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Compassionate Vulnerability

I enjoy David Whyte’s poetry and have attended workshops involving it. Living vulnerably is the only way to live. Living does not come with risk-free instructions. It can only happen with love that emerges as we each live our life fully.

Wildflower Women

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What does it mean to be more compassionate through our intimacy with disappearance? To me it means that we become braver as we surf the ever-flowing tide of loss and renewal in our lives. We are able to choose whether we will shut our heart off to love and compassion, opting instead to live a fear-based life. Or we can choose to live with openhearted vulnerability. Being vulnerable can be frightening! We inherently know that when we make ourselves vulnerable we also open ourselves up to hurt, loss, and sorrow.  When we choose vulnerability we are in a way honoring our soul by allowing for growth to be a bigger, more courageous, and compassionate human being. Without knowing the darkness we can never fully live in our light.

It happens to all of us when we step off into this thing called living. Some people choose to shut down when…

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About ivonprefontaine

In keeping with bell hooks and Noam Chomsky, I consider myself a public and dissident intellectual. Part of my work is to move beyond (transcend) institutional dogmas that bind me to defend freedom, raising my voice to be heard on behalf of those who seek equity and justice in all their forms. I completed my PhD in Philosophy of Leadership Studies at Gonzaga University, Spokane, WA. My dissertation and research was how teachers experience becoming teachers and their role as leaders. I focus on leading, communicating, and innovating in organizations. This includes mindfuful servant-leadership, World Cafe events, Appreciative Inquiry, and expressing one's self through creativity. I offer retreats, workshops, and presentations that can be tailored to your organzations specific needs. I published peer reviewed articles about schools as learning organizations, currere as an ethical pursuit, and hope as an essential element of adult eductaion. I published three poems and am currently preparing my poetry to publish as an anthology of poetry. I present on mindful leadership, servant leadership, schools as learning organizations, how teachers experience becoming teachers, assessement, and critical thinking. I facilitate mindfulness, hospitality retreats. and World Cafe Events using Appreciative Inquiry. I am writing and researching about various forms of leadership, how teachers inform and form their identity as a particular teacher, schools as learning organizations, hope and its anticipatory relationship with the future, and hope as an essential element in learning.

5 responses »

  1. “Intimacy with disappearance”. As I am getting older, I admit that the thought of eventual non-being comes up often.

    Reply

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