SI MONTHLY NEWS September 2006 Comments
From SI Exco News
Good Karma
A friend sent this to me attached to an email. I thought it embodied some of the Servas spirit and decided to share it with everybody. I am sure I have seen it before but feel it has many good points. The original had pleasant graphics which cannot be reproduced here due to space. Anyone who wants the original should contact me on newsletter[at]servas.org or jgiffould[at]aol.com
Instructions For Life
1. Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.
2. When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.
3. Follow the three R’s:
a) Respect for self,
b) Respect for others
c) Responsibility for all your actions.
4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.
5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
6. Don’t let a little dispute injure a great relationship.
7. When you realise you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.
8. Spend some time alone every day.
9. Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.
10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.
11. Live a good, honorable life. Then when you get older and think back, you’ll be able to enjoy it a second time.
12. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.
13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. don’t bring up the past.
14. Share your knowledge. It is a way to achieve immortality.
15. Be gentle with the earth.
16. Once a year, go to some place you’ve never been before.
17. Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.
18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.
19. Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon.
Working on nonviolence with people who killed
by Pat Patfoort
(This is the next article by Pat Patfoort who moderated the GA so well. Her last article was in August 2007. Again only parts have been extracted as the article is quite long. The full article can be provided by contacting the editor).
Since 6 years we have been working on a regular basis in 7 different prisons in Belgium with groups of about 10 prisoners. We met with the groups one or two times a week, over 8-10 sessions of 1h1/2 (with 1/2h more of private conversations afterwards). Altogether we did 20 such series of sessions, so we worked with about 200 detainees, mostly men, but also a few women. Most of them were imprisoned for a long term, because of terrible facts like having killed.
1) Content of the seminars
After the facilitator of the session had presented herself, her organisation and the seminar, the first session was one in which the detainees were asked, through a symbolic exercise, to think about themselves and were invited to tell the group afterwards some concrete facts in which skills and feelings about themselves showed up (like love, happiness, excitement, hope, irritation, anger, regret, hate).
Most of the time they participated very actively in thinking about themselves and usually they all told something afterwards to the group. As we did at the end of every session, we evaluated this first session, and usually people said they liked learning to know one another, they liked the atmosphere of listening and respect for one another, and they wanted to continue to thinking about discovering themselves.
2) What people learned
They learned about speaking with I-messages, how to deal with their own emotions (like frustrations, bottled-up anger, powerlessness, jealousy, being confronted with a lack of understanding or injustice, sorrow), accepting their own emotions, looking for their own motivations, empathy, giving people choices instead of putting them under pressure, being aware of different forms of communication (our intonation, our non-verbal communication). They became aware of how other people can see the reality in a different way from themselves, without being wrong. Other people can have other values.
They particularly liked to discuss with the group, especially in the way we did, which they were not used to at all: everyone could have his/her say, everyone was listened to and respected, people didn’t try to convince the other ones. So they did appreciate very much that the facilitator from the beginning made them talk one by one and listen to one another, that they didn’t talk at the same time or interrupted one another. This was new for most of them.
3) What changes did these seminars bring
I think this list gives a good idea of what these seminars can bring to people who committed terrible criminal deeds. We can summarize this list by saying that this kind of seminar makes people think more about how they behave and enables them to start changing their attitudes in the direction of nonviolence.
uploaded by Amelia
