June Weekend Wisdom with Dr. Brandon Nappi

Weekend Wisdom is a weekly sharing from Copper Beech Institute’s founder, Dr. Brandon Nappi. We have combined all of June’s Weekend Wisdom.

6.28.20

Lately, many of us at Copper Beech Institute have found ourselves thrust into brave conversations, the ones where we find ourselves in the midst of passionate disagreement. This is especially heart wrenching when ideological divisions threaten to fracture families and friendships. Most of us want to stay connected to the people we love even amid disagreement. These practices are designed to keep us connected in crisis. We would like to offer these six principles for brave conversations to help our community lean into important and challenging conversations. Even when we disagree intensely, we can still agree to these mindfulness principles which will support us in staying connected amid crisis. We hope that together, we can all lean into the discomfort of challenging conversations. The health of our nation depends on our willingness to engage each other. This is not always easy. Democracy isn’t fun all the time. We need practices to keep our hearts soft when the conversations get hard. Yet, our hope is that these simple practices will allow us to speak to each other in a way that honors our full humanity and leads to mutual understanding. We need brave conversations more than ever as we seek to explore what it means to share this world together. These principles include:

1. Listen to Understand

2. Talk to a Person not a Pathology

3. Let Go of Labels 4. Remain Focused

5. Cultivate Compassion

6. Stay Humble

6.21.20

Story shapes our experience of ourselves and our experience of work. We’ve been thinking deeply about how work can work better for us and for all people. Here is Part 2 of our reflection on how we can design a new normal to help shift the story of work in our lives. For themes 1-5, see last Sunday’s post.

6. PROCEED AT THE PACE OF TRUST How can we create genuine trusting relationships at work? Many workers feel like they are being watched by employers. During these unprecedented times, can we begin to measure the work and not the time? The pressure to produce, perform, and to demonstrate our value amid furloughs is soul-crushing. What does trust look like in the workplace?

7. FREEDOM People flourish in freedom. Let’s start a conversation around how we can encourage each other to explore individual passions and creativity while being accountable to organizational deadlines and goals. How have my assumptions about productivity and expectations of work been challenged by the pandemic? How am I supporting healthy and appropriate experimentation in the workplace?

8. PURPOSE Start a conversation about what values are most important to your team. Ground yourself in your purpose to avoid acting from a place of fear. Ask what really matters to us? Move beyond a mission statement to your deepest held values. Support others to honor their core values in the workplace.

9. FLEXIBILITY Flexibility around work schedules has been a great benefit for some. How can we create flexibility to support our teams after the pandemic? Flexibility in thought is just as critical. How can I see things from others’ perspective, especially the perspective of traditionally marginalized communities?

10. COMPASSION How can we make space to check-in, connect, and care for one another, whether in the middle of a global crisis or not? Can our CEOs be CCOs (Chief Compassion Officers)? Compassion is an important quality in leaders. Check in regularly with staff members and ask how you can be supportive. Deep listening is a crucial part of compassion. Can we also agree to be vulnerable in asking for what we need? Can we be compassionate toward ourselves and think regularly about self-care?

6.10.20

It’s tragic and true that white silence has created violence in our communities for people of color. Our reluctance to speak out has allowed racism and violent systems of inequity to continue and worsen. As mindfulness and meditation practitioners who dedicate much of our lives to the healing power of silence, we offer these alternative forms of silence as powerful medicine for an aching world. Thankfully, many are finding their voices around anti-racist activism in these soul-opening days. To be sure, we’ll need more than social media posts to undo 400 years of oppression. We will need deep inner healing, the bravery to self-reflect, radical honesty about our role in a racist society, and an embodiment of justice that radiates outward from the core of our being. There is still much work to be done within us and around us. This journey to creating a world where we are all valued for our infinite worth is the work of our lifetimes. While we have heard important messages about the damage of silence in the face of racism, it’s also true that silence can play a critical role in dismantling and healing oppressive structures in us and around us. If you are finding yourself needing these healing forms of silence in these days, it can be an important witness to name this explicitly in your social media feeds, in emails, on your webpage, and in conversations. Naming the form and intention of your silence can offer a powerful witness to your anti-racist commitment. By sharing WHY you are silent, your silence then speaks about your values and avoids the kind of complicity that has too long been the status quo in our country. May this healing silence embolden us to live with compassion, courage, and justice. Weekend Wisdom is a weekly sharing from Copper Beech Institute’s founder, Dr. Brandon Nappi.

6.7.20

This week’s Weekend Wisdom amplifies the voice of the mindfulness teacher Ruth King from her powerful book “Mindful of Race.” The world’s heart is on fire, and race is at its core. What’s happening in the world today is the result of past actions. The bitter racial seeds from past beliefs and actions are blooming all around us, reflecting not only a division of the races that is rooted in ignorance and hate but also, and more sorely, a division of heart. Racism is heart disease. How we think and respond is at the core of racial suffering and racial healing. If we cannot think clearly and respond wisely, we will continue to damage the world’s heart…The best tool I know of to transform our relationship to racial suffering is mindfulness meditation. For more than twenty years, that practice has supported me in experiencing racial distress without warring against it….I  learned how to relate to distress with more compassion, and I opened to a deeper understanding of my racial conditioning. I discovered that how I thought was core not only to my level of distress but also to my ability to break habits of harm. I have not reached nirvana, no. But I do know the freedom that comes from being able to look at what is happening— not what my mind is programmed to believe is happening, but what is really happening — without raging inside. Over time, this practice has profoundly impacted how I relate to both racial distress and racism in my relationships and communities. Through mindfulness meditation practice, I discovered the meaning of a quote often attributed to South African president Nelson Mandela: “When  we  can sit in the face of insanity or dislike and be free from the need to make it different, then we are  free.”  That’s what mindfulness meditation does.  It helps us put a crucial pause between our instinctive and often overwhelming feelings of being wronged or harmed or in danger and our responses to those feelings.  In that pause, we gain perspective-we find our breath, our heartbeat, and the ground beneath our feet. This, in time, supports us in seeing our choices more clearly and responding more wisely.