Violence is Not Leverage

Violence itself is not a tool of leverage.

Violence makes a compelling threat.

Threat is what invokes the real leverage—fear.

Specifically, threat carries the frequency and the invitation to let fear take the wheel. This is what leverages new behavior, behavior counter to my vows of who and how I want to be in the world.

In empowerment, the stance from which I Receive Violence, Love is the ruling tone. Fear does presence as an emotion, but it is not capable of wresting the wheel from love’s grip. It’s buckled firmly in the backseat, maybe wailing its head off, but so what? Baby on board.

Receiving Violence is a practice in which I allow that violence is exactly what it is—a tool of breakage and destruction, a tool of pain. Receiving Violence, I take radical response-ability for the actual event of breakage, destruction, and pain.

If a toddler smacks me in the face with a hard toy, I am ABLE to RESPOND. I do not have to react in violence, I account for the way this event is part of what it is to have a toddler around. I have already decided about ways I will respond when this kind of eventuality arises. I have Opted-In to the possibility of pain, destruction, and breakage.

Violence is not able to shape my behavior or my responses. The harm a toddler does to me does not have the leverage to cause me to behave counter to my vows of who I will be toward a toddler.

If I see the harm a toddler causes, to my body or my property, as a threat, that is when fear can rule. This is where I have the ability to be reactive to my own expectations, creating lines of right and wrong, fearing the destruction of things I have become attached to. This is where I have the opportunity to prioritize the integrity of structure over the devotion to experience, and ruin a relational moment on behalf of a thing, including when that thing is my body.

That’s when I yell at the toddler or hurt them back when they hurt me. That’s when I yell at them for destroying things.

If I am not capable of Receiving Violence, I am certainly perpetuating violence. Receiving Violence is how violence ends.

Death is the most radical reception of violence, and on death the violence ends. Beating a dead horse no longer qualifies as violence, it’s just hitting something.

Thankfully, it rarely comes to that. Woefully, that trajectory is quite difficult to avoid if it’s actually what’s on offer.

What we can all learn to implement quickly is the off-ramp that invites violence back to love by staying in love while violence is threatened, while it occurs, and beyond its impact.

We can all learn to weigh the gravity of Love on a moment, even one of high tension, great uncertainty, one which is rapidly evolving. We can be the system that offers the hearts around us a way back home to love.

If a situation is rapidly evolving, it can rapidly evolve to become love. I have seen it happen again and again, seeming like a miracle.

In truth, love is the thing that all of our systems prefer, and when our fear drives all the love away, that’s when panic really escalates, that’s when violence seems like the best course of action.

If there is an open channel to a loving course of action, time and again I have seen humans choose that course. When channels to loving courses of action close, when humans are doomed to be perceived as the villain regardless of what they do, that is when great violence occurs.

Receiving Violence means I take Radical Responsibility that all violence ends when it reaches me. I vow to be an alchemical force when I receive violence, and I apply every curation to limit and bound the violence to which I am exposed.