What happens inside?

In the former post about violence I talked about the fact that to be “nonviolent” one should be able to recognize violence and that in order to do that he or she can start only from her or his direct personal experience.

This opens a huge field of careful consideration about the theme of personal change.

When one starts dealing about themes such as social injustice and the necessity of a social change, he or she should consider that we lived all our lives completely immersed in an environment full of violence and injustice and that sometimes some aspects of those ugly things are sublety proposed as values.

Moreover, in today's age of massive transformation individuals, institutions and society are facing crisis. Transformation is going faster and faster, and the same thing applies to individual, institutional and society’s crises.

Changes which are taking place follow unexpected directions. This creates a general disorientation concerning the future and what to do in the present. In reality it’s not change per se what bothers us, because change in itself has many positive connotations. What worries us it’s not knowing what direction it may take and where we should direct our actions.

It is then necessary to give direction to a change which appears inevitable. The only way to do that is to start from ourselves. It is within ourselves that we should give direction to this disorderly transformation, whose outcome is yet unknown.

People who are active in a process of social transformation, such as those who work with associations, are particularly vulnerable to personal difficulties, such as frustration caused by the failure of a project, the feeling of being powerless in the face of too strong an “enemy”, or even the loss of enthusiasm and sense of purpose.

Taking into account the importance of human subjectivity as a fundamental factor in any process of change, it is very important to have a working method that helps sustaining our best aspirations and overcome the false differentiation between “personal” and “social” life. It is no possible to change the way the world goes without starting, at the same time, a process of personal evolution and personal strengthening, undermining the values and conditionings which prevent the achievement of one’s goals.

In the Humanist Movement we call this method “Personal Work” and we do it together dealing with some themes and interchanging experience... in some following post I'd like to propose some examples of those works, hoping that some readers of this blog would like to take part in a “virtual start” of a personal work process :-)