Saying “Yes” to Spirit: Being Lived into the Fullness of Your Potential

There is a Japanese philosophy called “wabi sabi”, which is about accepting and embracing that which is imperfect or flawed.  Most of you have probably seen kintsugi pottery, where gold is used to fill cracks that appear in a piece of pottery—a bowl, cup, vase.  One person who wrote about this said that kintsugi is how one can acknowledge the fact that the pottery object earned those cracks through the process of living and that filling the cracks with gold honors the fact of that experience.

Read More “698th Week:  Embracing What’s Imperfect”

One of the books from graduate school that powerfully impacted me was “Blaming the Victim”.  I was in a class where I focused my work on shame—collective and individual—and got deeply immersed in how we tend to blame the victim as a way to validate our beliefs and actions.  The impact of that class, and particularly the above book, has never left me.  It started me on a 40+ year journey of tracking my own internal process of judging and blaming, catching myself when I can and challenging my own rationalizations about what’s happening to people locally and around the world.  Even with this practice, I know that there are countless times when I engage in blaming the victim, unaware of my own biases and limiting beliefs.

As I watch the current situation in the United States—and we are not alone in our mistreatment of people we consider to be “other”—I not only feel deep heartache and distress, but am also keenly aware of how vividly a “blaming-the-victim” mentality seems to have captured the minds of those in power.  That this stance lacks empathy goes without saying.  The deeper problem is that blaming victims allows us to remain unaware of our privilege, of our seemingly justifiable disconnection from the suffering of others. Read More “716th Week:  Blaming the Victim”