Peace + Justice

In today's session, we explored together the concept and actions of surpassing our fear as community peacebuilders. For future sessions, we will follow a pattern, alternating between sessions for learning and growth; gathering for healing; and improvisational exploration to address emerging peace and justice issues.

Elehah Pooyandeh, a peace educator and mediator in Iran, anchored our session in a reflection on the source of our life force and love. She asked us to reflect on someone that we love dearly, observe responses to that love in our bodies, and direct our attention and feelings to that loving energy. We explored how to approach our activism from this center of love within us and how to return to it as needed.

In 1:1 dialogues, we shared our names, delving into their origins and how they contribute to our identity and our work for peace and justice.

Tom Kotlarek, our co-facilitator incorporates meditation to transcend fear with love, helped us identify fears that "activate" us: the fear of failure and the fear of social abandonment. Tom emphasized the importance of recognizing these fears and where they reside in us, using them to gain clarity in our approach and stretch with love towards justice. Just as we lift the amount of weight that will strengthen, not tear, our muscles, so can we stretch our limits to build capacity and growth as activists for social change.

For our breakout groups, we discussed the question, "How would you like to stretch beyond fear as a community peacebuilder?" Thoughtful responses included: working collaboratively with others; being mindful of what we absorb; challenging social perceptions, embodying courage for future generations; and accessing God - or what is holy and sacred in our lives.

Our next opportunity is the workshop, Trauma Aware Peacelearning, a 90-minute virtual workshop on Wed., March 13th from 6:30-7:45pm Central.

At our next monthly virtual Weave Peace & Justice meeting on Shifting Peace Within Yourself, scheduled Wed., April 2nd from 11:00am to 12:30pm Central, Tom Kotlarek will lead a guided meditation healing session.

If you'd like to join us as a co-facilitator, please reach out to me at: kteemuse@gmail.com.

A heartfelt thank you to everyone who attended and to those reading this summary!

@Kate Towle

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,

@Kate Towle

If a video tutorial about posting and navigating in the group would be helpful for you, please review!

Peace + Justice gathers virtually every 1st Wednesday of the month @11-12:30 cst

Check out the calendar for specifics about upcoming virtual events, circles and gatherings, as well as the Zoom link!

Dear Peacebuilders,

We began our May 1st session with the song First of May by James Taylor.

Our co-facilitator, Tom Kotlarek, led us through a process that he calls casting a circle so that we simultaneously become grounded and visualize a deeper connection to one another. We were joining positive energy from Tehran and Sénégal to Philadelphia and Arizona!

Using the "open mic" process, members were invited to share challenges with peacemaking they wanted to explore in more detail in breakouts. Our first prompt from Elaheh Pooyandeh was: How can we better accept the truth and the reality of things that we are facing?  The second from Marion Transetti was: How can we better balance the demands of our peace activities with our lives, our families and work?

Following twenty minutes of dialogue in our breakouts, Elaheh and Marion shared what they heard and learned from others in the small groups. Elaheh talked about how we are creating something together - and the challenges of dislodging conflict over centuries. She talked about the importance of taking small steps and having clarity on what is ours to do, our unique role. While it is hard to accept that we don't have to do everything ourselves, we can internalize that each of us is a piece to the puzzle.  Marion learned that each of us must periodically give ourselves time for a "reset" to review our priorities and honor what we really need. We must let go of what we can't control and find support through a network of people we trust.

Barry spoke to the importance of having an identity and invited us to be part of the Peace Brook network he is spearheading with Chicago residents. Julie pointed out that we can list our "weaving organizations" on the Weave Peace and Justice Group page under "Resources," at Weaving Organizations.

We wrapped up with a quote by  Sister Joan Chittister: Perseverance with hard things can be the source of the greatest pleasure, the deepest satisfaction. What we work hard to achieve, we value most.

Our next session, a skill-building session will be on Wed., June 5th, 11:00am to 12:30pm Central: Empathic Fluency: The Art of Listening.

Yours in peacebuilding,

@Kate Towle, Co-Facilitator

Thank you to all who joined for our New Year's session on January 3rd. @Caren Stelson centered us with a body scan meditation so that we could notice what we are holding in our bodies and send loving attention to the areas in need of transformation.

I shared a quote from the book, Awakening Joy: 10 Steps to Happiness by James Baraz with Shoshana Alexander:

DOING YOUR PART (Awakening Joy by James Baraz)

Once you consciously set out on your pathway with a clear intention to be happy, it might look like something magical or mysterious is happening as you actually find more well-being in your life. It's like when you learn a new word, you suddenly notice it everywhere. Neuroscience tells us that setting an intention "primes" our nervous system to be on the lookout for whatever will support what we intend to create for ourselves.

In his book The Mindful Brain, Daniel Siegel talks about the effect paying "attention to intention" has on our brain and thus our experience of our surroundings. He writes: "Intentions create an integrated state of priming, a gearing up of our neural system to be in the mode of that specific intention: we can be readying to receive, to sense, to focus, to behave in a certain manner." This suggests that when we pay attention to the intention to bring more happiness into our lives, we are more likely to notice the actions, opportunities, people, and things that can bring that about for us. It's sort of like recognizing which piece of a jigsaw puzzle will fit the picture.

Life is always presenting us with unexpected circumstances-obstacles as well as opportunities. Remaining aware of your intention helps you to more readily recognize, from the multitude of options life offers, those that support your vision.

Applying the work of Robert Fritz on manifesting vision and leadership (https://www.robertfritz.com/wp/), I invited us to reflect on our current experience and three items we'd like to release from our lives. We reflected on how we could transform each of our three items in a vision of what we would like to bring into our lives.

In 1:1 conversations, we talked about what steps we would like to take to alchemize what we release into our "re-solution." In our 1:1's, we talked about our projects, how we might support one another, as well as how to transform our fears to positive, grassroots work, our need for certainty to a spirit of discovery and our continual adapting to a process of intentional investments of time in what brings peace and hope. We agreed that beginning with our reality and vulnerability - and working from there to seek transformation - was grounding.

We ended with a few quotes to inspire our new re-solutioning:

"Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes." Carl Jung

WALK SLOWLY

It only takes a reminder to breathe, a moment to be still, and just like that, something in me settles, softens, makes space for imperfection. The harsh voice of judgment drops to a whisper and I remember again that life isn't a relay race; that we will all cross the finish line; that waking up to life is what we were born for. As many times as I forget, catch myself charging forward without even knowing where I'm going, that many times I can make the choice to stop, to breathe, and be, and walk slowly into the mystery. Danna Faulds, from Go In and In

Our next online session is scheduled for Wed., Feb. 7th from 11:00am to 12:30pm Central.

Yours in weaving peace & justice,

@Kate Towle

We invite all group members to align with the Five Peace Actions, created by the organization World Citizen Peace.   Consider this as a framework for living, being, sharing, learning, collaborating and exploration.

The peace actions are:

We ask members that all of our virtual gatherings, circles, discussions, posts and comments follow these agreements.  Please be mindful of your role in maintaining a supportive learning community.

• Find value in deep relationship & community success
• Confidentiality - stay in the group
• Speak your truth with grace (owning the impact)
• Assume positive intentions (compassion, empathy, assumption)
• Lean in to curiosity & vulnerability (ask questions, reflection, facilitative questioning)

• I am because we are (UBUNTU); Generative
• Work for the change we want to see & Do our innerwork