenny began covering the standard “handicapped” symbol on Boston parking signs with translucent stickers that depicted a new image. Over the familiar stick figure sitting upright in a wheelchair, they pasted one leaning forward, arms reaching back to spin the wheels of the chair.
Calling into question the depiction of the passive figure almost engulfed by the chair, the image that began as guerilla street art invites an entirely different world of associations—a person intentional and in motion, moving towards a place of her own choosing. Offered freely online, the new accessibility icon has been adopted by cities and institutions across the globe.
Transformation, this story reminds us, can be as simple as this: a different angle in a wheelchair.
Is There a Place for “Inner Work” in the Education Community?
“Teaching is personal. You have to put yourself out there. You have to confront who you are on a daily basis.”
These are words that I have used when mentoring student teachers. But, just like telling children to “pay attention” and then providing them with no strategies, the teaching profession—or at least this teaching professional (until recently)—hasn’t offered much to my student teachers about how to manage this personal work.
In the past few years, I have noticed a shift in how I present this to my student teachers. “Confront” has become “know,” and “know” itself has expanded: you have to know yourself, and you have to be kind and compassionate to that self. How do we know ourselves? What does this self-compassion look like? And, perhaps most importantly, how does addressing our inner lives make a difference in our lives as teachers and in our educational community? Is school really the time or place to do such work?
Sustainable Compassion for Those Who Serve
Forty- to fifty-percent of teachers quit their job within their first five years of teaching. Nurses, doctors and other medical professionals report increasingly less satisfaction in their work. Incidence of suicide among social workers is on the rise. Clergy suffer from depression and other medical issues.
Part of the problem is systemic—our social service providers are overworked and under-resourced. Yet another part of the problem is cultural, and stems from our beliefs about what compassion is and how we cultivate it.
Fierce Care, Not Self-Righteous Anger, for Social Change
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