Intelligence is more than intellect The educational system is focused on developing the intellect. The intellect is viewed as being located in the brain, experienced as the thoughts we have in our head, and demonstrated through writing and test taking. My work is to expand this limited view by introducing new practices that create richer… Continue reading Teaching Empathic Intelligence to Teens – Part 2: Developmental Stages
Summary: This post describes an exercise I use with teens for developing their expanded knowing called the Fairy Tale Game. My work is oriented towards one goal: that all humans access their Expanded Knowing. Gratefully, since this is a natural part of our humanness, accessing it is actually quite simple - and even more so… Continue reading Teaching Empathic Intelligence to Teens: Part 1 – The Fairy Tale Game
Accessing Your Empathic Intelligence to Transform Personal, Organizational and Social Systems. All living things possess the capacity to sense into their environment and respond in ways that place the individual in alignment with the health and well-being of the whole. This is true for all variety of life and at every scale: cell, organism, species,… Continue reading A Deep Commitment to Change
I have been actively working for social change since 1991, when I started facilitating intergroup dialogue as an undergraduate at the University of Michigan. My work has evolved today with the powerful practice of systemic constellations. After all this time, I certainly understand how easy it is to feel disturbed at the state of our… Continue reading Purpose Driven? Pleasure Driven!
The Constellation I was one of a small group of facilitators invited to do a systemic constellation around racism. The facilitator, Judy Wallace, asked us to generate a list of what should be represented. With the group size we had, we decided on White Power, Black Bodies, Child, Earth, Poor White Person. I was the one… Continue reading Rage, Grief and Activism
“Help! I need an emergency consultation!” The person calling is a wise and thoughtful leader in her organization. She explained that she was amidst end of year fundraising, and scheduling meetings to review her organization’s performance and direction. But the reason for her call was that she was angry, and she couldn’t get over it.… Continue reading A Truth and a Lie
February 18, 2012 - Hampden, CT I showed up at the workshop with a combination of butterflies in my stomach and a heaviness in my chest. The butterflies were excitement, but the heaviness in my chest was less clear to me. I had done a little research, so I had a general idea of what… Continue reading The First Time: Awe
In the last post I described an Empathic Seminar about the "N-Word". In this post, I'll debrief the experience and address some common questions. What happened in the "N-Word" exercise? We created a constellation of the system by identifying three points in the system: "Black Person," "White Person," and "N-word". Three people stood in the center of the… Continue reading Debriefing the Field Test
In today's post, you will read about an Empathic Seminar I introduced at a school in Bronx, NY. This is a firsthand account of the Fourth Key to Unlocking Your Empathic Intelligence: Field Testing. I further debrief this exercise in my final post. “I want to know why my students use the N-word with each other.… Continue reading The Fourth Key: Field Testing
"The idea is to pay attention to the living world as if it were a spider’s web: when you touch one part, the whole web responds."- Robin Wall Kimmerer, Interviewed by The Sun Magazine While many of us understand intellectually that we are, of course, part of an interconnected web, the dominant approach to teaching… Continue reading The Third Key: Systems Thinking
Expanded Knowing 