practice – Embody Peacebuilding

On Efficiency, Intentionality, and Care

In recent weeks, I’ve found myself in recurrent conversation and reflection about time, pacing, relationality, and flow. These threads have been weaving in reflexive navigation of collaborations and convenings alongside colleagues, friends, organizations, and processes. In these different spaces of encounter and exchange, I have noticed moments of profound resonance as well as deep dissonance that seem somehow tethered to time:

Moments when time feels like a soft companion, and others where time feels like a burden, a foe, or both.
Moments when process seems to circle and circle, conversations belabored and heavy as collectives strive for clarity yet only feel to deepen into complexity.
Moments when time boundaries have been breached – extending beyond a committed end point, sometimes by a little, sometimes by far more than feels honoring to the people and to the process.
Moments when collaboration flows nearly seamlessly, where time feels to suspend as conversation becomes a container for craft and creation.

Across these experiences, among many others, the center point of polarity presents as time. Yet, time is not itself the issue. Time is relative – our relationship to it shaped significantly by culture and context.

The deeper invitation these experiences may hold is toward an attentiveness to pacing, which I understand to be our relationship to movement with and through time. In conversation with a dear friend about the processes of one community with which I am involved, he gave voice to a couplet to which I’ve been consistently returning: pace of care and pace of purpose.

Pace of care suggests moving in a way that attends to relationship. It holds the spaciousness to give voice and listen deeply to individual and collective needs, to name experiences of challenge, to process through conflictual dynamics, to celebrate and dignify one another.

Pace of purpose suggests moving in a way that attends to vision. It holds the encouragement to move with generative momentum in the process of creation, to be accountable to commitments, to hold the flexibility to follow emergence while remaining anchored in intention.

How do we move both at the pace of care and at the purpose?

Holding these pacings not as distinct tides, but rather mutually constitutive flows that humanize and give dignity to process, the inquiry might be reframed: How do we move at the pace of intention?

Inhabiting this inquiry has opened a curiosity around notions of efficiency. When this word initially emerged in my reflections, I noticed a resistance. I am wary of how pernicious capitalist impulses of productivity and urgency so powerfully shape relationships to time for so many of us. How efficiency is frequently framed in service of minimizing cost and maximizing profit, too often at the expense of people and the more than human world.

Holding this resistance, my curiosity persisted, curling around contesting embodied experiences: The ease and flow when creative and collaborative processes moved efficiently, and the heaviness and burden when such processes moved at a pace that felt neither caring nor purposeful. The contrast of these experiences illuminated the synergy that expresses itself in the presence of alignment. This felt sense of flow was expressed when there was an alignment of values, purpose, and process, and enhanced when these dimensions were clearly named for collective visibility and accountability.

It is of note that this frame of efficiency does not correlate to speed or even a singular pace. There will be times where we move fast, where we move slow, and even when we pause, because that is what is needed and generative in the moment. This approach to efficiency thus has less to do with a calculus of time, and much more to do with the practices that enable us to move individually and collectively at the pace of intention.

Efficiency (n.): A quality of pacing in creative and collaborative endeavors emergent from remaining in integrity with intention, made possible through alignment of values, purpose, and process.

I am noticing, learning from, and seeking to embody various individual and relational practices to nurture the capacity to move with efficiency at the pace of intention. Here is an incomplete and growing list of such practices that I share with humility and curiosity about what your practices may be:

Ensure collective visibility and consent to the intention of a given conversation or process.
Be intentional about the process through which a conversation or collaboration unfolds. For example, ask the questions: How do we want to have this conversation? How do we want to approach this piece of work? What is the sequence of steps or inquiries that best enables us to fulfill our intention?
Cultivate the capacity to notice and name when a process or conversation is deviating from purpose. In this naming, center choice: Is this a deviation from original purpose that feels generative and important, or is it something that can be held for future conversation?
Acknowledge when creative process or conversation feels cumbersome. If there is spaciousness to do so, pause so as not force process. Trust that the time will come where creativity and creation will flow effortlessly. (This practice must be held in relationship with the reality of timelines and delivery dates, which sometimes impel engagement despite unideal conditions.)
Attend to relationships with authenticity and care, always and all ways.

On Care: In Resistance and Refinement

To practice into care is to practice into paradox. Even as this practice embodies a remembrance of our inherent interconnection, so too does it elicit a confrontation with our edges. And in these murky spaces between connection and boundary, I find myself wading in inquiry. The questions are many, however two are feeling particularly sticky for me this week:

How do we navigate encounters with resistance to care we may extend?

How do we grapple with the ways in which our care is imperfect?

These questions feel alive as I reflect on my experiences of both receiving and giving care in contexts that were anything but clear. I am writing this piece not for clarity on answers, but rather to better understand the contours of questions we will inevitably encounter in our relational lives.

As a teenager and into my early twenties, I experienced multiple hospitalizations and endured various forms of intensive treatment for an eating disorder. At different times I experienced a constellation of hospital stays, weekly health clinic visits, intensive outpatient programs, a residential program, and regular sessions with multiple therapists. The intensity varied, however for several years, some level of treatment formed a constant in my life. There were times in which I acknowledged the need for these interventions. I could understand the risk to my health and the risk to my life that my eating disorder created (even if at times I felt ambiguous about the consequences of these risks). There were also times – when the eating disorder was strongest and thus when the level of treatment was highest – that I resisted the care that my parents and health providers were imposing.

In these moments, what I felt was anything but care. What I felt was an attack on my agency. Their perception was that my voice and choices were distorted by the eating disorder. In return, I felt that whatever I would express in terms of my physical or emotional needs was dismissed – at times partially and at times fully.

The severity of this experience varied according to the type of treatment I was receiving. I am deeply grateful to have worked with amazing therapists, a brilliant nutritionist, and to have had (and continue to receive) invaluable compassionate accompaniment from my mother. In contrast, I also experienced treatment protocols whereby I felt completely silenced – perceived and treated as a broken, self-destructive object that needed fixing.

In these extensions of care, which ranged from fierce compassion to dictatorial, there were many times I struggled and resisted. In this resistance, there was a significant difference in how I felt care and pushed through the resistance my eating disorder put forward. This difference was the felt sense of love, compassion, and humanization in how care was extended.

There were moments my resistance was met with harshness and berating. My attempts to express the raging discomfort I felt in my body were discounted. My emotional experience, my agency, my personhood – all disregarded. This led to fights, fractured relationships, sometimes even attempts to run away.

There were moments where my resistance was met with patience and compassion, a recognition of the challenges I was experiencing and a holding firm to what would support my recovery. I felt seen and held, and often the conversations that unfolded from these instances bolstered the relational fabric of care and supported the progress of my recovery. In these moments, I truly felt care, even as I was pushed beyond what felt comfortable. In fact, it was this quality of care that enabled me to do so and thus enabled my recovery.

Part of my recovery journey has entailed a recognition for the ways in which my individual experience of an eating disorder is an expression of family, cultural, and structural dynamics of hurt, harm, and injustice. Carrying this lens, scaling from the individual and relational levels to the systemic, I am brought to a recognition that in the work of justice and liberation, there will be times in which our extension of care will not be perceived or received as such. Our work toward assuring collective wellbeing – which entails a confrontation with powerful and destructive individual and collective patterns, shaping, and systems that prevail in the world we live in – will be met with resistance. There are many ways in which we can meet this resistance in the name of building a more just and dignified world. Without any of these invalidating different strategies, I find myself wondering:

How can we notice when our extensions of care diminish or uplift the humanity of those we are caring for?
What possibilities for transformation unfold if we meet resistance with fierce compassion?
How do we nurture the patience and build the resource to accompany and create the conditions for resistance to transform over the long term?

During the first six months of the COVID pandemic, I moved to Paris to accompany my grandmother through the French confinements. A remarkably strong woman, up to that point she was living in her apartment alone. However, as a 99-year-old, who turned 100 one month into the pandemic, it was clear she needed additional support through the strict confinements that characterized the early COVID response in France.

In my mid-twenties at the time, I had no previous experience as a live in carer for someone in old age. But more than a carer, I was a grand-daughter who wanted to do her best to ensure the safety and wellbeing of her grandmother, to take care of her as best I could.

My grandmother was often in significant discomfort and pain. In an effort to ease her discomfort and to attend well to her needs, I took over many of the (by then diminished) tasks she would have previously done. Much of this was to do with meals. I would prepare her food, set the table, serve her, cleat the table, and do the dishes – all tasks she would have done before.

I thought this was helpful until one day she reflected something to the effect of, “Before you came, I knew where things were in the kitchen, and now I don’t remember. I used to be able to do certain things, and I can’t anymore.”

With all my good intentions to do as much as I could to care for my beloved grandmother, I ultimately diminished her agency. There are times I question the extent of the repercussions of this, how this might have contributed in certain ways to her decline. For when we cease to practice certain actions, we lose our capacity to do them. And for such an elderly person, this loss is permanent.

I wish I would have known better. Rather than do so many things for her, I wish I would have accompanied her with greater attention to providing assistance while creating conditions for her to continue moving and doing as she would have before. There were times we did this well. For example, we would prepare vegetables together to be cooked, or I would set pots and pans in place for her to be able to cook simple things without needing to lift and move objects that were heavy for her. There were many other times I defaulted to doing too much, motivated simultaneously by a desire to care fully for someone I love as well as a strong inherited tendency toward control.

It has been over two years since my grandmother passed away. I remain ever grateful for the many wonderful moments we shared during the time we lived together in the final years of her life – playing Scrabble, listening to her stories, sharing songs we loved, going for outings along the Seine (once the confinement restrictions eased). I also often experience doubt and regret for the ways in which my care was imperfect.

From this experience, I am trying learn and grow my care practice – not to strive for a perfect care, but to care in more helpful ways. Again, I wonder…

How can we extend care in a way that uplifts the agency and dignity of those for whom we are caring? For our care not to be of a quality of doing for, but of accompaniment?
How can we presence the patterns and shaping that contribute to the ways in which we care, some of which may be motivated by love and others that may be motivated by fear and control?
How can we approach and embody care with transparent reciprocity – to clarify needs of individuals and in relationship, and to revisit these needs for if and when they evolve?

Placing these two stories alongside one another, I am struck by the parallels. In the same way I received care through control in my mid-teens, years later, I replicated this pattern. This is a simplifying observation, as there were many counter-examples both to the care I received from my parents and to the care I extended to my grandmother. Regardless, the parallel is striking, and invites a deeper reflection into how the ways we practice care in the present are shaped by our previous experiences both giving and receiving care.

If we seek to co-create cultures of care in our relationships, our communities, or organizations, and ultimately our world, must be willing to grapple with the complexities and paradoxes that shape how we experience care individually and across scales of relationship. My wish and my hope is that this grappling can be done with curiosity and compassion; in service of deeper understanding of self, others, and the systems we inhabit; and in the company of caring community to accompany our growth and healing.

The inquiries and reflections in this piece are elicited by and drawn from my participation in the RISE for Relational Facilitators training from the Courage of Care Coalition. I extend deep thanks to Brooke D. Lavelle and Maha El-Sheikh for crafting and holding this beautiful space, and to my fellow training participants for their reflections and contributions to co-creating the experience.

On Relationships, Care, and Accompaniment

I’ve been in a space of noticing, noticing again, and noticing more. This noticing centers around a persistent dynamic that seems to be expressed in social change or social purpose-oriented organizations. The specific social change spheres I am moving in currently are those of peacebuilding, conflict transformation, and social healing and so these reflections will focus from my perspectives and experiences in these spaces.

What I am noticing is that many of these organizations that are oriented externally toward building peace and transforming conflict are themselves enmeshed in conflict. This used to create confusion in me. It felt incongruent. How come our efforts for peace are so embroiled in the dynamics that are the anthesis of that which we are pursuing?

Now I inhabit a different perspective. Nestled within this challenge is an opportunity: How can we pursue our missions of peace and justice in a way that is congruent with this very vision? This orients us toward process – to reckon honestly with how our processes of organizing replicate the dynamics we are seeking to transform, and to inquire into how we can organize in a way that embodies the change we are seeking to create.

This inquiry has guided me into the fractal of relationship. Relationships are the vehicle through which social healing and change unfold. They the terrain in which we can practice the embodiment of change. From my perspective and orientation to this work (a space of continuous learning, unlearning, and reflection), this invites a practice of relationship that is grounded in sincerity, authenticity, care, and love.

I am currently navigating unfolding encounters into the relational landscape of philanthropy. One expression of these encounters is that of the relationship between donors and partners. Drawing forth the threads of reflection shared above, I have found myself wondering about the role and responsibility of funders when partner organizations experience conflict or fracture. Far from answers or clarity, this has led me into an array of questions:

What is the quality of relationship between a donor and partner that enables a partner to share honestly about the challenges their organization is experiencing without fear of negative consequence?
What are the organizational and relational structures in place that enable conflict to be met with care?
How can opportunities be crafted or created to enter into conversational spaces that are conducive to honest, open sharing?
How can we expand notions of the resourcing funders provide beyond finances to more holistic forms of accompaniment?
Where is there room for mutual transparency – where funders and partners can share transparently challenges they have navigated or are navigating?
How can donor-partner relationships embody a quality of relationship across differentials of power and positionality that is reflective of the constellation of relationships we might seek to co-create in a world characterized by justice, dignity, and care?

In the relational landscape these questions ask into, I sit on the periphery and somehow maybe also in the middle. I am not of a funding organization, nor a partner organization, yet I am connected to both. I am listening, curious, unsure yet utterly convinced that our relationships across all scales of change are both the soil and the seeds from which transformation grows. In each encounter along our journeys of co-accompaniment, we are granted the opportunity and perhaps even imbued with the responsibility to till the soil, to tend the seeds that hold within them the change we seek. In my personal practice, drawing on the words of Grace Lee Boggs, this entails cultivating a “limitless capacity to love, serve, and create for and with each other.”

This cultivation is slow, circular, always ever incomplete. Perhaps because ‘completeness’ or ‘success’ is not the point. Rather, it is to be in the process. To be committed to try, try differently, and try again.

An Ever Unfinished Conversation

1.
Fear thrives in separation and distance.

2.
In the chasms that echo between the not-yet-met and the not-yet-known, imagination grows monsters.

3.
To traverse these chasms that exist within us and between us, we must be open to encounter.

4.
I am encountering fear.

5.
Maybe it’s truer to say, I am encountering myself. For fear is not separate from me. It threads through my tissues and is intertwined in my thoughts.

6.
A mentor once asked me, if I were a house, which aspects of myself would I welcome in and which I would close my door upon. There are aspects to which I would feel challenged to extend hospitality, but rather than close the door, I would prefer that we go on a walk together.

7.
My fear and I are going on a walk.

8.
As we walk, we talk. Not in words, but in textures and sensation.

9.
Sharp. Breathless. Hollow. Trembling. Rough. Weary.

10.
My fear is encouraging me to notice and acknowledge its multiplicity. Not reducible to a single moment, experience, or sensation – it expresses itself in nuanced ways.

11.
The more we talk, the more I notice.

12.
Limbs rigid.

13.
Movement awkward.

14.
Thoughts reeling.

15.
Heart throbbing.

16.
Hands gripping.

17.
Breath shallow.

18.
Chest armored.

19.
Mind unsteady.

20.
Our conversations are not pleasant.

21.
They are necessary.

22.
When fear is present, joy and ease feel far out of reach.

23.
To claim joy and access ease in the presence of fear is an act of resistance.

24.
To feel fear and dance anyway.

25.
To feel fear and laugh anyway.

26.
To feel fear and play anyway.

27.
To feel fear and human anyway.

28.
This practice of resistance has been and continues to be embodied by Black feminism with fierce grace for generations.

29.
May we always uplift and honor such lineages of resistance to systems of violence, oppression, and dehumanization, lineages that strive for collective liberation. For when those most marginalized in society are free, it means all are free.

30.
For some, to enter into conversation with fear is a choice. For others, it’s a daily conversation, imposed by conditions of interpersonal and structural violence and abuse.

31.
For all, it can be a conduit of transformation.

32.
In the conversations and spaces I inhabit, transformation as a term comes up frequently.

33.
People speak of transformation of self, of relationships, of communities, of society. I do, too.

34.
In the quest to usher and accompany collective transformation, there is a tendency to projectize change efforts.

35.
We focus on how to make change happen.

36.
Change is always already happening.

37.
We explore how to guide the unfolding of change so as to move closer to a world of belonging, of dignity, of love.

38.
We imagine possible futures and ways to bring those futures alive in the present.

39.
These are complex conversations.

40.
Perhaps, at essence, the dynamics are quite simple.

41.
It’s about relationship.

42.
Relationship to self, to others, to community, to the earth.

43.
Relationship shaped by the dance between fear and love.

44.
Simple doesn’t mean easy.

45.
In my current conversation with fear, I try to ground into love.

46.
I try to root into my faith that love is ever-present, but self-judgment and self-doubt are very loud conversationalists.

47.
So I choose joy. I choose ease.

48.
Most days, I move to remember joy in movement. To feel ease in my body.

49.
Slowly by slowly, this has been helping me to rebuild and reconnect with strength I once had.

50.
Returning. Remembering. Rebuilding. Reconnecting.

51.
An essence of any practice is repetition. Rhythmic return.

52.
Rhythmic return suggests commitment. Commitment suggests love.

53.
Bija Bennett has said, “Love is the glue that holds things together as well as the boundary that defines and separates them. This discernment quality sees the difference between two things and holds them separate so that they may know each other. One end of love is absolute separation. The other end is absolute union. In our relationships, we discern our differences so that we may know both ourselves and one another.”

54.
In the way that yin contains yang, maybe love contains fear.

55.
For encounter to be a possibility, separation must exist.

56.
Maybe the existence of fear is that which enables access to a knowing of love that would otherwise not be possible.

57.
It seems that sometimes, in certain spaces, people are afraid to talk about love. How ironic.

58.
I am curious about how to create conversational containers where love is at the center.

59.
More and more I sense that these conversations cannot be entered through the doorway of thought and logic.

60.
When we center the body, the wholeness of our being, and our relationality within and beyond a given space, a different kind of conversation becomes possible.

61.
It’s something to do with the quality of things.

62.
What happens when we get curious about the quality of presence we carry and hold in an encounter – where our curiosity is not driven by a desire to find answers, and rather is grounded by a commitment to humility and an appreciation of mystery.

63.
Humility. Mystery. Ambiguity.

64.
These are not experiences or qualities that are nurtured in dominant society.

65.
Even our nervous systems prefer predictability, stability, and consistency.

66.
What are the conditions that enable an appreciation and embrace of the unknown?

67.
What are the practices that cultivate a capacity to inhabit risk wisely?

68.
What are the routes to return to a safer space when the level danger becomes too high?

69.
What happens when there is no possibility for return?

70.
Some questions lead to answers. Some questions lead to more questions. Some questions lead to mystery.

71.
In his Letters to a Young Poet, Ranier Maria Rilke says, “Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

72.
Maybe it is best to let the questions lead.

73.
Approaching routes and paths toward which I experience uncertainty I find myself repeating two phrases. “Just see what happens.” And. “Easy, easy.”

74.
I wonder what would happen if we approached encounters with and of fear with compassionate curiosity.

75.
Sometimes the fear is strong enough to deter encounter. There is wisdom in that.

76.
These kinds of encounters cannot be rushed. If we try to hurry into them, the consequences can be high: injury, harm, violence, death…

77.
I’m learning to move at the pace of healing.

78.
It’s a slow study.

79.
Yin contains yang. Love contains fear. Healing contains hurt.

80.
It’s a practice of patience. And patience isn’t passive.

81.
Patience is creative adaptation, radical trust, tenacious tenderness.

82.
Patience is active presence.

83.
It’s the quality that grounds the accompaniment of transformation in generational time.

84.
With patience, we can notice differently – attending to the subtle sensations, shifts, silences, and songs that unfold through the process of integration.

85.
How do we notice our bodies healing?

86.
Skin regenerates. Muscles rebuild. Bones, ligaments, and tendons reknit.

87.
Even the sharp edges of a broken heart can soften over time.

88.
Healing. Integration. Process oriented terms, suggesting a movement toward wholeness and at the same time an acknowledgment that whole does not mean intact.

89.
We are always ever broken, fragmented. We are always ever whole, a patchwork knit together with the threads of love.

90.
It’s a practice of remembering.

91.
We humans are forgetful creatures.

92.
How do we remember? Again. And again. And again. And again.

93.
It takes courage.

94.
In my encounters with fear, I don’t feel courageous. I feel fragile, fickle, fumbling my way toward myself.

95.
Courage. It means to take heart.

96.
To feel fear and love anyway.

97.
So here I am, in slow study. Walking with fear. Moving with joy. Leaning into love.

98.
I forget often. I remember sometimes.

99.
trust in the wisdom
of rest, healing, and slow time
the true pace of life

100.
Just see what happens.

Practice is in the Return

There is a growing tide in the social change ecosystem that recognizes the role of self and collective care as necessary not only to support the sustainability of activists and social movements, but also to be in integrity with the vision and mission of the work. Such an approach to activism has been described in different ways in different contexts. A powerful current of this approach is that of healing justice. Cara Page and the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective describe healing justice in the following way: “Healing justice…identifies how we can holistically respond to and intervene on generational trauma and violence, and to bring collective practices that can impact and transform the consequences of oppression on our bodies, hearts and minds.”¹ The cultivation of practices that support the transformation of trauma and violence and nurture healing at individual and collective levels is a crucial pathway toward sustaining activists and movements seeking peace and justice.

For individuals, organizations, and communities engaged in social change, a question thus arises as to how are such practices cultivated and sustained. In contexts filled with urgent and competing demands, and risks to personal and collective safety, accessing and prioritizing care practices is often perceived to be a distraction from the ‘real work.’ It is only through attending to our own care, healing, and wellbeing, however, that we can be sustainable and in integrity with our work toward the building of just and dignified futures.

To support the development and consistency of care practices, I wonder if it could be supportive to intentionally consider specific elements of practice. Beginning in January of this year, I began a journey through which I have been learning about the nature of practice in new ways. These learnings and reflections are by no means intended as a definitive claim about practice, rather they are insights that have emerged through my embodied experience and about which I am curious in how they can be applied to other realms of practice.

Over the course of last year, I followed my friend Julie’s journey from vertical to vertical, from standing on her feet to standing on her hands. The journey unfolded through 365 days of daily practice, slowly building the strength and developing the balance to hold a free-standing handstand. I was curious and inspired. It was a joy when the coach and guide, Damien Norris, extended an open invitation to participate in this journey by making the instructional videos available on YouTube.²

January of this year marked the beginning of my handstand journey. It also marked the beginning of what has proved to be fairly challenging year, one filled with seasons of grief, displacement, and isolation. Most of the year, I was able to easefully integrate the training into my daily routine. Some days and weeks, however, I have not been able to train due to travel, sickness, or other circumstances. In both the regularity and inconsistency of my training, I’ve become deeply curious about the nature of practice.

Practice holds inherent a repetitive quality, requiring a regularity of participation. In the case of the handstand journey, the invitation is extended into daily practice. Each day, there are particular movements to train, beginning with hollow body holds and slow progressing over time. And yet, the days and weeks in which I was unable to do the training, the practice did not disappear. The practice has been as much in my active participation in the training as it has been in my choice to return to it, be that each day or after a week away. The essence of practice has been not only in the training, but in the choice of return.

Fairly far along into the handstand journey, I am confronting a new obstacle in my practice. Having recently dislocated my elbow, I am unable to bear weight on my left arm. For the first couple of weeks after the injury, I drifted from the daily consistency of my practice, disappointed and unsure when I would be able to return. Eager to continue in the journey, but uncertain of how to do so in these new circumstances, I reached out to Damien, who graciously offered a variety of suggestions to adapt my training.

Returning to consistent training has felt amazing. Whereas my body feels challenged by some of the new movements, the felt sense of return to the practice, which has become a source of sustenance and stability through this year, has been one of comfort and a deep settling in my core. Although I continued to move and train in the days and weeks since the injury, I would not have been able to return to the specificity of handstand training so soon were it not for external accompaniment and support. The guidance and encouragement were essential in a circumstance where I was in doubt about my ability to remain active in the practice.

While I remain far from the ability to hold a free-standing handstand, as I find my way there, I am learning deeply about the nature and components of practice. At this moment, I am present to three key components that facilitate and comprise practice, namely, the physical act of training, the choice of consistent return, and accompaniment along the way. As I continue in this handstand journey, I am curious of what more I will learn.

Enacting and sustaining generative change, whether at the individual or collective level, requires shifting habits of being from those that perpetuate harm or dis-ease, to those that support healing and wellbeing. Such change involves the integration of new practices into our lives. This is much easier said than done. Emergent from an understanding of the nature and components practice – behavior, accountability, and accompaniment – we might invite ourselves into a set of inquiries that help to identify not only the activities and processes that can support us, but also the conditions and mechanisms of accountability necessary to make these practices sustainable. These inquiries may sound like:

For individuals

What are activities or experiences that support my wellbeing and bring me joy?
What conditions need to be in place for me to consistently and regularly participate in one or more of these activities?
Who can support me in to remain consistent in my practice?

For organizations

What rituals, policies, and processes can support the wellbeing of employees individually and the organization as a whole?
What conditions need to be in place to ensure these practices are regularly and consistently upheld?
Who within or outside the organization can support consistency of practice?

For communities

What activities, traditions, and rituals can support the wellbeing of our community?
What conditions need to be in place for these practices to be regularly accessed?
Who in our community can support consistency of practice?

As we seek to adopt new practices to nurture care and support transformation, perhaps any clarity emergent from such inquiries could support us, illuminating what will enable greater accountability to ourselves and each other as we strive to embody and bring forward greater peace in ourselves and justice in the world.

accountability

consistency’s key

practice is in the return

each day, try again

¹ To learn more about the work of the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective, you can check out their website, http://kindredsouthernhjcollective.org/.

² If you’d like to start your own journey to handstand, you can find Damien’s guidance through all 365 days available here.

On Care and Dignity

I am in the early days of learning how to move and be differently in my body.

I took a fall while rock climbing this week. Dropping to the earth from fifteen feet up a wall, my body tried to protect itself. I landed on my outstretched arm and dislocated my elbow.

I remember being on the wall. I remember being on the ground. I don’t remember the moments in between.

I am learning how to move with three limbs.

There are many things I can do with my body. There are many things I can’t anymore, at least not alone.

I am learning how to receive care and assistance in new ways. At the same time, I am present to my desire to find new ways to do physical tasks independently. Things like opening a jar or cutting a piece of fruit. I notice my resistance to offers to do tasks for me, particularly the tasks I can still do. My independence and agency are cherished, even as the reality of our interdependence is in a particularly strong expression these days.

I keep remembering my grandmother. I wish I could apologize. Sometimes we learn too late.

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, I moved to Paris to accompany my then 99-year-old grandmother through the weeks and months of confinement. I’d never been a sole and full time caregiver for an elder before. In my deepest desire to help her, to relieve her of any burden of excessive effort, I began doing nearly every task for her. I thought I was helping. Instead, I overtook the daily routines and tasks that she still had the capacity to do.

Only now, as I move slowly, finding new ways to accomplish what were previously simple tasks, am I able to experience an embodied compassion for what my grandmother was trying to communicate to me.

Perhaps when we offer or express care, it is not always best to ‘care for.’ We may be wiser to ‘care with’ – to acknowledge the agency and capacity of each person in the caring relationship, both those offering and those receiving care. In this way, to extend care is not to do something for someone. Instead, to care with is to accompany another, offering assistance if and when an endeavor exceeds their limitations in a given moment. Such an embodiment of care allows for a fuller acknowledgement of reciprocity in relationship. I may extend care in a certain expression, and receive care in another. Further, whereas I may currently be in a position of being largely receiving of care, and in the future, I will be able to offer care in return.

Our independence does not negate our interdependence. Just as our interdependence does not negate our independence. These are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps, rather they are mutually constitutive.

It is in the claiming of my own agency that I am able to be present and in service to others.

It is in the recognition of the connection of my life with that of all beings that I am not only called into service, but also supported and sustained through community care, accountability, and nourishment.

There is great power in both agency and compassionate relationship. May we embody the bridge that joins these expressions of humanity, in doing so, honoring the dignity of ourselves and each other.

On Patience, Perseverance, and Practice

Through the alchemy of forests and friendships, my love of rock climbing has recently been rekindled. I am a novice climber, delighting in and curious about all that this movement practice holds. In the short time that I have returned to climbing, I have found myself curious about the interplay it offers between patience, perseverance, and practice.

Patience. From the Latin patientia, meaning “the quality of suffering,” which is present participle of pati, meaning “to endure, undergo, experience.”¹

Perseverance. From the Latin perseverantia, meaning “steadfastness, constancy” or the “quality of continuing or enduring.”

Whereas patience conveys a particular orientation to the experience of navigating challenging and painful circumstances, perseverance evokes a commitment to endure through the circumstances, to stick with it. This necessitates practice – the repetition of an action; trying and trying again and again and again.

When I climb, my current approach is primarily to repeatedly work routes that are (for me) accessible with a bit of challenge. Every once in a while, however, I mix in attempts of routes of a higher difficulty. These attempts often go like this:

Approach the wall.

Try out a starting position.

Fall.

Try a new starting position.

Get on the wall.

Fall.

Walk away.

Approach the wall.

Get into the starting position.

Reach for the next hold.

Fall.

Rest.

Approach the wall.

Get into the starting position.

Reach for the next hold.

Grip.

Shift body.

Step up.

Fall.

Rest.

The pattern is consistent. Try. Fall. Try again. Fall again. Over and over. But each fall is not a failure. If I am attentive enough, each time I fall, I notice what didn’t work and what I need to change: how to shift my body position, how to move my leg, how to bend my elbow, how to place my foot. Each time I fall, I have the opportunity to fail better. Eventually, with enough perseverance, I might fail my way to the top, completing the route. This might happen in one climbing session, or over the course of days or weeks.

It is not purely a matter of persistence, however. If, in my repeated attempts to climb a route, I become frustrated or overly fearful – tense in body and mind – I fall much sooner, unable to reach the height or a hold I previously attained. And so, I am learning to be patient – not to force, but rather to take my time and approach each new attempt with curiosity and ease. When I approach the wall, I exhale and relax my arms. As I reach for the first hold and step my feet up, I whisper to myself “easy, easy.” When I intentionally choose and cultivate fluidity and ease in my movement, even as my muscles and strength are strained, I climb much better and move nearer toward my goal.

If I successfully complete a route, I try again. Movement coach and my dear friend Julie Angel shared with me an approach to learning a new movement skill that says: Once is never. Twice is maybe. Three times you have it. I’ve integrated this into my climbing practice, reclimbing each route. Every time I do, I find new ways of moving, positioning, and placing my body that are more fluid, steady, and assured. Cultivating these patterns of movement and mind, I find myself stronger, more courageous, and more creative in my attempts at new routes, new challenges.

Climbing, I am finding, offers an invitation to practice patient perseverance, to repeatedly embody and enact a quality of presence and engagement with challenging and difficult circumstances. In another framing, it is an invitation to practice a quality of presence and engagement we carry in our navigation, and eventual transformation, of conflict.

John Paul Lederach suggests that the transformative work of peacebuilding lies in the fostering of a certain quality of relationship, particularly between people who are differently situated or differently minded in society.² At the core of this is the quality of presence we carry in the conflicts we encounter, a compassionate presence that honors the dignity and humanity of those around us, especially with those deemed as “other.”³ The cultivation of such a quality of presence requires patience, perseverance, and practice.

We must be patient for we are all human. We all carry wounds and we have all caused harm. In the process of reconciliation and conflict transformation, we must be patient with ourselves and others as we make mistakes and stumble along the long and arduous journey of relational repair.⁴

We must persevere for the conflicts we face within ourselves, in our relationships, and in our world are vast and complex. They will not be solved with quick-fixes, instead asking of us commitment to the process, especially in moments where the challenges we face seem insurmountable, when our endurance and perhaps even our hope is tested.

We must practice for so long as we live, we encounter conflict. With each such encounter we are given an opportunity to embody ways of moving and being in relationship that center dignity and care.

Whether at the crux of a climbing route or the impasse of a conflict, cultivating patient perseverance can help us to transcend the limitations we may initially perceive. We persist in the challenging moments, trusting that there is a way through. We will fail often, possibly many more times than we succeed. But perhaps, with enough intention and presence, each time we can fail better, moving us closer in the direction of generative change.

¹“Patience,” Etymology, https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=patience.

² “John Paul Lederach – The Art of Peace,” The On Being Project, November 8, 2021, https://onbeing.org/programs/john-paul-lederach-the-art-of-peace/.

³ Lederach, John Paul. “Compassionate Presence: Faith-Based Peacebuilding in the Face of Violence.” Joan B. Kroc Distinguished Lecture Series. Lecture, February 16, 2012. https://digital.sandiego.edu/lecture_series/3/.

⁴ It is notable here that the word patience shares a root with compassion, which comes from the Latin compati, com meaning “with, together” and pati, translated as “to suffer.” In other words, compassion is the quality of how are together with or alongside suffering.

On Gratitude and Centering Relationship

In the fall of 2018, my dear friend Julie invited me to join a 30-day gratitude practice, connecting with four other women to everyday share three things for which we are grateful in a group text. I greatly enjoyed the practice, as it offered an opportunity to reflect more intentionally on the interactions and activities of my day. Over just a short time, I noticed myself resting more frequently into gratitude and being present to all that I have to be grateful for. Of the five other women sharing their daily gratitudes, I only knew Julie. The others live around the country. While not knowing these women in person, it was lovely to connect in shared practice, to learn about who they are and what they value through what they chose for their three daily gratitudes.

The thirty days passed, and Julie invited us to continue for another 45 days, which I happily did. Then came the new year and a I received a message Julie sent to our group, offering the invitation to join in 365 days of gratitude. Never before had I consciously committed to a yearlong daily practice, but having already established a rhythm of practice in the preceding months, it was an easeful yes to embark upon this journey.

Writing this, we are nearing the 180 day mark of gratitudes. The initial insights and shifts that unfolded from the first thirty days have sustained. The ways in which I orient toward the goings on of my life have shifted substantially, as I rest more fully into gratitude each day. Gratitude has become a space almost to which I default, resting into the gifts of the moment, even when those gifts are situated in times or spaces of anxiety, challenge, and overwhelm. There is another gift this daily gratitude practice has offered, however, one for which I am deeply grateful and on which I have come to reflect very frequently.

In reflecting each evening on the happenings of the day and choosing three things I am grateful for, I began to notice patterns in my gratitude notes. Consistently, one if not all three of my gratitudes is centered on relationship. It is that conversation I had with someone, a friend’s presence in my life, the support someone has provided in a moment of need, or the opportunity to support someone when they are in need. This has led me to reflect upon that which I value most in my life, and that which is most nourishing, namely centering relationship. I now carry a different quality of awareness with regard to the ways in which I share in and inhabit relationships in my life. With a deeper and more conscious appreciation for the sustaining force these relationships carry, I have also been provided with a directionality in terms of what I can move toward when I am feeling disconnected, anxious, and otherwise unwell. Knowing what nourishes me, I find myself being more intentional about cultivating and being deeply present to existing and emerging relationships. Sometimes it is just a momentary crossing of paths, a smile in the hallway. Other times, it is an hours long conversation that traverses vast landscapes of thought and reflection. Each of these embodiments of relationship carries such value, offering the opportunity of engaged presence, of seeing and being seen, of listening and being heard, of sensing and being sensed.

Continuing to navigate this year of gratitude, I have received a gift I did not anticipate, but has been so deeply transformative. I know now what nourishes me. Further, I know what nourishes me is the people with whom I am in relationship. Every evening, I receive the gift of resting into gratitude to and for the people in my life who challenge me, who support me, and who sustain me.

May we all know that for which we are grateful, and may we all have the opportunity to cultivate its presence in our daily practice.