Chapter 2: Hope in Dark Times

22: She Saved Her Friend’s Life

In today's Daily Metta, Michael analyzes a dramatic story that took place in El Salvador when a Canadian volunteer with Peace Brigades International risked her life and ended up saving herself and her friend.

23: Getting Beyond Crisis-Mode

"We are lurching from crisis to crisis." In today's video, Michael continues on from yesterday, underscoring how our common way of thinking has no way to understand the dynamic of Karen Ridd's heroic act and its effect. He adds a contemporary example of how the prevailing worldview, or "old story," prevents us from acknowledging or understanding nonviolence.

24: Empathy Tells Us Something About Nonviolence

In this video Michael discusses the fact that modern science specifically neuroscience, specifically mirror neurons confirm that fact that we feel one another's pain. This is important because important because if people were more aware of this, they would be much less likely to hurt others, i.e. be violent.

25: Three Lenses for Understanding Violence

In today's conversation Michael talks about the "three lenses" one can use to look at violence: moral, medical, and educational. He explains why we think the moral model is not working, why the medical model is better, and why the educational model would be best, although we hardly use it.

26: Are We Ignoring the Lessons of Nonviolence?

"We are seeing nonviolence working all the time and we are ignoring the lesson." When nonviolence happens, do we notice? Michael relates two stories: Nurse Joan Black and Antoinette Tuff, and examines how the media interpreted them, and emphasizes that if our understanding of nonviolence were richer, we would learn something powerful about our capacity as human beings to resolve our greatest challenges.

27: Power of Vulnerability

Michael recaps the story on page 43 of Search for a Nonviolent Future, of the woman who stood up to her husband, which illustrates three interesting points about nonviolence: a)there is no name for it that we recognize; b) because of this we cannot build upon and learn from our experiences common though they are; and c) that people often spontaneously practice aspects of nonviolence, in this case, "the power of vulnerability."

28: A Strong Tool for the Courageous

In this talk, Michael addresses the very common misconception about nonviolence, only slightly less common than it was in 1906, that it is the absence of violence purely and simply, and therefore a very weak force, if a force at all.

29: Awakening Compassion

Here Michael cites the discovery by Rachel MacNair of what she calls 'Perpetration-Induced Traumatic Stress'--the fact that as the Buddha and the others often said, when we injure another, we feel that injury ourselves, a fact for which there is now scientific proof. Michael emphasizes how the nonviolent actor can awaken awareness of this reflection in a person threatening to use violence against one, and that this is one of the powers underlying nonviolence.

30: On Humiliation and Nonviolence

In this episode, Michael continues onward into Search for a Nonviolent Future and warns against the resorting to and acceptance of humiliation.

31: “Power is of Two Kinds”

"Nonviolence is who we are." Michael discusses a quote from Gandhi where he says, "Power is of two kind: fear of punishment or love" as a starting point for understanding nonviolence.