#14Days: A cry for compassion in treating addiction (3 min)

Excellent reminder of how compassionate creates the space in which healing can occur. In schools, about as far as you can get from a "clinical setting", the principle of unconditional regard coupled with designing highly engaging learning opportunities help form a very powerful and attractive option for learners.  Compassion seeks to understand the complexity within the learner, including the root cause of the pain, so that each learner can be actively engaged in designing their own learning solutions. This, in turn, builds in the learners new capacities, hopefulness, goal setting, self-regulation skills, and self-efficacy.  As the video clip suggests - reflecting intentionally after tragedy has run its course often revolves around the question, "At what point could we have intervened?" The starting line of intervening entails reflection and upping our curiosity as care givers - not upping our expectations for performance. In Washington's Compassionate Schools model we might simplify this same message in a different but parallel way - asking a child to be ready to come ready to learn each day while virtually everything in their life is chaos is like expecting them to "play chess in a hurricane."