My partner Caitlin is a master of compassionate inquiry. For years she has been working with Byron Katie’s work, using it with herself, in her coaching practice and with our family. She was recently interviewed for Byron Katie’s next book on how the work has changed her parenting, and that interview appeared today on Katie’s website.
A bonus she has discovered in her new way of being is that her children involve her more in their processes. They trust her to be present and simply curious with them about whatever they’re dealing with. Together, they come up with ideas and create solutions to problems and conflicts. “They know I’m with them–present in the moment and not gone, lost in all those thoughts as I search for my Parenting Plan and Theory…In that clear place we can really hear each other and connect, and there are so many more options and possibilities.”
It’s what we try to do daily with our kids and also in working with clients.
[tags]Byron Katie, Caitlin Frost, parenting[/tags]
“We all fight on two fronts, the one facing the enemy and the one facing what we do to the enemy.”
–Joseph Boyden, Three Day Road, p. 301
Three Day Road is about two Oji-Cree soldiers who fight for Canada in the first world war. They survive the fight with the enemy on the battlefield, but they lose the war to the other enemy, the one that lurks on the inner front.
It is only *I* that holds others as “enemies.” No one is born into this world as my enemy. I create that story. My prejudices are my own, whether they appear to be generated by others or not. How do I know this is true? Because not everyone treats everyone else the same way.
In my martial arts training, we speak of our “enemies” as opponents. We offer respect to our opponents by bowing to them because having an opponent helps us to discern our real enemies – our thinking. It is very difficult to best an opponent if you think of that person as an enemy. To fight and survive you must be clear. You must be engaged with what is happening, not your story of what is happening. The moment you forget this is the moment you stop fighting your opponent and start fighting your enemy and is the moment your opponent has beaten you. Truly, you have beaten yourself. A bout with an opponent, whether it is in dialogue or in the dojang, should lead us back to confronting our enemies and they, as Pogo said, are us.
There is no relationship between winning or losing on the mat and in the mind. You can lose a bout on the mat but overcome one more prejudice in the mind. And, like Boyden’s characters, you can win on the mat but what is unconfronted in the mind will destroy you. For me, peace is the when I eliminate my true enemies – the thinking that imprisons me. And so, I bow to my opponents for their helping me discover what it is I need to confront in myself.
Notes collected this week:
- Here is a link to a story of a most remarkable wedding between two lovely women who met on LiveJournal, found help through Craigslist and had it all documented on Blogger, Blogware and YouTube. And what is so remarkable about this story is that it is a story of how these technologies helped people find warmth and kindness and love in a company of strangers. The new world is blossoming, and we are finding one another, and discovering that we are highly pre-disposed to friendship and connection. del.icio.us!
- If, like me, you are addicted to TED talks, then you might also develop a craving for Scitalks, Humtalks and Busitalks.
- You know all those stats about “X is incresing at so much per day”? Here’s what it looks like all toted up. Interesting to see how bicycle production outpaces car production and how abortions run at about 60% of births. That helps to explain why this CBC poll was hacked this month.
Amy Lenzo at the World Cafe blog tossed out a great link today, to the Global Oneness Project, a collection of videos about what we need to do on this earth. The bonus for me is an interview with my friend Tom Hurley, who I met last week in Belgium. I connected very deeply to Tom for a variety of reasons, but we shared a deep set of conversations on topics as diverse as stewardship, governance and the responsibility of love that helped me ground and understand my experience. The video with Tom is a nice summation of our need to integrate opposites, inner and outer, science and spirit. These are themes that lie deep in my practice of “practical decolonization.” Colonization as a project is about splitting polarities into opposites, decolonization is about making these whole again – healing.
I’m constantly amazed at how close we can come to people we have never met before. I’m wondering what it is we share that creates the invitation to depth so quickly. It’s beyond the fact that we share practices and approaches. What lies at the heart of such a phenomenon, and is this new or did it occur in the past?
