Peace Ambassador Training #2

What have you learned from Aqeela’s presentation about how to maintain inner peace in the face of challenges, and even conflict and wounding? 

The message I took away from Aqeela’s presentation is that storytelling, sharing experiences, and deep listening are key to building the compassion needed to not only heal but to grow as a community.  I’m very curious about this because my upbringing involved a lot of fairy stories made up by my mother which transported me to another realm of reality. But she rarely shared stories about our family, or my father or her life before me.  So this taught me that we can create the world we want to see around us, but the world that is around us doesn’t have to exist. My understanding of storytelling was fractured from a young age.  

I lived on Pine Ridge Indian Reservation for three years after graduating college as a volunteer teacher in a parochial school. I learned the value of storytelling and deep listening there too. Storytelling on the individual level opens the possibility to reconcile confusions that come from holding a story so close.  Storytelling has the power to filter our cultural experiences, values and traditions into powerful threads of collective identity.  

I studied phenomenology after I left the reservation. Phenomenology is the study of lived experiences. I believe that because we all have lived experiences together simultaneously, our individual experiences are all equally important to the collective truth of our lives together.  We all are the sum of our collective memories.  

I really appreciated this week’s discussion. I learned that once personal healing begins within, the work for a cause can be rooted in loving kindness, equanimity, compassion and peace.
 

What are you learning in your own story?
I’m learning how willing I can be to feel unworthy of love and learning how untrue that is.