The Zen of You and Me: conflict

To engage our differences is to engage our judgments and stories. This creates barriers between us, making listening much harder.
We have the same basic values, but/and the harmony that includes our differences and diversity is deeper and more durable than the one that doesn’t.
Listen by letting go and receiving. Listening is the best tool to open into togetherness.
- Listening does not mean agreement; keeping that clear improves our listening.
Sameness smooths and calms, difference injects energy and movement.
Skilful inclusion of our differences is difficult. Working with differences overrides our deepest protective habits. It requires more of a world-centric view than ethnocentric or egocentric.
Resolving a conflict creatively is an exercise in growth, but/and we can develop a taste for working with this disruptive energy.
It is vitally important that if we have a want or need when expressing our differences, we make a simple request.

Judgements

To engage our differences is to engage our judgments.
When our attention narrows like this, we find ourselves trapped in the one perspective that makes us feel the safest: “I’m right and you’re wrong.”
What story do I tell myself about my role in the conflict?
Our judgments create barriers between us. These become little fences of difference that make the open field of genuine listening much harder to enter.

The harmony that includes our differences is deeper and more durable than the one that doesn’t.
Our deepest nature is the unity that includes diversity.
We can see that we have the same basic values, and together, we have more of those values.

Listening is the best tool there is to lower anxiety, diminish division, and open into sameness, into togetherness.
Listening is an act of emptying out and receiving. It is simply letting go and for a moment becoming one with another point of view.
Listening does not mean agreement. If you can keep that clear, your listening will improve.

In an exchange that unsettles or agitates us, for instance, we can smooth things out by creating more sameness.
When discussions become sluggish, flat, or uninspiring, we can inject a dose of difference.

Including differences in conversation, allowing them to energize and provoke us, but not to alienate us, requires a lot of skill.
When we lean toward conflict, we are literally overriding our oldest, deepest protective habits.

It wouldn’t occur to the fundamentally egocentric person to work on relationship skills because such a person doesn’t have the free attention to tune into another viewpoint.
There is an excitement in the move from ethnocentric to world-centric because difference is no longer frightening. It is stimulating.
At this stage, exploring differences appears necessary and compelling.

If we are able to work with the tension of difference, we become confident in our ability to discuss and integrate ways in which we are not the same.
It is vitally important that if we have a want or need when expressing our differences, we make a simple request.
We can develop a taste for working with the disruptive energy.
Resolving a conflict creatively is an exercise in growth.

Added 2024-02-24.