"A Love-centered Way," Excerpt from Culture Shift: Nonviolence at Work
Where do you spend your time? Whether you go to an office or volunteer with a local organization, whether you care for family or gather with a religious group, Pace e Bene’s new book Culture Shift: Nonviolence at Work offers skills and approaches to bring nonviolence into your working relationships. Author Kit Miller wrote this book thinking beyond the typical 9-5 jobs, seeing leadership in the multitude of places where we dedicate our efforts.
In a time where so many of us ask ourselves what we can do to make things better, Culture Shift helps us to see opportunities to show up more fully and create spaces where every person feels heard and is supported in their humanity. Check out an excerpt below.
“With wisdom, love, and a wealth of practical experience, Kit Miller shows us how nonviolence can be a force for good and how it can transform our work and our lives. This book is a treasure. I look forward to exploring its many facets with our Zen community.”
Nonviolence supports and compels us to move out of our conditioned acceptance of powerless identities and to take responsibility for change in any way, at any scale. In a culture laced with more forms of violence than we can count, nonviolence invites us to move toward our potential as changemakers in personal, political, and professional ways.
Nonviolence is often misunderstood. Encompassing far more than the absence of violence, the field of nonviolence includes thousands of skills, practices, and actions. Nonviolence has been described in many ways—as a philosophy or way of life, a science or art; a toolbox for change, a set of solutions and alternatives, and so forth. The King Center in Atlanta, Georgia, defines nonviolence as a love-centered way of thinking, speaking, acting, and engaging that leads to personal, cultural, and societal transformation. In short, nonviolence is not passivity, or weakness, or doing nothing.
Nonviolence at work takes a thousand forms. Here are a few you might recognize:
Standing up for colleagues who are overlooked.
Helping coworkers (and others) sort out a conflict.
Changing discriminatory and unjust policies.
Ensuring events and services are accessible to all.
Speaking up when there’s a problem.
Taking responsibility for solving problems, regardless of who created them.
Challenging mistreatment.
Asking for help rather than going it alone.
If you lead your life this way already, or are trying to, and don’t think of it as nonviolence, that’s OK. Even without that intentional framing, these approaches are still powerful. In word and action, over time, they do more good and less harm. They contribute to the kind of nonviolence that Dr. King, James Lawson, Gandhi, Dorothy Day, and others lived, and are also described as principled nonviolence. I invite you to try out this perspective—that you may be acting nonviolently—while reading and see how it feels.
Ready for more? Culture Shift: Nonviolence at Work will be released on September 10, 2024, but you can preorder your copy here.