“How can they possibly think that?!”, “If only they wouldn’t…”, “I can’t believe they’ve just said that…”, “They just need to wise up…”
Familiar thoughts?
Many of us experience the consequences of thinking like this in our daily lives. Some of us tragically, when armed conflicts result from an inability to be with the seemingly unpalatable.
How might I sit, listen, seek to understand someone who I take as ‘other’ in a way that honours the truth of what they feel and believe, without me feeling that I have to give up my own truths?
What can ‘I’ find in common with ‘them’ to establish a stepping stone – however tentative – a ‘we’, from where some understanding (and even mutual action) can stem?
Leading Through Storms’ 20th May Monday Monthly will offer both an embodied practice to help us do this more effectively, and an opportunity to inquire into the experience with fellow participants.
https://www.leadingthroughstorms.org/current-programmes/monday-monthly-20may
Perhaps a small, close-in, contribution to bringing more peaceful co-existence to the world.
A new edition of @Barry Oshry’s excellent short work, Encounters with the ‘Other’, inspires this Monthly. In 62 pages he writes beautifully on crafting new possibilities for how we meet the ‘other’. As he says, ‘Change the pattern of interaction and our experiences of one another will change’.
The photo; two pioneering activists from Roots – a local Palestinian-Israeli initiative for understanding, non-violence and transformation – working tirelessly for peace, often in the face of massive hostility from ‘their’ ‘own’ ‘side’. Listening to them tell their stories in the West Bank was one of the most memorable afternoons of my life – thanks to @Leaders Quest.
