Inoculation For Outrage

This weekend was the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attack on the U.S.. Thinking of 9/11 reminds Americans of the trauma of that day and entering into the “War on Terror.” It can remind us also of the daily trauma and terror of the staggering amounts of violence and human-generated suffering still happening around…

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Our Afghan Story Revisited

Close to 20 years ago I went to Pakistan with my close colleague Ike Lasater to work with Afghan tribal elders in a refugee camp along the border. It was January 2002, soon after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the U.S. and our bombings and invasion of Afghanistan. It was a particularly dangerous time for…

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Code Red for Humanity

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on Monday released a major report of over 200 leading scientists from around the world confirming dire, catastrophic consequences from climate change if we humans don’t take rapid, radical action.  Although we have been hearing about the potential effects of climate change for decades, Monday’s report from…

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Being Held and Transformed in the Formless

Are you, like me, more and more often feeling a depth of grief seeing ways that we humans are relating to each other and to this beautiful living Earth? As we stare into the abyss, what can give us the strength and courage to hold the enormity of the pain and conflict, and transform it…

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Feminine Power

In my last blog I spoke about my journey with faith and courage and how that has come about through the relationship with my wife, Schena.  Together we are on a path to bring more empathic connection to the world one conversation at a time. Schena is launching a new platform called Chai with Schena,…

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Faith and Courage

I want to write about faith and courage, and share with you about a particular core conflict dynamic with my wife Schena that has been quite repetitive and challenging for us over our now almost 19 years of marriage. I have grown enormously over the years learning how to truly live and apply the skills I…

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Returning Home

I’ve lately been thinking back on my childhood and remembering how I would look to Nature and Life for a mothering spiritual presence that was absent in physical form. I’m sure I didn’t think of it this way then, but as I look back I believe that’s what I was doing. It has been with…

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Reaching Critical Mass

This week as the U.S. population continues to be dangerously divided on who won the presidential election, and the surging pandemic takes its devastating toll, I have been more deeply than ever contemplating the question, how can empathic communication go further out into the world to help people and the planet?  What came first were…

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Across the Aisle

As tensions ratchet up around the U.S. presidential election results, and more and more common is heard the phrase “civil war,” we need some way to bring the temperature down. We seem to be moving towards inhabiting different worlds of alternate realities, parallel universes of perspective, experience, and belief, with the very real potential for…

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Resistance

I deeply believe that humanity’s path out of this time of growing crisis is to not only support a new way of being but to also resist the current social-political-economic system that is killing us and life on the planet. The way I see to resist, however, is with empathy and care. As I understand…

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