Laura Van Dernoot Lipsky Quotes

Trauma stewardship is not simply an idea. It can be defined as a daily practice through which individuals, organizations, and societies tend to the hardship, pain, or trauma experienced by humans, other living beings, or our planet itself.

Plain and simple, passion is a commitment without condition. It requires intensity for caring about something without regard to difficulty.

The Soto Zen priest Suzuki Roshi said, “All of you are perfect, and you could use a little improvement.

To allow ourselves to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful. Thomas Merton, American Catholic theologian, poet, author, and social activist

Being passionate is about recognizing what makes you happy, focusing on and learning about it, and, ultimately, doing it in the name of your own satisfaction and pleasure.

We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves.” —Albert Camus, philosopher and author

Compassion provides us the breathing room we need to keep on keeping on. It also allows us to evolve: When we lack compassion, we become significantly stifled in our ability to connect with ourselves, with others, and with our lives.

How is this working for my deepest, most honest self? How is this working for those I serve? How is this sustainable? What is a more functional way to respond?

Abandon any hope of fruition. The key instruction is to stay in the present. Don’t get caught up in hopes of what you’ll achieve and how good your situation will be some day in the future. What you do right now is what matters. Pema Chödrön, Tibetan Buddhist nun and resident teacher of Gampo Abbey, Nova Scotia

If we lived in a society where equity, respect, access, and justice were realized, and unearned privilege and inequality and oppression were transformed, the impact of trauma exposure in our lives would look dramatically different. Suffering would still occur. People would sustain injuries and contract illnesses and even hurt each other. The difference is that we would only have to confront that suffering at face value: an injury, an illness, a hurtful act. We would not have to wonder if disparities between rich and poor, white people and people of color, heterosexual people and gay/lesbian/bi/transgendered people, and so on contributed to the suffering. We would not have to wonder if we personally benefit from the disparity that underlies the suffering. We would not have to wonder if we are vulnerable to the same disparity. We would not have to decide whether we should act to change the disparity, or if we should blame the person suffering for the disparity, or if we should ignore the disparity altogether.

When we refer to trauma exposure response, we are talking about the ways in which the world looks and feels like a different place to you as a result of your doing your work.

trauma stewardship refers to the entire conversation about how we come to do this work, how we are affected by it, and how we make sense of and learn from our experiences

Thich Nhat Hanh gives a talk in which he asks if we should have to work to appreciate the beauty in life. He replies that no, we should not ever have to work to take in what is beautiful, what is precious, what is sacred; we should simply be open to absorbing life’s blessings as often as they present themselves. Because, as he says,“Suffering is not enough.”Thich Nhat Hanh joins other masters who encourage us to be completely present for all things wonderful; if we are going to be present for life’s suffering, we will need all the nourishment and rejuvenation that comes from life’s beauty.

Humor gives me physical and psychological energy; as I have become more open and alive, my laugh has changed. I laugh really loud now, from deep in the belly, and that’s a good thing. Physiologically that gives you an internal massage of your organs.

I was endlessly vigilant. I focused my energy on controlling my surroundings. I managed my new reality by trying to will into existence a way to move through each day. I was entirely uncentered. For anyone who can relate to this, you know that substituting an external architecture for an internal sense of structure can be bulletproof for a time. But only for a time.

Breathing is the one regular, life-sustaining process we can always observe within ourselves. It is evidence of the present moment rising and passing away. It is a constant reminder that everything, including our own lives, is subject to a universal law, the law of impermanence. This perspective can free us to realize the myriad choices we have to live harmoniously, with deeper awareness, in this life. The

Which reality should we focus on? Should we focus on the trauma itself? Should we focus on the heroism of women, men, and children who continue to struggle? Should we focus on the economic, environmental, and political practices, past and present, that have created conditions in which violence and destruction thrive? Or should we focus on the amazing capacity of humans to survive, help, love, repent? If we choose wrong—or, worse yet, if our attention strays—how much more suffering will go unnoticed

One example of systematic oppression is structural violence. This concept was introduced in the 1970s by Johan Galtung, a pioneering Norwegian researcher in peace and conflict, and founder of the International Peace Research Institute. He describes structural violence as “a form of violence which corresponds with the systematic ways in which a given social structure or social institution kills people slowly by preventing them from meeting their basic needs. Institutionalized elitism, ethnocentricism, classism, racism, sexism, adultism, nationalism, heterosexism and ageism are just some examples of structural violence. Life spans are reduced when people are socially dominated, politically oppressed, or economically exploited. Structural violence and direct violence are highly interdependent. Structural violence inevitably produces conflict and often direct violence including family violence, racial violence, hate crimes, terrorism, genocide, and war.

I want to believe that we can all agree that no human being deserves to die abandoned and alone. I want to believe that but in a world where people use drugs rather than go to a hospital where they've already been treated poorly, choose to die alone at home or next to a riverbank, I'm not so sure. America remains the only country on the planet where it's easier to get high than it is to get help. When crises pile on top of each other, humans tend to dissociate. It's hard to think about the climate crisis when you're worried about paying your electric bill. The more emotionally depleted we are, the more we revert to our lizard brains and the more inured we become to the suffering of others. 'I got traps that will hurt you and I will hunt you down.' Lizard brain warps our sense of self, it undercuts our health, and it literally turns us into victims of our own toxic individualism. 'Americans are drowning in the lack of grace, the lack of humility, the complete inability to assume well about others', my friend, the trauma expert, Laura van Dernoot Lipsky, said.

Somewhere between internalizing an ethic of martyrdom and ignoring ongoing crises lies the balance that we must find in order to sustain our work.

We can stop and create an intention for any aspect of our lives.​ As​ a boy, Deepak Chopra watched the practitioners who regularly rose​ before dawn to gather for daily meditations. In The Book of Secrets, he​ explains that by greeting the sun upon its arrival, the meditators​ believed they could influence the day. Every morning, they expressed​ an intention for meeting their purpose that day. For us, too, creating​ an intention is like allowing sunlight to flood the next few steps in​ front of us.

When we speak up for people or creatures or environments that are unable to speak for themselves, we may gradually lose the ability to distinguish their voices from our own.

It can be very hard to reduce our identification with work, let​ alone break the addiction to overwork that often results.These ways​ of being are feverishly supported in certain societies.When I lived in​ Guatemala, I’d often be invited to sit with someone’s family in a small​ indigenous community, high up in the mountains, and talk with them​ for hours. They posed many questions, but never once was I asked,​ “What do you do?” In Central America, Japan, Mexico,New Zealand,​ and throughout Europe, people ask where you live, how your family​ is, what crops grow near your home, what you think of their country,​ and so on, but not about what you do for a living.

Structural violence is visited upon all those whose social status denies them access to the fruits of scientific and social progress.