I was told by some of our Neufeld Institute staff that our newsletter subscribers might appreciate hearing from me at the start of this new year. I usually turtle during the winter holidays, retreating to my family and my reading and generally closing the shutters to the outside world. It isn’t that there aren’t thoughts…
A very long time ago it seems, I gave a talk called Cultivating Caring Children. I loved that material. More recently I had the opportunity to keynote on empathy. Oh my goodness, I was taken by surprise by the rant that was in me. I decided at that time to create a course with empathy as the…
I keep waiting for someone to ask me this. Not even when writing Hold On To Your Kids, over 20 years ago now, did anyone ask me – not my editors or even my most articulate co-writer, Gabor Maté. Perhaps it is obvious and doesn’t require further explanation. On the other hand, the capitalization was a deliberate choice…
‘Tis the season of beginnings, most obviously of a new cycle of time of course. This often comes with some attempts at fresh starts and renewed resolutions. I have a number of such beginnings in mind for myself.What I am thinking about however, is something more philosophical but also much more salient, especially in the…
Sometimes in our travels we come upon something that seemed initially like just one more place to visit, only in retrospect to reveal itself as absolutely key to our understanding of the world and our place in it. I remember a few such transforming experiences in my life. My travels over the theoretical landscape of…
As I have been immersing myself into the material in preparation for my 2023 conference address on the Wisdom of Dependence, I once again find myself in awe regarding Nature’s blueprint for the unfolding of human potential. At the same time, I am acutely aware of how much we are still being governed by the…
Editor’s note: These reflections from Gordon on the mystery of coupling are in the context of the upcoming course, Making Sense of Marriage, being offered in January 2023.We’ve been coupling forever it would seem. Some of us started rather early in life – much earlier than our parents would have liked or even without our…
I have tried to tell the story of frustration in a one-day seminar, a two-day course, and even a three-day course, but I remain unsatisfied that the story has truly been heard. If one is to believe Chris Anderson, the curator for TED Talks, my problem has been too many words. According to him, the…
There’s a hole in my bucket …I can’t say the words without hearing Harry Belafonte’s smooth mellow voice singing the words to this 400-year-old nursery rhyme – a most humorous depiction of futility: going round and round in circles without getting anywhere. A ‘hole in the bucket’ is, in fact, more than just a great…
As parents are pondering the best path forward for their children and families during this pandemic, a number of pundits have been featured on Canadian news channels urgently stating that children NEED to go to school. One even stated that children need to go to school more than they or their families need to be kept…