Activities for Month Three (PRINT VERSION AVAILABLE HERE) The following activities are options for you to implement as works best for your family throughout the entire month. None are very demanding, but each one requires of us our full presence of mind and heart. You are invited to be creative with the activities: find your… read more
Posts by Stephanie Van Hook
Seeing Nonviolence?
The Metta Center–especially our founder, Michael Nagler–has been interested in the science of nonviolence for several decades. So the other day, I sent this article out to our awesome volunteers to see if it would spark some cool insights about how we understand nonviolence: Hi everyone, The Metta Team has started exploring questions related to… read more
Tips for Facing Crisis
Photo Credit: Leslie Mclurg, KQED In crisis situations–whether by human-made violence or natural disasters–we can draw from the tools of nonviolence to help us take care of ourselves and others with sensitivity and awareness. The following list includes activities we can do by ourselves and share with others.… read more
A Really Inconvenient Truth
Climate change is real. It is also essential. “I like storms.” -M.K. Gandhi Eleven days without violence. This was the stunning result after the California Institute for Women (CIW) joined in Compassion Games, a worldwide experiment in social uplift drawing from Karen Armstrong’s work with the Charter for Compassion. The CIW is not a privileged… read more
Calmness under provocation
“Victory is impossible until we are able to keep our temper under the gravest of provocation. Calmness under fire is a soldier’s indispensable quality. A non-cooperator is nothing if he cannot remain calm and unperturbed under a fierce fire of provocation. There should be no mistake. There is no civil disobedience possible until the… read more
Lesson 2 (Family Program)
Activities for Month Two (PRINT VERSION AVAILABLE HERE) The following activities are options for you to implement as works best for your family throughout the entire month. None are very demanding, but each one requires of us our full presence of mind and heart. You are invited to be creative with the activities: find your… read more
What about the ‘others’?
“We get asked all the time in our workshops, ‘Well, isn’t violence just part of human nature?’ And I used to struggle responding to it, because it was hard to argue. It has always been part of our history. Then several years ago, I met Paul Chappell, a graduate of West Point turned peace activist.… read more
Changing perception of a campaign’s motives…
“Who we are in the eyes of others is the image we project, but of course that image comes across differently for everyone who reads it because, as we know from the field of constructive conflict management, no two people’s perspective is identical. (…) How can we overcome these blocks to accurate perception of… read more
Two hands of nonviolence…
“The late writer and activist Barbara Deming wrote about the two hands of nonviolence in her book-length essay, Revolution and Equilibrium: ‘With one hand we say to one who is angry, or to an oppressor, or to an unjust system, ‘Stop what you are doing. I refuse to honor the role you are choosing to… read more
The earth is breaking…
Once upon a time, it happened in a forest that a hare was resting under a banyan tree. He had an intuition of doom and thought, “What would happen to me if the earth will break?” Suddenly, he heard a weird striking sound. He said, “It’s happened, the earth is breaking up.”He jumped up… read more
