2019-10-03 - Being Genuine by Thomas D'Ansembourg ================================================= Introduction ============ Violence is in fact a consequence of our lack of consciousness. Were we more aware inside of what we are truly experiencing, we would find it easier to find opportunities to express our strength without committing aggression against each other. Chapter 1, Why We Are Alienated from Ourselves ============================================== Violence, expressed within or without, results from a lack of vocabulary; it is the expression of a frustration that has no words to express it. ... And there are good reasons for that; most of us have not acquired a vocabulary for our inner life. We never learned to describe accurately what we were feeling and what needs we had. ... we started to listen to the feelings and needs of everyone ... To survive and fit in, we thought we had to be cut off from ourselves. The author's process to get in touch with ourselves --------------------------------------------------- * Intellect (or observation) * Feelings * Needs (or values) * The request (or concrete and negotiable action) 1. Intellect (or observation) ----------------------------- Four characteristics of the functioning of the mind that are often the cause of the violence we do to ourselves and others: * Judgments, labels, categories * Prejudices, a prioris, rote beliefs, automatic reflexes * Binary system or duality * Language of diminished responsibility Judgments, labels, categories We judge others or situations as a function of the little we have seen of them, and take the little we have seen for the whole. Prejudices, a prioris, rote beliefs, automatic reflexes We have learned to function out of habit, to automate thinking, to presumptively have prejudices and a prioris, to live in a universe of concepts and ideas, and to fabricate or propagate unverified beliefs. We enclose ourselves and others in beliefs, habits, and concepts [that reflect our fears]. Binary system or duality ... most of us have gotten into the habit of expressing things in terms of black and white, positive and negative. [Reality is infinitely more rich and colorful than our poor little categories.] Language of diminished responsibility We use a language that allows us not to feel responsible for what we're experiencing or for what we are doing. 2. Feelings ----------- Through this traditional way of functioning, which sets mental processes at a premium, we are cut off from our feelings and emotions... It is useful to identify our feelings because they inform us about ourselves and invite us to identify our needs. Feelings operate like a flashing light on a dashboard, indicating that something is or is not operating properly, and that a need is or is not being met. Developing our vocabulary expands our ability to deal with what we are experiencing. Power of action is therefore tied to awareness and the ability to name elements and differentiate among them. 3. Needs (or values) -------------------- Most of us nowadays are to a large extent cut off from our feelings, and we are almost completely alienated from our needs. Can we genuinely give proper listening attention to others without genuinely giving ourselves proper listening? If we cut ourselves off from our needs, there will be a price to pay--by ourselves and others. Some frequent ways we pay for this: * Difficulty making choices that involve us personally. * Addiction to the way others see us. Unable to identify our true needs, we become dependent on the opinions of others. * We put a lot of energy into being nice and meeting the needs of others. So if one day, in spite of all that, we confusedly observe that our [own] needs are not being met, then there is necessarily a guilty party, someone who has not bothered about us. We then get into the process of violence by aggression or projection * We experience being subservient to the needs of others (or we have feared not being able to have our own needs met) to such an extent that we bossily impose our needs on others... We then get into a process of violence through authority. * We are exhausted at trying to get our needs met and forever failing. Finally, we capitulate: "I give up! I give up on myself. I close in on myself, or I run away." Here the violence is directed against ourselves. A key reason for us to be interested in identifying our needs is that as long as we're unaware of our needs we don't know how to meet them. If needs aren't followed by a concrete request in an identifiable time and space, it often looks to the other person like a threat. The other person wonders if he or she will have the capacity to survive such an expectation and remain themselves, maintain their identity, and not be swallowed up by the other person. When I perceive listening to another's need as a threat, i cut myself off from it and flee, or I take refuge in silence. 4. The Request (or concrete and negotiable action) By making a practical request, we release ourselves from the often intense expectation that another person should understand our need and accept the "duty" or challenge of meeting it. Such an expectation can last a long time and prove very challenging. Making a request means we assume responsibility for the management of our need and therefore assume responsibility for helping to meet it. By seeing what underlies our request and identifying our need, we give ourselves freedom. We escape from the fallacy that there is only one solution. By taking care of our true need instead of haggling over our request, we give ourselves a space to meet, a space to create! We often favor quick and dirty solutions. This is one of the consequences of our education: seeking intellectually to solve things--and solve things fast!--using our intelligence, our performance capabilities, getting immediate results, moving as quickly as possible from seeing the problem to solving it without taking the time to listen to what is truly at stake. Our misunderstandings are often mis-listenings, themselves resulting from mis-expressions, ill-spokens, and unspokens. We are capable of learning to speak with sensitivity, force, and truth. Chapter 2, Becoming Aware of What We Are Truly Experiencing =========================================================== Those parts of ourselves that we fail to listen to ultimately have ways of giving us vigorous reminders that they exist. * In order to survive, it is a matter of urgency to clearly distinguish between taking care of and taking responsibility for. * The only sustainable way of taking proper care of anything, in my view, is by deriving deep pleasure from it, feeling great satisfaction for the other person at the accomplishments and steps taken. If ever a part of us is acting out of duty, out of sacrifice, because "I must"--and feels such things as obligation, constraint, and guilt--this part eats up our energy and vitality and sooner or later turns on itself by coming through in the form of anger, rebellion, or depression. Children are often hypersensitive about how a conversation starts. They haven't yet acquired protective armor against the brusqueness of adults' usual manner of conversation. Starting the observation in a neutral way doesn't mean we're repressing our feelings. It means we start the conversation in a way that respects reality and the vision that the other person has of it (which may be quite different from our own), and that enables us to communicate to the other person the full force of our feeling without judging or aggressing. Differentiating the telling of facts from an interpretation of them is common practice in police inquiries and court procedures. Before looking at the facts in light of societal values as expressed through laws, all of the parties concerned need first of all to agree on the facts. The same applies to the armed forces. Judgments are static; they deep-freeze reality. Judgments enclose reality in a single aspect of its nature and stop it [our thought] dead in its tracks. There are two benefits from distinguishing true feelings from feelings that constitute an interpretation: * The freer our language is of any dependency on what another does or doesn't do, the more we'll be able to become aware of our needs and values, then take initiatives to make sure that they're honored. * This distinction allows us to be better understood by others, using words that generate the least possible discomfort, fear, resistance, opposition, objection, argument, or flight. [This makes our language easier to listen to.] To people who are working with me, I often suggest that they say their needs aloud. People have a tendency to view their need as theoretical and bury it under critical thoughts, quickly repressing it. Reformulating the need aloud is a gentle way to take the time to check that it rings true with you. In doing support work, which one can consider to be an attempt at conflict resolution between the conscious and the subconscious, it is this word [that truly speaks of yourself] that we seek together, not for the word itself, of course, but for the awareness it releases. Growing up, we got the confused and almost constant impression of others' guilt and debt toward us rather than any enlightened sense of individual responsibility. In my amorous relationships, as soon as the notion of "couple" threatened to materialize, I managed to sabotage the relationship, "courageously" relinquishing the decision to the woman I was seeing. Systematically, I would take neither the decision to go on and commit, nor the decision to end the relationship and disengage. I needed to be in a relationship with a person with sufficient inner strength and self-esteem to be autonomous and responsible, who would love me for who I am and not for what she might wish me to be and whom I would love for who she is and not for who I might dream she would be. I did not want to spend the rest of my life responsible for meeting another's needs for affection, security, or recognition, nor having another to be there to make good my deficiencies. This space for freedom, breathing, and trust was indispensable in order for me to be able to commit. These difficulties in our relationships could be summed up in one question, which to a greater and greater extent seems to account for a fundamental challenge of our human reality: How can I stay myself while being with another; how can I be with another without ceasing to be myself? As I travel the path toward another, I cannot afford not to travel the path toward myself. In human relations we are dependent when we act out of fear or lacking, losing, or being lost. We are free and responsible when we act out of a taste for giving, contributing, or sharing. This begins with the relationship to ourselves and presupposes a proper understanding of our mutual needs. A need is not a desire, wish, or momentary impulse. It is the collaboration, the consultation, that makes it possible to come up with all kinds of solutions. The quality of listening and respect that comes from seeking such a solution in a climate of compassion is such that the actual solution becomes secondary to the relationship itself. Think of something you can't do, then say to yourself something like this: "I don't understand a thing about data processing..." Then ask yourself how things are [feeling] inside. Now simply add [the phrase] for now: "For now, I don't understand a thing about data processing..." What [feeling] has become alive in you now? You see, we can choose between language and consciousness that either enclose us or open us up to new possibilities. Any use of [the word] "but" causes us to split in our awareness by canceling out or diminishing the first proposition. Using [the phrase] "and at the same time" puts both propositions into perspective. Take any sentence you might tend to say, e.g. "I agree with you because ... but ..." Replace the word "but" with "and at the same time" and then look inside to see if you just might get a different picture. We can float through life amid ideas, ideals, and magnificent concepts. If we do so, we might never encounter reality, never bring ourselves fully into the here and now. I personally was quite stuck in the Peter Pan complex, summarized as follows: "Reality through a windowpane is all right, but I'm afraid of really getting into reality, fear of failure, fear of imperfection, fear of shadows and incompleteness. I will make choices later." Immersed in an apparently conventional legal career, I pursued my dream that all was possible. For a long time, I tried to keep all doors open in front of me without going through any of them. In my support work, I observe that the difficulty of moving into the request or concrete action is strongly linked to the difficulty of entitling oneself to exist and deciding on true practical action independent of others' expectations and values. A realistic request takes reality into account--such as it is and not such as I fear it may be or such as I dream it may be. Seek first the smallest thing we might do, and change will follow. We do not like being prevented "from doing." We much prefer being invited "to do." ... the subtle essence of the form of communication I am proposing [is] avoiding [in] both our language and in our consciousness whatever divides, compares, separates, hampers, encloses, resists, sticks, embarrasses--and preferring language that opens, conjugates, connects, allows, invites, stimulates, facilitates. It is the negotiable nature of the request that creates the space for connection. This is more or less how it happens: If we don't make a request, it's as if we weren't allowing ourselves the right to exist. We remain with a virtual, disembodied need. We aren't truly making our place in the relationship. Furthermore, if we issue orders or make requirements, it's as if the other person doesn't have the right to exist either. The ability to formulate a negotiable request--and thus to truly create the space for a connection--is a direct function of our own security and inner strength: in short, our confidence in ourselves. Chapter 3, Becoming Aware of What Others Are Truly Experiencing =============================================================== Seldom do we listen truly. Rather, we politely wait for our turn to take the floor while preparing our own little bit--at best focusing only haphazardly on what the others are saying and at worst using their comments essentially as a springboard for our own opinions. Sadly, most of these "conversations" are little more than sequences of monologues. There is precious little encounter, and that explains why there are so few nourishing, stimulating, energizing conversations. We don't talk true, nor do we listen true. We pass each other by. We miss each other. More and more, I'm of the belief that in this "passing by" lies the basic emptiness from which most of us suffer so acutely. We're missing out on the nurturing process that is born of true connection. And we're missing out on the connection both to ourselves and others. As long as we don't know what we're looking for, we try to fill the void with all sorts of tricks. By naming the need, on the one hand we shed light on our own clarity and assume full responsibility for what we are experiencing; on the other hand, we inform others of what is alive in us and, at the same time, respect their freedom and their responsibility. We invite them to take responsibility and not simply to obey. We invite them to get connected to themselves while staying connected to us. For me, this is the number-one property of communication: providing meaning for what I do or what I want. Sooner or later each of us will be called upon to review how we define our life and our priorities--and deal with issues surrounding meaning. Communication means [both] expressing and listening. Expressing oneself and allowing another to express also, listening to oneself, listening to the other person, and often checking to make sure the reciprocal listening is of good quality. Many relational difficulties stem from the fact that we don't take the trouble to ensure that we have properly heard another person and that the other person has heard us correctly. It took me a long time to realize that all of this energy "eaten up" by fear was then no longer available to act, to create, to quite simply be. Paralyzed to a greater or lesser extent by fear, I pretty much stopped evolving and, consequently, I stopped being. [The author was stuck in a rut of fear most of the time, having only momentary flights of confidence and creativity.] Examined separately, [my many little fears] looked benign, harmless, coincidental. In a flash, though, with a breakthrough of consciousness into the fog of the subconscious, through therapy, I was able suddenly to see them as a single whole, like a teeming entity, a web-like network. I appreciated in an instant the extent to which they were neither coincidental nor occasional but structural, i.e., representing the way I truly operated. At that moment, I became aware that I was in danger of dying. Perhaps not dying an immediate physical death, but in danger of psychic death [being dead inside]. This awareness awakened my instinct for survival; it was a matter of urgency to change. It was essential to relinquish fear and swing over to trust. This is one of the challenges of life: either staying in the known--which weighs upon us or even tortures us, but which is reassuring because it is known--or swinging over into the unknown, which can be infinitely more joyful, infinitely richer, but it involves a passage, a change. Do I act out of the joy of loving or out of the fear of not being loved? It seems to me that very few people living as couples are truly in a person-to-person relationship, a relationship of responsibility, autonomy, and freedom where each party feels the strength and confidence to say, "I am capable of living and finding joy without you; you are capable of living and finding joy without me. We, you and I, both have this strength and autonomy, and at the same time we love being together because it's even more joyful to share, to exchange, to be together. We don't strive to fill up the gaps, but to exchange plenitude!" Sometimes this state of being is called synergism--where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Without knowing it, we're sitting next to the only well that could truly quench our thirst. It's called presence with self, presence with others, presence with the world, presence with divinity. What hurts does not necessarily harm... and often helps. I would suggest not only being open to our emotional or psychic suffering, as well as the suffering of someone else, but actually welcome it as an opportunity for further growth. If we want to see what this suffering means, it can be a chance to grow, to learn something about oneself, about another, even about the meaning of our life. In my experience, welcoming suffering always heralds [as long as we accept "going in" in order to "get out!"] profound joy, both renewed and unexpected. Let me make something clear: If we can spare ourselves pain, so much the better. Since at least a certain degree of emotional or psychic suffering tends to be the lot of humanity, however, I suggest experiencing it as an incentive to get to a new level of consciousness, to change one's plane of existence. Suffering produces cracks in the wall, opens a breach, or turns the key of a secret door as I can gain access to a new space within myself, a profound and unexpected space, a place where I will get a better taste of ease and inner well-being, greater solidity, and more inner security. From that place I will be able to look upon myself, others, and the world with greater compassion and tenderness. Empathy or compassion is presence directed to what I am experiencing or to what another is experiencing. Empathy for self or empathy for another means bringing our attention to what is being experienced at the present moment. We connect to feelings and needs in four stages of empathy: Stage 1: Doing nothing ---------------------- Accept just being there. All human beings have the resources necessary to heal, to awaken, and to know fulfillment. When we perceive them in a balanced way, we will be able to listen fully to ourselves and others without interrupting and reacting. Stage 2: Reflecting on another's feelings and needs --------------------------------------------------- This is not a question of interpreting, but rather of paraphrasing in order to attempt to gain awareness of feelings and needs. It is of vital importance to realize that repeating or reformulating another's needs doesn't mean approving them, agreeing with them, or even being willing to meet them. Reflecting feelings and needs is like throwing the other person a lifeline. A response of this nature, on the one hand, is an incentive for the other person to look inside, to go deep down and ascertain an inner state. On the other hand, it demonstrates to the other person compassionate listening, which is needed to become aware of inner resources. It is, therefore, active listening. We are present and are displaying our presence by accompanying the individual in their exploration of their feelings and needs. The listening will be all the more active since the other person will tend to go back into their head, into a mental space, possibly needing help to come back to their feelings and needs. Judgments are tragic expressions of unmet needs. Empathy literally means "staying glued" to another's feelings and needs. It also means putting yourself in the other person's shoes. This means, on the one hand, you invent nothing, no feeling or need, and you attempt to get as close as possible to what the other is feeling by putting their feelings and needs into words; on the other hand, the other is urged to listen carefully and explore their feelings and needs rather than going up into their head, their intellect, into cultural, psychological, or philosophical considerations. The other person guides us, shows us the way. When we complain, we often tend to identify with what we don't want or no longer want. Then we talk about that to someone who isn't able to help us. This is a recipe for spending a hundred years of one's life complaining, while changing nothing. Empathy is the key to a quality relationship with both ourselves and others. It is empathy that heals, relieves, nourishes. Stage 4: Noticing a release of tension, a physical relaxation in ---------------------------------------------------------------- the other person ---------------- Our nonverbal language often shows when we're feeling understood, joined. Waiting for this sign is invaluable in checking whether the other person feels understood or is ready to listen to us. When a person resists open communication and empathy persistently enough, it can result in despair. This only confirms to that person that they were right to keep the barriers up. It can help to clearly express our frustration in NVC, but that may also be rejected. What remains is silent empathy--empathy from the heart. This calls for inner-empathy work so that one doesn't in turn get caught up (or bogged down) in the spiral of aggression. Our needs must be recognized more than be met. Often nothing in particular needs to be "done." And just being there doesn't necessarily take a long time. Chapter 4, Creating a Space to Connect ====================================== Human beings are like the wells; if they go down inside themselves, they get connected to each other via the same water table. The same water keeps all human beings alive. The same needs are their lifelines. As long as we remain on the surface, face to face, mask to mask, there is every probability we'll maintain a language that separates and divides. If we wish to go down into our well and accompany another person in theirs, there is a great likelihood that we'll find a language (water!) that unites us. Each of us regularly gives ourselves body care. We tend to our hair, our beards, our clothes, our homes, as well as the whole range of machines and apparatuses that we use... We do maintenance on all of these things for our own well-being and that of our families. And all of the logistics are perfectly well-mastered and built into our routines. That is true to such an extent that we can with no difficulty postpone an appointment by claiming that the car is at the garage or that the computer has broken down. What's strange is that relationships, whether with ourselves or with other people, are expected to operate unassisted, without any fuel, with scarcely any maintenance! It's hardly surprising, therefore, that they so often wear out, burn out, or break down. We don't take care of them. We get more wrapped up with logistics than with closeness, as if closeness were taken for granted. Chapter 5, Emotional Security And Meaning: Two Keys to Peace ============================================================ Are we celebrating our consciousness--or constantly "keeping the books" on good conscience and bad? If another person is sad or unhappy, we tend to believe it's our fault. Such accountability in reality is more like accountancy--being a "bean counter" in relationships. Listening means trusting in the ability of another to be, which allows them to come up with their own solutions. Caring means helping another person to live what they have to live. It means not preventing them from doing so. It means not attempting to get them to spare themselves from suffering a bump in their road by minimizing it. It means helping another person to get inside their difficulty, to penetrate their suffering so they'll be able to get out of it, aware that this path is their path and that only they can make themselves walk along it. Caring means focusing our attention on a person's aptitude to heal from some suffering to to solve some difficulty they're experiencing, rather than providing a ready-made remedy. It means trusting that the other person has all of the requisite resources to pull through, if they can succeed in listening to themselves and being listened to in the right place. This presupposes that we have acquired trust and self-esteem. How can we trust in another's ability to be if we have not gained confidence in ourselves about our own? We don't learn to be loved as we are, but to be loved as others would like us to be True connections take place between beings, not between roles. Connecting means, first of all, being. If we wear a mask and the other person wears a mask, that isn't called a relationship, it's called a masquerade ball! And that is OK? If it is fun, and if both parties derive pleasure from the masks and the games, we can rejoice. Unfortunately, experience has shown that a regular diet of such balls (literal and figurative) eventually becomes sad and distressing. [Ben's note: Psychologically speaking, we all have many layers of personas and this is a natural adaptation as social animals. We can never completely remove all of our masks. We can never communicate in a completely uncensored way, not even with our closest loved ones. We can only shift in one direction or the other. For this reason i resist the notion that it is so simple as throwing off masks at a ball! "Those trapped at such a stage remain "blind to the world, hopeless dreamers... spectral Cassandras dreaded for their tactlessness, eternally misunderstood." Persona psychology, see section Absence It is not safe to be completely honest. Those people lose employment, friends, and liberty. They are locked up. But we still have the freedom to be a little more honest than we are now.] By practice in easy situations we develop our muscle power to be able to say no in more difficult instances. Succeeding in saying no, in setting boundaries while respecting others, is all the easier as we acquire both strength and flexibility in the way we live out needs for self-confidence, inner security, recognition, identity. By working on our own self-knowledge, we get better and better at knowing what we are saying yes to. This results in more ease in saying no in a constructive and creative (and non-hurtful) way--or hearing someone else's no without taking it personally. Rather than saying merely no in opposition, we shall focus our attention and our energy on what we are saying yes to. [A friend put it this way: There are many other possibilities and you can probably find some where you would be willing to say yes. Where is your yes?] If we don't give ourselves measured, just appreciation, we run the risk of spending much of our life desperately seeking disproportionate appreciation from others. When we address anger in NVC, we're working on our own sense of responsibility on the one hand, and we're ensuring that the other person is listening to us on the other. To do so, we connect with ourselves and stop being "beside ourselves"! * The first step, therefore, is to keep our mouths closed, to shut up rather than blow up, not in order to repress our anger, to push it down, or to sublimate it, but precisely to give it its full authentic voice. We know that if we explode in another's face, instead of having someone in front of us who's listening to us and attempting to understand our frustration, we'll get a rebel plotting a rebellion, a victim preparing an assault, or an escape artist who has already flown the coop! Yet, what is our need if we are angry? In short, that the other person hear us, understand the extent of our frustration and our unmet needs. To be sure, in order for us to be listened to well, we know we must have first of all to listen to ourselves. * The second stage in dealing with our anger takes place within: receiving the full impact of our anger, accepting the intensity of it in Technicolor and without compromise. I observe that for many of us (and I've experienced this myself) there is such a stigma around anger that it's even difficult to imagine our being angry. We'll say we're sad, disappointed, or preoccupied--socially and "politically" correct feelings--rather than allow ourselves to have real awareness of the anger in us. This second stage is therefore fundamental to me: recognizing that we are angry, even enraged, and mentally noting all the visions and fantasies that come to our minds, recognizing the violent images that surge up... This inner acknowledgment of these images of violence has the effect of the pile of plates that people sometimes hurl to the floor--or the chair they smash to smithereens against the wall. Such overt actions provide relief and a safety valve for the excess energy that anger brings about that prevents us from listening to ourselves. Only after regaining some calmness, after the emotional catharsis these visions and projections evoked, will we be able to attempt the descent into our well. * The third stage consists of identifying the unmet need(s). * The fourth stage consists of identifying the new feelings that may then surface. Anger can mask other feelings. Once it diffuses these more precise feelings will, in their turn, inform us about our needs. * Finally we're ready for the fifth stage: opening our mouths, speaking our anger to the other person. Now because we've done some inner work, we have a much greater chance of being heard by them. Sometimes, it's pretty hard to get into the inner listening quickly while you're still with the other person. It might be wise to say, "I'm too angry to listen and speak to you now in any satisfactory way. I first of all need to get in touch with my anger and understand it better. I'll talk to you later. Can you give me thirty minutes?" ... there's nothing to prevent you from "taking a timeout" More joy is derived from attempting to resolve our conflicts than from "succeeding" in escalating them. Chapter 6, Sharing Information and Our Values ============================================= We are familiar with constraints, a synonym of sorts for security. Why do we hold back? Is it not because freedom generates in many of us greater fear than does security? If we had greater awareness of our needs, we would see more clearly that we choose our priorities--and that the use of our time reflects that in a very obvious way. To respect rules we have to understand them. We're all dangerous if our vitality has no opportunity to express itself, if our ill-being has no opportunity to be shared, explored, and understood. Violence is a bomb of thwarted dreams exploding. Chapter 7, Method ================= ... when participants at a training session insist on having advice as to a method of regular practice, I suggest the following: Three minutes, three times a day! Three minutes listening to yourself without judging, without blaming, without advising, without trying to find a solution. Three presence-filled minutes for you, not for your plans or concerns. Three minutes to take stock of your inner state without trying to change anything. Three minutes to connect with yourself, check that you are truly present to yourself, and that to the question, "Is there someone home?" you can truly answer with all your being, "Yes, I am there." Do this three times a day! It is out of this quality of presence to yourself that may well be born a quality of presence to others. This method is an invitation, with a wink, to awaken to the fact that it generally isn't helpful to set for oneself change objectives that are so huge that they entail the risk of never getting to first base. When we listen to ourselves in this way, we can little by little get a sense of direction, of mission and, free from any notion of quick fixes or instant results, focus our attention and our consciousness on the lift emerging within us: Where is the life force in me, what is it saying to me, what needs are being met, what needs are not being met? Once the needs have truly shaken out and priorities clarified, solutions can begin to be perceived. Be aware of gratitude and express it ... for all the needs that have been met. Be grateful--even with everything collapsing around us--for being able to take the next breath, to have hands to feel, to have eyes to see. Once we sense the nourishment produced by everything that is going right, we find the strength to take on some things that are going wrong. This is a principle of inner ecology. A few questions to ponder, Do we need to: * Wait to lose our nearest and dearest in order to express our love? * Wait to be hospitalized to celebrate the joy of being in good health? * Be alone in order to appreciate company? * Wait until things "all go wrong" in order to become aware of what was going right? If we aren't watchful, our consciousness can get filled up with all sorts of bad news, to such an extent that there is little room to take in the good news. Epilogue, Cultivating Peace =========================== I increasingly believe that violence is not the expression of our true nature. [Ben's note: we will have to agree to disagree. One has only to observe other animals in nature to see that violence is natural.] Violence and noncommunication constitute not one major problem but rather seven billion small problems. As our numbers grow, we are invited to take seriously our responsibilities regarding our day-to-day behavior--and to take care of keeping a healthy consciousness. I believe that each one of us, with our human dignity, receives our share of the responsibility. I hope--this is the dream alive in me--that more and more men and women will become aware and joyfully recognize this responsibility and assume it in their daily lives, happy to contribute in this way, wherever they are, with whatever means they have, to the welfare of the global family of humanity. author: D'Ansembourg, Thomas ISBN: 1-8920-0521-2 detail: tags: book,non-fiction,self-help title: Being Genuine Tags ==== book non-fiction self-help