Unshakable Leadership Is a Number 1 Bestseller

As I said previously, I have a chapter in the No. 1 bestselling book, Unshakable Leadership. 

 

Go here for more information and to order your copy now.  

 

In my chapter, "How to Be a Leader in Today's World", one topic I covered was the Blogging Carnival for Nonviolence. I invite you to submit a blog post.  Please do so from the 15th of June.  Go here for the guidelines.  

 

 I look forward to hearing from you!  

 

 

 

I'm a Bestselling Author - AGAIN!

I am pleased to announce that I have a chapter in the Number One bestselling new book, Unshakable Leadership.  

 

In my chapter, "How to Be a Leader in Today's World", I talk about my journey of overcoming self-doubt, embracing my African and African American heritage, my commitment to nonviolence and holding the annual Blogging Carnival for Nonviolence.  I share practical strategies for modern leadership.  

 

Go here to order the paperback in the U.S.  Go here to order it in the  UK.   

 

 

Unshakable Leadership to Pre-Order

 

I am pleased to announce that I have a chapter in a forthcoming new book, Unshakable Leadership, which you can pre-order here.  

 

In my chapter, "How to Be a Leader in Today's World", I talk about my journey of overcoming self-doubt, embracing my African and African American heritage, my commitment to nonviolence and holding the annual Blogging Carnival for Nonviolence.  I share practical strategies for modern leadership.  

 

Go here to order your copy of the Kindle ebook now.   It will be a physical book as well.  

Your Experiences Are So Important

Peace Circles

Your experiences of empathy, nonviolence and/or violence are so important. They are vital. People want to read, and hear, about your experiences because we can relate to them and feel inspired by them.

If you have witnessed violence - and everyone has at some point in our lives - we will connect with your experience from the heart.

If you are recovering from violence, many people around the world share your concerns and will be inspired by your vulnerability, your courage and your healing process.

 

If you are helping others to recover from violence, through writing or teaching or through other means, people will be touched and inspired by your message.

If you are sharing practical nonviolent methods, your work can help others all over the world. We can end the culture of violence, help grow the culture of empathy and spread the culture of peace.

The Blogging Carnival for Nonviolence is a collective effort. You can be a part of it. And I extend an enormous “Thank You” to all of the bloggers who have contributed to our first 10 years.

Please share your experience with the Blogging Carnival of Nonviolence 2023. Your blog post can be:

• a written blog; 
• a vlog;
• an audio blog or podcast;
• a poem; or
• any other form you choose to use.

Go to our Facebook page to contact us and submit your blog post.

The 2023 blog posts will appear here.

Go here for the guidelines.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Please share this with your networks and please comment below.  Thanks!  

Attacks on Uighur Muslims and Rohingya Muslims

Systematic Attacks on Uighur Muslim Women

Please note:  This blog post contains adult themes and is NOT suitable for children.  

News has been coming out of China about attacks on Uighur Muslims in China.  First, the mainstream news outlets reported that Uighur Muslims were sent to "re-education camps" within China.  

 

Now, we are receiving news of Uighur Muslim women being attacked, sexually assaulted,  gang-raped and tortured in the "re-education camps".  Other Muslim women may also be experiencing these attacks.  I am very disturbed by this, and I am sure you are as well.  

 

If you have followed my blogs and the Blogging Carnival for Nonviolence, you will be aware that I am passionate about Nonviolent Communication (NVC) and that I frequently blog about attacks on Black people, particularly those involved in police officer-related incidents.  These are happening with alarming frequency, and Black people in the UK are 50% more likely to die in officer-related incidents than any other group.  

 

I am always saying that each of these incidents is another reason to practice Nonviolent Communication (NVC), and, of course, they all are.  

 

However, there is so much suffering in the world - all different countries, all different cultural backgrounds, experience violence.  Many of them experience extreme violence.  

 

In conflict situations, rape is commonplace - it is used as a method of subduing the population.  

 

One woman, Tursunay Ziawudun, has broken the silence on systematic rape and torture of Uighur Muslim women. 

Go here for more from the BBC.  

Go here for more from Daily Sabah.  

Go here for more from The Guardian.  

 

You will also recall the reports of genocide being committed against Rohingya Muslims in Burma/Myanmar.  

 

We must do all we can to stop these atrocities being committed against Muslims, and to end violence in our own communities.  This is one more reason to practice NVC.  

 

Peace on the Table

By Sheila Mann 

Click here for more blogs from the Blogging Carnival for Nonviolence. 

Sheila Mann of Peace on the Table

One of the workers at my hummus factory is a Syrian refugee.  She arrived in Brazil ten months ago, and she is learning Portuguese.  When I interviewed the other workers, all women, first of all, I chose each one from a different religion (Jews, Christian Arabs and Muslim Arabs).  I explained that it was very important that they understand why I was asking about which religion they belong to, and that this factory and project is about integrating all people together, and asked them to help the Syrian girl to integrate and learn the language.

I thought that they had understood, but when they began working, they didn´t try to include her in the group and sometimes they laughed at her because of how she spoke Portuguese. I called each one separately and explained once more about peaceful coexistence between people, and that I expected them to help the Syrian woman and treat her as equal, but it still didn´t work. So I decided to use another method.

I called everyone, including my partner (the only man in the factory) before the coffee break, gathered all seated in a circle.  I asked everyone to close their eyes and breathe deeply three times, then I began to tell them a simple story about a happy family gathered after dinner in the living room, when suddenly there were bombs falling in the other parts of the house, and the house was destroyed.  I spoke about the fear and how all the family ran away to save their lives, and how it was difficult to abandon everything and just run away to a safe place.  And the long route of this family to reach a shelter and the possibility of leaving the country and beginning in another place, like Brazil, and the effort to be integrated and to speak a language which is very different from theirs.  I asked the women to try and imagine themselves having to learn a new language such as Arabic for example, something so strange and different that it was really very hard to learn.

Peace on the Table

When I finished the story, I asked everyone to breathe deeply once again and to open their eyes slowly. Then I asked them to stand up and put them in pairs, standing in front of each other and to each hold up the arms of the one in front as a form of exercise.  Then I asked the one who was being helped to turn around, and the other one to massage her back, and then I asked the one who received the exercise and the massage to close her eyes, lean on the other and let her lead for a small walk around the factory.   When one finished, I asked the women to switch sides and each do the same thing to her partner.

I repeated these exercises every day and each time used another story.  It worked, they began to treat the Syrian woman better, because they touched her, had to lean on her with confidence to be led through the factory.  Now they are chatting more with her and have stopped laughing at the way she speaks. 

I was born in Beirut, Lebanon, I´m Jewish and emigrated to Israel in 1968, and in 1973, I came to Brazil, where I live now.  

I´m a visual artist and a specialist in Lebanese food. I had the idea to combine these two passions and realized an artistic performance in a well-known museum in Sao Paulo, where I made a speech for peace based on a statement by Martin Luther King Jr., and then served a unique Arab dish for almost 300 people.  

Recently, I decided that I was not doing enough to bring people together, so I invited my son-in-law to be my partner and opened a hummus factory, as I consider this dish  common to both Arabs and Israelis.  In the factory, we have only women workers, each one of them from a diferent religion.  

I hope that you´ve liked my story, and for more information, I suggest that you access my facebook page, Peace On the Table, or my videos on YouTube with my name Sheila Mann.  It was a great pleasure to tell you about my peace activities.

http://www.peaceonthetable.org/en/   www.compot.com.br

 

Eat by Choice, Not by Habit - Sylvia Haskvitz

Sylvia Haskvitz, Eat by Choice, Not by Habit

Listen below for my interview with Sylvia Haskvitz, author of Eat by Choice, Not by Habit. 

Most of us don't think about food and eating in the context of Nonviolent Communication (NVC).  But, as Haskvitz explains, the way we talk to ourselves around food and eating has an effect on our lives.

This blog post is part of the Blogging Carnival for Nonviolence.

Please share this blog post with your networks, and please leave your comments below.  Thanks. 



Sylvia will be leading a three-day workshop on Eat by Choice, Not by Habit, in England on December 3rd-6th.  Click here for details and to book. 

Subhadramati: A Flock of Wild Geese

Subhadramati

This post by Subhadramati, a member of the Triratna Buddhist Order based at the London Buddhist Centre, explores why nonviolence is a cornerstone of Buddhist practice.  This is excerpted from her book Not about Being Good.  

This blog post is part of the Blogging Carnival for Nonviolence.   

Please share this with your networks, and please leave your comments below.  Thanks.   

On our last winter retreat, a woman told me about a moment of realization. She began by saying she’d never been able to understand why Triratna Buddhism emphasizes vegetarianism. She had been adamant that she was not going to become a vegetarian in order to be a ‘good Buddhist’, and of course she could reel off examples of eminent Buddhists who are not vegetarian.  

Not about Being Good

But then, in meditation, she had a spontaneous vision of a flock of wild geese flying overhead. They were so beautiful and so free. It suddenly seemed appalling to diminish such freedom and beauty by shutting those creatures in a cage, then killing them and eating their flesh.

 

Simultaneously she realized that in some way the geese were part of her, and she was part of them. She said, 'I knew that to hurt them would be to hurt myself'. I can still remember the radiance of her expression as she spoke. She had had a glimpse of the deeper truth that the practice of vegetarianism is trying to point to, the truth of the connectedness of all.

It was a concrete experience of the fact that, the more you resonate 

with other living beings as living beings, the more you’ll become unable 

to harm them. It will be more natural to help them, and, in doing so, 

you yourself will realize your humanity more deeply.  

 

However, if, through a lack of this resonance, you negate the lives 

of others, you will negate your own humanity – as do certain of the 

characters in Martin Amis’s, God’s Dice. The hero of the story is Bujak, 

who is endowed with super-human physical strength. He arrives home 

to find his mother, daughter, and granddaughter all brutally murdered – 

and the two murderers still on the premises. He could easily kill them 

but doesn’t. ‘I had no wish to add to what I found’, he says. 

'I saw that they weren’t human beings at all. They had no idea what 

human life was. No idea!  Terrible mutations, a disgrace to their 

human moulding.' 

 

 

Here the murderers, by their violent act, have absolutely negated the 

solidarity of one human being – as a human being – with another. 

They have become, in Bujak’s term, ‘mutations’ – although in human 

form – because they are so destitute of the fellow feeling that is part of 

the nature of being human that they have deprived their fellow human 

beings of the thing that was most precious to them – their very lives. 

 

 

Killing may be the most extreme form of violence. But violence can be 

defined as ‘doing to another person, by whatever means, what he 

does not want us to do to him’.  This means you are violent every time 

you try to assert yourself at the expense of another.  

 

The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that being ‘inhuman’ is being 

‘destitute of natural kindness’.  Being truly human then must consist 

in being able to recognize and act from that sense of natural kindness, 

that sense of solidarity between one living being and another. 

That means that every time you breach that solidarity, you are going 

against something that is natural to human nature. You are in fact 

negating your own humanity. In contrast, becoming more deeply 

human means learning to affirm others. You’ll tend to affirm others 

where you have an imaginative identification with them, and you’ll 

tend to negate others where you lack that.

 

Leader of "The Nation’s Mosque" Condemns Atrocious Acts of ISIL

I have been sent a statement from Imam Talib Shareef, leader of "The Nation’s Mosque", Masjid Muhammad, located in Washington, D.C.
 
He released the statement in response to the recent murder of Jim Foley and all inhumane acts of ISIL.  

As I am a Buddhist, not a Muslim, the views expressed do not necessarily reflect my views.  As a practitioner of Nonviolent Communication (NVC), I do not condemn anyone, however much I oppose their actions.  I do appreciate this and all statements in support of ending violence and I have reproduced part of the statement, with which I broadly agree, below.  

Please join us for the Live Web Stream of the International Summit on Nonviolence tomorrow, Saturday the 23rd of August.  For details, see:  Blogging Carnival for Nonviolence.  

The statement reads as follows: 

"We join President Barack Obama and the world in offering heartfelt prayers and condolences to the family of Jim Foley and commend his life of service and sacrifice for humanity; and we stand with the world in strongly condemning the group ISIL for the inhumane, barbaric, cowardly, murder of all innocent life and their countless acts of extreme violence against humanity.  We are continually outraged and bothered by senseless acts that do not uplift or bring peace to our souls and lives collectively." 

The statement goes on to say, with reference to ISIL,  "their 'state' is far from Islamic as their actions are not the actions of Muslims, the followers of Prophet Muhammad (saw) who taught and lived that we are never to the take the life of the innocent, that we are to respect and protect religious freedom and the houses of worship for Christians, Jews, and others, that we are to always seek peace over aggression and never be the aggressor, and that we are not to let the hatred of others cause us to swerve from just behavior. The Holy Qur’an states: O you who believe! Be upright firmly for Allah (G-d), as witnesses to equity and justice, and let not the enmity and hatred of others cause you to result to wrong or criminal behavior and depart from justice.

"Any person, no matter how desperate their situation, no matter how much their hearts are paining because of wrong that has been done to them, whether real or perceived, there is no justification for them to make innocent people the target of their terror or the target of their violent inhumane acts.

".... Prophet Muhammad said, 'The best of you are those who bring benefit to others, to society'; Jim Foley’s life of service puts him among the best." 

IMAM TALIB M. SHAREEF, CM Sgt, USAF-Retired
President, Masjid Muhammad (The Nation's Mosque)
Imam/Chaplain, National Muslim American Veterans Association

Media Contact:  Fitrah Muhammad, Executive Assistant
202-425-5815
imam@thenationsmosque.org
Fitrah@msn.com

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