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Online Dispute Resolution Degree

Next week the second group of new graduate students will begin the online dispute resolution Masters Degree offered by Dominican University in River Forest, Illinois.  The program begins with an intensive five-day mediation skills course taught by two of my NMB colleagues and me as part of a cooperative agreement with Dominican.  For more information about the program, go to the Dominican University web site.

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Yoga in Conflict Zones

The Washington Post recently carried an article about yoga teachers from the Washington, DC, area working with groups in the Occupied Territory of Palestine to reduce the pervasive stress of living in a long-term conflict environment.  (The article, “DC  Teachers Offer Yoga to Combat the Stresses of Conflict-Ridden Ramallah,” can be found at Yoga.)

My partner in Holistic Solutions, Inc. (and in all other things), Julia Morelli, has for quite some time used yoga and the “Internal Arts” as part of her dispute resolution practice (that’s Julia in the photo), and there are a growing number of practitioners who use Aikido and other martial arts as aids in stressful environments.  The Center for Mind-Body Medicine has long been involved in exploring the connection between our physical selves, our emotional selves, and our relationship to conflict, including a good bit of work in Israel and Palestine.

As part of my work with SMU’s graduate program in dispute resolution, I have teamed with an Israeli psychologist to teach a course in trauma and long term conflict.  That course featured interaction with the outstanding trauma counseling professional in Israel, and I currently am pursuing a proposal to produce a trauma intervention package that can be used by schools in Palestine to blunt the impact of daily trauma there.  There’s a lot to the mind-body/mindfulness approach to stress reduction and conflict resolution.

 

06
Aug 2012
POSTED BY danielrainey
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Groundviews – Not In Our Name

Groundviews, a ground-breaking project for citizen journalism in Sri Lanka, has begun a campaign called “Not In Our Name” to denounce religious violence.

The links to the “Not In Our Name” sites are:
Groundviews – Not In Our Names
and
Not In Our Names
(One may leave a comment at the second link.)

This statement is my addition.

It might seem strange that someone in the U.S., who has not, unfortunately, even visited Sri Lanka would have a comment about the religious-based violence that gave rise to “Not In Our Name.” But I’m just old fashioned enough, if that’s the right way to describe it, to think that the good and bad done for and to our brothers and sisters all over the world reflects on each of us, no matter where we happen to be geographically.

Most major religions have at their base a core of values that suggest kindness and tolerance. History has given us all the examples we could ever want of instances in which zeal and fervor have overshadowed tolerance, leading to some of the most ghastly human-on-human violence imaginable. To quote a religious figure who happened to have been Roman Catholic: “Though sometimes we have the feeling that what we do just means a drop in the vast sea, the sea would be less without such a drop.”

So, as my drop in the sea, here’s my declaration:

My name is Daniel Rainey, and no violence, persecution, or prejudice based on any religion, occurring at any time in any place, is done in my name.

16
Jun 2012
POSTED BY danielrainey
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