Restorative Empathy

Transforming Domination Culture from the Inside Out

What Would You Do with Your Life if You Were Living Your True Purpose?

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firecracker

Almost two decades ago, I passed through a toll booth on the San Francisco Bay Bridge. I held out my money to a toll taker, and in return he beamed at me, his smile radiant and his eyes kind. With the buoyant warmth of a parent talking to their beloved child, he asked, “How are you today, sweetheart?”

I thought to myself, “This person is spreading love to every single person who passes through. Amazing. What a meaningful way to spend your day.” He taught me in that 30-second exchange that anything we do, when imbued with love, can be deeply meaningful.

Every single human on this planet needs meaning and purpose. A sense that our life has a positive impact, and that our existence matters. An experience of making a meaningful contribution to one being or a lot of beings or the entire world.

What is your life’s unique purpose? What feels genuinely meaningful to you? And what keeps you from fully living that purpose?

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What Would You Change in Your Life Today if You Trusted Your Needs Would Still Be Met?

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hot air balloons
I don’t know about you, but when I was younger, I accomplished a lot in my life through force, “willpower,” punishments and rewards, and deadlines (emphasis on the “dead” part, which is how I often felt at the finish line of projects and degrees).

I’d been conditioned to think that coercion, from myself or others, was the only way anyone got anything done—that left to our own devices we’d squander our lives and do absolutely nothing to contribute to the world—so I dominated myself and allowed others to dominate me into doing the things I loved until I no longer remembered what it felt like to love them.

I stayed in jobs, in relationships, in places, in situations, as long as there was even a shred of enjoyment. I was praised for my “stick-to-it-tiveness”—my tenacity, loyalty, and dedication. And I was pretty chronically angry and depressed from sticking with strategies that didn’t actually touch my needs.

Nonviolent Communication offers a vision that we all share the same universal human needs, and that there are infinite strategies to meet each of those needs. Violence arises when we lock into one strategy (one approach, one person, one group of people) to meet our needs, even if that strategy overpowers other parts of ourselves, other needs we have, other people, or our environment.

What would life be like if, instead, we put all of our needs on the table and came up with a creative set of strategies that touched all those needs?

What if we took our needs more seriously than our strategies?

[Read more…]

Making Nourishing, Accomplishable New Year’s Resolutions Free of Self-Domination, Defeatism, and “Shoulds”

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Every year, an estimated 40 percent of Americans make New Year’s resolutions, but one study suggests that only 12 percent actually accomplish their goals. Why do so many of us start each new year with resolutions, only to drop them once the hope of a fresh start diminishes?

The cultural message about our unsuccessful attempts to stick to our resolutions is that we’re lazy, distracted, or incompetent. But the standard resolutions model we’re given actually set us up to “fail” and thus break trust with ourselves, so that we’re left in doubt of our own ability to act from a place of empowered intentionality. When we fail to achieve our goals with that model, we’re told we lack willpower, and to try again. And again, and again, until we get tired and give up. We may get so discouraged and angry that we resolve never to make another “stupid resolution” again. But without setting and acting on our own intentions—whatever the time of year—how can we ever hope to be empowered, fulfilled, and truly free? [Read more…]

Releasing Shoulds and Choosing Joy: A Restorative Approach to the Holidays

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Six years ago, my grandmother died a week and a half before Christmas. While she was ninety-one and physically incapacitated by ill health, her death was a huge visceral shock to my system. She’d helped raise me from the time I was four, and while our relationship had not been without its pain and complications, she’d been the woman who’d sat with me at the kitchen table for thousands of hours, playing games, eating meals, being my life’s most constant companion. She was very much my parent, and after losing her, I immediately released all my usual approaches to the holidays, fully expecting that the inevitable result would be a time of bleakness and unrelenting grief. [Read more…]

From Procrastination to Collaboration: Resolving Inner Conflict By Making Time for All of Your Needs

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Why do we do one thing when we’re trying to accomplish another? Our predominant cultural message is that procrastination is personal weakness, lack of willpower, or some other personality flaw that must be overcome—an assessment that more often leads to self-recrimination than any satisfying resolution of the problem. That’s because procrastination isn’t a flaw, it’s actually an important signal that you have an inner conflict in need of attention. [Read more…]