Transparency & Healing

I have had a keen interest – one might even say a fascination – with the topic of transparency for many years now. It has emerged as one of our deep values within the Compassionate Listening facilitator community, and informs my life to a significant degree.
There’s probably no other venue where we model transparency as profoundly as in our Advanced Training. Every year, the senior facilitators come together to team-teach at our two Advanced Training retreats, totaling nine days. We're often joined by 4-6 other facilitators from our community, who come to support us all, and immerse in the beautiful learning community that is created as we all come together with the participants as students and teachers, evolving our curriculum and practices together.

Jewish-German Reconciliation

This story begins when I was nineteen years old, with a seemingly minor event. I was living in a farming community called a Kibbutz, on a stunningly beautiful piece of land near Jerusalem. This Kibbutz is famous for its archeological ruins going back to the Kings period, 3000 years ago – the biblical first Temple of Kings David and Solomon.

One evening I was at a favorite spot – on the ruins of a Crusader castle from the 1100’s, watching a beautiful sunset. At one point I looked down the trail and saw a very pleasant looking middle-aged man, walking slowly up to the castle. I knew that he was doing just what I was doing…coming up to watch the sunset.

Compassionate Listening in Beit Jala

I spent June 1-3, 2007 in the small town of Beit Jala, adjacent to Bethlehem, with 19 Israeli Jews and 19 Palestinian Muslims and Christians from all over the West Bank (Palestine). Maha El-Taji and I facilited the training session, and Cheri Catt and Len Wolf came from the U.S. to assist and support us all.

In the past month and a half since my return to the Puget Sound, I have not found many words to describe my experience. It was a great privilege to be of service to these peace and community leaders. Maha and my focus was on holding a strong container so that the participants could trust the Compassionate Listening process and dive deeply with one another. There were times when the wounds were so exposed and the pain so raw, that I wondered if the container would shatter. But we all pulled through. The desire to connect - to understand and be understood, is so huge. They risked so much, and found that it is possible to reach new ground.

Peace Building: Israel, Palestine, Antalya

I am full of stories from our November 2006 training delegation in Israel and Palestine, and the peace conference in Turkey that some of us attended afterwards. I watched our group of participants create beautiful containers over and over again for those we sat with, and hearts opened - ours and theirs. It was a privilege to sit with so many beautiful souls: a former celery farmer evicted from her Gaza home last year, a mayor elected on the Hamas slate, and the founder of the right-wing Jewish settlement next door to his village. We listened to a Jewish director of special education centers in the Galilee whose son was wounded in Lebanon last summer; and a Palestinian-Israeli mother grieving the loss of her 15-year old daughter and her home to a Hizbullah katusha rocket during the Israeli invasion in Lebanon last July. Seeing the group hold Israelis and Palestinians from such a wide political spectrum with such compassion was a sacred process that, once again, restored my hope and faith in humanity. Each participant stretched, and saw the benefits.

Education for Peace and Democracy Conference, Antalya Turkey, November 19th – 23rd, Sponsored by Israel-Palestine Center for Research and Information (IPCRI).

After the delegation ended, seven of us boarded a charter plane from Tel Aviv to Antalya, Turkey, along with 170 Israelis and Palestinians, to attend the conference. In Antalya, we met up with 100 other peace-builders from America, Europe and other countries. There were formal plenary sessions in the mornings and evenings, and eight concurrent sessions to choose from at all times during the day, including a film room.