SIX LEVELS OF VALIDATION

1. Being Present: giving your complete attention to the person struggling in a non-judgmental way

2. Accurate Reflection: Summarize what the person has said, try to really understand and not judge the person’s experience

3. Reading someone’s behavior and guessing what they may be thinking or feeling: pay attention to the person’s emotional state and label their emotion or infer how they may be feeling. Be sure to check in with the person to make sure your guess is accurate!

4. Understanding someone’s behavior in terms of their history and biology: think about how someone’s past experiences may be affecting how they are feeling now, in this moment or situation.

5. Normalizing or recognizing emotional reactions that anyone would have: recognize that many people may feel the way that you or the other person is feeling in a given situation and let them know that it’s okay to feel this way as many people do.

6. Radical genuineness: this happens when you are able to understand how someone is feeling on a deeper, personal level. Perhaps, you have had a similar experience. Sharing that with the other person can help to validate their feelings and reactions.

Romancing

“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”

― Ursula K. Le Guin

The practice of making life more meaningful through acts of love, spontaneity, and pleasure. Acting beyond mere survival, getting into dialogue with the precious and the divine. We can practice romance beyond intimate relationships. We can romance ants, stones, drains, rivers, trees, construction sites. How would it feel to bring an air of devotion to our engagement with the world? To give gifts to soil, to spend quality time with sewege, to do favours for trees, to write love letters to climate? What would this devotion inspire? How could it grease the wheels of collective action (often so driven by guilt and rage)? How could it expand our capacity to hold the difficult to love parts of our relational networks? How might it increase our capacity to live relationally amongst capitalist ruins?

Often, when we say, “I love you” we focus mostly on the idea of the “I” who is doing the loving and less on the quality of the love that’s being offered. This is because we are caught by the idea of self. We think we have a self. But there is no such thing as an individual separate self. A flower is made only of non-flower elements, such as chlorophyll, sunlight, and water. If we were to remove all the non-flower elements from the flower, there would be no flower left. A flower cannot be by herself alone. A flower can only inter-be with all of us… Humans are like this too. We can’t exist by ourselves alone. We can only inter-be. I am made only of non-me elements, such as the Earth, the sun, parents, and ancestors. In a relationship, if you can see the nature of interbeing between you and the other person, you can see that his suffering is your own suffering, and your happiness is his own happiness. With this way of seeing, you speak and act differently. This in itself can relieve so much suffering.