Showing posts with label love. Show all posts
Showing posts with label love. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 23, 2013
Language, Meaning, and Consciousness Transformation
by Miki Kashtan
There is no question that my love of language is an inherited trait. My father was a lay linguist, in addition to being a teacher, writer, and public intellectual. In the last few years of his life, in his fifties, he went back to school to get a Ph.D. in linguistics, a project he didn’t complete due to illness. Not having a degree didn’t stop him from writing and continuing to perfect a book about common errors in usage of Hebrew until he got sick and had the book finally released for publication. My mother also wrote a book about language, explaining in detail a unique method she developed for teaching Hebrew, both to native speakers and as a second language. I hope she gets to publish it in her lifetime. Our family culture was suffused with intellectually stimulating conversations about politics, society, Judaism, psychology, social critique, and deep engagement with all of our daily experiences. In among these topics, we always had extensive discussions about language and meaning, about the source of words, and about how changing words, even word order, can change meaning. It’s no wonder to me that I landed on a language-based practice as a primary passion and my calling.
I continue to carry in me the deep reverence for precision and clarity in use of words that unites our family. Which words we choose to say is not “just semantics,” as so many often say. Rather, I see each word that we choose as carrying a specific field of meaning. If we change the words we use, we change the message we send – both to the person who hears it as well as to our own brain. I have a distinct experience that a language-based practice such a Nonviolent Communication (NVC) can most literally change the wiring within our nervous system.
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Learning from Life – A Journal
by Miki Kashtan
In the last few weeks, since I returned from Europe, I learned so much through the experiences that I found on my path, without planning to learn anything, that it became clear I wanted to write about the experience of learning all the time. I decided I wanted to expose the bits and pieces below for the purpose of showing, both myself and others, how everything that happens, happy or not, can support our movement toward where we want to go. If you are reading this blog, you know that I am plagued by a fundamental and deep impatience fueled by a deep longing for an entirely different way for us, humans, to live on the planet. The vision is strong, and what I most want is companionship, many people willing to join me on this amazing journey to a profound personal freedom that will allow us to take a stand and, together, turn the tide. I am dedicating this sampling of my learning, these very personal reflections, to this bold vision, without quite knowing what connects to what.
At some point in the last few weeks, since being back from a month of workshops in Europe, I reflected on what made this trip so profoundly satisfying for me. Yes, it’s always satisfying for my work and offerings to be received enthusiastically, and yet I know that wasn’t it. The answer, when it came was deeply resonant. Everywhere I was in Europe, I was with people who love me and whom I love. When surrounded by love, I can breathe differently. I don’t have it at home, not in this same way. The many people in my life that I share love with are not with me all the time. Some uncertain part within me is still insisting that there is something unusual about wanting it, that this is not how life works. I refuse to believe this part, because I think I know better. I think I know that my experience is accurate to being human. We live, in my opinion, so far from what evolution designed us for: to be in ongoing connection with others. The isolated life of modernity doesn’t suit me. I know that for sure. I suspect fully that it’s not satisfying for others, either. Of course I can’t know, and I want to remain humble about it. It may, indeed, be that I am unusual in not being able to rest in a place of full individuation, living as a separate and unique one person. How ironic, considering how much I feel myself to be different, other than most, and still, I want and long to live surrounded by and immersed in love. I am not willing to give up any more, even if it doesn’t ever happen.
In the last few weeks, since I returned from Europe, I learned so much through the experiences that I found on my path, without planning to learn anything, that it became clear I wanted to write about the experience of learning all the time. I decided I wanted to expose the bits and pieces below for the purpose of showing, both myself and others, how everything that happens, happy or not, can support our movement toward where we want to go. If you are reading this blog, you know that I am plagued by a fundamental and deep impatience fueled by a deep longing for an entirely different way for us, humans, to live on the planet. The vision is strong, and what I most want is companionship, many people willing to join me on this amazing journey to a profound personal freedom that will allow us to take a stand and, together, turn the tide. I am dedicating this sampling of my learning, these very personal reflections, to this bold vision, without quite knowing what connects to what.
Immersing in Love
At some point in the last few weeks, since being back from a month of workshops in Europe, I reflected on what made this trip so profoundly satisfying for me. Yes, it’s always satisfying for my work and offerings to be received enthusiastically, and yet I know that wasn’t it. The answer, when it came was deeply resonant. Everywhere I was in Europe, I was with people who love me and whom I love. When surrounded by love, I can breathe differently. I don’t have it at home, not in this same way. The many people in my life that I share love with are not with me all the time. Some uncertain part within me is still insisting that there is something unusual about wanting it, that this is not how life works. I refuse to believe this part, because I think I know better. I think I know that my experience is accurate to being human. We live, in my opinion, so far from what evolution designed us for: to be in ongoing connection with others. The isolated life of modernity doesn’t suit me. I know that for sure. I suspect fully that it’s not satisfying for others, either. Of course I can’t know, and I want to remain humble about it. It may, indeed, be that I am unusual in not being able to rest in a place of full individuation, living as a separate and unique one person. How ironic, considering how much I feel myself to be different, other than most, and still, I want and long to live surrounded by and immersed in love. I am not willing to give up any more, even if it doesn’t ever happen.
Thursday, January 24, 2013
Some Things I Am Learning from Martin Luther King, Jr.
by Miki Kashtan
In 1990 I celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr. Day for the first time, and in the most significant way I remember. The entire day I was sitting with my partner at the time, and we were focusing on our dreams, our big dreams, our biggest dreams, way beyond just ourselves and our own lives.
In 1990 I celebrated Martin Luther King, Jr. Day for the first time, and in the most significant way I remember. The entire day I was sitting with my partner at the time, and we were focusing on our dreams, our big dreams, our biggest dreams, way beyond just ourselves and our own lives.
Although the relationship is long gone, the effects of that
day are still with me. It was then that I had the startling realization that
there is really no reason why Dr. King did what he did and I, or anyone else,
can’t. That may have been the day I took on with explicit clarity the
responsibility to do all I can to contribute to the dreams I have, some of
which I have carried in one form or another since I was a small child.
Early on Monday morning this week, I received an email from
a friend who forwarded a number of Dr. King’s quotes to me, some known to me
and some not. I was thinking about them all day, and I decided to dedicate this
week’s blog piece to sinking into the depth of meaning some of these quotes
have had for me.
Thursday, June 7, 2012
It’s Not So Easy to Be Rich
by Miki Kashtan
I had my first true inkling that being rich might have its own challenges in the mid ‘80s, when I was in a relationship with a millionaire. At the time I was living in a tiny apartment on Columbus Avenue in Manhattan, which was still in the early phase of massive gentrification. More than once, I remember him standing at my window looking at the people walking up and down the street, and saying: “They all want to be where I am.” More than the words, it was the unmistakable tone of melancholy that I heard in his voice that affected me. Nothing in his demeanor resembled happiness. I also remember another phrase he often said: “What comes after success?”
One of the mythologies of our culture is that having money is the single most important factor in the choices we make, the most reliable path to a life of happiness, and the ticket to feeling good about ourselves. In some significant ways, money indeed provides access to more resources, such as material goods of any kind as well as services that may not be available to all. Having enough money means a certain kind of immediate ease with all manner of decisions. I don’t intend to minimize the significance of such material benefit.
And still... The more I have come to know the lives of people with significant access to resources, the more struck I am with how many challenges and hardships they experience. Given how easily and often the rich are maligned (a challenge in and of itself), I wanted to offer my intuitive and learned understanding of the plight of the rich. If you happen to have access to money, you will likely recognize some of these dilemmas. If not, I hope you can imagine it. My goal, here as often, is to support our collective movement toward a world that works for all, the currently rich and the currently poor, by reducing the veil that hides our humanity from each other.
I had my first true inkling that being rich might have its own challenges in the mid ‘80s, when I was in a relationship with a millionaire. At the time I was living in a tiny apartment on Columbus Avenue in Manhattan, which was still in the early phase of massive gentrification. More than once, I remember him standing at my window looking at the people walking up and down the street, and saying: “They all want to be where I am.” More than the words, it was the unmistakable tone of melancholy that I heard in his voice that affected me. Nothing in his demeanor resembled happiness. I also remember another phrase he often said: “What comes after success?”
One of the mythologies of our culture is that having money is the single most important factor in the choices we make, the most reliable path to a life of happiness, and the ticket to feeling good about ourselves. In some significant ways, money indeed provides access to more resources, such as material goods of any kind as well as services that may not be available to all. Having enough money means a certain kind of immediate ease with all manner of decisions. I don’t intend to minimize the significance of such material benefit.
And still... The more I have come to know the lives of people with significant access to resources, the more struck I am with how many challenges and hardships they experience. Given how easily and often the rich are maligned (a challenge in and of itself), I wanted to offer my intuitive and learned understanding of the plight of the rich. If you happen to have access to money, you will likely recognize some of these dilemmas. If not, I hope you can imagine it. My goal, here as often, is to support our collective movement toward a world that works for all, the currently rich and the currently poor, by reducing the veil that hides our humanity from each other.
Thursday, February 9, 2012
Stepping into Power while Maintaining Connection
by Miki Kashtan
“One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love....What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.” - Martin Luther King, Jr.
I have read and re-read these lines countless times. Each time anew I feel a little shock as I reconnect with the immense task of transforming the deeply embedded notions of power and leadership that limit our collective ability to create a world that truly works. When a reader wrote to me “And you are wanting to contribute and make a differences by ‘I continually strive to increase my own power and leadership.’ ??” I was quite confident that he had in mind precisely the “power without love” notion that Martin Luther King talked about. That concept of power still lives in so many of us, even when we work to transform it. And I am no exception.
I have a deep and visceral aversion to coercion of any kind, to imposing anything on anyone. I have known for some time now that this has blocked me from unleashing my full capacity to contribute what I have to the world. This knowledge hasn’t translated into actual changes despite my great wish. What more do I need to learn?
Since time immemorial, people have been going to the desert to receive inspiration and create transformation. In December, I went camping in the desert for 9 days with my nephew. The days were bright and warm, and the nights were long and cold. Night after night I lay inside my sleeping bag and simply thought. A lot.
I learned that while I have immense ease in accessing a clear vision about the world I see as possible, I have not had a goal. Thinking so starkly in the long nights, it became evident to me that I haven’t had enough faith in the possibility of a transition to the clear vision I have, and certainly not in the possibility that I might contribute something of significance to that transition. As a result, I have been giving my attention to everything that comes my way, because everything can conceivably contribute to the vision I have. I came back knowing I want to develop clear and strong goals for my work, and then make my choices much more strategic.
One of the clear obstacles on my way to having the necessary faith has everything to do with deep-seated fears I have about power and connection. Whether I am the one “in power” or someone else is, when there is a clear difference between what I want and what others want or do at any given moment, I am sometimes challenged to the core for fear of losing connection. I am deeply afraid of people being upset with me, and can completely lose my inner sense of choice and effectiveness when challenged in specific ways. This happened to me recently, in September, when I led a 7-day training of trainers which was overall one of the most challenging teaching experiences I’ve had in my 15 years of sharing NVC with the world. One morning, while setting up an intricate activity, one guy, who was particularly unhappy with what I was doing and made this known repeatedly in the preceding days, raised his voice and expressed immense frustration. I literally couldn’t see any useful way of responding, because I didn’t see the possibility of connection. As a result, all I could see was to go along with what he wanted and I couldn’t imagine “fighting” with him or in any way imposing my will on him. I chose to go along, and felt traumatized for days afterwards. It was only recently that I woke up to what I could have said to him, what could have been a response imbued with both power and connection: “I want to make this work for you, and I also want to make it work for me and everyone else. I would really like your support in reaching that goal. Would you take a moment in silence to think of what might work for all of us while I do the same?” Some version of this, to me, is an example of responding powerfully without imposing or giving up. Would it have worked? Depends on what we mean by “work.” It most emphatically would have worked inside of me to maintain my wholeness and integrity. I have no way of knowing whether or not it would have reached his heart and re-established connection. I hope the next time I am challenged I will have this wisdom available to me.
“One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love....What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.” - Martin Luther King, Jr.
I have read and re-read these lines countless times. Each time anew I feel a little shock as I reconnect with the immense task of transforming the deeply embedded notions of power and leadership that limit our collective ability to create a world that truly works. When a reader wrote to me “And you are wanting to contribute and make a differences by ‘I continually strive to increase my own power and leadership.’ ??” I was quite confident that he had in mind precisely the “power without love” notion that Martin Luther King talked about. That concept of power still lives in so many of us, even when we work to transform it. And I am no exception.
I have a deep and visceral aversion to coercion of any kind, to imposing anything on anyone. I have known for some time now that this has blocked me from unleashing my full capacity to contribute what I have to the world. This knowledge hasn’t translated into actual changes despite my great wish. What more do I need to learn?
Since time immemorial, people have been going to the desert to receive inspiration and create transformation. In December, I went camping in the desert for 9 days with my nephew. The days were bright and warm, and the nights were long and cold. Night after night I lay inside my sleeping bag and simply thought. A lot.
I learned that while I have immense ease in accessing a clear vision about the world I see as possible, I have not had a goal. Thinking so starkly in the long nights, it became evident to me that I haven’t had enough faith in the possibility of a transition to the clear vision I have, and certainly not in the possibility that I might contribute something of significance to that transition. As a result, I have been giving my attention to everything that comes my way, because everything can conceivably contribute to the vision I have. I came back knowing I want to develop clear and strong goals for my work, and then make my choices much more strategic.
One of the clear obstacles on my way to having the necessary faith has everything to do with deep-seated fears I have about power and connection. Whether I am the one “in power” or someone else is, when there is a clear difference between what I want and what others want or do at any given moment, I am sometimes challenged to the core for fear of losing connection. I am deeply afraid of people being upset with me, and can completely lose my inner sense of choice and effectiveness when challenged in specific ways. This happened to me recently, in September, when I led a 7-day training of trainers which was overall one of the most challenging teaching experiences I’ve had in my 15 years of sharing NVC with the world. One morning, while setting up an intricate activity, one guy, who was particularly unhappy with what I was doing and made this known repeatedly in the preceding days, raised his voice and expressed immense frustration. I literally couldn’t see any useful way of responding, because I didn’t see the possibility of connection. As a result, all I could see was to go along with what he wanted and I couldn’t imagine “fighting” with him or in any way imposing my will on him. I chose to go along, and felt traumatized for days afterwards. It was only recently that I woke up to what I could have said to him, what could have been a response imbued with both power and connection: “I want to make this work for you, and I also want to make it work for me and everyone else. I would really like your support in reaching that goal. Would you take a moment in silence to think of what might work for all of us while I do the same?” Some version of this, to me, is an example of responding powerfully without imposing or giving up. Would it have worked? Depends on what we mean by “work.” It most emphatically would have worked inside of me to maintain my wholeness and integrity. I have no way of knowing whether or not it would have reached his heart and re-established connection. I hope the next time I am challenged I will have this wisdom available to me.
Perhaps I was able to see this more clearly because I had the occasion to experience a similar situation from the other end. This past month, I was part of a training team consisting of 12 people. Two women were leading our pre-training meetings, and I really didn’t like how they were doing it, exactly the position that guy in the UK was in. I suffered immensely, because I so very much wanted the training, which involved 120 people from all over India, to be a real contribution to them, and I was, once again, paralyzed about how to bring about a change without losing connection. This one is even more deeply rooted in me. All my life I’ve connected being powerful and effective with being separate, alone, and unliked. Even in this moment as I am writing these words, this belief is still lodged in me, and is only very slowly dissolving. This fear contracts my heart and limits my options. Again, a truly collaborative option didn’t emerge until later. I covered up my fear with lame jokes about myself; I chose to let go of many things that later turned out to have been potentially significant turning points in our time together, which others also noticed and wanted something different; and when I did express myself, I wasn’t creative about how to convey the care and deep desire to make things work for all of us. We came into the first day of training without having made some critical decisions, and thus less than fully cohesive as a group.
Our team continued to meet every evening after the daily activities of the 5 days of training. The very first evening, when I was eager to have us complete the decisions we still needed to make and learn from what didn’t work that day, the facilitators proposed an activity I simply couldn’t imagine would bring us closer to that goal. I expressed that concern and sat, tight and distressed, waiting to see what would happen. I felt alone, separate, discouraged. Then, to my utter amazement, one of the other people on the team suggested that I facilitate our meetings. What a complex reaction I had! I was mortified and embarrassed, once again predicting separation and pain. I was touched beyond words to have at least one person recognize what I had to offer. Alongside, I also experienced care for the person who made the suggestion, imagining that she was suffering in comparing herself to me. Mostly, I was in awe, especially when everyone agreed.
The true healing for me happened over the rest of the week. Instead of upset and conflict, everyone appreciated my leadership. Instead of loneliness and separation, I didn’t lose connection with anyone. This was the kind of experience that can start to dismantle the thick layer of my ancient beliefs. I saw, in action, that I could act powerfully and remain in connection with people. Seeing this possibility allowed me to come back to the earlier experience and find words I could use to assert my power and remain in open-hearted connection. I have also begun to see ways that I could assert my power when I am not the designated leader, and still maintain connection with those who are leading.
Power with love is the heart of collaboration. Power differences, from either end, make it harder for us to hold on with clarity to the deep knowledge that everyone matters and a solution that works for all is always possible. Having had these experiences and working out my internal reactions to a place of beginning integration, I now see more and more that that collaboration remains a possibility even in moments of great challenge.
Friday, December 24, 2010
From a Jew on Christmas Eve
by Miki Kashtan
At the last Tikkun gathering that I attended back in February one of the speakers talked about how Jews and Christians are united in their discomfort about the fact that Jesus was Jewish. So I laughed with everyone else, and have shared this insight with many others since, and still see that I personally love it that he was Jewish, because I feel a sense of connection with him that is rendered more meaningful this way. Which almost begs the question: how would a Jewish woman born and raised in Israel develop a sense of connection with Jesus?
Loving No Matter What
The year was 1991. I was having a fight with a friend during and after a back-packing trip. We were lying on my bed, facing each other, talking, and trying to get to the bottom of what was going on. We weren’t getting very far, though we were getting friendlier than before. Then my friend expressed an entirely new piece I hadn’t heard before: she was upset with me for not protecting myself at all. It drove her crazy, she said, that all through the trip I continued to reach out to her, extended my love and friendship, and tried to connect. I was distraught, to the core. I started crying, I just couldn’t contain my helplessness. I couldn’t fathom how someone could be upset with me for loving, for reaching out. In my agony I cried out that I didn’t want to learn to protect myself. I knew even then, before discovering Nonviolent Communication, that I didn’t want to learn to protect myself. And right there, in the midst of crying, I suddenly sat up, agitated and excited. I understood, intuitively, from the inside out, from within the despair, what Jesus was trying to do: he was trying to love no matter what. I felt an enormous sense of kinship with him. Not because I was anywhere near where I sensed he got to. That didn’t matter. I was on the same path, and I was not the only one. In that moment, without knowing hardly anything about him, I found peace and inspiration in this way of understanding his life.
The Revolutionary Defiance of Turning the Left Cheek
My second interface with Jesus came years later, when I read Walter Wink’s The Powers That Be. Page by page Jesus was being transformed back into what I believe he was: a revolutionary Jew claiming the power of love to transform the world he lived in, and willing to risk everything for truth. I understood the courageous wisdom provided in the Sermon on the Mount, where turning the other cheek thrusts one’s full dignity on an anonymous oppressor who would aim to demean by a common practice in Roman times: delivering a back-handed slap on the right cheek. If you want to hit me, says the man who turns the left cheek, hit me as an equal. There is no way I can do justice to the depth of analytic wisdom and historical scholarship that Wink calls upon to bring to light the message of full empowerment that had been masked as passivity for centuries.
On the Path of Nonviolence
In 1996, some years before reading The Powers That Be, I embraced the path of vulnerability which I have been on ever since. I didn’t know when I started that unprotecting myself would become a path of nonviolence. I only knew I wanted to reclaim every last bit of my vulnerability, just exactly the way I had it as a child. I started doing it for myself only: I wanted to feel more at home on this planet, more alive, without opposition to what I was experiencing, and with more trust of others and of life.
Little did I know that I was stumbling on a path that would call into question every small way that I responded to my surroundings. I would have been surprised. Now I am not. I am deeply aware how protection was completely woven into the fabric of my being. I have unprotected myself sufficiently to see the pull of protection and with it the contraction that limits the truly nonviolent options. My practice is strong. By day I find heart and inner sustenance enough to soften the contractions, to expose my heart, to find presence, to reach for connection. At night, however, when I fall asleep and my conscious practice is no longer present, the deep structure of protection takes center stage again, and my sleep is disrupted, vigilant, light. I have yet to make full contact with the deepest vulnerability hidden within the protection. I have yet to experience tenderness toward the act of protecting. I have yet to find understanding and peace about choosing to protect in the first place.
If I am to love no matter what, this means loving this fierce unbending protection in me, too. If I am to sink into the fullest of vulnerability, I will find the deepest place of love in me. When I can touch or imagine that love, I feel, again, kinship with Jesus.
In the name of his love untold numbers of people were killed, many of them my people. Not only in the 20th century. The Jews of Europe were outcast, castigated, attacked, and killed in large numbers repeatedly over the two millennia of Christianity. Speaking of love alone is not enough to prevent violence. We need courage in addition, the courage to face consequences, whether physical or emotional, so we can love fearlessly and remain soft and open enough to respond nonviolently to what we don’t like. This is how we can transform the legacy of separation, scarcity, and war we have been given into a future of love, generosity, connectedness, and the possibility of human co-existence with each other and the planet that so lovingly provides for our needs.
Wednesday, July 21, 2010
Shame and Love
This post was inspired by an email I received two days ago: “Where does shame come from …? How can we approach it so we can eventually free ourselves from it? What works for you? What did you see working for others? Anything alive in you around this topic that might serve other readers as well?”
I don’t really know where shame comes from, so I can only share my opinions and conjectures about it (and I tend to have those about almost anything). My sense about shame is that it’s a primary mode of punishment, a way that adults instill forms of behavior in children who then internalize it and grow up carrying enormous amounts of shame in them. If you look at the language, adults will often say, most literally: “shame on you.” In Israel
Shame is in the category of what are called social emotions, and is deeply connected to our sense of belonging and being loved. If we are shamed often and deeply enough, we end up feeling shame about our very desire to be loved and accepted. Shame is endemic in this culture, and has consequences beyond the pain that it brings to those who feel it. Profound shame is one of the most common experiences of very violent people, a tragic finding to which I have already alluded (see my post Nonviolence and Living Undefendedly). If Gilligan is accurate in his understanding of violence, then overcoming shame goes beyond feeling better – it may well be an essential condition for a violence-free society. My earlier studies when I was doing academic research point in the same direction. Cross-cultural studies suggest that the single most powerful predictor of a violence-free culture is the length of time that babies are carries in arms, and the other key predictor is the degree to which teenagers are allowed free sexual play in a given culture.[1] Our freedom to love and be loved, both in our infancy and when our sexuality wakes up, is the key to understanding all of these findings. The pain of not being allowed to show love and ask for love is so extreme it can lead to violence.
So how do we overcome shame? How I have worked with my shame is by walking directly into it. I have been doing it for many years now, and I am delighted to say that I have burned through most of my shame. It takes immense discipline and courage. Often when I have done it I felt totally spent afterwards. It means going against everything I was ever told is wrong about me, doing what I was repeatedly told is shameful, and setting myself up for potential ridicule and shunning. Perhaps it’s been relatively easy for me because I have suffered so much ostracism in my life that the prospect of it is no so frightening any longer. I often think that the best way to experience deep safety is by being thrown into what we are afraid of and seeing that we can survive it. One tool that helps with gathering up the courage is finding my own inner acceptance, which can then nourish and protect me if others don’t. The practice of NVC helps me find the acceptance through connecting to the shining light of the core human need or longing that is at the heart of whatever it is that I feel shame about. In my case it’s almost always about love: wanting love, wanting to show love, or trusting love or people.
As life would have it, the next day after receiving that email I had the opportunity to practice. I stepped in front of a group of 40+ strangers who are attending an intensive program with me (Institute for Sacred Activism, led by Andrew Harvey). I let them know about my struggles with the program, and specifically that in some ways I was not resonating with what has been moving and inspiring to them. And I believe I managed to do with dignity, with undefended vulnerability, and without in any way implying judgment of anyone who was resonating with the language. The result was a sense of more connection, more appreciation of the people, and more trust that there is room for me to be.
Later that day I received one more reference to shame in a comment on my previous posting (A Slice of Heaven). In that comment I see familiar themes: longing for human connection, yearning for support for one’s heart and sadness, aching for love. We all do, we all want so so very much to give and receive love. When will we, collectively, lift the taboo on tenderness so we can release the shame that plagues us and live and love freely?
by Miki Kashtan
[1] If you are interested in exploring, you can look for this article: James W. Prescott, "The Origins of Human Love and Violence", Pre- and Perinatal Psychology Journal, 10(3): 143-188, Spring 1996. Bear in mind this is very difficult to find; even many academic libraries don’t have it.
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