Posts Tagged ‘Nonviolence’

Living in denial – but for how long?

Sep 6th, 2009

by ianpeatey.

25 comments

I hate Steve Pavlina!

“No! Steve Pavlina?” I hear the incredulous cries go up around the blogosphere.

“You mean the same Steve Pavlina who almost single handedly created the self development blog?

Hate him?

How can that be???!!!”

Pavlina thinks I’m a Nazi

Last Thursday morning, I was minding my own business getting ready for a couple of days trip to the mountains in central Romania. I had a couple of hours to kill before leaving Bucharest – a city where you really need to time your journey well or risk sitting in traffic for hours and hours.

“I know,” I foolishly thought to myself. “I’ll read a few blogs while I’m waiting.”

A word of advice – never read blogs while waiting to leave for a vacation.

‘Modern-day Nazis‘ caught my eye and I wish it hadn’t. Before you follow the link you might want to read the rest of this post first or you might end up hating Pavlina as well.

If you’ve not read it yet, the post is based around a video of some very ugly behaviour in a chicken hatchery for egg production (not for meat). It’s pretty horrific viewing by itself, but then Pavlina rubs salt into the wound by accusing anyone who eats eggs of being a Nazi. There’s also some stuff in the article about living consciously and taking responsibility.

The smug guy even has the audacity at the end of the article to say that if you have a strong reaction then that proves you must be a Nazi. I don’t think he did actually write that, but that’s what I understood.

I eat eggs AND I had a strong reaction.

Pavlina thinks I’m a Nazi.

It’s not wise to ignore reactions

I know from many past experiences that when I react to something, there’s some important business for me to have a look at. Why would I get triggered if there was nothing there?

I calmed down a little on the journey and talking it through with Mona helped a lot – always a calming influence at these moments.

A few things were immediately clear.

My reaction was NOT about what Steve Pavlina thinks about me, nor was it about eggs. Nor was it about being called a Nazi because although I don’t like it much, I’ve been called worse.

What emerged over the course of the weekend were very important questions (and a few answers) about my lifestyle and the extent to which it’s become out of harmony with some of my core values, in particular nonviolence and respect for life.

Aligning values and lifestyle

There are several dimensions to our lives and whenever some of the elements are not aligned there’s an inner conflict. For example when I say something I know to be untrue then I’ll probably experience some inner conflict because it’s not aligned with my value for honesty.

When I can catch the signs of inner conflict then I can take action. Some of these conflicts, though, are not so obvious and they lurk under the surface of my awareness. They may appear from time to time and if I don’t listen then I deny or ignore them. As long as things are not aligned and the conflict unresolved, I carry the tension with me.

Who knows what unhealed physical, emotional or psychological wounds they then create?

The strength of my reaction to Steve’s article was a clear signal of some unexamined stuff within me and Steve’s words were simply a catalyst.

I could have chosen to blame Steve and continue to exclaim ‘How dare he call me a Nazi… ‘. Not a particularly useful approach in my quest to get continually less stupid as I get older. Instead, I did the intelligent thing and took it as sign that some things I’m not aware of are not aligned as I’d like them to be.

What I buy and consume

I choose not to eat meat of any kind but I do eat eggs. I buy most of my food from the supermarket and that includes a range of dairy products. I rarely pay much attention to the source of the food I buy. I rarely pay much attention to the source of ANYTHING I buy or consume.

Until now, that is.

EVERYTHING I buy or consume comes from somewhere. It has a history.

Not a factory farm

I can’t get away from the fact that much of the animal-source produce in the supermarket comes from factory farms. I’ve never been in factory farm but I’m guessing they’re not idyllic places full of fluffy, contented animals and rosy faced young milk maids.

I’m also assuming, judging from the chick video, that they are violent places with little respect for the life of the animals.

Eggs are just one small example. Chickens are hatched and immediately examined. Male chicks are fed directly into the meat grinder and female chicks are kept alive to become living egg factories.

Can anyone tell me this is respectful of life and nonviolent?

What I can no longer avoid is that whenever I eat food from this source I take some of that violence and disrespect into my body. I support the system that produces food in this way – both the factory farms and the supermarkets by voting with my stomach and my wallet.

Lifestyle revolution

We all draw the boundaries of our lifestyle differently and it is not for me to judge anyone else for their choices.

If I’m genuinely committed to nonviolence and respect for life then I have to live my whole life on this foundation, and not pick and choose according to what’s most convenient. I can’t continue to stick my head in the sand and pretend it’s OK for me to be part of these systems.

I’m on the verge of a lifestyle revolution where the boundaries of what I can accept for myself have shifted. For my own well being I want to align all the decisions I make against my core values.

And this means paying attention to the sources of the things I buy and consume. It affects, among other things, the food I eat, the clothes I wear, the places I visit and how I get around.

I don’t yet have a clear picture of what this all means but I do know that shopping is not going to be the same again.

I’m guessing many things will start to change now.

Why do I hate Steve Pavlina?

He single handedly destroyed a whole set of delusions and has thrown into disarray my nice convenient way of life where I could get everything I needed at low cost at my local supermarket.

If I try this now I’m going to be haunted by an image of newly born chicks being thrown into a meat grinder.

Thanks a lot Steve!

The invisible path

Jul 9th, 2009

by ianpeatey.

11 comments

The idea of our lives as a journey is a very old one – Homer’s ‘The Odyssey’, for example, and our language is filled with journey metaphors. We talk about ‘reaching a crossroad’ when faced with a major decision or ‘reading the signs’ when looking for guidance. But what is this journey we call ‘life’?

A reader sent me a message some time ago and in it she wrote the following (repeated with permission, of course):

I work with Tarot. The Fool is called in older decks The Juggler and is often seen balancing on one foot while juggling. One summer, when my daughter was seven, she came up with the idea that she would like to draw her own tarot deck. I gave her some blank index cards and left her to it.

A couple of days later I asked how her project was going.

She pulled me into her room to show me. The fools card was very interesting. It showed a man dancing along a narrow path. He looked a bit like Indiana Jones. I just asked her, wasn’t that path suppose to be invisible?

“Nope,” she answered. “He knew that path wasn’t supposed to be seen, it was supposed to be felt. That’s how he is balancing.”

I had worked with the cards for years and had learned many lessons, but my daughter taught me much that day.

There was something about this story that I really liked, though at first it seemed to me contradictory. But then the wisdom of a seven year old has a certain purity and logic that is often lost on us adults. Well, this adult anyway.

Reading the story several times now, I find some wonderful imagery.

We are all dancing Jugglers

There are so many things to balance, balls to keep in the air. In many parts of the world life is really quite complex and how often do we drop the ball? It’s not always easy to know what is most important and what can be safely discarded. Juggling is frenetic, skilful and can be a beauty to behold when we find our balance and our rhythm.

We are all Indiana Jones

Life is an adventure, a journey to be travelled. It’s full of exciting places to explore and discover, experiences to savour and dilemmas to face. If we choose to take the journey, that is, rather than watch it as an observer. Indie could have stayed put and carried on lecturing at his university, but he chose to get out, solve mysteries, recover ancient wisdom and artifacts. He was also courageous, got beaten up a lot but ultimately was a hero, albeit a fictional one. Don’t we all have the hero inside us? Don’t we all have the spirit of adventure waiting to burst out?

We are all Fools

I take my life’s journey way too seriously at times. Writing about nonviolence is not always light and cheery stuff, I realise, but in the scale of the universe there’s nothing we humans have ever done, are doing or will ever do that is really so important or serious. We are just ‘dust in the wind’ to quote the song, and whenever I believe any different, then I’m a Fool.

Our paths are supposed to be invisible

We walk the path of our lives never knowing for sure what’s ahead. No matter how intelligent we think we are, we can not see the future. And if we did, then would there be a purpose to our lives? If our paths were known to us then what would our free will and our actions mean? It would be like reading the last page of a mystery novel – there’s really not much point then in going back and reading the rest. Or at least it takes a lot of the pleasure out of it.

Our paths are revealed to us

I’m a great believer in signs. As in a real trip, we often take a map and rely on the signposts to help us move forward. With life, we know our destination. In human form our end point is death. There are many theories about what might happen after that, but death is certain for all of us. The important thing (to us as individuals) is the path we take to get there. Signs, if we choose to read them, help us on our way. We can miss the signs if we’re not attentive, and we can misread the signs, but they are all around and within us to reveal parts of our journey.

Felt not seen

We know when we’re on track. We know it because we feel it and our minds can understand that. Provided we learn to listen to what our feelings are telling us. Provided we allow our minds to do what they do well and not allow them to get cluttered up with all the rubbish we feed into them.

When you look in the mirror in the morning, is the person you see smiling back at you. If so, they are probably on their path.

What do you know about Romania?

Jun 19th, 2009

by ianpeatey.

5 comments

Ok, it’s a strange question to ask.

I’ve been thinking all morning about how to link this post with the themes of nonviolence and self improvement and failed miserably to come up with any coherent explanation.

All I’m left with is the truth -- these videos were produced by a friend of mine and his colleagues. He asked me to spread them around because he’s (quite rightly) very pleased with the results. So Alin, if you’re reading, this is the best attempt I can make to reach a wide audience.

Of course, I do have a personal link with Romania as I live there half the time and it’s a country that is well worth a visit, and really should be on everyone’s list of ‘places to see before you die‘.

The country is one of warm and friendly people, outstanding natural beauty, unspoiled cities and basic rural life.

Apart from Bucharest. I’d give that a miss if I were you. Unless you happen to be into frenetic cities, cars everywhere and architecture best summed up as a mixture of a crazy dictator’s vision of the future and crumbling older buildings.

Journey of Life

If you happen to plan to come this September, then why not combine it with joining me on ‘Journey of Life‘ in the heart of the Romanian mountains? That way you get to see the country at it’s best, meet me and get a great 4 day self development retreat all at the same time.

What more could you ask for?

But I’m not violent …

May 13th, 2009

by ianpeatey.

13 comments

You may have noticed the theme of this site is nonviolence as a lifestyle and maybe you’re wondering if it’s relevant to you. I’m guessing this because when I mention my work in the area of nonviolence I often get the reaction:

‘That’s great! But I’m not violent’

I fully understand, because I thought that until a few years ago.

I was brought up in a family of tolerance, calmness and peace. I never got in fights, didn’t hit anyone, shout at or insult people. If anyone had told me I might consider adopting nonviolence as a lifestyle, then I certainly would have given the same reply.

‘But I’m not violent.’

My personal revelation

I had a personal revelation (or perhaps it was a revolution) in 2001 when I attended, what I expected to be, a business related conference focused on the learning organisation (Peter Senge’s ‘The Fifth Discipline‘ was flavour of the month at the time).

Indeed there were many interesting things at this large conference and I got my first taste of NLP, meditation, accelerated learning and other wonderful approaches to self development.

Scattered between the array of smaller workshops were keynote presentations by apparently famous people I’d never heard of before and I found myself in Marshall Rosenberg’s slot. He was giving a brief introduction of Nonviolent Communiation (NVC) and, frankly, if I’d noticed the title I would have given it a miss. I wasn’t violent so how could it be relevant to me?

Those 2 hours were like a cold shower – very uncomfortable but left me refreshed and tingly afterwards.

Another analogy that comes to mind is that I was invited to lift the carpet on my spotlessly clean home, only to discover layers of dust underneath.

I realised, violence was engrained in my way of thinking, my behaviour and my appoach to life and other people. It was very subtle and easily missed under the covering of ‘nice person’, but was unmistakeably and undeniably there.

Looking back, it was the subtlety that scared me the most because subtle things often go unnoticed.

After I’d seen it in myself it became clear I was both a giver and receiver. It was also in everyone I knew – with no exceptions. Not only that, I saw the hidden strains of violence deeply embedded in the society I grew up in and still live in.

How am I violent?

If you’ve read this far then probably around this point you’re wondering what on Earth I’m talking about.

My personal definition of ‘violence’ is quite broad. It’s an intention and action to inflict either physical or emotional suffering. I know the definition is imperfect so please don’t get hooked on that. The point is, I’d always thought of violence mainly on the physical plane and not really considered it on the emotional level.

If you’re like me and think you are not violent then consider a few of these examples where I either gave or received violence:

believing I’m the cause of other’s feelings (= me feeling guilty)
using this belief to get others to do what I want (= others feeling guilty)
doing things I thought I ‘have to’ because of concept of duty (= giving away my freedom and feeling trapped)
using ‘should’ to get others to do what I want (= trying to take away freedom of others)
judgements to categorise people (= fear of being judged)
believing I’m right and getting attached to ‘my way, or no way’ (= both me and others triggered into fight or surrender mode)
putting aside my own needs to please others (= ignoring my own needs)

There are plenty of other examples I could name.

Each one creates suffering of some kind in me or in others. The suffering may be a tiny drop compared to the vast ocean of violence the human race is swimming in, but without the tiny drops, the ocean doesn’t exist.

Search for alternative ways of living

Having seen how I contributed to violence on the planet I determined to do something about it and find a different way to live.

There are plenty of alternatives available if you just search a little.

You won’t find them in the mainstream media and you’re unlikely to find them taught at school. Our society is still based on a paradigm of violence (both obvious and subtle) and change at that level is usually slow.

You will find them if you look, though.

You’ll find some of them here and you’ll find more if you check out the sites on my links page. You’ll find them in many organisations around you, locally, nationally and globally.

Most of all you’ll find them in yourself.

We all have peace and nonviolence in our hearts if we care to look for it. And that’s the best place to start.

Posts Tagged ‘Nonviolence’