I've Been Shot In Combat. And As a Veteran, I'm telling you: Allowing Teachers To Be Armed Is an Asinine Idea

I’m a survivor of trauma. I’ve worked for decades with children and families who’ve experienced trauma. I’ve met, talked with, and listened to veterans and others who’ve experienced the trauma of war. I understand trauma in my deepest being. We must, we absolutely must protect our children from the trauma of living in the war zones they’ve been in for far, far too long. We must stop this madness. If we don’t, we are complicit in their deaths and in the great suffering of survivors. On all levels and in all ways we must do the right thing. — Molly

 By Matt Martin

After the most recent school shooting, this time at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where a 19-year old gunman was charged with killing 17 people, debate flows freely, yet again, on how to best prevent these tragedies from ever happening. Anyone with a heart can surely agree this is the overall goal. The morning after the shooting, NC State Representative Larry Pittman (R-Cabarrus County) stated that he wants to work with police to train and allow teachers to carry guns in attempt to limit the death and destruction caused during a school shooting.

“We have to get over this useless hysteria about guns and allow school personnel to have a chance to defend their lives and those of their students,” Pittman said during a meeting of the Joint Legislative Emergency Management Oversight Committee, as reported by the News & Observer.

Defending children is a must, but putting a firearm in the hands of even the most trained teacher isn’t the answer. Anyone suggesting this solution has clearly never experienced a situation like the one seen in Parkland because it oversimplifies the complexity of an active shooter situation, especially in close-quarters. It is not as easy as a “good guy with a gun stopping a bad guy with a gun.”

I ask that you take a few minutes to understand my perspective and why I feel strongly about this matter. Before recently moving to Charlotte, I served for three and half years as an Army infantryman, stationed at Fort Wainwright in Fairbanks, Alaska, and I deployed to Afghanistan’s Kandahar Province in 2011. By the time my tour was over, I left a place that claimed two members from my company, cost six others at least one limb, wounded over 25 percent of our total force, and left me with shrapnel in my face and a bullet hole in my left thigh. When I saw the news flash of another school shooting I couldn’t help but think of the firefights I had been involved in and how these students and teachers just encountered their own version of Afghanistan.

Make no mistake, the fear and chaos they faced is no different than what my fellow soldiers and I faced in Afghanistan—a fear and chaos that I still remember like it happened yesterday.

Please continue this essay here: https://www.charlottefive.com/arming-teachers/

Tara Brach: Compassion Can Be Cultivated

It is my experience that compassion is essential to living a healthy, whole, courageous, kind, empathic, and loving life. Compassion is also a vital part of what is needed in our world today. Whatever our religious or spiritual tradition, may we each seek and learn from all that supports the deepening and strengthening of our capacity to emanate the wisdom and loving gifts which are rooted in compassion. Bless us all. — Molly

Compassion Can Be Cultivated

The capacity for compassion is hardwired into our brain and body. Just as we are rigged to perceive differences, to feel separate, and to react with aversion, we are also designed to feel a connection with our fellow humans. Specialized "mirror neurons" attune us to another person's state — to their emotions and the intentions behind their movements — and re-create that state in our own brain. Our experience of them is not just a projection based on visible expressions such as grimaces, narrowed eyes, or furrowed brows. Because of mirror neurons, and other structures in the prefrontal cortex that make up our compassion circuitry, we can actually "feel with" them.

Yet these compassion circuits are easily blocked when we're stressed and out of touch with our emotions and bodies. They can also become blocked when we buy into cultural stereotypes and when we're experiencing unexamined reactivity to the people in our life. Research shows that the less we identify with someone — the less they seem real to us — the less the mirror neuron system gets activated.

The good news is that we can unblock and activate our compassion networks. This happens as we intentionally turn toward the refuge of truth and love. Mindfulness directly engages the parts of our brain (the insula and anterior cingulate cortex) that are key in reading others' emotions. When we mindfully recognize that another is hurt or afraid, we naturally feel the tenderness of compassion. That tenderness blossoms fully as we find ways to express our care. This alchemy of letting ourselves be touched by another's pain and of responding with love is the essence  of Buddhist compassion practice.

One such meditation training, the Tibetan practice of tonglen, literally means "sending and receiving." The breath is used as a support and guide: Breathing in with deep receptivity, we take in the pain of others. Breathing out, we offer our care and blessings, sending whatever will bring relief and space and happiness. This practice goes counter to our tendency to shut down in the face of suffering. As my mother discovered, the more fully we let ourselves be touched by suffering, the more we soften and awaken our hearts. The more we offer our love, the more we discover our belonging to all beings, and to loving awareness itself.

The starting place in tonglen is an intentional relaxing of the armor around our heart. Each of us has been wounded and, in reaction, has erected defenses to protect us from experiencing further harm. We don't want to be vulnerable or available to pain. Yet before we can be tenderhearted, we have to be tender. As poet Mark Nepo writes —

"Our challenge each day is not to get dressed to face the world, but to unglove ourselves so that the doorknob feels cold, and the car handle feels wet, and the kiss goodbye feels like the lips of another being, soft and unrepeatable."

— Tara Brach

Excerpted from  True Refuge: Finding Peace and

Freedom in Your Own Awakened Heart

Our greatest strength lies in the gentleness and tenderness of our heart.— Rumi

Rumi: Come Back, Come Back

Sometimes you hear a voice through 

the door calling you.

As a fish out of water hears the waves...

Come back. Come back.

This turning toward what you deeply

love saves you.

 

— Rumi

Sharon Salzberg: A Dedication To Kindness

A dedication to kindness offers us a chance to try to make a real difference despite the obstacles and unhappiness we might face. No matter what our belief system, actions, or status, we are joined together in this world through strands of relationship and interconnection. That suffering child, orphaned through a tsunami, who we see in Indonesia or Sri Lanka is part of our own lives, and we must not forget that. There is nothing that just happens only "there" anymore — not a war, not an exploitation of the weak, not a disease, not a hope for change. We need to stop reinforcing the sense of dehumanization, of "us" and "them," of separation that leads to wanton cruelty in the first place.

And if tomorrow is going to look any better than today, we must realize that the currency for compassion isn't what someone does, right or wrong — it is the very fact that that person exists. Commitment to the possibility of kindness cannot be discarded as foolish or irrelevant, even in troubling times when we often can't find easy answers. If we abandon the force of kindness as we confront cruelty, we won't learn anything to take into tomorrow — not from history, not from one another, not from life.

— Sharon Salzberg

Excerpted from The Force of Kindness: Change Your

Life With Love and Compassion