Kindness

My partner is back in chemotherapy. We have been letting our friends and family know, making plans around work, schedules, accommodations, travel and seeing LOTS of health care providers. I have an excellent vantage point; I am not the one dealing with the physical, mental, and emotional stress of treatment, but I have ringside seats for everything. And from where I’m sitting, I think the most important virtue in the world is kindness.

Throughout all the interactions of recent weeks my partner has been treated with kindness. By doctors patiently explaining things she didn’t really want to hear, by nurses and technicians drawing blood and talking about side effects, by friends offering support in a myriad of ways . . .

Suffice it to say that kindness has been clearly evident in our daily lives, and has been making all the difference in how those days go.

I’ve always felt that kindness is grossly underrated. It is a simple concept and I believe it is inherent in each of us. But as with any inherent ability - to hit a golf ball or bake amazing bread - the key is practice.

How do we impress upon our children the importance of kindness? A good first step is always by making the unconscious, conscious. Bringing kindness to consciousness is easy enough. In the school where I work, we have a bulletin board with a crazy looking bird sticking out of it in a 3-D flurry of pink feathers. This bird is our GAK. On this bulletin board are tacked up dozens of tiny eggs that each record a Genuine Act of Kindness. Every Thursday morning in the school opening, we read out GAK’s. They are read by students or teachers and are meant to recognize the kindness of anyone in our school community – students first and foremost, but also teachers and aides and the secretary and the bus driver and parent volunteers and the library volunteers and the hot lunch providers and . . . well, you get the picture. We are acknowledging and reinforcing the virtue of kindness in the students but more importantly, we have showcased a particular aspect of life for them to observe and evaluate.

This is how we learn, is it not? We observe, we mimic, we internalize. Kids need to have kindness highlighted for them. With the GAK program, they learn what it is and then they watch for it. They become attuned to it, whether they are involved in the act or not. They have opportunities to observe the offering as well as the acceptance of kindness and they get to see the results for both parties. This is the thing I most love to see on the playground. One child stopping to assist another is great; three more children observing the interaction and feeling the energy created by an act of kindness is of immeasurable value.

But of course, there is always the risk of the focus sliding to the “reward”. A kindergarten student stood holding open the school door all recess in anticipation of the returning students, and when I asked her to close it and keep the warm air in, she replied, “But I want to be GAK’d!”

I watched this trend happen in a previous school and decided to find another route to helping kids explore kindness. It actually started as I stared at my poster of the Circle of Courage by George Blue Bird, Sr. I felt confident that my classroom gave children ample opportunity to experience and explore the other three virtues in the circle: Mastery, Independence and Belonging. But I felt the fourth virtue of Generosity was not a tangible part of my grade four program. So I created the Secret Agent Society. We each chose secret agent code names. We all took an oath of secrecy that only our class would know about the SAS. I made the kids Mission Journals in which they would record their weekly missions. Every Monday, they drew a slip from the can which held the names of every member of our school community. By Friday, they had to have secretly done something to make their target’s day a little brighter. Our goal was to bring smiles of happiness to the faces of our subjects.

Then the agent had to write it up in his or her journal (and my expectations of how creative or suspenseful their mission reports had to be, was commensurate with their writing ability) and make an oral report to the SAS on Friday morning as we ate our snacks. I liked the days when someone would report on their mission and, because of the secrecy component, would end with, “But I don’t know if they smiled or not.” Someone else would often fill it in for them, reporting on a smile or a response that the agent didn’t get to see. But even more, I liked the days when someone would report their mission, without benefit of knowing the result and would appear to be just as satisfied and pleased as if they had received a big, direct ‘thank you’.

It was fun – they got to be sneaky and we made up SAS drills for how to camouflage what we were doing if non-agents came into the room while we were having the oral reports or writing up mission logs. We even made up code names for the subjects. (Had to monitor that a little!)

Can we teach kindness? No. We can’t teach intelligence or talent either. Our job is to foster these things.

We strive to provide opportunities for students to recognize kindness, to appreciate its value, to truly feel its benefits and to find ways to practice incorporating it into their lives in a meaningful way.

Monica is the author of "Thanks for chucking that at the wall instead of me."

Lessons from the Kindergarten room

It might be true – that whole thing about learning everything you really need to know back in Kindergarten. I’d forgotten, until recently, when I returned to Kindergarten as a temporary helper. I have been remembering my lessons from Kindergarten: how much more fun it is to paint a face rather than a piece of paper, how worked up adults can get over irrelevant things, how annoying it is to have to wait in line.

But those other things too; how quickly hurts go away when a hug is involved, that learning is exciting, and how much better everything is when you have a friend – teeter totters, building forts out of hockey nets and parachutes, and sharing secrets.

Every child at every age is a miracle, but there is something special about little ones in their very first year of school. Never again will they hug their teachers or classmates with such love. I watch them and wonder how long it will take for them to stop being amazed at what they hear and see at school. Will they be able to maintain this sense of wonder?

In every child in every classroom hides the learner that they were in that first year. Perhaps they were precocious, like Karly, over-enunciating to correct me when I heard “blue” and handed her blue construction paper. “No Monica! G-G-GLue.” Or maybe they were shy and sweet like Darryl with his sunshine smile and gentle hugs. Whoever their Kindergarten teacher met is still there. And so is their sense of wonder and curiosity. So is their kindness and playfulness. And judging by the way those characteristics have come back to the surface in me as I have spent time with the five year olds, I’d guess they are not so deeply buried in our fourth graders, our sixth graders, and even (dare I say it?) our eighth graders.

We’ve survived September. The routines are set and everyone is settling in. But let’s not settle too deeply. Let’s keep looking for what sparks imagination and brings out the natural learner in each of our students. Let’s keep looking for their best selves.

Here are a few fun moments from my time in the K, 1, 2 class.

During sharing, a kid who is new to the school was on the hot seat. She didn’t have anything specific to share so the teacher asked if anyone had a question for her. Several hands shot up and the little girl pointed to the one being stabbed most furiously into the air.
“How many teeth have you lost?” the little boy asked.
“Six,” she replied without hesitation.
There was nodding and murmuring from all over the carpet. Six was good. She wasn’t ahead of too many of them and she wasn’t a baby. Hard to know for sure, but this disclosure may have been responsible for her instant acceptance into a riotous game of British Bulldog later in the morning.


In the gym, a little girl ran screaming by me in the World’s Biggest Tag Game. Then she stopped and ran back to me, stood perfectly still and calm and said, “Guess what?”
“What?” I asked.
She put her finger on her cheek. “Once a spider bit me right here.” And she was gone, running and screaming into the mass of bodies.


On the playground, the kids saw an old friend. They ran up to the adult they all clearly loved and gave her hugs. One ran off while still updating the woman. I didn’t hear it all, but by the time the little one got to the top of the play structure, her voice carried nicely across the playground. “Kindergarten is WAY too long.”


It happened so fast, I couldn’t even react. We were outside. It was hot. One kid took off a heavy hoodie; another, a sweater. They had t-shirts on.
“Good idea,” I said.
Suddenly bare tummies were everywhere. Half the class was topless before you could say ‘bellybutton bouquet.’ Then I forgot about the various stages of undress and took them all inside for a drink. One made a break for the room and I grabbed her with her warm little fat-puppy tummy and directed her back outside.
“No, we have to go outside and get our clothes on before we go back in the classroom.”
I made a point of reassuring the classroom teacher when I clarified the shirts-on policy with her: “Don’t you worry,” I said. “I had mine on the whole time.”


I wandered around with the pink sweater for several minutes, showing it to the five year olds I thought might own it, then just asking kids if they even recognized it. Finally I got to Karly who promptly said, “It’s Julia’s.”
“I should have come to you first,” I told Karly.
She shrugged. “I don’t mind helping.”


Monica is the author of "Thanks for chucking that at the wall instead of me."

Emotional Literacy

Human beings are emotional as well as rational. Regardless of the context, we function best when these two parts of our whole are in balance. There is a great deal of research on emotional intelligence and its benefits in all walks of life, including our professional lives. In the world of finance, business, and technology, more and more companies are recognizing that it is not intelligence which creates a competitive advantage but the collective emotional intelligence of their staff: the ability to understand self and others is acknowledged as the new advantage in today’s market.

We live in a global village that must learn to relate and communicate. As educators, we know how to help our students find and develop their intellectual strengths. But how much of our time is devoted to helping students understand themselves, to recognize and enhance the strengths of their emotional intelligence?

I believe the first step to enhancing emotional intelligence is to develop emotional literacy. Schools have done well with the literacy of rational thinking. By the time they graduate, our children speak fluidly about a huge range of topics of the intellect, but ask a young person about his feelings or his relationships or his understanding of himself and watch the fluency dwindle to a halting, embarrassed stutter. The language of our humanity is somewhat lop-sided.

Literacy begins with vocabulary. The next time you do a check-in with a group of kids, ask them how they are feeling and do not allow use of the words good, great, fine, okay, etc. See how they do. We need to be developing emotional vocabulary from a very early age. Parents need to label affective states for infants and toddlers. Identification through observation. “You feel happy.” “She feels worried.” “I feel frightened.”

Next we need to connect the words to feelings through discussion of experiences. “When the dog was lost, I felt worried.” This exercise is not limited to little children. We need to do this with kids throughout their development. It strengthens understanding of the terms when they are little and, as they grow older, it provides insight into how we each respond to events. We need to understand that a situation may create different feelings in different people. How easy and erroneous it is to assume that others are seeing and experiencing things the same way we are.

Thirdly, we need to teach recognition by connecting feelings to body sensations. “Worry makes my stomach jumpy and my hands want to move.” “When you were angry this morning, where in your body did you feel your anger?” The ability to recognize emotions in the body is the first step toward control of emotions in small children. As we grow older, trusting the information our body provides about our emotional responses may help us to avoid the mixed messages we often send when there is a conflict between what we feel and what our mind tells us we should feel. Our bodies do not lie.

When children can recognize and name their own emotions, they can begin to read emotions more accurately in others. We can help by pointing out opportunities to practice. “How do you think it felt for her when that happened?” “When you saw his face, how do you think he was feeling?” The benefits of this ability to read the emotions of others are obvious. It is surprising then, that we assume this skill is inherent and do not provide opportunities for practice beyond a very early age.

Lastly, we can teach and model “I messages” which shift comments away from blaming and shaming and allow for more accurate communication. “I feel nervous when you don’t listen in the gym.” “I feel unappreciated when you complain about the field trip I planned.” Clear I messages are harder for kids to misinterpret as simply, “You’re bad.”

With a little mindfulness and a watchful eye, the everyday events of our days can provide many opportunities to develop emotional literacy without adding another class to the curriculum. Imagine the difference it will make in our families and in our classrooms when we manage to raise a generation who speak easily about their own strengths and weaknesses, about their hopes, about their relationships.

The business world also awaits this generation. In the words of Daniel Goleman:
". . . imagine the benefits for work of being skilled in the basic emotional competencies – being attuned to the feelings of those we deal with, being able to handle disagreements so they do not escalate, having the ability to get into flow states while doing our work. Leadership is not domination, but the art of persuading people to work toward a common goal. And in terms of managing our own career, there may be nothing more essential than recognizing our deepest feelings about what we do – and what changes might make us more truly satisfied with our work."
p. 149 Emotional Intelligence

Monica is the author of "Thanks for chucking that at the wall instead of me."

Problem Solving

“Problem solving” is a term borrowed from Life Space Crisis Intervention. At the Regional Support Centre where I worked, it became our term for talking. Many of our kids came to us with negative mindsets about talking. When we used the word “talk,” most kids heard “lecture,” or “scold,” or “trouble.” When we said it was time to “problem-solve,” the response was different. They soon learned this meant that they would get to tell their side of the story and it would be listened to without judgment. They also learned that they had a pretty good shot at resolving the problem.

I will not attempt to explain the ideas of Dr. Long and Dr. Wood. I wholeheartedly recommend that you learn about Life Space Crisis Intervention for yourself. What I will do is tell you what LSCI means for me.

One of the things I lacked early in my career was an idea of who I needed to be during a student’s crisis. I assumed my job was that of moral thermometer. I felt the kids often lacked clear ideas about right and wrong and I can remember listening to kids tell me stories while I reminded myself to look disapproving. I actually distracted myself from being a good listener, because I thought it was my job to frown or cluck my tongue when the story got to the part about sneaking out the bedroom window or slashing a tire or running away from the police. I thought the kids would interpret a neutral face as condoning their behaviour.

LSCI changed that completely. It requires that I be present with kids when they are upset, help them be calm enough to talk, and listen to their story with no judgment. That is the first phase. After that, I will use questions and clarification to determine the details of the events as clearly as possible. Last, I will determine what the situation calls for, choose a direction to move in, and assist the students to see the meaning behind their actions. Hopefully, the result is learning for the students, about their patterns of behaviour, about how those patterns negatively affect their lives, about how they can work to change them. Sometimes, it takes a lot of problem solving just to help a student see the pattern and then a whole lot more to begin to address it. The point is, LSCI provides a framework to use and a role for the adult to play. Knowing my role in dealing with kids was something more like counsellor, coach, or friend, was far more appealing to me than Dispenser of Justice. When I began to use LSCI, I was amazed to find that once kids had worked through a problem with me and had even been able to see their contribution to the problem, they were far more willing to discuss consequences.

Monica is the author of "Thanks for chucking that at the wall instead of me."

Conflict (part 2)

As mentioned in the first part of this discussion, I needed to do some learning to move from my mindset of conflict as detour to conflict as benefit. The first thing I had to learn was that the only person I can control in a conflict situation is myself. Seems a simple concept, doesn’t it?

After dealing with a conflict, I would go over it again in my head—the intellectual process as well as the emotional one—and I soon recognized how much energy I expended trying to control the student’s behaviour and choices. When I finally internalized that I had no control over their part, I was able to relax more, listen better, and ironically, outcomes immediately started to be more positive. I focused on staying present: as I trained myself to stop mapping the route of the discussion and just let it unfold, my instincts became more actively involved.

Next, I learned about conflict styles: passive, assertive, aggressive.
Some of these styles work well together to resolve conflicts – two assertive people will have a positive resolution in no time. However, an aggressive and a passive person will likely have very brief conflicts which appear to be over quickly and easily, but they will have an ongoing pattern of the same types of conflicts over and over in high frequency. This is because the passive person is backing down, apologizing, making it better, and the issue is buried, but not dead.

Because I knew I could be aggressive when not mindful, I practiced very concrete behaviours in conflict situations. For example, because the other participant was usually smaller than me, I would sit or kneel down if possible. Because I had a tendency to point (not good for kids with hair triggers), I sometimes put my hands in my pockets. Because I knew I could get loud, I tried to lower my voice right away.

Incidentally, people in conflict tend to mirror the behaviour of the other person, which means the more mindful participant (read: adult) needs to make sure they do not mirror aggressive behaviours of angry kids and be mindful of what the other participant is seeing in the mirror. (Try this sometime with anyone you find too loud: Talk softly and slowly and watch them relax and talk more quietly.)

Know your style and adjust for it. If you are passive, push yourself forward, if you are aggressive, hold yourself back. Whatever the child’s style, keep it in mind and don’t be detoured by style over content.

Stress is a huge contributor to conflict situations and we all experience stress of different kinds. Developmental stress: birth to death and everything in between! Potty training, training bras, bra burning, burning urination . . . developmental stress is constant in the growing and learning process. Sometimes we forget how much this is contributing to conflicts that arise with kids. Psychological stress: what kids believe about themselves. This is a factor for many kids and how “irrational beliefs” get in their heads can be pretty mystifying but it happens all the time. I had a student tell the class that when he was little, he believed that being sent to his room meant that his mom did not love him anymore. Reality stress: things go wrong in daily life! Here’s where celebrating mistakes and not getting caught up in perfection can relieve stress for kids. Some kids are stressed out by any mistake they make. Physical stress: tired, sick, sore, growing!

Understanding how these impacted me helped me to monitor myself in conflict situations: “Give this a little extra thought – you didn’t get enough sleep last night.” It also gave me a little extra compassion for the student and a bit more help in depersonalizing the aggressive behaviour that was probably not so much about me at all.

Finally, I learned about how the conflict cycle works. I learned what was happening so that I could step outside of it and see it as an entity outside myself. I could say, “Oh, this student is experiencing a stressful incident I am unaware of and their feelings have created a negative behaviour directed at me. I will not respond to the negative behaviour but will use my impressive skills to determine what created the initial stress and address it first, thus de-stressing the child, creating a stronger bond between us and finally, addressing the negative behaviour in a calm, supportive manner.”

Well, maybe it didn’t go exactly like that. Maybe it was more like, “Don’t yell! Find out what’s really going on and then you can punish him later!” Incidentally, by the time we worked through the conflict, I never felt like punishing them. I usually felt more like hugging them. And while they started out on the attack, they were more likely than I to bring up the topic of restitution.

Conflict can be positive. The details of working through the conflict will vary from one helping adult to another. At the Centre, we used a method called Problem-solving. But that’s a topic for another day. Or another post.

If you want to read more about this view of conflict, please check out chapters four and five of Thanks for chucking that at the wall instead of me.

Monica is the author of "Thanks for chucking that at the wall instead of me."

Conflict (part 1)

One of the biggest challenges of any relationship is dealing with conflict. Regardless of the nature of the relationship – staff/student, colleagues, family, or partnership – how we handle our conflicts will help to determine the quality of the relationship.

I don’t know anyone who hears the word conflict and feels a warm fuzzy glow of anticipation. We tend to attach negative connotations to the word, in varying degrees. Our emotional response to conflict has a lot to do with how we define it, and that definition is largely created within the culture of our family of origin. In families where agreeing and getting along is valued highly, any disagreement may be considered a conflict. On the other hand, a family that enjoys a healthy debate may not consider the same situation to be a conflict at all. But once we have decided that we are encountering a conflict situation, we each have a set of emotions and behaviours that are automatically engaged.

In actuality, the definition of conflict is simply a situation in which there are opposing ideas, opinions, or wishes. Mediation Services of Canada begin their literature with the following basic precepts:
1) Conflict is a natural and inevitable part of life.
2) Conflict happens even in the best personal and professional relationships.
3) In itself, conflict is neither bad nor good. It can be constructive if handled properly and destructive if handled poorly. http://www.mediationserviceswpg.ca/

Until I worked at the regional Support Centre, an alternative school setting for students with behavioural challenges, I would have been surprised by Mediation Services’ third point: I had no consistent evidence in my life to support the idea that conflict could be constructive – at least none that I had paid attention to. I considered conflict something best avoided and while outcomes of conflict could be positive, I rarely saw the actual process as valuable.

When I worked at the Centre, where conflict was part of every day, I learned that conflict could have consistently positive results in relationships with our students. However, I had a lot to learn before that realization became a practice with consistent results.

I had to learn about the nature of conflict itself: to see it as a process with understandable parts and predictable patterns. I had to understand and internalize the notion that there was nothing that I could control in a conflict situation except myself. (That’s harder than it sounds!) I also had to learn about the things that contribute to conflict and the different styles that people employ when dealing with conflict.

I was willing and able to learn all of that, but what I needed most was an understanding of my own behaviour in a conflict situation and confidence in controlling it.


Monica is the author of "Thanks for chucking that at the wall instead of me."

Swimming Lessons

Swimming Lessons

I’m about six years old and I am at swimming lessons. I have been here everyday for a week and I have yet to get in the water. I stand paralyzed on the pool deck staring in horror at the big body of water. The swim instructor, Valerie, is gently trying to persuade me for the umpteenth time to get into the water. My mother is in the stands yelling to Valerie, “throw her in or I’ll come down there and throw her in myself”.

The interesting thing about this is that my mom has a deathly fear of water. As she is fond of saying, she gets disoriented in the shower. So why would she want Valerie to chuck me into the drink so mercilessly? For precisely that reason. My mom was determined that I would not go through life with the same fear of water with which she lived.

I don’t really remember this incident. It is family folklore but apparently I did end up in the water (with “help”) and I have never looked back. Once I got in, I did not want to get out. I was a fish, just like my big sister, my big brother, and my dad. In fact, it is safe to say, that I have some serious water-loving genes. I swim regularly and the rumours persist around my transformation to Mermaid during full moons.

Are you confused? How do the scared kid and the Mermaid fit together and what, pray tell, is the point of this story?

My point is this: my natural inclination is to love water and feel perfectly safe in it. My learned behaviour was to fear water. My mom never told me to fear water, I just felt her fear and adopted it as my own. That’s what kids do. They feel our responses to things and make unconscious interpretations based on those feelings. I felt my mom’s fear of water and decided at an unconscious level, that water was scary.

Thankfully, my mom did not allow me to stand pat on my erroneous interpretation about the scariness of water. She made sure I got past my adopted feelings and found my truth.

I think it is really important for all adults to be aware of this phenomenon. We all have our fears and insecurities. We may be very good at hiding them from other adults because adults can be fooled by camouflage. Kids can’t. They’re not paying any attention to our carefully constructed “presentation”. They are little sponges, hanging around, soaking up our true feelings and making sense of that information as best they can.

I want to be more aware of the signals I send to kids. If I think some hang up of mine is affecting someone in my area of influence, I have to be able to talk about it. I care enough about the kids in my life, to push myself out of my comfort zone and talk about my fears. In fact, being willing to do that, has been the catalyst for actually looking at and addressing some of those fears.

And I continue to examine my fears to make sure they are my own, not someone else’s that I adopted long ago and carried with me into adulthood.

Challenge for the day: pick a swimming pool you’ve been avoiding and jump in. You never know . . . maybe you’re a mermaid too!






Monica is the author of "Thanks for chucking that at the wall instead of me."

Compassionate education

Compassion in Education

Compassionate education might be an oxymoron to some people. I’ve talked to lots of folks who would say it was; who look back on their own schooling as a time and place devoid of compassion for their individual struggle or story.
I think compassion drains out of our classrooms when we spend more time seeing a group in front of us than we do a collection of individuals. This is one of the most important challenges for educators; to hold a micro-society in one hand – where kids learn about give and take, getting along, problem-solving, co-operation, and so many other key elements of living with others. In the other hand, we hold a jostling crowd of unique individuals, each with distinct needs, strengths, interests and histories.
A compassionate classroom acknowledges and strives to respect this balance. I believe compassion is a practice – one that can be nurtured and strengthened in ourselves; one that can be fostered in our students. The Dalai Lama says that “true compassion is not just an emotional response but a firm commitment founded on reason. Therefore, a truly compassionate attitude towards others does not change even if they behave negatively.” *
However, even the Dalai Lama concedes that developing this kind of compassion is not easy.
In order to transform compassion in myself from a conscious response for a select few to an unconscious and universal practice, I put myself on a four step program. I imagine myself moving steadily through these steps, but of course, I jump forward and slip back.
Step 1: I know someone and in their story, I find something which elicits my compassion for them.
Step 2: Although, I am presented with behaviour which does not elicit compassion, I can access my compassion by getting to know this person, hearing their story and finding something which brings my compassion forward.
Step 3: When confronted with a person who invokes a negative reaction in me, I can temper my response because, cognitively, I accept that everyone has their own story, challenges, and pain whether I am aware of it or not. Therefore, they deserve my compassion.
Step 4: I approach all people with compassion: I have internalized step three and it is no longer a cognitive process but an automatic emotional response.
What step am I on, you ask. Well, as with most things, you could say I’m on a sliding scale! I spoke with a friend about this topic and she thought she was a stage 3 or 4 with the population of troubled youth she worked with but a 1 with their parents. It’s a process. But the important thing is to be engaged in making it a practice.
And, again, as with all things, I have little hope of developing compassion for others if I am unable to treat myself with compassion. Perhaps the hardest is first; if I can find compassion for myself, with full knowledge of all my faults and foibles, it will be so much easier with others. Aren’t we always hardest on ourselves?
Why is it so important to bring compassion into our lives and into our classrooms? Because we are losing compassion in our world. It is not a right to be treated with compassion in our society, even though every human being would choose to be treated with compassion. We have a tendency to decide who deserves compassion and dole it out like a reward or sometimes, a bargaining chip.
Last year the provincial police called my home to solicit donations for their fundraising campaign and when I asked what the money was for, I was informed that the money would be split between preventative youth initiatives and a legal fund working towards harsher penalties for offenders. We seem to be at a crossroads as a society, torn between our collective compassion and our collective fear.
Each of us has experienced the power of compassion, both as recipient and giver. We have seen how change can occur in stuck places, how a shift can come when true compassion is accessed. We have likely all experienced being really upset with someone and thinking that we could never forgive them, but somehow we find compassion for their situation, whatever that is, and our feelings shift. Or we are able to focus on them as a person and not fixate on the perceived wrong they have done us, and we find compassion . . . and things change.
The generation of kids we are working with, will take charge of our collective future. Imagine what could be if they did so with the deep belief that every human being deserves compassion, regardless of their ideology, their past, their choices or even their behaviour.

“Compassion is not religious business, it is human business, it is not a luxury, it is essential for our own peace and mental stability, it is essential for our human survival.”
-His Holiness the Dalai Lama

*(Compassion and the Individual retrieved May 24, 2007 from www.dalailama.com/page.166.htm)
Also of interest:
Nurturing Compassion & Educating the Heart
Vancouver Dialogues 2006
http://www.dalailamacenter.org/vancouverdialogues/2006/nurturing.php#nurturing


Monica is the author of "Thanks for chucking that at the wall instead of me."