Introductions

Dear Friends,
I am Warren Summers. *nervous*
I find these introductions very difficult, because I am never sure which information will most help you (who I do not know yet!) to connect with my story. I notice that I feel a kind of pressure to explain myself and my ideas according to an imagined hierarchy of values that might not reflect exactly where I am at now.
Should I begin with details of what I love? I think so.
I am currently studying handweaving. It is slow and really challenges me to think about how I understand the objects/process of production that surround me. It is also a place for me to engage with my mindfulness practice. Weaving gives me the ability to wrap people in the energy of my care and I find this to have a deeply healing effect for people and for me. When I first took a piece of handmade fabric off of my loom I was struck by how simple, direct and honest it felt. *warm and fuzzy*
I love taking time to stop and be with people. I am not sure where the weaving is heading, but it has opened the doors to community and conversation with many people so far.
I am a spiritual amalgam of learnings from a wide range of traditions. I was raised in an urban catholic church. Found a home in the yoga of Krishnamacharya. Wandered with the ideas of Sri Aurobindo. Landed near Krishnamurti. Spent time with Australian shamans. Simultaneously, I moved from Catholicism into the Quaker tradition – where I feel a deep kind of homeliness. I am now also involved in a zen sangha that practices in the tradition of Thich Nhat Hahn. This tradition of mindfulness is very alive for me at the moment. Locally I am also involved in a Nonviolent Communication group (in the tradition of Marshall Rosenberg) and we have recently set up a ‘despair and empowerment’ circle in the tradition of Joanna Macy.
(Sharing this information so plainly, I feel a little vulnerable. I hope that this transparency is helpful in some way.)
The aspect that all these traditions have in common, for me, is a great amount of space for plurality and inclusion. All of these teachers and practices ask me to question dogma and assumptions – and to develop a personal practice that reflects and respects the needs of me and my community/ies.
I have a music degree (composition) and currently work as the communications manager for a national alliance of LGBTI (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and intersex) health organisations. This role is a constant source of learning for me. I am hoping to incorporate the principles of nonviolence into the fabric of our organisation.
My hope for this course is that this time spent exploring nonviolence will make me an instrument of peace and wellbeing. I am really looking forward to interacting with everyone that is a part of this course. I am deeply grateful to the Metta Center for the opportunity to participate. *inspired*
 
Blessings and peace to you all!
W

Hi All

My name is Paul Bazely. I having been practising Passage Meditation for 20 years now and that is how I was introduced to Michael Nagler and his work. I became convinced that nonviolence was the missing piece in the jigsaw of my world view. It linked and underpinned all the other activism issues that i am passionate about like environment, social equality, restorative justice etc. I think it is THE means and the end to all these issues. I’m hoping to gain a firm foundation in nonviolence practice and theory that I can take into all other areas of my life personal, professional and in the community.

I am an actor who lives in Brighton UK. I am a part of the NVC community in Brighton and am also a Quaker. I am looking forward to extending my nonviolence community online with you all x

Cindy Russell here on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in Seattle as I sit in my basement enjoying the quiet and the cool and meet some of the lovely people I will be spending virtual time with over the next bit of time.  And now it is my turn to chronicle how I ended up here and where I hope it will lead.

I awoke in my forties from the long dreaming – dreaming that my life was not my own – dreaming that choices I made did not matter – dreaming of something better.  I knew from the earliest I can remember that the life my siblings chose (and there were 7 of them older than me) was surely not the life I was meant for.  Marriage and recreating the environment they thought they were escaping.  While I knew that was not for me I had no idea how to fashion  a life of purpose.  Or even that such a thing existed.

College took me not so much away from home as to a life of new possibilities.  My theater studies led me to NYC where I spent many years working as a lighting technician and then as a stage manager.  For many reasons, I moved away from theater and focused on my day jobs.

These years were filled with emotional turmoil and several bouts of severe depression.  It wasn’t until I moved to Seattle and my mother died that something shifted in me.  Maybe having no one with expectations I felt the need to fulfill allowed me the space to see  just what I expected from my life.

And so began this journey.  I was extraordinarily fortunate to find myself in the exact perfect environment for growth to flourish.  I bought a bookstore – so there I was everyday being presented with a parade of how a life might be lived.  Even more extraordinary the bookstore was located in a neighborhood with hospitals, cancer clinics and transplant centers.  So I saw people in their rawest forms – patients and caregivers alike.  Saw them moving through remarkable times.  Made and lost dozens of friends over the 12 years I owned the store.

And began to understand my power.  How every choice matters.  How every person matters.  How I can change only those things I can directly touch – that it is up to  others to change those things beyond me.  I don’t mean  this as a way of minimizing individual power – rather it is what makes individual power and choices the most potent force out there.

So the study of peace making and living a life of non violence in all I do seems right.  If I can bring peace to my troubled soul and learn how  to model this behavior I will have found and fulfilled my purpose.

Greetings Everyone! Thanks so much for introducing yourselves and for welcoming me as a participant in this wonderful course of study.  My name is Jean Thies (some know me as Claudia, which is my given first name).  I live in an Intercommunity Contemplative house in the north end of Seattle, Washington.  Four of us share this home–two humans and two elderly rescued golden retrievers!  Our purpose or mission is to support peace and justice makers by educating ourselves and others about the fine work that is being done on the planet by folks such as you!

I attribute my interest in nonviolence to a summer workshop in New Mexico that I took four years ago. The week long workshop was a study of the work of Gandhi, Dorothy Day (the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement), Martin Luther King and Thomas Merton (a contemplative monk). These four nonviolent peacemakers inspired and challenged me to embark on a journey into nonviolent peacemaking.  Our teacher, John Dear, is a contemplative, nonviolent peace activist who has written over 30 books, mostly about the nonviolent Jesus.  John works for another organization dedicated to teaching nonviolence, Pace e Bene.

I’d very much like to immerse myself once again in the work of Gandhi, Jesus, and all of the other nonviolent mentors we have here to learn from so that I can contribute to the transformation that is so needed on our planet.

Hi everyone,

I have just read the previous introductions and I am really touched by the diversity and the sincerity of the individuals in this group.  I feel “wow-ed” by all of you and the fact that I am getting to be a part of this.  I feel grateful to Stephanie and to The Metta Center!

My name is Sydney Hughes-McGee and I live in a rural area outside of Winston-Salem, North Carolina.  During the week, I work in Winston-Salem teaching yoga (Desikachar style, aka Viniyoga) and doing bodywork.   I spend much of my weekends at a family campground in the Sauratown Mountains that my husband runs on the Dan River.  I have  teenage son.  In this second half of my life I want to put my energy into cultivating the world  I imagine is possible for my son, for his generation and for their children.

My work until now has been focused around embodiment- inviting people into an aware and loving relationship with their bodies- a relationship based on listening, rather than on dominating.  I believe that  aware and awake bodies lead us into a vital and responsive relationship with the larger natural world.   This has been a big piece of my own healing, which seems to go on forever.

I feel a lot of pain for the loss of natural places and the health of natural systems.  I don’t always know what to do with this grief.   In the last year, I have begun to develop an aspect of my work that I am calling  “Eat, Pray, Local.”   What I am wanting to do is be together with others in silence in nature- spiritual adventuring in our own backyard, so to say.  I have started by offering day trips on the Dan River that combine meditation, movement and kayaking, and introduce the practice of being present where we are, with nature as our teacher.    I feel like a real beginner at this, but have had moments of feeling heart humbled and restored to my truth just by giving it a try.  I am excited to be introduced to the depth of Joanna Macy’s work in the readings this week.

Like Stephanie, I came to learning about ahimsa through yoga studies.  So much of my experience has been interpersonal.  I want to be more socially active and responsible and have a feeling that this program will expose me to some new avenues.  I hope I can keep up with the intellectual and political savvy of this group.

I look forward to getting to know you all better,

Sydney

Hi All –

My apologies for the delay in posting here – the last couple of weeks have been a whirlwind of energy in my life.  Much of it good; and there’s just a lot of it.

My name is Sadie Rosenthal and I’m in the middle of moving from Baltimore, where I was for the last two years (9 before that in NYC), to Los Angeles.  My fiance, Rachael, just got a job here, and her family is here, we’ve been staying with her family while looking for a place to live and have just gotten a lease on a lovely little loft downtown.  And we’re in the midst of wedding planning (for Nov) and family meetings about the wedding and… so I’ve just been a little off the planet.

My background in non-violence.  I guess I’d have to say I started to have a real problem with violence in seventh grade when we dissected frogs in science class.  We were paired in teams of two, and each team had one dead frog between them to dissect.  I was horrified that all of these poor frogs had been killed and shipped to us somehow so that we could stand there in our uncertain seventh grade selves making awkward jokes about squishy frog innards.  Around the same time I became a vegetarian after eating chicken, seeing the veins, and making the connection that this thing I was eating had been a living, breathing being – once I made the connection it seemed unthinkable to me that we could eat animals.  My parents didn’t really understand, and in mid-Michigan of the 1980s not eating meat was like being a Communist – somehow fundamentally “unAmerican” and just weird and wrong.  Suffice it to say, I didn’t have the easiest time in middle and high school.

I did my undergrad in political theory, and spent a lot of time in DC doing internships because I really believed that it was possible for one person who cared enough to change the system for the better from the inside (and I was and am a policy geek).  I went to law school to be able to do that work, and then spent four years in DC doing juvenile defense advocacy and anti-juvenile death penalty work.  I am incredibly proud of the work we did, and at the same time, it burned a deep hole through me.  I have unending admiration for people who can do death penalty work long term; I just couldn’t get any emotional distance from any of it – my kids, their families, my lawyers, the victims, their families…  I took it home with me every night and it ate its way through me (we talk about secondary trauma and burnout amongst advocates – I definitely think that there is a piece of it that falls under the concept of “violence” and would be more effectively addressed using the language of non-violence rather than that of trauma, though they are intimately related.)

So I quit and went to art school for four amazing years, and then went to work in communications for an organization based in spreading contemplative practices within the Jewish community – both as individual and community transformative work.

I am fascinated by the intersections of violence, injury, retaliation, forgiveness, non-violence, metta/chesed practice, individual/community transformation, restorative justice, contemplative practice, conflict prevention (and the role of language, communication, and misunderstanding).

I am at a place of career transition and don’t have an exactly clear picture of where its heading (I’d love to do my PhD in conflict prevention/transformation at some point but don’t know when that’s realistically going to happen), and I so deeply appreciate being accepted to this course as part of my trying to figure out where I fit in, what pieces I’m most interested in personally, and where my career is headed next.

Thank you to everybody for your sharing here, it is deep, open, honest, beautiful, and inspiring.  Namaste, Sadie

Hi everyone! My name is Brendan Graham, and I’m writing from Newport, Rhode Island. I’m very excited to be participating in this course with all of you and am looking forward to learning more about nonviolence. I found my way here, to the Metta Center, through the online nonviolence course, and have been following their work ever since. I’ve been interested in nonviolence for some time, and have been influenced in my life by the example of Gandhi, and more recently Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement. I went to Providence College, studying Public and Community Service Studies and also Theology. Nonviolence, I felt, was the link between them, and I’ve spent my time since college trying to “live a nonviolent life”, with lots of successes, and failures, along the way. I’m here, like I’m sure many of you are, because I want to learn this stuff in a deeper way and really integrate it into my day to day life, and hopefully teach others, too. Right now I work in a kitchen preparing mostly baked goods, and spend my off-time in the garden, skateboarding, working on my spiritual practice, and, you guessed it, learning about nonviolence! I feel privileged to be on this journey with you all, and am inspired by all the good things I’m reading in the above posts! As a younger person, it gives me lots of hope to know you are all out there doing so much good in the world, and I know I will be learning a whole lot. Thank you!