Just wanted to share that I have confirmed my participation at the Passages event at Inscape, former INS building in Seattle.
Passages is a two-day event now instead of four. I will be participating with a special version of my international community oral storytelling festival project.
Stay tuned for more information and updates.
Amineh
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Saturday, September 11, 2010
Reconciling Divisions with People through Compassion to Self
This article was posted in the YES! Magazine on June 8, 2010.
The Roots of Compassion
To be compassionate toward others, we first have to learn to be merciful with ourselves.
posted Jun 08, 2010
Rabbi Ted Falcon, Pastor Don Mackenzie, and Sheikh Jamal Rahman, known collectively as the "Interfaith Amigos," have been learning and teaching together since 2001. They blog weekly for YES! Magazine.
As a young adult I was fascinated by a verse in the Tao Te Ching: “Compassionate towards yourself, you reconcile all beings in the world.” If I desired peace in the world around me, the verse implied, I should start by practicing compassion for myself, thereby unleashing a healing energy that would help reconcile divisions with the people I encountered. Ever since I was first graced with this insight, I have tried to cultivate an awareness that any difficulty I have with another is a reflection of the relationship I have with myself—and, conversely, the more peaceful I am with myself, the more peaceful I am with those around me.
Compassion in Islam
My reverence for that verse in the Tao Te Ching deepened during the course of my studies in Islamic spirituality, as my parents and other teachers emphasized that compassion is the most critical divine attribute we can cultivate in our lives. On this mysterious journey on Earth, the most valuable provision is the understanding and practice of mercy and gentleness for oneself, which results organically in compassion for others.
The Prophet Muhammad said that the heart of the Quran is rooted in the “Basmala,” the formula that opens virtually all of the one hundred fourteen chapters of the Holy Book: “In the name of Allah, Boundlessly Compassionate and Merciful.” When a Bedouin asked the Prophet how the Basmala could be bestowed upon him, the Prophet famously replied: "Have compassion on yourself, and on others, and the Basmala will be bestowed upon you.” These words of the Prophet Muhammad constitute the core of Islamic spirituality.
The Power of Compassion
How can one begin to explain the awe-inspiring power of mercy and gentleness? Teachers from various traditions ask us to observe nature's closest metaphor to compassion: The element of water. There is nothing so soft and yielding as water, but it is powerful enough to overcome the hardest stone. This soft element has the power to wash away continents. Water, like compassion, is necessary for life: Wherever water falls, says the Quran, life flourishes. The Earth was parched, says the Holy Book, but God sent down the waters of mercy and the Earth was “clothed in green.” Likewise, the person who practices compassion is blessed with authentic strength and at the same time blesses the world with life-affirming grace.
Compassion for Self
We are placed mysteriously on Earth in a state of confusion and bewilderment. In truth, we have no idea of who we are, where we come from, or where we are going. In the poet Rumi’s playful words, “We all arrive here a little tipsy.” In this confused state, we need to be gentle with ourselves. Our beings deserve to be touched with compassion every step of the way.
To grow compassion for ourselves, we must embrace not only our ten thousand joys of life but also our ten thousand sorrows of life. We need to learn to embrace our uncomfortable feelings with mercy and gentleness. The human ego tends to avoid, deny, and minimize feelings that make it feel threatened. Unpleasant feelings such as anger, sadness, and jealousy possess an edge only because we perceive them as something separate from ourselves. When we acknowledge them and enfold them with mercy and gentleness, we allow them to become healed and integrated. When, with courage and compassion, we kiss our inner demons, they turn into princes and princesses. Spiritual teachers have said that the more space sorrow carves into our being, the more joy we can contain. There is, of course, no need to run towards pain and suffering. But we should not run away from them.
We can truly forgive only if, during the process, we practice compassion for ourselves by lovingly enfolding the difficult feelings that arise in us.
I once had a client who was desperately seeking spiritual techniques to forgive the man who had murdered her daughter. This was, she believed, the only way she could be freed from her burden of hate and pain. But the more she tried to forgive, the more angry she became. In fact, she began to develop illnesses. What was missing was compassion for self: the compassionate need to honor her feelings of anger and suffering, the need to make sacred the difficult feelings by embracing them with mercy and kindness. What she needed was not to push them out but to bring them in, gently, lovingly, with mercy for herself. When she allowed herself, little by little, to embrace her dragons through a spiritual practice called “sacred holding,” she experienced a remarkable healing: She was blessed with a sense of release, freedom, and unburdening, and her strange illnesses disappeared. This woman’s story demonstrates that we can truly forgive only if, during the process, we practice compassion for ourselves by lovingly enfolding the difficult feelings that arise in us.
The Charter for CompassionVideo: Thousands are uniting behind a simple principle that one scholar believes forms the basis of the world's religions: compassion.
Compassion for the Other
Over time, compassion for self creates an inner spaciousness that gives us the capacity to be compassionate with the other, no matter how confrontational or adversarial he or she is. From the place of inner spaciousness, we are able to discern between behavior and being. We realize that we are confronting the antagonism, not the antagonist.
In Sufi literature there is a story about how a judge might behave while sentencing someone who has committed a terrible crime. One judge might proclaim the sentence with contempt and disdain for the criminal, eager in his heart to banish this “scum of the Earth” into oblivion. This judge does not differentiate between behavior and being. Another judge, one who has cultivated inner spaciousness, would render the same sentence—but with solemnity and respect for the offender’s soul. Out of compassion he makes sure that the offender is accorded human dignity and is not maltreated in prison. Maybe the judge even prays for the offender, sending light from his heart to the soul of the convicted person. So the same sentencing is carried out with two different energies. Is this a big deal? Absolutely! Compassion is an energy from the soul that has the power to shift heaven and Earth, both in our own hearts and in the hearts of those whose lives we touch.
Sheikh Jamal Rahman wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Jamal is co-founder and Muslim Sufi Minister at Interfaith Community Church in Seattle. Originally from Bangladesh, he is a graduate of the University of Oregon and the University of California, Berkeley. His books include The Fragrance of Faith: The Enlightened Heart of Islam and Out of Darkness into Light: Spiritual Guidance in the Quran with Reflections from Jewish and Christian Sources.Friday, August 6, 2010
Immigration, Detention and Deportation in the Northwest
Between Worlds/Behind Bars
Immigration, Detention and Deportation in the Northwest
From the dark days of the Chinese Exclusion Act to post–911 crackdowns on undocumented immigrants, immigration detention has a controversial history in both our nation and in the Puget Sound region. Between World/Behind Bars is a four-part series exploring immigration detention from its roots in the 1930s at “Seattle's Ellis Island" in the International District to today's privately-run Northwest Detention Center on the Tacoma Tideflats.
Thursday, August 5, 2010
Seattle's Ellis Island
This interview transcript is from KUOW New website from 2/23/2010. Reporter Sarah Stuteville is one of the leadership team members of the Common Language Project.
Seattle's Ellis Island
In segment one of our series, "Between Worlds/Behind Bars," Sarah Stuteville takes us inside the now–closed processing and detention center on Airport Way and explores a dark corner of our city's past.TRANSCRIPT
[Ed.: Transcript and audio have been edited and differ from the original broadcast version. (7/20/2010)]
Chinn: "The US needed the labor to build the city."
Cassie Chinn is a historian at The Wing Luke Asian Art Museum. Her family immigrated to Washington in the early 1900s.
Chinn: "So for instance, the Ship Canal was built by immigrant labor. The bricks for the roads, paved by Chinese laborers. So there was a huge need, especially after the Seattle fire, for labor to rebuild."
But the boom times didn't last. And as the economy suffered so did immigrants who were seen as a threat to jobs. Chinese immigrants were specifically targeted and anti–immigration laws that spanned the early 20th century stemmed the flow of new arrivals from China. Despite these restrictions, people found ways around the laws.
Chinn: "If you were a citizen and you traveled back to China and you were married and you had a family then your children would be citizens of the U.S. and so they could then come and immigrate as U.S. citizens."
This sounds simple but it wasn't. Some people faked documents that claimed they were the children of U.S. citizens. These people became known as "paper sons." But other immigrants with legitimate family ties, even children, were held under suspicion in immigration processing centers.
Chinn: "They would be held in detention indefinitely, they would be interrogated, and often these were young kids, um, traveling on their own, and they would be interrogated to prove that they were who they said."
A new, larger facility on Airport Way was built in 1931 to deal with these immigrants, but as time progressed it saw many uses. In the days after Pearl Harbor was bombed, leaders from the Japanese American community throughout Washington state were rounded up and questioned here, in the following months these men and their families were sent to internment camps as far away as Idaho.
In the 1960s and 70s the majority of people passing through here were Mexican and Central Americans, many held on immigration violations and by the last decades of the center's use it had become less a place of arrival and more often a final destination before deportation.
Jay Stansal: "I think the place is full of ghosts, is full of a lot of people where there was no hope at all."
Jay Stansal is an assistant federal public defender, he's spent years defending immigrants and refugees. He started taking on cases defending people in the Airport Way detention center in the 1980s when he was a young law student for a legal services nonprofit.
Stansal: "You know, I spend a lot of time with people when I would just say, uh, you know, holding their hand, crying with them saying, there's no hope, this is what the law says, there's no hope. "
He's visiting with his old client, Many, who he met in the Airport Way facility in the 1990s.
Many Uch: "So this is where I spent the most time writing to news papers and friends and families and my own brief and stuff was here."
Many Uch is a 33–year–old Cambodian American. He was among one of the last groups to live within these walls. The furniture is all gone but there are eerie remains: a lone shoe on the floor of the laundry room, a cafeteria tray in the abandoned mess hall, there's even a small laminated sign someone posted that reads 'Welcome to America' above a clip art American flag.
This is Many's first time back since the building closed. he walks slowly through the echoing cement halls peering out the grated windows of the large tiled cells, pausing in the basement processing rooms surrounded by a chain link fence.
Uch: "Either you sleep on the floor, so this would be packed with people waiting and sometimes they would have children here too, because they had nowhere to put them."
Many's family brought him to Seattle from Cambodia twenty–five years ago. He grew up in White Center, a poor neighborhood outside the Seattle city limits that struggled with crime and gangs in the 1980s and 90s.
As a child, Many was a permanent resident but never became a U.S. citizen, a distinction that didn't matter much to him until he ended up in trouble. He was arrested at eighteen for driving the getaway car during a robbery and sentenced to 55 months in jail. But under new laws passed in 1996, Many's crime became a deportable offense. And on the day he finished his jail time he was taken directly to Airport Way to await deportation. Jay was Many's lawyer.
Stansal: "In 1999 we started representing Many and a bunch of other fellows that had been indefinitely detained in this and other facilities."
They were going to send him back to Cambodia, the country he left when he was eight, but Cambodia wouldn't take him and Many was held here indefinitely.
A series of cases has since ruled that indefinite detention, even for detainees with deportation orders, is unlawful. But at the time it meant that Many spent six months in Airport Way and got to know it well.
Uch: "So you can see people walk by from the inside and if the window would be open because it would get so hot then we'd open the window and make conversation with people on the outside."
The cells that Many stayed in were right above the street, about thirty feet from the open side walk below where pedestrians regularly passed.
Many says he and his fellow inmates often sought ways to interact with the city beyond their cells, shouting out the window at passersby.
Uch: "Like 'Hey! We're up here! We're up here!' attracting conversation, or like good–looking girls or something and it was like it was like boring so that's why we did it."
Stuteville: "So did anyone ever talk back?"
Uch: "Yeah! They do, they make conversation yeah, and sometimes you could have friends over, you could say hey come to the window and we'll talk for about ten minutes, that is until the guards say hey you can't do that."
This building has a history of interacting in strange ways with the city around it. Cassie of Wing Luke — we heard from her earlier about interrogations — says stories of the Airport Way immigration station were often told in her family.
Chinn: "My grandmother tells a story of how they would go visit. They would sing songs outside of the window to encourage them."
Many people Many met within these walls struggled between the boredom of their confinement and the uncertainty of their futures, and for some of them there was no encouragement to be had. There were two suicide attempts during the six months that Many stayed here.
Uch: "One was hanging with sheets, strangled themselves, razor, yeah."
I asked Many why he thought they did it.
Uch: "I think to them there's no way out you know I mean and they have no choice."
And the place does seem haunted. There are worn painted yellow footprints on the pocked cement floor for detainees to follow when they were being moved. Steel solitary confinement cells gape open into the halls and "the yard," a fenced in rooftop, is scrawled with graffiti testimonies in melted rooftop tar of the names, dates and countries of those who passed through here.
For Many and Jay it is an emotional return and before they leave there is an awkward hug in the empty visitors room where Many once spoke to his mother through the thick plastic window.
Many was released from detention in 1998. He now has a three–year–old daughter, drives a delivery truck, and works as a community activist on issues of deportation and immigration. He still lives with a deportation order but is hopeful that a request to Governor Gregoire for a pardon may be granted this year. For Jay, it's good to visit the center on Airport Way one last time.
Stansal: "I'd say it's good to see it dismantled, I hope to see the whole system dismantled someday and we can just live on the planet as brothers and sisters as I think we were meant to to begin with."
Plans to convert the building on Airport Way to office space begin early next year. But the closing of this center did not mean the end of immigration detention centers in the Puget Sound area. A new, much larger facility below downtown Tacoma opened in 2004, and, with it, the beginning of a new chapter in the history of immigration in our region.
I'm Sarah Stuteville for KUOW.
© Copyright 2010, KUOW
Friday, July 23, 2010
Elif Shafak: the art of transcending cultural ghettos
Elif Shafak, one of my most favorite storytellers of the Middle East shares in her TEDGlobal 2010 talk, The politics of fiction that "our hearts might dwindle," and that "our humanness might wither if we stay for too long inside our cultural cocoons." Shafak addresses in her talk the importance of telling and listening to stories and how stories bring people together, bridge the gap between them and connect all humanity. Her work, in particular her recent TED talk has ignited in me a strong interest in organizing an intercultural & intergenerational community oral storytelling festival in Seattle. Being together with friends, neighbors and strangers sharing stories is priceless. Shafak's talk brought magical memories from childhood years in Syria and Palestine. I feel fortunate growing up in a culture rich of social gatherings where the old and young gather and share stories so frequently.
TED talks are only 18 minutes long, so hope you'd watch this video. Hope the following excerpts from the talk's transcript would entice you to watch the video.
TED talks are only 18 minutes long, so hope you'd watch this video. Hope the following excerpts from the talk's transcript would entice you to watch the video.
- "Now one other thing women like my grandma do in Turkey is to cover mirrors with velvet or to hang them on the walls with their backs facing out. It's an old Eastern tradition based on the knowledge that it's not healthy for a human being to spend too much time staring at his own reflection. Ironically, [living in] communities of the like-minded is one of the greatest dangers of today's globalized world. And it's happening everywhere, among liberals and conservatives, agnostics and believers, the rich and the poor, East and West alike. We tend to form clusters based on similarity, and then we produce stereotypes about other clusters of people. In my opinion, one way of transcending these cultural ghettos is through the art of storytelling. Stories cannot demolish frontiers, but they can punch holes in our mental walls. And through those holes, we can get a glimpse of the other, and sometimes even like what we see."
- "From her, I learned, among many other things, one very precious lesson. That if you want to destroy something in this life, be it an acne, a blemish or the human soul, all you need to do is to surround it with thick walls. It will dry up inside. Now we all live in some kind of a social and cultural circle. We all do. We're born into a certain family, nation, class. But if we have no connection whatsoever with the worlds beyond the one we take for granted, then we too run the risk of drying up inside. Our imagination might shrink. Our hearts might dwindle. And our humanness might wither if we stay for too long inside our cultural cocoons. Our friends, neighbors, colleagues, family -- if all the people in our inner circle resemble us, it means we are surrounded with our mirror image."
- "In the end, stories move like whirling dervishes, drawing circles beyond circles. They connect all humanity, regardless of identity politics. And that is the good news. And I would like to finish with an old Sufi poem. "Come, let us be friends for once; let us make life easy on us; let us be lovers and loved ones; the earth shall be left to no one."
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Welcome!
Welcome to the blog of one of Adapt International's new programs. You Who Stand in the Doorway, Come in is a sample of a larger intercultural and intergenerational community oral storytelling festival that we hope to launch as one of the Seattle Center's annual festivals.
Please follow us to learn more about other Adapt International programs and initiatives, and what you can do to take part of our efforts to build community and understanding locally and internationally. We'll be posting articles on storytelling traditions around the world and on how storytelling is used as a tool in peacebuilding and public health interventions.
Thank you and see you soon.
Amineh
Please follow us to learn more about other Adapt International programs and initiatives, and what you can do to take part of our efforts to build community and understanding locally and internationally. We'll be posting articles on storytelling traditions around the world and on how storytelling is used as a tool in peacebuilding and public health interventions.
Thank you and see you soon.
Amineh
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)