Author: Katherine Stoessel

Re-reading a book at a different time in one’s life offers surprises. Recently I picked up Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina becoming engrossed with the characters.  I wanted to re-read it for  personal reasons but I was surprised at how it related to my work. Re-reading I was struck by the powerful depiction of the human capacity…

A few months ago, I had a dream. It was a sensation, a feeling rather than a story. I’m in a park, it’s a beautiful day. People are spread out in small groups, everyone enjoying each other and the sunny day. Permeating the dream is the consciousness of revolution. Demonstrations are going on in major…

Reading the article, ‘In an age where the heart rules the head, here’s a case against empathy’, what Ms. Hinsliff characterizes as ‘empathy’ is actually ‘sympathy’. When we sympathize, we identify with the feelings of another because we have experienced similar feelings. It is easy to sympathize. She describes empathy as ‘gooey emoting’. It is…

Greek Tragedy in Our Times: Antigone in Ferguson Last month I travelled to NYC to see the classic Greek tragedy, Antigone, distilled and adapted by director Bryan Doerries, to grapple with the death in 2014 of a young black man, Michael Brown, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The deaths of mostly black…

The US criminal ‘justice’ system is anything but ‘just’. Over the past decades changes in sentencing have resulted in mass incarceration of mostly African Americans and poor people, resulting in deeply harmed families and communities. Even before these consequential changes in laws and sentencing that began in the 1970’s, the US justice system can only…

The Role of Emotion in Achieving Success in Mediation  Success I have grappled with many things in my years of mediation practice, but the question of success is one that is ever present for me as a practitioner and a trainer of mediators. What is success in mediation? What is the interplay between success and…

The last family meditation I did got me thinking more specifically and carefully about the principle of ‘consent’ in mediation. In this context it had to do with the option of parties to bring supporters or other individuals concerned and/or involved in the issues at hand to the mediation and that the decision to do…

Recently in Moscow, Russia, for a family visit (my daughter has lived and worked there for 10 years), I spent most afternoons in neighborhood parks with my 4-year-old grandson. Picking him up after nursery school, it being May and warm and sunny, and given his fascination with moving water, he would invariably ask to go…

Everyone aspires to live in a safe community. Every parent wants to know their children are safe. Sadly today, in the US, when it comes to schools there are many parents, children, and community members who feel increasingly anxious and unsafe. We (and likely many from other parts of the world) have been grief stricken…

George Floyd was a stranger to me until last May. No longer. No longer with us but living in our mind and heart and imagination as the symbol of injustice cut down by racial hate, unacknowledged white supremacy and the violence endemic in our nation’s policing. My husband and I looked at each other in…

I first heard this interview on ‘Reckonings’, a weekly radio program broadcast on Oaklands WGPC. Follow this link for more information on the broadcasts, their mission and programs: http://www.reckonings.show/episodes/24 In this episode, author and playwright Eve Ensler, discusses her recent book, The Apology’. In it, she imagines the apology her father never gave her for…

I’ve been thinking a lot these days and months about transitions. Big and small. This is because I’ve just made a big one – moving back to NY state after 17 years overseas, 15 of those in the UK. There have been other big ones in my adult life, certainly the move from NY to…

I recently returned from a 3-day International Restorative Justice Conference held at Vermont Law School in Burlington. There was a wide range of topics and lively keynote speakers, including Robert Sand, director of the Center for Justice Reform, Judge Robert Yazzie from the Navaho Nation and Donna Hicks whose theme was Dignity and the research…