Sublime

Alexander and his colleagues were asking people in Crown Heights to bring together a stew of racial and religious factions and create a community with some shared purpose and identity. But his group did not take the crucial step of preparing the participants for what would happen to them as they began to share and learn from each other’s perspectiv

If you are not in a position of authority, then you can help protect troublemakers by making sure they are invited to meetings. And when they do say something that creates disequilibrium, you can choose to be curious: ask them to say more about their idea rather than allow everyone else in the room to ignore them.

In designing your workshops, you’re co-creating the conditions for self-discovery in a supportive community using liberating practices. You’re offering a safe space for individuals like Melanie to practice becoming choosers and deciders, and to realize that they have freedom in how to relate to themselves, others, and the world.

This is precisely what the weak do everywhere. Through bitter experience they have learned how to exercise extreme care, how to behave so as to reduce the threat of immediate danger from their environment. Fear thus becomes a form of life assurance, making possible the continuation of physical existence with a minimum of active violence.

This work is deeply personal, and it invites you to do your own transformative work, because who you are is more important than what you teach.

7. Institute peer leadership consulting. Individual and collective commitments to go forward will be hard to make because they require decisions about who will take what losses,

Foster a Taste for Action

Ancestors.