Alice Miller, from For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence

For ten days, an unconscionable length of time, my father blessed the palms of his child’s outstretched, four-year-old hands with a sharp switch. Seven strokes a day on each hand: that makes one hundred forty strokes and then some. This put an end to his child’s innocence. Whatever it was that happened in Paradise involving Adam, Eve, Lilith, the serpent, and the apple, the well-deserved Biblical thunderbolt of prehistoric times, the roar of the Almighty and His pointed finger signifying expulsion–I know nothing about all that. It was my father who drove me out of Paradise. —Christoph Meckel

Whoever inquires about our childhood wants to know something about our soul. If the question is not just a rhetorical one and the questioner has the patience to listen, he will come to realize that we love with horror and hate with an inexplicable love whatever caused us our greatest pain and difficulty. —Erika Burkart

Introduction

Anyone who has ever been a mother or father and is at all honest knows from experience how difficult it can be for parents to accept certain aspects of their children. It is especially painful to have to admit this if we really love our child and want to respect his or her individuality yet are unable to do so. Intellectual knowledge is no guarantee of understanding and tolerance. If it was never possible for us to relive on a conscious level the rejection we experienced in our own child-hood and to work it through, then we in turn will pass this rejection on to our children. A merely intellectual knowledge of the laws of child development does not protect us from irritation or anger if our child’s behavior does not correspond to our expectations or needs or if—-even worse—it should pose a threat to our defense mechanisms. (more…)

healingarts | April 13, 2005 |

Pema Chodron, from When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times

Only in an open, nonjudgmental space can we acknowledge what we are feeling. Only in an open space where we’re not all caught up in our own version of reality can we see and hear and feel who others really are, which allows us to be with them and communicate with them properly.

When we talk of compassion, we usually mean working with those less fortunate than ourselves. Because we have better opportunities, a good education, and good health, we should be compassionate toward those poor people who don’t have any of that. However, in working with the teachings on how to awaken compassion and in trying to help others, we might come to realize that compassionate action involves working with ourselves as much as working with others. Compassionate action is a practice, one of the most advanced. There’s nothing more advanced than relating with others. There’s nothing more advanced than communication — compassionate communication. (more…)

healingarts | April 12, 2005 |

Sharon Salzberg, Joh Kabat-Zinn, from Lovingkindness

“Only connect.”—E. M. Forester

We can travel a long way and do many different things, but our deepest happiness is not born from accumulating new experiences. It is born from letting go of what is unnecessary, and knowing ourselves to be always at home. True happiness may not be at all far away, but it requires a radical change of view as to where to find it. (more…)

healingarts | April 10, 2005 |

Michael Sky, from The Power of Emotion: Using Your Emotional Energy to Transform Your Life

Emotional suppression sometimes serves a useful, even essential, purpose. When suffering a severe traumatic injury, the body automatically passes into the physiological state of shock, blocking all feeling and sensation, and numbing consciousness, so that the injured person can better begin recovery. Similarly, when children experience physical, emotional or sexual abuse, they commonly report feeling numb, losing consciousness, and sometimes even leaving their bodies (they may remember objectively observing the event from above). In such cases, emotional suppression serves as a mercy, a blessing, and a necessary first step in the healing process.

Even during lesser travails, suppression often seems the best we can do. As children learn early on, no matter how much a parent (or boss, policeman, or other authority figure) may violate you, it rarely helps to vent your rage, and indeed, expressing anger-energy typically only makes matters worse. Grief-stricken as you may feel, crying does not always help—especially when around other people who will not abide tears, or when the time and energy given to crying might interfere with something else that needs to get done. The same with fear: showing one’s fear to others can undermine one’s ability to lead and/or interfere with the need for immediate action. Feeling sexual arousal at the wrong time or place or around the wrong person offers no other choice than to suppress it now. Likewise, needing to laugh during a funeral. (more…)

healingarts | April 9, 2005 |

Mark Juergensmeyer, from Gandhi’s Way: A Handbook of Conflict Resolution

In my opinion, the beauty and efficacy of satyagraha are so great and the doctrine so simple that it can be preached even to children.

The basic idea of Gandhi’s approach to fighting is to redirect the focus of a fight from persons to principles. Gandhi called it satyagraha, “grasping onto principles,” or “truth force.”

He assumed that behind any struggle lies another clash, a deeper one: a confrontation between two views that are each in some measure true. Every fight, to Gandhi, was on some level a fight between differing “angles of vision” illuminating the same truth.

This means that most of the ways that you and I fight simply miss the point. We either grapple with the person who represents a position or else try to accommodate that person, without struggling with the position itself. That, to Gandhi’s mind, leaves the real conflict unresolved. It simmers in the background, ready to boil over on another occasion. (more…)

healingarts | April 8, 2005 |

Thich Nhat Hanh, from Creating True Peace: Ending Violence in Yourself, Your Family, Your Community, and the World

True peace is always possible. Yet it requires strength and practice, particularly in times of great difficulty. To some, peace and nonviolence are synonymous with passivity and weakness. In truth, practicing peace and nonviolence is far from passive. To practice peace, to make peace alive in us, is to actively cultivate understanding, love, and compassion, even in the face of misperception and conflict. Practicing peace, especially in times of war, requires courage.

All of us can practice nonviolence. We begin by recognizing that, in the depths of our consciousness, we have both the seeds of compassion and the seeds of violence. We become aware that our mind is like a garden that contains all kinds of seeds: seeds of understanding, seeds of forgiveness, seeds of mindfulness, and also seeds of ignorance, fear, and hatred. We realize that, at any given moment, we can behave with either violence or compassion, depending on the strength of these seeds within us.

When the seeds of anger, violence, and fear are watered in us several times a day, they will grow stronger. Then we are unable to be happy, unable to accept ourselves; we suffer and we make those around us suffer. Yet when we know how to cultivate the seeds of love, compassion, and understanding in us every day, those seeds will become stronger, and the seeds of violence and hatred will become weaker and weaker. We know that if we water the seeds of anger, violence, and fear in us, we will lose our peace and our stability. We will suffer and we will make those around us suffer. But if we cultivate the seeds of compassion, we nourish peace within us and around us. With this understanding, we are already on the path of creating peace. (more…)

healingarts | April 7, 2005 |

Eckhart Tolle, from The Power of Now:A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment

A beggar had been sitting by the side of a road for over thirty years. One day a stranger walked by. “Spare some change?” mumbled the beggar, mechanically holding out his old baseball cap. “I have nothing to give you,” said the stranger. Then he asked: “What’s that you are sitting on?” “Nothing,” replied the beggar. “Just an old box. I have been sitting on it for as long as I can remember.” “Ever looked inside?” asked the stranger. “No,” said the beggar. “What’s the point? There’s nothing in there.” “Have a look inside,” insisted the stranger. The beggar managed to pry open the lid. With astonishment, disbelief, and elation, he saw that the box was filled with gold.

I am that stranger who has nothing to give you and who is telling you to look inside. Not inside any box, as in the parable, but somewhere even closer: inside yourself.

“But I am not a beggar,” I can hear you say. (more…)

healingarts | April 4, 2005 |

Thich Nhat Hanh, from Anger: Wisdom for Cooling the Flames

We all need to know how to handle and take care of our anger. To do this, we must pay more attention to the biochemical aspect of anger, because anger has its roots in our body as well as our mind. When we analyze our anger, we can see its physiological elements. We have to look deeply at how we eat, how we drink, how we consume, and how we handle our body in our daily life.

Anger Is Not Strictly a Psychological Reality

In the teaching of the Buddha, we learn that our body and mind are not separate. Our body is our mind, and, at the same time, our mind is also our body. Anger is not only a mental reality because the physical and the mental are linked to each other, and we cannot separate them. In Buddhism we call the body/mind formation namarupa. Namarupa is the psyche-soma, the mind-body as one entity. The same reality sometimes appears as mind, and sometimes appears as body. (more…)

healingarts | April 2, 2005 |

Harriet Lerner, from The Dance of Connection: How to Talk to Someone When You’re Mad, Hurt, Scared, Frustrated, Insulted, Betrayed, or Desperate

The thread that unites my work both as an author and as a psychotherapist is my desire to help people speak wisely and well, sometimes about the most difficult subjects. This includes asking questions, getting a point across, clarifying desires, beliefs, values, and limits. How such communication goes determines whether we want to come home or stay away at the end of the day.

This is no simple matter, as glib terms like communication skills or assertiveness training imply. Assertiveness is considered a good idea — if not a cultural ideal. But despite decades of assertiveness training and lots of good advice about communicating with clarity, timing, and tact, we may do our best to speak but still feel unheard. We may find that we cannot affect our husband or wife or partner, that fights go nowhere, that conflict brings only pain rather than an opportunity for two people to learn more about each other. We may have the same dilemma with our mother, sister or uncle, or close friend. (more…)

healingarts | April 1, 2005 |

Thom Hartmann | CommonDreams

Years ago, a popular and wry sign to hang in one’s office or on one’s cubicle said, “A Clean Desk Is The Sign Of A Sick Mind.” There is a very faint grain of truth to that, which highlights an opportunity for the media to use Terry Schaivo’s tragic situation to actually save lives of girls and women (and a few men) in non-vegetative states.

For years it was believed that anorexia (not eating) and bulimia (eating and vomiting or “purging”) were signs of an exogenous “induced” (life-experience-caused) mental illness. The most common theories constituted a hodge-podge of ideas ranging from “bad parenting” and child abuse to the more Freudian “poor toilet training,” and psychotherapy to treat anorexia and/or bulimia centered around trying to remember, bring out, relive, and/or relieve these “causes.” These therapies rarely worked, and often made situations worse by focusing on the loci of the obsession. (more…)

healingarts | March 31, 2005 |

Marshall B. Rosenberg, from Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life

Believing that it is our nature to enjoy giving and receiving in a compassionate manner, I have been preoccupied most of my life with two questions. What happens to disconnect us from our compassionate nature, leading us to behave violently and exploitatively? And conversely, what allows some people to stay connected to their compassionate nature under even the most trying circumstances?

My preoccupation with these questions began in childhood, around the summer of 1943, when our family moved to Detroit, Michigan. The second week after we arrived, a race war erupted over an incident at a public park. More than forty people were killed in the next few days. Our neighborhood was situated in the center of the violence, and we spent three days locked in the house. (more…)

healingarts | March 29, 2005 |

Jack Kornfield, from The Art of Forgiveness, Lovingkindness, and Peace

You hold in your hand an invitation: To remember the transforming power of forgiveness and lovingkindness. To remember that no matter where you are and what you face, within your heart peace is possible.

The teachings in this book contain age-old understandings about love. They give simple and direct practices to help cultivate its qualities in your own heart. This wisdom is essential for all who live in modern times.

The words of the Buddha offer this truth: Hatred never ceases by hatred But by love alone is healed. This is the ancient and eternal law.

Often we find ourselves in conflicts that unsettle our peace of mind. We face difficult situations, and our problems can feel insurmountable. Pain, anger, and fear can arise in ourselves, in families, in business, in communities, and between nations.

We would like to find a way out of the suffering, Even in the worst situations, the heart can be free. (more…)

healingarts | March 28, 2005 |

Kaethe Weingarten | Common Shock: Witnessing Violence Every Day, How We Are Harmed, How We Can Heal

The other day I took my friend’s daughter, age seven, to the park. While I was pushing her on the swing, a father smacked his small son in the face. Turning away from this man and little boy, I saw my young friend, Anna, riveted with attention to the same scene.

Within a few pushes Anna began to kick her feet to slow herself down, and soon she was able to reach her feet to the ground, where she scuffed her shoes, the better to stop. Turning her head toward me, she said matter-of-factly, “I don’t want to stay here anymore. Can we go home?”

Had I been bending down to remove a leaf off my leg, had I been chatting with the woman pushing her daughter on the swing next to ours, had I even been yawning, eyes temporarily closed, I might easily have missed what Anna saw. The little boy had not made one peep, so no sound from him would have returned my gaze to the sandbox where he was playing.
(more…)

healingarts | March 26, 2005 |

Mike George |Discover Inner Peace

The movement of our spirit in the world is like a beautifully choreographed dance. The possibilities for finding new steps to match the changing tempo of the music are endless, but our spirit—the core of the self—remains changeless, whatever the mood or pace of the music.

Our bodies are incidental to our identity, which is why the modern cults of beauty and style should be treated with scepticism. Neither do the various roles we play in life, nor the chance circumstances that befall us, define our essence. We are, quite simply, spirit, and recognizing this will lead us to question certain basic misconceptions we might have about our relationship with other people, with time, with change, and with all the world’s phenomena as perceived by our senses. An understanding of spirit also brings us to call into question the faculty of reason, which in the Western world has been elevated by the scientific empirical tradition far above its proper status, and the validity of the emotions, which serve only the ego.

If we look inside ourselves, we will rediscover the reality of spirit, and if we take this self-understanding as our compass in life, we will learn to live more creatively, more lovingly, and more peacefully. We will have faith in our institutions and be able always to act confidently and with a clear conscience, in the knowledge of our accumulating spiritual wealth.
(more…)

healingarts | March 25, 2005 |

Pema Chodron | Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living

If we want to communicate and we have a strong aspiration to help others — on the level of social action, on the level of our family, at work in our community, or we just want to be there for people when they need us — then sooner or later we’re going to experience the big squeeze. Our ideals and the reality of what’s really happening don’t match. We feel as if we’re between the fingers of a big giant who is squeezing us. We find ourselves between a rock and a hard place. . . .

There’s a discrepancy between your inspiration and the situation as it presents itself, the immediacy of the situation. It’s the rub between those two things — the squeeze between reality and vision — that causes you to grow up, to wake up to be 100 percent decent, alive, and compassionate. (more…)

healingarts | March 24, 2005 |

Riane Eisler | The Power of Partnership: Seven Relationships That Will Change Your Life

Twenty-five years ago, I stood at a turning point. I had to rethink everything about my life. I was the single mother of two children, working as a family attorney, doing research, writing, lecturing, looking for the life companion I yearned for, grieving over the death of both my parents, not getting enough sleep, not paying attention to what I ate, pushing myself until I nearly collapsed. I became so ill that at times I thought I might die. When I walked, my heart pounded and my breath got so short I had to stop. I hurt everywhere, so much that I sometimes cried. I finally realized I couldn’t go on this way —I had to make major changes in my life.

I began with simple things. I stopped taking all the drugs my doctors prescribed and instead radically changed my diet. I stopped eating the rich foods and pastries of my Viennese childhood: no more apple strudel and Sacher torte, more vegetables and fruits. I realized that I carried a great deal of pain that I had to process if I was going to heal. I began to meditate. I found a wonderful therapist. I became more accepting of myself and found new joy in my relations with others, particularly those closest to me. (more…)

healingarts | March 23, 2005 |

Lee Jampolsky | Healing Together:How to Bring Peace Into Your Life and the World

Hope is a state of mind, not of the world -Vaclav Havel

It would be naive to think that the problems plaguing mankind today can be solved with means and methods which were applied or seemed to work in the past -Mikhail Gorbachev

Bad things happen, and to good people. Some of us seem to attract more than our share of tragedy, and often without obvious reason. Seldom do we know when tragedy will come, and no amount of preparation can make the world a crisis-free place. The key to maintaining peace of mind in such an unpredictable world is searching for purpose and opportunities to grow no matter what life brings us. We should not look to the tragedy itself for purpose, but rather to our response to the disaster. It is here that we have choices and can discover a purpose that make us better individuals and brings us closer to one another. (more…)

healingarts | March 22, 2005 |

Pema Chodron | Comfortable With Uncertainty

Being able to lighten up is the key to feeling at home with your body, mind, and emotions, to feeling worthy to live on this planet. For example, you can hear the slogan ‘Always maintain only a joyful mind’ and start beating yourself over the head for never being joyful. That kind of witness is a bit heavy.

This earnestness, this seriousness about everything on our lives-including practice-this goal-oriented, we’re going-to-do-it-or-else attitude, is the world’s greatest killjoy. There’s no sense of appreciation because we’re so solemn about everything. In contrast, a joyful mind is very ordinary and relaxed. So lighten up. Don’t make such a big deal. (more…)

healingarts | March 21, 2005 |

There should be no dead breath, no small chemistry, but intentional and full use of breathing as a feeling instrument in the actual and present ingestion, translation, and transfer of Life-Energy. — Da Free John

The purpose of conscious breathing is not primarily the movement of air, but the movement of energy. If you do a relaxed, connected breathing cycle for a few minutes, you will begin to experience dynamic energy flows within your body. These energy flows are the merging of spirit and matter. — Leonard Orr

Breathe deeply and gently through every cell of the body, laugh happily, and release the head of all worries and anxieties; and finally, breathe in the blessing of love, hope, and immortality that is flowing in the air, and you will understand the meaning of human breath. — Pundit Acharya

We so easily take breathing for granted. A fully automatic process, beginning at birth and continuing without interruption until the day that we die, breath typically flows as a fully unconscious process—we have no need to in any way consciously attend to our breathing. Just as we can expect to breathe quite adequately while sleeping each night, so can we expect our breathing to continue without consciously doing it. Breath will continue through the deepest and most unconscious of human sleep. (more…)

healingarts | February 28, 2005 |