healing energy and judicial activity

Pandora wrote:Yeah, Bruce, I'm with you there!

However, I am firmly of the opinion (having experienced it myself) that Reiki is quite capable of changing your career for you. I would never have considered leaving a decently paid job in the charitable sector and blowing six grand on training as a holistic therapist - but Reiki not only cleared my job out, it also cleared my voluntary activity out. That was much more upsetting than leaving my job!

What I'm saying is that if people are in occupations which are inimical to Reiki, it has a habit of clearing that away.

From Ballistic to Holistic
Angry and depressed by win-at-any-cost legal work, a growing number of lawyers are seeking peace of mind — for their clients and themselves — by bringing spiritual alternatives to the practice of law.
By Elaine McArdle | January 11, 2004

When Rita Pollak became a lawyer 23 years ago, she envisioned herself in a noble profession that would improve people's lives. Instead, she discovered the legal system brutalized everyone it touched: clients, judges, lawyers. Law practice wasn't about seeking justice or finding reasonable resolutions to conflict. It was lawyers focusing on destroying their opponents by any means possible: nasty fights, vicious accusations, twisting the truth.

In this "win-lose" model, no one was really winning. Divorce litigation drove families further apart and ran up astronomical legal bills. Juvenile court was a scene from Dickens: children crying, teens chained together, attorneys huddled in corners trying to speak to their clients, judges with groaning caseloads, and no time for careful decisions. "It was really a painful place to be," says Pollak, who practiced in Greater Boston. "You're in a bickering, competitive model. What could be worse for families and children? And, ultimately, for judges and attorneys?"

Pollak's work literally made her sick. Every time she was due for court, she would vomit and have diarrhea. "I chose this profession because I wanted to be of service to people and to our greater society," she recalls, "but I didn't feel the system I found myself in encouraged that. The whole environment was very toxic."

Like a growing number of lawyers, Pollak decided to quit; she had the vague idea of working as a florist. "I had to do something beautiful. I didn't care what it was, but it had to be visually and holistically healing."

David Hoffman knows the feeling. A child of the 1960s, he graduated from Harvard Law School in 1984 and selected a venerable Boston firm, the now-defunct Hill & Barlow LLP, which supported his desire to practice in a socially conscious manner. Despite his best efforts, he found that very difficult to do.

One of his first cases involved a roof that collapsed in a commercial building. It would cost $300,000 to fix, and Hoffman's client, who owned the building, was willing to pay $100,000 toward repair. The roof manufacturer offered a matching amount. That left a $100,000 gap. But instead of working out their differences, the two sides battled in court for nine years, spending a combined $600,000 on legal fees -- six times the amount in contention. Although he'd performed his job exactly as he'd been taught, Hoffman felt frustrated and unhappy. "It wasn't consistent with my approach to life and to problems in general," says Hoffman, who lives with his family in cooperative housing in Acton. When a friend commented that his was "a hurting, not a helping, profession," he started thinking, he says, "there had to be a better way."

chi_solas wrote:I have taken advantage of the opportunity
to participate in Harvard PON seminars at
the law school. I have observed a new
trend of mediation being introduced into
court room thinking. I have listened to
Judges who were skeptial talking about how
this new thinking really worked when they
tried it.

[from an article quoted by Bridget] Pollak's work literally made her sick. Every time she was due for court, she would vomit and have diarrhea. "I chose this profession because I wanted to be of service to people and to our greater society," she recalls, "but I didn't feel the system I found myself in encouraged that. The whole environment was very toxic."

Bruce wrote:

chi_solas wrote:I have taken advantage of the opportunity
to participate in Harvard PON seminars at
the law school. I have observed a new
trend of mediation being introduced into
court room thinking. I have listened to
Judges who were skeptial talking about how
this new thinking really worked when they
tried it.

These days, many courts routinely order cases into mediation before they come to trial. Mediation tends to work well for some types of cases, and not for others. It can work well for commercial disputes involving parties who dealt in arms-length transactions. So far as I've seen, mediation doesn't work well at all for child custody disputes, where the parties have often hated each other for a long time and the stakes are higher than division of money.

More generally, there's also a move toward private Alternative Dispute Resolution (i.e., mediation or arbitration outside the court system). One of the structural problems that's been recognized is that -- unlike the courts -- the private resolution isn't subsidized by taxpayers, so the parties pay the entire cost of the proceedings, and so it tends to disadvantage a party who does not already have much in the way of financial resources. Another structural problem in arbitration is that "repeat customers" -- businesses that have their clients sign arbitration clauses -- tend to be favored by the arbiters when disputes arise.

[from an article quoted by Bridget] Pollak's work literally made her sick. Every time she was due for court, she would vomit and have diarrhea. "I chose this profession because I wanted to be of service to people and to our greater society," she recalls, "but I didn't feel the system I found myself in encouraged that. The whole environment was very toxic."

It's at least stressful. When my mother was a public defender, she felt nauseous every morning that she went to court. But she didn't realize that it was caused by work until after she retired, when she no longer felt nauseated.

Bruce

Cheryl Conner's academic and professional credentials give her an intellectual gravitas that comforts those in the hyperrationalistic world of law. She's a graduate of Harvard Law School with a master's degree in economics from the University of Michigan, a former assistant US attorney who also worked at one of Boston's biggest and most influential law firms, Goodwin Proctor.
Her own transformation started about eight years ago, when, as a Massachusetts assistant attorney general, she became frustrated with the limitations of litigation. Around the same time, while hiking in Colorado, she met a Tibetan Buddhist master who deeply influenced her. Conner began studying Buddhism and Eastern thought, which led her to contemplate how rules-based legal training alters the way lawyers perceive the world and treat their clients. Soon thereafter, she took a position as director of intern programs at Suffolk Law School, where she received a grant to teach contemplative meditation. That's when she started getting calls.
"These were people who wanted to talk about integrating ethical, spiritual, and religious values within law practice," she says. So she organized a conference at Suffolk six years ago called "Beyond the Code: Can Spiritual Values Be Our Compass?" It marked the first time that a formal conversation on spirituality and the law took place in Boston. "It gave lawyers permission to come out of the closet," she says.
Until that point, lawyers' frustration had focused on process: specifically, hating litigation. "But we were getting to a deeper level," Conner says. "We were saying, 'It's the whole way we relate, to clients and each other and the context of human lives.' "