Here’s the video recording of my webinar with Restorative Action Alliance (9/30/24). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyYSbgd15-ghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyYSbgd15-g
I hope you will check out my book, Being Restorative (Bauhan Publishing). The book is available for order from the publisher or ask your local bookstore to order it. You can find it on Amazon and Barnes and Noble as well.
I admire in particular the hybrid quality of the book itself — part memoir, part essay, argument, dialectic — which is why, perhaps, it has a conversational feel, which I love. There is the reality, and you lift this up in the form and structure and tone of your book and voice, that all our ideas, all our experience, is interrelated/interconnected, and that we in some very immediate and substantive way, become together.
Kimberly Cloutier Green
While restorative justice refers to a set of principled responses to harm centered on healing, often in a legal context, and restorative practice extends those responses to other contexts such as schools and the workplace, restorative being embeds connection, compassion, belonging, and accountability into everyday life. In this collection of essays, Leaf Seligman—restorative practitioner, circle-keeper, educator, itinerant preacher, and advocate for tenderness—reflects on a worldview and embodied practice that restores the possibility of a world where the right relationship can flourish.
“Leaf Seligman is a preacher. Period. But she isn’t a preacher from the pulpit; rather, her ministry is embodied and brought forth in her every engagement with the world. Her ministry is restorative. Her ministry, as it unfolds in this book, paints a picture of humanity in deep relationship with ourselves and nature as a whole, illuminating the ethical reason for such a relationship. She asks good questions of us all while making a gentle yet urgent call for readers to shift their mode of being through a solid seven-point foundation and a tender five-point process of accountability. The vulnerability of her own personal stories woven into this work begs readers to reflect on how they themselves are showing up in the world. If we all leaned into this work as laid out by Leaf, the world would be a better place, reminding us that “the first step is to nourish the capacity to imagine.”
—Dr. E. Jabali Stewart, circle keeper and co-founder of Huayruro
“What an honor to learn from the life stories and wisdom of a whole-hearted practitioner like Leaf Seligman. This book reflects not just on how restorative practices can re-shape our world but also on how each of us can be more restorative in our world. Weaving the doing with the being, the lessons learned with the frameworks, the poetry with the memoir, is both helpful and hopeful. On top of that, Leaf’s work on co-creating a restorative pedagogy is enlivening and expanding young people’s sense of safety, imagination, and community in these uncertain times. By connecting the practices of restoration with the challenging contexts of our world, Leaf is showing how possible it is to shift from an all-or-nothing, fear-based, punitive approach, to one that encompasses the both/and, the wholeness of life, and love for all. Thank you Leaf for sharing your insights, your inquiries, your passions, your vulnerability, with us all so generously. You show how reckoning with compassion can yield lasting repair and give our relationships and systems what they long for and need: inspiring paths forward.”
—Shilpa Jain, beloved community-builder, conflict transformation practitioner, and former Executive Director, YES!, Berkeley, CA