During this week’s Conscious Dialogue, many resources were shared by panelists and guests. Robert Kenny, one of our experts, has followed up and compiled information that will be helpful as it relates to consciousness, non-violence, and the topics around grief. Several people have also asked about how they could get my book, The Power of Our Way: A Path to a Collective Consciousness. That info is at www.powerofourway.com, www.powerofourway.com/store, or at any major internet bookseller. If you do buy the book on Amazon or another site, send me your receipt and I will send you the gifts that go along! For those of you who have asked about the upcoming Community Call-in group dates visit www.powerofourway.com/teleseminars for dates, times and registration.
Robert’s suggestions, and some of the ones submitted by community members are listed below!
Ritual: Power, Healing and Community, by Malidoma Patrice Somé, a medicine man and diviner from the Dagara culture in West Africa. One chapter is especially focused upon the relationship between ritual and community. Another decries a funeral ritual and the "language of grief". This book is cited again and again by those who are trying to deepen the life of their community.
The Spirit of Intimacy: Ancient African Teachings in the Ways of Relationships, by Sobonfu Somé. "She shares ancient ways to make our intimate lives more fulfilling and secure and offers powerful insights into the 'illusion of romance,' divorce and loss. With this book, the spiritual insights of indigenous Africa take their place alongside those of native America, ancient Europe, and Asia as important influences on Western readers. Sobonfu’s name means 'the keeper of the knowledge.' She began her initiation at the age of five when the elders discovered she was speaking a language from the spirit world and foretelling important events. She’s an instinctive and intuitive healer who teaches from the deep well of knowledge of womanhood and Spirit, traveling the world to offer her native perspective on community, healing, intimacy, rituals, and the sacredness of everyday life."
Welcoming Spirit Home: Ancient African Teachings to Celebrate Children and Community, also by Sobonfu Somé, "draws on the wisdom of the African ancestors to show how to build communities where children are not only welcomed but prized. The author demonstrates how ritual and the spirit can be used to enrich daily life." Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, says, "This is a teacher who can help us put together so many things that our modern Western World has broken," Sobonfu Somé's website is http://www.sobonfu.com/.
Moving Through Grief: An Experiential Ritual is a workshop that Sobonfu Somé offers periodically, most recently at the Rowe Center in Massachusetts: http://www.rowecenter.org/schedule/current/20060324_SobonfuSome.html. "This transformational and soul-invigorating workshop is designed to break through our cultural barriers to grief. There is a need to periodically feel and express grief in order to purge the soul of hurts and pains. The suppression of emotion in general, and grief in particular, is linked to spiritual drought, emotional confusion, and illness. To begin to regain a serious and lasting sense of connection with ourselves and with spirit, we need to find a place to release our grief – grief about the loss of loved ones, the loss of our dreams, and the loss of our connection with our ancestors. Ritual is a technique for transcending the mundane and connecting with our souls. The soul is the core part of the self while the spirit is active in the world. It is as though the soul is the sun and the spirit is the rays coming out of the sun. In the West, we’ve lost many of our rituals and mourn the loss of connectedness that ritual offers us. Rituals create community and intimacy, invite the spirits to help us nourish ourselves during the healing process, and help us achieve a lasting sense of peace. In the traditional world of the Dagara of Burkina Faso, West Africa, the ritual of grief, conducted almost daily in different parts of the tribe, is their way of releasing the tension caused by loss and of restoring continuity in relationships."
One of the people Robert mentioned on Wednesday’s Conscious Dialogue is Marshall Rosenberg. His book is Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. It contains some examples from his work in educational settings. You might also look at his book, Life-Enriching Education:Nonviolent Communication Helps Schools Improve Performance, Reduce Conflict and Enhance Relationships, and the book by Sura Hart and Victoria Kindle Hodson, The Compassionate Classroom: Relationship Based Teaching and Learning. Also, visit the website of Rosenberg's Center for Nonviolent Communication, www.cnvc.org.
You might also check out the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL), which is the original and premier organization trying to help teachers and their students develop emotional intelligence.
And two colleagues and friends of Robert’s are helping schools and their students learn how to resolve conflict nonviolently, reintegrate spirituality, and build community. They are:
- Sue Keister (an educational consultant who is the training director at Quest International), [email protected], and
- Linda Lantieri, [email protected], an educational consultant who has co-written or edited two wonderful books, Waging Peace in Our Schools and Schools with Spirit: Nurturing the Inner Lives of Children and Teachers.
Here are a few powerful resources he also recommends, for both individual and collective transformation:
Dean Radin's book, The Conscious Universe. He makes a very compelling case for the reality of intuition and other forms of "extra-sensory" perception (what I prefer to call "other-sensory" perception) and the fact that we are all deeply connected with each other. The research results are unusually strong and a number have experiments have been much more rigorous than the typical experiment done in the "hard" sciences. Not that makes any difference to mainstream scientists, even though they'll claim that they follow the evidence
Angeles Arrien's book, The Four-Fold Way, which includes a number of cross-cultural processes and practices, in addition to the four universal meditation postures that I referred to during the calls. I use these in my work with individuals, teams and organizations, because each posture draws upon archetypal energy associated with the postures. The energy can be used in a very practical way to strengthen one's personal boundaries, articulate a clear vision as a leader, use intuition to answer life questions, deal with and resolve conflict, develop love and compassion for oneself and others, receive divine guidance, and appreciate and use one's gifts fully and creatively.
Any of Pema Chodron's books or audiotapes, including Awakening Loving-Kindness, When Things Fall Apart, and, especially, The Places That Scare You. The last book describes the practices that I mentioned on tonight's call: tonglen (giving love and taking in suffering), loving-kindness practice, and compassion practice. Her work is particularly helpful in learning how to transform ourselves by being present with our emotions and tapping the underlying, pure energy. If one wishes to develop compassion for and feel deeply connected to oneself, others and all sentient beings, Pema's books are hard to beat.
Marshall Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life and Lucy Leu's Nonviolent Communication Companion Workbook. Both books contain practical exercises for learning how to use communication to build empathy and understanding. They also constitutive a highly effective and practical means for experiencing and learning what virtually every spiritual tradition teaches in essence: how to be present, how to naturally move from judgment to compassion, and how our thoughts and interpretations about the motives of others condition our emotions and separate us from each other.
We will continue to add others as they come in!
Namaste, Anita
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