Parker Palmer on Movements
Posted October 18th, 2007 by Lisa Rohleder
I discovered the writer and educational reformer Parker Palmer because one of my patients works with him. She is one of my favorite patients: a Vipassana meditator for 30 years, a former grade school principal, a lovely and gracious person. She told me that when she first met Parker Palmer, she was smiling so widely he asked her, "Why are you smiling?" And she told him, "Because you are one of the only famous people I've met who didn't turn out, in person, to be an asshole." Apparently he laughed for a really long time.
I know this is not a brief article, but I'm hoping you all will read and comment on it anyway. I found it very encouraging:
http://www.couragerenewal.org/resources/writings/divided
And if anyone doubts that we are indeed a movement now, check out this post in the Integrator Blog, under #7 -- including a nice plug for Communichi:
http://theintegratorblog.com/site/index.php?option=com_content&task=view...
Here's to the undivided life.
Re: Parker Palmer on Movements
"This is what happens when we decide to take responsibility for our health, for our relationships, for getting satisfaction in life. And I believe that as we get more skilled at taking personal responsibility, we will find ourselves taking responsibility for our community, our profession and society."
I love what you said, Marty. It explains to me why it takes so long to get people to understand why we must get involved in some kind of activism.
Re: Parker Palmer on Movements
This is a really helpful article. The concept of an organizational approach to change, versus a movement approach to change, applies to many areas of personal as well as professional life. It's as if we try to make change from within the system, and when that doesn't work, we despair instead of taking responsibility. The solution is to create a movement. Movements take courage.
That wonderful moment occurs when:
"These people have seized the personal insight from which all movements begin: No punishment can possibly be more severe than the punishment that comes from conspiring in the denial of one's own integrity."
This is what happens when we decide to take responsibility for our health, for our relationships, for getting satisfaction in life. And I believe that as we get more skilled at taking personal responsibility, we will find ourselves taking responsibility for our community, our profession and society.
Marty Calliham
Re: Parker Palmer on Movements
Thank you for all of your deep thinking on this. I gave my first talk yesterday to a group of about 25 employees from the City of Tacoma Public Utility District.
In contrast to the last time I gave a public talk, a year or two ago, as a BAcupunk, I could feel myself standing more in integrity.
The path of an educator (teacher) is long and ever full of learning, being unafraid to sit down at the front of the bus - in whatever unfamiliar and possibly uncomfortable situation may arise.
Re: Parker Palmer on Movements
I thought the article was right on and surprisingly easy to read from an academic. No "deconstructing", etc. I bet he IS great to meet in person.
I am hopeful that the paradigm shift is closer rather than farther. The Secret, the Abraham books, Eckhart Tolle & Depok Chopra's books, Conversation With God books, The Last of the Ancient Sunlight, Blessed Unrest, Al Gore's book and movie, etc. etc. etc. are all saying the same thing. It's increasingly difficult to live divided lives, to deny and to refuse to acknowledge that we do create what we live and we must take responsibility for what we are doing.
The comon thread for me in all these books and the article is integrity, refusing to continue in a broken system and making changes in your life so that you live your values. Thankfully, more and more people in more and more places around the world are doing just that.
I sure am glad you got fed up, Lisa, and went looking for company. :-)
Re: Parker Palmer on Movements
What a very moving article, full of helpful ideas. Though he is focusing on "collaborative learning," so much of what he says applies to us. I like the way that acupuncture - as we understand and practice it - is a very collaborative process of healing.
Some other favorite parts, any of which could probably be a blog topic on its own [I've changed some of his words below in brackets (from things like "teacher" and "student" and "academy"), just to make the parallels more obvious]:
"We sometimes get perverse satisfaction from insisting that organizations offer the only path to change. Then, when the path is blocked, we can indulge the luxury of resentment rather than seek an alternative avenue of reform and we can blame it all on external forces rather than take responsibility upon ourselves."
"They have realized that a passion for [Chinese Medicine] was what animated their decision to enter the [profession], and they do not want to lose the primal energy of their professional lives. They have realized that they care deeply about the lives of their [patients], and they do not want to abandon the [working class]. They have realized that [acupuncture] is an enterprise in which they have a heavy investment of personal identity and meaning and they have decided to reinvest their lives, even if they do not receive dividends from [insurance companies] or from [the medical establishment].
For these [acupuncturists], the decision is really quite simple: Caring about [healing] and about [patients] brings them health as persons, and to collaborate in a denial of that fact is to collaborate in a diminishment of their own lives. They refuse any longer to act outwardly in contradiction to something they know inwardly to be true that [doing acupuncture, and doing it well], is a source of identity for them. They understand that this refusal may evoke the wrath of the gods of the professions, who are often threatened when we reach for personal wholeness. But still, they persist."
"[A healthcare] system that ignores human need in favor of a narrow version of professionalism depends on a reward system that keeps both [practitioners] and [patients] in their place. But as soon as rewards for alternative behavior emerge for either group, it becomes more difficult for reform to be denied its day."
Re: Parker Palmer on Movements
The Courage to Teach is one of the required books in our OCOM doctoral program. Parker Palmer beautifully describes the anatomy of a movement in this book, much of it echoing that wonderful article. I think it's a book worth getting.
and when you come down to it, our role as reformers of the healthcare system is not only technical, as acupuncturists, but educative. We help teach our patients about our medicine and their relationship to their health/bodies. Personally, I love to see the "aha!" light up patients' and students' eyes when they gain more insight into their relationship with their bodies. It's a liberating moment.
Re: Parker Palmer on Movements
To the undivided life!
Great article, Lisa. Thanks for pointing it out.
I'm struck again and again by the usefulness of qi as a set of metaphors for accomplishing undivided living. In my upcoming book, What is Qi?, I discuss this set of metaphors with an eye towards correcting long standing misconceptions, such as "qi is energy." I want modern readers to have ways to take hold of and use qi as a tool for undividing their lives...or connecting them.
After examining a wide range of Chinese sources on and about and of qi, I discovered that these metaphors concern interconnections and connectivity; communication; change; movement; and rhythm.
There's a synopsis of this in an article published in the Summer 2007 issue of Qi Journal, under the same title for anyone who wants a taste and can't wait for the book.
Qi stands as a primary example of ways in which the potency of Chinese medical ideas has been diluted and dispersed by contemporary educational standards...and how this power can be recovered andd developed, at least in part, through awareness of the integral meanings of the words themselves.
Makes me wonder even more who stole our language.
Ken