A conversation about Compassionate Conversations
After around ten billion years, our planet appeared. Then after four billion additional years, our species emerged. Then following some fifty thousand years, you and I appeared. And after forty-five years of being a community developer, group facilitator and trainer, decentralized governance policy adviser, innovative leadership professor, consultant, and public speaker, I became an author and activist. What about you?
Welcome to Compassionate Conversations on Substack. Compassion is com (with), plus passion (suffering.) Compassion is being with suffering, ones own and others, and taking actions to relieve that suffering.
These conversations will concern individual, social, and ecological suffering and what we can do to help relieve suffering and create happiness. They will explore four dimensions of suffering and compassionate action (as in Ken Wilber’s integral quadrants) of individual mindsets and behaviors, and collective cultures and systems. They will involve, among other frameworks, the objectives of Kate Raworth’s “Doughnut Economics” of promoting social justice and ecological regeneration. And, I will be writing as someone who has studied and practiced for many years in the mindfulness tradition of Thich Nhat Hanh and Plum Village.
Each conversations will include my sharing reflections and questions, and your sharing yours. I intend to be clear, kind, and open to your observations, feelings, interpretations, and decisions. I will avoid gloom and doom but may sometimes include grief or sadness. I want to be honest, helpful, and hopeful. And I really look forward to hearing from you.
Since 2013, in my blogs, books, social media posts, grad school lectures, and public speeches, I have focused on six challenges of climate chaos and ecocide; patriarchy and misogyny; systemic poverty and corporatocracy; plutocracy and fascism; systemic racism and religious fundamentalism; and continuous warfare. And, I have called for actions and policies of environmental regeneration, gender equality, socioeconomic justice, participatory governance, cultural tolerance, and peace and nonviolence. Recently, I have added pandemics and artificial intelligence (AI) to the list of systemic challenges.
It is my belief that we are living in the most critical time in human history and have an opportunity and imperative to reinvent society and embody a compassionate, ecological civilization. In my book A Compassionate Civilization: The Urgency of Sustainable Development and Mindful Activism, I explore the current crises, the visions, obstacles, strategies, and actions to create a compassionate world, some of the arenas of transformation required, the emerging movement of movements (MOM), several innovative leadership approaches, the necessary global-local citizenship, and a few effective practices of care for self and others as mindful activists.
So, in such a moment as this, what am I about?
As a healthy seventy-eight year old, I am committed to know, do, and be all that I can for the sake of all that can be. I am aware that life on Earth is threatened by human-induced climate change and other crises. I am aware that billions of my sisters and brothers are suffering with me and that there will be more suffering. How do I respond? What do I say? What do I write? What do I do?
First of all, I am grieving. I grieve the loss of entire species and ecosystems. I grieve the social chaos and collapse that is happening.
Second, I vow to relieve the suffering of all beings everywhere. I vow to live a life of compassionate action, moment by moment, breath by breath, understanding interbeing and impermanence.
Third, I commit to model and catalyze social justice and ecological regeneration in my daily life, relationships, and watershed activism.
Fourth, I prepare for the completion of my life in gratitude and wonder.
Fifth, I engage in political and social activism including getting out the vote (GOTV) for representatives who will champion the wellbeing of all humans and all species and ecosystems.
Sixth, I care for my family, friends, and neighbors near and far.
Seventh, I care for the health and happiness of this Earthling’s body-mind.
May you and I live mindfully each moment in the here and in the now, breathing in, and breathing out, with knowledge from all past moments, and on behalf of all future moments.
What words or ideas caught your attention in the above? What does the above remind you of or make you feel? What question would you like to ask? What story would you tell about what is written? What will you decide to do because of what you have read? (These questions are part of the ORID (objective, reflective, interpretive, and decisional) conversation method of the Institute of Cultural Affairs (ICA), with which I worked for many years.)
I look forward to hearing from you. Let the conversation continue!
May you be safe and happy,
Robertson