in utrumque partes
On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 5:18 PM, a potential friend wrote:
Hi,
I came across your website awhile back and was wondering if you could tell me a little bit more about your organization?
Here are some words I use to describe our work. They do not fit precisely for everybody involved, as we are defined by our work, our work together, and not by loyalty to a central authority.
ABC, Association Building Community, is an intentional, distributed community based in Berkeley CA that exists to support people working together to develop the process arts for the building of communities that make peace.
Guardians of Peace is a developing community of conflict facilitators and groups formed into a training partnership in order to practice under most circumstances the process arts that deal explicitly with many kinds of conflict. In practice this looks like cross training between martial arts (like aikido, for instance) and group process facilitation (like mediation, Nonviolent Communication, psychotherapy, and many other process arts). Dedicated Guardians, as opposed to apprentices or students of one or another method, work together and individually inviting everyone they meet to redefine peace as conflict done well.
Practice
Ongoing morning classes
Brandon teaches Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings from 7-8am in the park, and you are MOST welcome to come play. Tuesdays and Thursdays are for scheduling individual tutorials (not always private) and no formal instruction is guaranteed. We will meet most often in the green on Hearst St. between Milvia and Bonita. If the details need to change, updates will be posted (time and place) before bed the night before, in the morning before you set out please go to freeaiki.com to see Twitter updates in the mid-left column.
The format will be flexible but will usually look like:
1. mark the training area boundary and cross it as a group for misogi (cleaning of foreign objects)
2. breathing exercise and stretches
3. light taijutsu (open hand techniques) w falls-optional
4. weapons (bring both bokken and jo if you are able).
In the spring Brandon will begin offering quarter-hour pieces of Martial Nonviolence which is an improvisational conflict facilitation practice of his devising. He also hopes to work more extensively with other people wanting to refine their conflict skills and continue to build the community of practice known as Guardians of Peace. Free-will donations are welcome but never required, as there are no organizations involved yet, or formal agreements, and everyone is responsible for their own training and level of risk.
Map: http://tinyurl.com/guardiansaiki
Community
Everyone who responds to the surge of energy they feel when they hear that conflict itself can be an art of peace.
Circle
Everyone who contributes directly to the governance and development of the Guardians of Peace as an entity.
Partnership
Everyone who chooses the public role "Guardian" and trains with others in specific physical, emotional, and intellectual process arts through which their guardianship is realized.
Idea
"Peace is conflict done well" (sm)
... is being carefully practiced, learned, and modeled in our training. Rather than sell a fantasy of Safety we guard the literal and metaphorical places where peace is a practice, lives, and thrives.
Through martial non-violence (sm) we work to thaw the cold-hearted and fearful machinations that clutch for Security at the expense of others. Fears about attack, victimization, failure, and dying are often quite reasonable. Locating them in an abstract "enemy" or "evil" most often results in being less rather than more prepared to respond well.
There are shadows for sale today, possibly more so than ever before. They whispers that human beings can have relationships free of conflict by crushing literal enemies, suppressing terror and dissent, and avoiding friction. People who practice peace know that the resistance felt when the door of conflict is pushed open comes from the creative friction that can power hope, illuminate dreams for the future, and drive the adaptation necessary for our survival as a species.
We will be a training partnership of individuals committed to working well with conflict no matter its root or character.
Working well with conflict will reliably lead to mysterious difficulties. Often we will lack the expertise to create a useful response in a specific situation. Awareness of this certainty makes us more rather than less able to function. It can and will also lead to:
* building community on purpose to have the support we need to practice this work authentically,
* learning to tell (speak) the differences that makes human beings work,
* readiness to make a difference (needed departures from business as usual) to improve the felt quality of life,
* a growing awareness that best practices in all dealings need movement in the directions of sustainability that is profoundly relational (ecological, psychological, mythological)
* and much more as the popular imagination takes up the ideas involved...
for additional information please call Toll Free: (866) 236-0346 or email: brandon at abcglobal dot net
