bell hooks on Radical Love & Buddhism

When I knew how to love the doors of my heart opened wide before the wind
Reality was calling out for revolution.

Thich Nhat Hanh, in the poem “The Fruit of Awareness Is Ripe”

I came across a great piece by bell hooks on Shambhala Sun, entitled Toward a Worldwide Culture of Love. hooks' touches on the emergence of the discussion of love within Buddhism, particularly from Thich Nhat Hanh. This love is not fluffy, romantic love. It is transformative and revolutionary love--so similar to that which Freire speaks of.

When lecturing on ending domination around the world, listening to the despair and hopelessness, I asked individuals who were hopeful to talk about what force in their life pushed them to make a profound transformation, moving them from a will to dominate toward a will to be compassionate. The stories I heard were all about love. That sense of love as a transformative power was also present in the narratives of individuals working to create loving personal relationships. Writing about metta, “love” or “loving-kindness,” as the first of the brahmaviharas, the heavenly abodes, Sharon Salzberg reminds us in her insightful book Lovingkindness: The Revolutionary Art of Happiness that “In cultivating love, we remember one of the most powerful truths the Buddha taught … that the forces in the mind that bring suffering are able to temporarily hold down the positive forces such as love or wisdom, but they can never destroy them.… Love can uproot fear or anger or guilt, because it is a greater power. Love can go anywhere. Nothing can obstruct it.” Clearly, at the end of the nineties an awakening of heart was taking place in our nation, our concern with the issue of love evident in the growing body of literature on the subject.

Because of the awareness that love and domination cannot coexist, there is a collective call for everyone to place learning how to love on their emotional and/or spiritual agenda. We have witnessed the way in which movements for justice that denounce dominator culture, yet have an underlying commitment to corrupt uses of power, do not really create fundamental changes in our societal structure. When radical activists have not made a core break with dominator thinking (imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy), there is no union of theory and practice, and real change is not sustained. That’s why cultivating the mind of love is so crucial. When love is the ground of our being, a love ethic shapes our participation in politics.

To work for peace and justice we begin with the individual practice of love, because it is there that we can experience firsthand love’s transformative power. Attending to the damaging impact of abuse in many of our childhoods helps us cultivate the mind of love. Abuse is always about lovelessness, and if we grow into our adult years without knowing how to love, how then can we create social movements that will end domination, exploitation, and oppression? John Welwood shares the insight in Perfect Love, Imperfect Relationships that many of us carry a “wound of the heart” that emerged in childhood conditioning, creating “a disconnection from the loving openness that is our nature.” He explains: “This universal wound shows up in the body as emptiness, anxiety, trauma, or depression, and in relationships as the mood of unlove.… On the collective level, this deep wound in the human psyche leads to a world wracked by struggle, stress, and dissension.… The greatest ills on the planet—war, poverty, economic injustice, ecological degradation—all stem from our inability to trust one another, honor differences, engage in respectful dialogue, and reach mutual understanding.” Welwood links individual failure to learn how to love in childhood with larger social ills; however, even those who are fortunate to love and be loved in childhood grow to maturity in a culture of domination that devalues love.

Continue here!

Judicious and Radical Love in Teaching

Love is not simply giving; it is judicious giving and judicious withholding as well. It is judicious praising and judicious criticizing. It is judicious arguing, struggling, confronting, urging, pushing and pulling in addition to comforting. It is leadership. The word "judicious" means requiring judgment, and judgment requires more than instinct; it requires thoughtful and often painful decision making.

-M. Scott Peck
The Road Less Travelled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth

Meditations for Teachers

A month since I've blogged = major teaching stress.

As long as space endures,
And as long as sentient beings exist,
May I also abide,
That I may heal with my heart
The miseries of the world.

-A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life

I walk, I fall down, I get up, Meanwhile, I keep dancing.

-Rabbi Hillel

Imprints

Saw this as I was walking today in Brooklyn.

Fall 09 Issue of Rethinking Schools = Props to Freire

The new issue of Rethinking Schools is out: School Leadership in Tough Times.

Big City Superintendents: Dictatorship or Democracy? Lessons from Paulo Feire

Did you know Paulo Freire was a school district superintendent? His ideas are as thought provoking as ever.

What else looks good?

Editorial: Where Is Our Community Organizer-in-Chief?

by the editors of Rethinking Schools.

There is a disturbing overlap between Obama’s educational policies and those of George W. Bush. The nation’s schools don’t need an entrepreneur-in-chief; we need national leadership that supports critical thinking, educating the whole child, and democratic participation from the ground up.

The Fun Theory - duh!

With Every Step, Peace

How can we teach this to kids?

Every morning, when we wake up, we have twenty-four brand new hours to live. What a precious gift! We have the capacity to live in a way that these twenty-four hours will bring peace, joy, and happiness to ourselves and others.

From Thich Nhat Hanh's Peace Is Every Step: The Path of Mindfulness in Everyday Life.

We are very good at preparing to live, but not very good a living.

Very similar to John Dewey's notion that education is not a preparation for life, but a way of life.

Connections between mindfulness and teaching?

Teaching Teachers Mindfulness to Foster Education, Improve Well-being
In the Classroom, a New Focus On Quieting the Mind, NY Times

Going Beyond

From the NY Times. Several education folks weigh in. I like what Diane Ravitch has to say:

Beyond Testing

The single biggest problem in American education is that no one agrees on why we educate. Faced with this lack of consensus, policy makers define good education as higher test scores. But higher test scores are not a definition of good education. Students can get higher scores in reading and mathematics yet remain completely ignorant of science, the arts, civics, history, literature and foreign languages.

Why do we educate? We educate because we want citizens who are capable of taking responsibility for their lives and for our democracy. We want citizens who understand how their government works, who are knowledgeable about the history of their nation and other nations. We need citizens who are thoroughly educated in science. We need people who can communicate in other languages. We must ensure that every young person has the chance to engage in the arts.

But because of our narrow-minded utilitarianism, we have forgotten what good education is.

DIANE RAVITCH
Ravitch is a historian. Her book ‘‘The Death and Life of the Great American School System’’ will be published in February.