by Aggie Perilli
Communication is our superpower. It is always necessary and healthy to empathize and share understanding, particularly when elected officials resort to dishonest and exploitative exclusions and attacks. The moment equitable inclusivity and other universally shared values are threatened or compromised, in the loving spirit of civil rights leader John Lewis, you may need to get into good, necessary trouble.
Apply your talents and abilities to ensure universal safety and well-being as only you can.
More than 30 years in the business of communication, and also the practice of yoga and mind-body healing, have taught me how mercilessly our unexplored emotions and biases can deceive us. It is our intuition or gut instinct that tells the objective truth about the interconnection of all creation I have seen illuminate what is.
As a previously single divorcée, I witnessed our illuminating interconnection following an evening yoga class in bucolic Bucks County, Pennsylvania. I glided seamlessly through yoga flow in the flirtatious hope I’d impress my fellow yogi and casual date. The intensity of my moving meditation left me as gently buoyant as if I had landed cross-legged on a lightly grounded cloud.
As I drove home along the county’s dark rural backstreets, it felt oddly natural to see a subtle yet vibrant radiance link lush woodlands with mailboxes and street lamps from the haloed ground in between. Had I doubted what Vietnamese Buddhist Monk, author and mindfulness teacher, Thich Nhat Hahn, described as humanity’s “interbeing,” I never could again.
Inspired, I remembered the timeless wisdom of the 13th-century Persian mystic poet, Rumi, who said, “There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”
Photo by Brandon Montrone
I have happily since remarried the younger non-yogi bicyclist and nature lover, Michael Evans, and continue to enjoy inside-out communications. As Michael and I grow older, I’ve learned to enhance my health and productivity with at least 15 to 30 minutes a day dedicated to meditative reflection on the truth and palpable peace and joy of unconditional oneness and love.
Mobilizing Inside-Out Empathy and Shared Understanding
In a PBS 1985 interview, mythologist and author Joseph Campbell called the greatest human transgression “the sin of inadvertence, of not being alert — not quite awake.” Campbell urged viewers: “follow your bliss” and “enjoy the refreshment and life within us all the time.”
Like a proud parent or guardian, my most enriching joy comes from my gratitude and faithfulness towards all blessedly diverse beings and our interconnected environment. Faithfulness for me involves writing.
Since 1984, when I launched my career as a journalist in Princeton, New Jersey, I’ve had the humble privilege of sharing my bliss lifelong as a writer and communications professional. For over 30 years since, I have also enjoyed sharing the bliss of clients and partners of Aggie Perilli Communications International (APCI).
One of APCI’s most inspiring client partnerships involved the The Arc of Somerset County. Together with The Arc, APCI provided a voice for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, enhanced their equitable inclusion and community participation; promoted ways to prevent some disabilities; and increased financial donations and the businesses that hire people with disabilities and the projects provided to Arc occupational centers.
The COVID-19 pandemic has since heightened global awareness of our interdependence with all beings and the organic environment that sustains us.
Our global time-out opened a window for more of us to become proactively aware and responsive. It provided nonessential workers with a pause from being too preoccupied with often conflicting obligations and digital distractions to empathize with themselves, let alone anyone else.
Today’s interrelated catastrophes serve as a wake-up call. Here in the United States, deadly partisan politics delayed equitable funding for nationwide coronavirus testing, medical equipment and supplies, and life-saving healthcare reporting.
Many of us continued to safeguard one another by social distancing and remaining largely in lockdown. In international news, we enviously learned that nationally tested New Zealanders could safely return to their workplaces and shops, restaurants and sporting events, and sizable gatherings after little more than two months.
That’s all the time it took for New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and her united team of 5 million to contain and eradicate COVID-19 for more than 100 days. When new coronavirus cases foreseeably emerged, prepared New Zealanders resumed their phased lockdowns with transparent testing and contact tracing and, again, safely and healthfully contained and eradicated COVID-19.
“Ardern never put us on a war footing,” noted New Zealand’s microbiology professor, Siouxsie Wiles, in an NPR interview. “Her speeches weren’t about attacking an invisible enemy,” or anyone. Rather, she empathetically conveyed the seriousness of our coronavirus pandemic.
With admirable humility and jokes about becoming a new mom, Ardern encouraged New Zealanders to safeguard, rather than to counterproductively fight one another.
Amid simultaneous crises from racism and violence to climate catastrophes, Ardern’s nonviolent politics of kindness serve as a real-life masterclass in breakthrough leadership communication.
It is essential for world leaders to learn from Ardern’s lifesaving boundaries and transformative oneness. In 2019, Fortune magazine had already recognized Ardern as one of our world’s greatest leaders. Fortune noted how Ardern, while still a new mother, “deftly, empathetically, and humbly navigated New Zealand through the worst terror attack in their country’s history” after a gunman fatally shot 50 people in two mosques in the coastal city of Christchurch.
Fortune credited empathetic Ardern with setting “a standard for dignity in the face of violence.” Within weeks, she earned near-unanimous support for New Zealand’s sweeping nationwide ban on most semiautomatic weapons including the type used in the attack.
Photo by Raquel Costa
Life-Saving Oneness Emanates from You
It is equally vital to learn from the success of investigative journalists and authors Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein. During the 1974 Watergate scandal, Woodward and Bernstein’s “best obtainable version of the truth” led to the resignation of then President Richard Nixon for his impeachable abuse of power, obstruction of justice, and contempt of Congress.
As these seasoned journalists advise, follow the lies as well as the money and identify the motives behind revelatory attempts at exploitative divisiveness and distractions.
Neither compromise universally shared values and give in, nor give up.
Boycott incompetently unaware and exploitatively dishonest and divisive media. As a former journalist, if I or my colleagues falsified or denied the news and divisively misused the pronouns, “you” and “they,” we would have been justifiably fired. Rather than empathize and share understanding, ideological news programs, such as Fox “News,” exploitatively profited from their criminal provocations of fear and loathing. Fox’s consequential decline in profits in 2022 still reportedly exceeded $1 billion.
Independently research and boycott advertisers who perpetuate and ostrich enable revelatory projections of guilt, shame and blame, rather than embrace the unifying truths and transformative peace that safeguard and inspire us all.
It can be easy to identify complicit followers. They culpably feed on false projections of divisiveness, then consequently grow frightened and confused. One way Thich Nhat Hanh jokingly advised us to avoid bitter projections is to wear T-shirts that ask, “Are you sure?”
Evil is never required. For example, accountable are all complicit in the unlawful arrest and detention of countless minorities and fellow immigrants, including children criminally torn from their parents at the United States border and detained for a profit — with inadequate safeguards and neither recordkeeping nor the intention or plan to ensure their urgent reunification. These barbarities are inhuman betrayals of “love your neighbor,” one of the greatest commandments from which most major world religions flow.
Have the heart and courage to identify and eliminate the root causes of pervasive revolving-door corruption across government and industry, and do all possible to urgently end and prevent the worst catastrophic consequences across interrelated areas of our lives.
Firmly yet kindly, empathize and share understanding that opposition to a woman’s right to choose the abortion of souls yet to emerge in no way exonerates every voter’s accountability to equitably and enthusiastically care for the billions of interdependent souls here now.
It is most unloving to deny openhearted discussions about falsely fear-driven patriarchic and hierarchical exploitations of politics and religion, when these are among the areas where empathy and shared understanding may be needed most.
The exclusion or abuse of any interdependent being for any projected exploitation is destined to backfire.
Develop discernment. Faithfully end and prevent potentially distracting obfuscations and denials, especially when the source is entrusted with decision-making power. In 2019, I lamented that hospitals like the one where my stepson, Justin, served as an ER physician would end up treating at least one patient who had ingested cleaning fluid at the provocation of our pathologically dishonest and disinterested United States president.
Use your vote and consumer dollars to ensure what the spiritual book, A Course in Miracles, describes as the qualities of God’s teachers. Among them are honesty, defenselessness, gentleness, generosity and an abiding joy deeper than happiness.
These and the interrelated characteristics of faithful patience and tolerance remind me of my peacemaker mom, Louise Perilli.
Growing up, when the same schoolboy tried to bully me, my steel-magnolia mom would say, “Ig-nore him. He’s try-ing to get a rise out of you.”
The first woman to provide accounting for a business where accounting had been relegated to men, my mom never condoned the exclusion or disparagement of anyone for any projected exploitation or abuse ever.
As an adult, whenever I visited my parents, I’d feel a palpable peace the moment I stepped in their front door. Their unconditional love and joy inspired me to adopt the qualities of patience and tolerance or non-judgment as my applicable definition of forgiveness and pathway for change.
Be or advance inspirational leaders who are trustworthy and audaciously attentive and responsive.
Proactively visit the nonprofit and bipartisan website, headcount.org, and make sure you are registered to vote. Verify your polling place and solidify plans for you and your loved ones to vote beforehand. Where possible, register for your mail-in or absentee ballot and vote early.
As John Lewis noted on Facebook, our vote is “almost sacred.” It is “the most powerful nonviolent tool we have in our democratic society.”
Make sure your voice is heard.
Additionally, use your consumer dollars to ensure the respect and protection of all blessedly diverse beings and our interconnected environment. Do all possible to urgently end and prevent criminal inequities that can harm our most vulnerable beings first.
Before one more destructive attempt to resort to the culpable extremes of violence and enabling indifference or hopelessness, take a restorative breath.
Remain faithful to the only true and lasting power and infinite potential of unconditional oneness and love, which includes tough love.
With trust-building boundaries, communicate and empathetically partner with everyone, including ardent challengers. They may be inspired to join your most grateful and enthusiastic champions.
Ensure enhanced environmental protections, including safe renewable energy and native organic land use without delay! Expedite globally integrated mitigations and, as yet, the possible reversal of even worse climate disasters now. Otherwise you can expect even worse cataclysmic deaths and mass displacements, annual billion-dollar losses, and the extinction of a million species during our Earth’s already hottest years on record.
Throughout the process, remember the teaching of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.: Be the overdue peace we wish to see in the world.
Studies conducted by political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan found that nonviolent civil resistance movements, such as the transformative pro-democracy boycott of white businesses during apartheid in South Africa, are far more likely than violence to produce lasting change.
Expedite our world’s lifesaving shift from the push of projected evil to the only true and lasting power of unconditional oneness and love.
How are you applying your talents and abilities to serve as a unifying force for love?
Aggie Perilli is president of Aggie Perilli Communications International (APCI).
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