Thank you to all who joined today for our session about the Living Room Conversations approach to dialogue around painful topics. Today, we centered our conversation on the Israel-HAMAS war.
We were grateful to be joined by David Munir Nabti, now living in Lebanon who supports social entrepreneurship in the Middle East. David is part of the group Bloom, a peace and wellbeing group in the Middle East. He shared his experience of witnessing so closely the brutality and humanitarian crisis from this war.
I invite you to use the attached PowerPoint that @Darlene Cain and I developed for your work and the groups you facilitate. There are many effective approaches (or human technologies) for guiding strong dialogue. We like the Living Room Conversation approach because it is accessible, simple to follow, yet surfaces depth and context to difficult topics. We talked about grounding ourselves as we enter such a dialogue; allowing room to make acquaintance; offering guidelines; setting the tone for new perspectives to deepen our insight; and allowing time for group synthesis.
As we spoke together about how the war recalibrates our understanding of peace and the work it requires, we affirmed:
- the importance of respect for one another's experience;
- the value of hearing one another's stories;
- being present to one another for this long journey;
- celebrating each other's growth; and
- creating a space that allows us to voice how we really feel with a learning mindset - even though our view may be unpopular.
@Frances Kraft, our Community Manager, reminds us that Weave's free Learning Center offers another module to guide us through planning and facilitating conversations - discussing what to do when those conversations get hard. The module, created in partnership with @K Scarry at The People's Supper, is available at this link: https://learning.weavers.org/g...g/group-facilitation.
As in our session, I'll leave you with a reflection from author/theologian Thomas Merton:
Peace demands the most heroic labor and the most difficult sacrifice. It demands greater heroism than war. It demands greater fidelity to the truth and a much more perfect purity of conscience.
We look forward to seeing you again on Wed., Dec. 6th from 11:00am to 12:30pm Central for our zoom session on Conscious Leadership.
Yours in peaceful weaving,