The questions and comments around love are piling up in my inbox faster than my brain can process, so I’m just going to keep typing at the pace my fingers will allow and hope that eventually I end up writing my way through them all. Today I’m tackling the thorny question Read more…
My most faithful reader has been emailing me about my last post on bringing love consciously into our work, and raises the following questions:
I actually anticipated these two questions, because they have also been weighing on my mind. Let me take on the second question first: Can you have a single definition of love for everyone in your life?
I speak only for myself, of course, but, YES, I have arrived at a single definition of love for absolutely everyone in my life, and for me it’s both a matter of principle and a pragmatic way of figuring out where I’m falling short and what I need to do to keep growing. (more…)
I’ve been staring a lot of sacred cows in the eye lately, and it’s been a very productive exercise. In my last post I wrote about empowerment; today I feel like taking on the subject of love. No matter how tough our actual job situations get, youth service professionals firmly maintain our love for the work and the people we serve: “I love working with youth!” “I love my young people.” What do we actually mean by the word ‘love’? More precisely, I should ask, what do you mean when you say the word ‘love’?
There’s been a lot written around the languages of love, but that’s not what I’m referring to here. While it’s interesting to figure out whether you express love through words, action, etc., I’m trying to get at something deeper still: your very definition of ‘Iove.’ In other words, when you tell someone “I love you,” or you prepare a meal for your loved one, or you give someone a hug, what is your intention? (And please don’t say, “To show love,” because that would be circular reasoning.)
If you can’t answer this question, I suggest you take some time to put together your own personal definition of love because this is too important a term to throw around lightly. My interest in love is not born of intellectual curiosity. This has to do with practice. Knowing what you actually mean when you claim to bring love to your work has several very concrete advantages. (more…)
What youth program these days does not claim to be in the business of youth empowerment? But if you pay attention to what’s actually baked into the DNA of a program, you will get a firmer grasp of an organization’s particular definition of youth empowerment, and you’ll come to understand Read more…
Old readers will know that I’ve spent a great deal of time working with my Emerging Leaders on establishing self care practices in their lives. We adopted the habit of opening our meetings up with a guided meditation, which everyone really loved. But I wasn’t sure how easy it would be for my young people to take these practices home with them, so to speak, because let’s face it: it’s not easy for anyone to transform their lives. At the start of my own efforts toward mindfulness and wellness, I would begin doing something like yoga or meditation with a lot of enthusiasm, but if something urgent came up, such as a big work project, all that would go to the wayside. Eventually, I found my way into my own rhythm of integrating yoga, meditation, cardio, and strength training into my life, but it’s taken years to get here. For me, it wasn’t so much finding the time for it all, but accepting the fact that I am probably never going to be someone who will have an established routine for all this. I do what I have the energy for in whatever combination I find appealing on any given day.
Since I’ve been approaching my youth work with a very light touch this year, I haven’t pointedly been asking my young people if they’ve been practicing self care. I don’t want to hound them about anything, because at the end of the day, I trust that whatever is meant to stick with them from all the things that have come out our time together, will take root. We like to celebrate the big victories, of course: graduations, college scholarships, first jobs, etc. But I count the subtler shifts in my young people’s lives as triumphs that are just as significant as external milestones, because what goes on under the hood lays the foundation for everything else. How I love to see these sprouts break ground. Such a moment happened just this morning.
Where have I been all these months? Although I came thisclose to moving to Singapore this year, I’m still here in New York, dividing my time between the city and the Hudson Valley. One thing I realized about my two-week silent retreat and a month-long trip to Singapore and Korea is that if I didn’t make any substantial changes in my life, I would go right back into the habit of overworking no matter how intensive or long of a “rest period” I gave myself. Something had to happen at a deeper level. (more…)
[This is for Hank Norman.] One of my favorite tweeters recently sent out a provocative little about knowing the difference between harmful suffering and that which is part of the growth process. What’s his secret? I don’t know. He’s being awfully tight-lipped about it </joke>, but I have my own answer! I have so Read more…
So I wasn’t even a full twenty four hours out of my retreat when I was hit by the spiritual equivalent of a Mack truck. Funny how these things work. I had ideas of easing back into things, but the Universe decided to dish it out all at once. My Read more…
For months now I’ve been yearning to go on a silent retreat. In the coming days, with my husband’s departure for overseas work, and his inspired encouragement on this strange longing of mine, I’m seizing the opportunity to live in more silence than I ever have before. Despite my strong Read more…
I’m choosing to write this rather personal post on this public blog because so much of the work I do in the world is fed both directly and indirectly by the work I do internally. This year has brought a steady stream of learning opportunities, and while they did not Read more…