The 3 rules

The 3 rules for classrooms and communities

photo by hancel deaton

Early in all of my community college courses and in the faculty development workshops I facilitate, I introduce The 3 Rules. Over the years my students and I have come to appreciate the challenges and the power that these 3 simple rules can have. We come back to them frequently throughout the semester. They are the basis for connection and collaboration.

The 3 rules are:

1. take care of yourself

2. take care of each other

3. take care of this place

Taking care of yourself
is really about understanding yourself. Knowing our own values, what matters most to what and us we want for our future and the future of the world. We can learn to be more conscious and mindful of how we interact with each other and the world. We can stop to reflect on how we habitually react in situations that distress and annoy us.

What do you value; what matters most to you?

What are our interests? What are our talents?

What do you have to contribute to the world?

What is your vision for the future of our world?

What do you do to take care of ourselves?

What could you do more of?

What could you do better?

Can we become more conscious, more mindful of our thoughts, our judgments, our fears, worries, and concerns; more conscious of how we habitually deal with the world around us?

Can we then let go our ego-grasping needs and wants and be here for something bigger?

Taking care of each other
This one seems to be even tougher for us to practice. Compassion, connection and community action requires the courage to let go of our personal agendas. In my classes we discover that students take care of select others—family and close friends or mission projects that will ultimately feed our own egos.

Can we expand our consciousness to all others, not just our friends and family? Can we be more mindful of their thoughts, worries, fears, and concerns? Can we really listening to them? Can we listen without judging, without fixing them, without wanting to set them straight?

Can we be compassionate, not just sympathetic, with their suffering? Others don’t need our help. They want our partnership, our understanding. They want our support, not our help.

What are we doing to take care of others?

What could we do better?

Taking care of this place
What place, students ask? This classroom? The school? I suggest to think even bigger, broader and deeper. This town, state country? Better. How could i be responsible for taking care of the world, the earth?

Can we summon the courage the be conscious, compassionate, connected, creative, and responsive to the cries of the world? Can we expand our attention to the wolrd populations, to all species, the our mother earth? Can we listen with open hearts to the cries, concerns, worries, and fears of all beings?

Rather than distract ourselves, can we experience and express fully the anguish and outrage we feel at the destruction we see? This is tough. When we begin to be touched by the troubles we see, we want to avoid. We distract ourselves. We go shopping, we eat, we watch television. Do we have the courage and the willingness to stay with the cries we hear?

Can we reconnect with others and with the earth?

What are we doing to take care of this place?

What could we be doing better?

Try the 3 rules in your communities. Check in often to see how its going. When I check in I have asked one or two of these questions:

Which of the 3 rules have you broken and what is your evidence?

What practices to you find effective in following any one of the 3 rules?

What is your current relationship to each of the 3 rules?

What kind of relationship would you like to have with each?

I would love to know how it goes for you and your communities.
~jim

Healthy communities

Six practices of healthy communities

photo by hancel deaton

Margaret Wheatley has worked for years writing books and helping groups around the world become healthy, civil, effective communities of action.

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. ~Margaret Mead

Most recently, she outlines the following six practices that tell us when we are in a healthy community.

A healthy community:

1. …knows it is a community,
practices inclusion, encourages participation, looks for value in each voice.

2. …involves youth in significant, respectful ways. Adults behave better when youth are there.

3. …focuses on what’s possible—not what’s wrong. Asks: Who cares enough to work on it?

4. …talks to itself and keeps expanding the conversation, not afraid to talk to each other and listen carefully.

5. …expects leadership everywhere, looks for the accidental activist: “i just had to do something.” Real leaders see a need and step up with courage, heart, and concern.

6. …knows its history, singing the songs of its elders gives community the capacity to endure.

It is not our differences that divide us, but our judgments about each other. ~Meg Wheatley

Love is much more demanding than law.
~Desmond Tutu

Anyone listening?

Is anyone listening?

a rant, a plea, an invitation

photo by Carole Williams, 2004

is anyone listening?

are we as hard-hearted, closed-minded,
 and fundamentalist about Sustainability as “they”
 are about their (Industrial)GrowthEcomomy? are we?

this is not a legislative issue.
 it’s not about who’s right. voting divides us.

the possibility of a positive, sustainable future is created. can you imagine?

creativity sustained by freedom, based in listening/considering/accepting and responding... rooted in love.

“Being listened to is so much like being loved,


most people can’t tell the difference.”


~David Oxberg

We have some work to do (on ourselves mostly). We have some listening to do, some responding to do. We!

Is it time to wake up yet?

Pecking and tapping

Teachers and students, hens and chicks,

pecking and tapping

photo by hancel deaton

In his book Mountain Record of Zen Talks, John Daido Loori relates the following story.

As a teacher and a student I love this story.

Are you a teacher? Are you a student?

“Kyosei one of the leading teachers of ancient Chinese Zen, was a successor to Master Seppo, who succeeded Master Tokusan.

“In a famous koan, ‘Kyosei’s Pecking and Tapping,’ he uses the image of the pecking and tapping between mother hen and her chick inside the egg.

“When the chick is ready to come forth, it begins tapping on the inside of the shell, and the hen, hearing this, responds: peck, peck, peck. Sometimes the hen starts, peck, peck, peck. And the chick responds, tap, tap, tap. It’s peck, tap, peck, tap—the two of them working together bring the chick out of the shell into the world.

“Kyosei often utilized this image to elucidate his particular style of teaching and to point out that the relationship between hen and chick, teacher and student, is critically timed. If pecking starts too soon, instead of a chick, what ‘hatches’ is an undeveloped embryo. If it starts too late, the chick can smother inside the shell. Hence, it is vitally important that what happens is a well-coordinated effort between teacher and student, hen and chick.”

I tell my students that I cannot teach them anything they don’t have a question about. I peck and wait for their tap. If I don’t hear tapping, i peck again. I love my work.

Promoting possibility

photo by hancel deaton

Our opinions kill creativity.

In environmental science class on Tuesday, I noticed how our negative opinions STOP conversations, KILL creativity and LIMIT possibility. Students gripped by negative opinions glaze over and leave the conversation.

Why do we entertain our negative opinions?

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities,

but in the expert’s there are few.”

~ Suzuki Roshi, Zen master

We find certainty in our opinions. They’re known. It seems safe there. A place to hide from having to consider other possibilities.

We live in a measurement world of judging and jumping to conclusions to appear smart, be right and look good. I asked the students: What examples can you think of, what personal stories do you have where judgments and opinions have stopped creativity and limited possibilities? Lots of examples.

“It's not our differences that divide us,

but our judgments about each other.”

~ Margaret Wheatley

Listening without judging, refusing to take sides, refraining from voicing opinions takes courage. Being curious, asking questions and listening for possibilities stopped being cool around age 3. Remember? We risk losing our place, our membership in our communities, our sense of belonging is in jeopardy. People will think we are weird.

"Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing,

there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

~Rumi

Our opinions are habitual. They’re automatic. They seem to flow through us. Freedom from this conditioning, freedom from being judgmental takes conscious rigor, it takes continuous practice.

The world is changing. Certainty is an illusion. Curiosity takes courage. Creativity is risk. Consider the possibility.

How do you want to live your life? …In the illusion of safety or in the freedom of this moment? …In the measurement world or the universe of possibility? …In your head or out here in the conversation?

Reconnecting our world

photo by hancel deaton

Joanna Macy, inspiring peace and environmental activist, introduced me and my students to “Despair Work and Work that Reconnects.” We are now using her practices to reconnect to ourselves, other beings and our world.

We all witness destruction daily—of fellow species, of ecosystems, of people, of cultures, of our life-giving earth. We wonder: What is in store for our children’s children? What will be left?

Appalled, we turn away to more immediate tasks. We close our minds, we deaden our hearts, we become unresponsive to the pains of the world.

Our despair goes un-experienced, unacknowledged, and unexpressed. It's just not cool to be scared, sad or outraged. We are afraid of the pain our despair might bring. Will we lose control? So instead, we choose distractions: TV, eating and shopping. What are yours?

Reconnecting begins with our willingness to experience, acknowledge and express our anguish, despair and outrage at the destruction we witness. It's okay to feel the anguish, to express outrage.

When we share our fears and our outrage: we notice we are not alone, we notice we have choices and we begin to see things with new eyes. Coming together, sharing our anguish, knowing we're not alone; we grow more compassionate, more connected and more able to go forth with new courage.

Consider practices that reconnect to bring your classes and communities together. Design actions to reconnect our world. It is all up to us. What will you do?

>> please visit Joanna Macy and support her work.

Learning to stay

photo by hancel deaton

Students agree, they do better in school when they pay total attention in class. Seems simple enough, except for a couple of things:

1. We have 40,000 thoughts per day, most of which are reruns, by the way. Take a minute, try counting your thoughts, then do the math. It wouldn’t be so bad if we could stop thinking when we wanted to. Try it. Not so easy, huh? Thoughts distract us from paying attention in the moment.
2. AND, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varella, noted perception biologists, assert that at least 80% of what we perceive is in our brains already. This means that, at most, 20% of what we perceive at any moment comes from what's really out there.

These two make learning difficult. It's very hard to get the mind's attention away from the endless stream of thoughts from the past.

Being here takes courage. It seems much safer—more familiar—to be “in our thoughts.” Entertaining new ideas seems risky. When we leave this moment; we glaze over.

Being here, paying total attention to what’s going on around you in this moment, takes practice. Total attention is a mind, body, and spirit practice. It is a single focus phenomenon; no multi-tasking. Every moment, every conversation we are in, is an opportunity to practice being here.

So, in class we begin the practice of being here and learning to stay.

Learning to stay. What does it take? We are always leaving. Have you noticed? We really don’t want to be here. It’s threatening. You have probably left numerous times during this conversation, yes? Where did you go?

When you notice you’ve left, come back to this moment. Get out of the stands and back in the game.

I don’t criticize students for not paying attention. I ask them: Are you here? Were you here? Totally present? If not, where are you? Where were you? What percent engaged?

Or, did you leave? Where were you? . . . Welcome back!

After a while, some weeks into the semester, students start asking each other: Are you here totally? Did you leave? Where did you go?

Students will raise their hands and volunteer: Hey, I left. I’m back. What did I miss?

Thich Nhat Hanh asks us to surrender to the now…