10 years ago, I attended a panel talk at UNI. The stage was set for inviting a discussion-style offering between esteemed community voices and … the Dalai Lama. My initial disappointment around attending the panel vs. his keynote quickly faded as I watched. I had so wanted to focus on listening to what this world-renowned teacher had to say. Him. Just him. But for me, the dynamic that unfolded in the panel setting was exactly what I needed to see …
It was evident that His Holiness had come ready to have a collaborative exchange of equals with his panel mates. The understandable irony was … they were not of the same mindset. Over and over I witnessed accomplished individuals defer to him for insight and wisdom. He made a few attempts at positioning his responses with an ask for shared engagement, sighting that he was a simple Buddhist Monk. While wise and learned, he lacked the experiential time they had each spent in the gritty human trenches at the root of their contextual questioning. He continued to point out … “This is your community, these are situations you deal with every day. What is your emerging insight pointing to?” He was always met with the same response. They abandoned their voice and elevated his when they could have blended, intersecting their local perspective with his global, humanitarian view. Eventually his shoulders slumped, as I imagined they had countless times before, and he shifted into a pseudo keynote spiel about education that you knew he had spouted so many times before that it almost felt canned.
Fast forward to the present tense where a ringing call still lingers in the air. Let us each remember that All have a role to play in what’s unfolding within and around us.
It is up to every one of us to source deeper into the center of our personal/shared stories … to mine the assets and abilities that reside there and to bring that raw offering to the surface.
Internal Peace involves holding and tending the disparate and feuding parts within … the healing, integration and harmonization of the Self.
Interactive/External Peace is the continued expression of the ground we have gained in evolving the self to include others and our surroundings.
Only together can we craft and cultivate what it means to reinstitute the “humane” back into the human experience. For Self/Other/All of Life. The world is waiting.
—Noelle Holmes, Prairiewoods board member