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Sunday, March 26, 2006

from our original website

Guardians of Peace
...is an idea becoming more real with each movement.


"Peace is conflict done well"

... is being carefully practiced, learned, and modeled in our training. Rather than some fantasy of safety we guard the literal and metaphorical places where this idea lives and thrives.

Through martial non-violence (sm) we work to thaw the cold-hearted and fearful machinations that clutch for Security. Fears about attack, victimization, failure, and dying or often quite reasonable but locating them in any particular "enemy" or "evil" most often results in being less rather than more prepared to respond thoroughly with alacrity and specificity.

There is a fantasy for sale today, possibly more so than ever before, that human beings can have relationships free of conflict by crushing literal enemies, suppressing terror and dissent, and avoiding the frightening friction that fires our fears. The inherent dilemma that then arises is the parallel closure of the door conflict otherwise reliably opens on the specific and necessary creative friction that carries the energy designed to power hope, dreams for the future, and the adaptation necessary for survival.

We will be a training partnership of individuals committed to working well with conflict no matter its root or character.

Working well with conflict can and will lead to mysterious difficulties Often we will lack the expertise to create a useful response. Awareness of this certainty makes us more rather than less able to function. It can and will also lead to:

  • building community on purpose,
  • learning to tell (speak) the difference (what makes human beings work toward both complimentary and opposed needs and desires and so bump into each other on the road to wherever),
  • readiness to make a difference (needed departures from business as usual) to improve the felt quality of life,
  • a growing awareness that best practices in all dealings need movement in the directions of sustainability that is relational no less than ecological,
  • and much more as the popular imagination takes up the ideas involved...

for additional information please call Toll Free: (866) 236-0346, sign in to view our "Tribe" (Tribe.net) or email: brandon at guardiansofpeace dot org