Tools and Practices

We have a lot of things to answer for…. We need to make peace with the indigenous peoples that were here before we came. We need to make peace with the black community, slavery. We need to make peace with the earth…with all our creatures, with all the plant life. —Marianne Marstrand, executive director of the Global Peace Initiative of Women

It’s easy to react to each day’s news and events (personal and public) with raw emotion, adding to waves of anger, grief, and even calls for retribution well before the facts are in. Social media can make this even more intense.

If we mean to cultivate nonviolence and peace, we need to practice another way, says author Parker Palmer. Instead of responding with corrosive cynicism or irrelevant idealism, Palmer says we need to stand in the “tragic gap” between these two poles.

In honor of our friend, Brother David Steindl-Rast, we offer his wisdom on the expansive nature of spirituality for this practice.

Contemporary culture puts a premium on revenge. Retaliation is portrayed as a mark of strength, a sign of equality, and a way to exact our due. Yet the truth is just the opposite. Only the brave can forgive from the heart. —Dolores Wood

With this practice, we celebrate the gift of poetry, the way it both brings into focus and helps us transcend the world around us, the way it opens and puzzles us, delights and moves us.

Everyone alive has suffered. It is the wisdom gained from our wounds and from our own experiences of suffering that makes us able to heal. Becoming expert has turned out to be less important than remembering and trusting the wholeness in myself and everyone else. Expertise cures, but wounded people can best be healed by other wounded people. Only other wounded people can understand what is needed, for the healing of suffering is compassion, not expertise. —Rachel Naomi Remen

Practice democracy with this exercise designed to focus on our commonality, our unity, which is foundational to finding ways to reach across real and imagined divides.

If only we can overcome cruelty, to human and animal, with love and compassion we shall stand at the threshold of a new era in human moral and spiritual evolution—and realize, at last, our most unique quality: humanity. —Jane Goodall

Overcoming cruelty means living our lives consciously, aware of how our behaviors impact other sentient beings around the globe. The choices we make each day—how we interact with people and animals, what we consume, whether we make time to connect with ourselves and others—have far-reaching impact.

Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy to a friend. We never get rid of an enemy by meeting hate with hate; we get rid of an enemy by getting rid of enmity. By its very nature, hate destroys and tears down; by its very nature, love creates and builds up. –-Martin Luther King, Jr.

Do you shy away from hugging family or friends? From putting an arm around someone's shoulder or showing affection to your husband, wife or partner in front of your children? Many of us like to receive affection. A hug, a pat on the back, a smile and squeeze of a hand can generate good feelings. Still, social conventions and fear of what people may think can stop us from expressing our feelings in simple physical gestures.

Over the next month, try showing more affection to your family and friends.