“No mud, no lotus.” — Thich Nhat Hanh
“We can never obtain peace in the outer world until we make peace with ourselves.” — His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama
Karuna — Compassionate and joyful actions, with equal consideration for all beings.
Everyone has a desire to be happy, peaceful, and live meaningful lives, The Karuna Center offers personal, organizatinal, and community Compassion-based service to help move forward with awareness and compassion.
Increase Awareness and Insight
Make Conflict Generative, Transformative, and Less Harmful
Practice Compassion
Conflict Transformation and Prevention
Compassion-based trauma informed conflict transformation provides support and guidance, with practices to help move more effectively in and through conflicts, now and in the future.
- Inquire about the situation. Determine concerns regarding the dispute, others’ role in the dispute, and your role in the dispute, along with desired outcome
- Name and deconstruct the elements of the conflict, including motivations and self awareness in relationship to the conflicts
- Build conflict and trauma literacy and capacity
- Learning mindfulness based conflict resolution skills
- Explore choices and uncover potential plan of actions
- Reconstruct the situation to confirm choices and develop a plan of action
Building Trauma Literacy
The collective trauma of a nation, a community, a family, a child, or a devastating environmental disaster asks us to show up in the best way we can, in a way that promotes peace and reconciliation, healing, and transformation, and, most importantly, does no additional harm. Working in social, environmental, political social impact spaces, we are often faced with situations where trauma is pervasive. It is important to build our trauma literacy, to understand trauma intellectually, and develop a sense of how to work with people who have experienced trauma, whether directly or vicariously as co-workers, volunteers, or in communities.
Collective Responsibility
- Seek to ensure that our activities do not cause further traumatization or psychological harm to people already suffering the effects of conflict.
- Recognize that we have an ethical responsibility to ensure they conduct their work in a trauma-sensitive manner.
- Adapt, amplify, or even abandon some core tools and approaches when working with a specific group, culture, or community.
- Be aware of hazards associated with classifying people as traumatized, without recognizing that individuals, groups, and communities respond to events and experiences in different ways and within political and social contexts.
Concepts and Tools
- Focus on the intersection of trauma and personal/social/environmental/political/community challenges.
- Build trauma literacy, and understand the nature and expression of trauma.
- Understand why ‘the brain matters’ as it relates to trauma.
- Decrease barriers to engaging in social/environmental/political/community change efforts.
- Discover ‘what helps’ when working with potentially traumatized individuals, groups, communities, and systems.
- Support healing and restoration.
- Restore hope, trust, and a sense of belonging.