As usual my goal is to provide a podcast every other week. Sometimes that works out and other times, well, the unexpected happens and pulls me away. The weeks there is no podcast I am going to provide you with some materials to consider as we continue our journey towards a more peaceful world.
This week I want to share with you the book that changed my perspective on Peace. Like many of us I considered Peace an unattainable dream. There were a couple of reasons for this. First, I could not clearly define it. I did not understand the concept. Second, I really did not understand how it could be achieved and sustained. Throughout all my years of formal education I had no real exposure to the history of peace, only cursory explorations of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. From the time I was a child I always wondered why people sought to harm each other when there were other ways to solve problems. It seemed obvious that just taking the time to listen to each other could prevent so much needless suffering. Hence, my choice as a profession.
Over the years I had become increasingly uneasy about what I was doing professionally as a Social Worker. I was providing mental health services for individuals, groups, families, and doing program development but something was amiss. It became apparent that what people really needed was a basic sense of safety and security. Decent jobs, homes, benefit packages and a sense of purpose and hope. They also needed a voice. The systems put in place to assist them were not listening deeply enough to really help them. The issues increasingly seemed to be more about the systems that people were living in rather than individuals themselves. I had seen the effects of direct violence on many of the people I worked with but had not yet come to understand the depth of structural violence that so many of them were exposed to and its effects on them.
Complicating this was the fact that some of the workplaces I was involved with were very dysfunctional. Our egos, fear, and frustrations at times led us to lose sight of our Missions and also our ethical obligations to treat each other with respect. There is an old Vietnamese tale, the Pine Gate, that I always related to. We start out with good intentions but during our journey we can lose our way. In my last such position after experiencing five supervisors in 7 years, two of whom were fired and escorted off the job the same day, I made the agonizing decision to walk away. By the way developing an arrhythmia helped. I had told a colleague a year earlier that my heart as not in the job anymore. Too bad I did not listen until my body voted. And guess what, three months after leaving the arrhythmia went away.
So I shifted my direction and put myself in a position, teaching at Community Colleges, that gave me a chance to be in a different situation. I also enrolled in a Horticulture program at a local college and in addition started taking some history courses. Then one day, in 2005, the night before a conference in Boston I took a ride over to Harvard Square on the “T” and happened upon the Harvard Coop. I was looking at the massive selection of books, I could stay there for years reading them, and one caught my attention: Creating True Peace: Ending the Violence in Yourself, Your Family, Your Community, and the World by Thich Nhat Hanh. I thought, this guy really gets it.
This book is what really solidified my journey into the study and practice of peace So much of what he said resonated with me. Creating True Peace is a great place to start or continue your effort to find peace in yourself and share it with others. I hope you find the inspiration I did. I will leave you with an excerpt from the book that continues to inspire me:
“As you begin your practice of nonviolence, this may seem very difficult to do. You become aware that violence is all around you. You become aware of the seeds of anger, fear, and hatred in your own consciousness. You may feel a huge block of suffering inside you and feel that you are unable to transform the anger and fear within you and the violence that is directed at you. For many of us this is the situation. We have allowed violence to accumulate in us far too long because we have no strategy to deal with it. When we cannot handle our own suffering, we spew forth our frustration and pain onto those around us. We are the victims of our own suffering, because we do not know how to handle it, we hurt others when we are in pain. We – each of us – must become responsible for our own pain and work to transform it in order to save ourselves and those we love.”