Context of Crisis

The situation is "tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving."

This is the definition of a crisis, in Grahm v. Connor, a decision about when force is warranted by an officer of the law to protect citizens.

Say what you will about our criminal justice system, I only hope we all remain ignorant about how much protection this system might be offering us. LOOK at it—it is aptly named, it describes itself perfectly; a CRIMINAL justice system. It is the "justice" of answering crime with crime.

If you are passionately certain this is not the way YOU want to live, as I became while acting as an instrument of this system, I offer that this choice for me meant living a new way in all my relationships.

Perhaps paradoxically, what I learned as an instrument of the system were skills of relationship which, if applied by everyone, would create a peaceful prosperity beyond crime. I learned skills which were capable of ending wars of all types. I learned how to subvert, end, and live beyond tyranny.

Indeed, there are societies here now which have ended or nearly eliminated crime and severe punishment through sensible laws and enforcements built on a robust social order the community lives into. These systems do not require external controlling forces and therefore contain little rebellion. These systems run on positive pro-social desires of interconnected humans.

Peaceful laws describe what is happening via our elected social order. Forceful laws prescribe what should happen on penalty of pain.

Practicing the technique and skill of applied relationship technology is what it means to live into a positive social order. It means I am being who I want to be as informed by all my own opinions of how the world should be, and how people in the world should act.

My social order begins within my home.

Tense, uncertain, rapidly evolving. This was the context I once created for my closest relationships. This was the justification I used for the way I would force my will upon another, control them, make split-second decisions, protect myself.

I was tense. I was carrying grief I was unwilling to feel. I was moved by fear I was unable to manage another way. I lashed out with this tension, as a temporary relief that only served to build upon itself.

I was uncertain, but certain that certainty was required. I needed constant assurance from the world that things which cannot be known would be a certain way. Uncertainty inflamed my fear and increased my tension.

I was rapidly evolving relationships in my mind. I was making meaning of every little thing, taking it in, analyzing it, asking what it meant about me, about them, about the relationship. My loved ones would return to an entirely different relationship in the evening than the one they'd left in the morning.

I created situations for my loved ones which were like my childhood with a tyrannical alcoholic who did his time in the military and in prison.

I created contexts that let me rule how I was ruled with force as a child, by an adult whose internal conditions were tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving.

There's a way in which I am lucky that my case was so extreme, it could not go on. Lucky that, after I ended the wars within me, I was called to work in a prison, to meet extreme behavior with a detached, loving stability, to live into the way cruelty cannot be personal to me. The way cruelty is personal to no one, but a disease passed through ignorance, like so many others.

The ignorance that spreads practices of cruelty, punishment, crime, and all resistance, force, and war is the ignorance of how to practice love, right here, right now.

It is the ignorance of emotional mastery techniques, literal skills and ways of meeting emotions and thoughts.

It is the ignorance of the truth that there is a peaceful resolution available for even the harshest and most extreme situation, and the ignorance of the truth that my loved ones are very rarely attempting to serve me anything so harsh as that.

Ignorance itself is no crime—we literally have to learn every single thing in order to know it. It is innocent to believe that conflict is guaranteed in relationship. It is innocent to believe that control is required. It is innocent to yearn to be more loving and not know how.

But while those in this reality remain innocent, they are punished by the reality brought forth through this ignorance. And they punish others and do harm in this ignorance.

The technology I teach is practical. It is what TO DO if you want to stop being a victim of ignorance, if you want to end unhealthy patterns of control, if you want to live with your loved ones in mutual empowerment.

I have two upcoming workshops, teaching this practical relationship technology; I hope to see you there.