The Zen of You and Me

Intro

To engage our differences is to engage our judgments, and our judgments usually pack an emotional punch, and that is where the difficulty begins.
Because our brains and bodies are hardwired to interpret even slight variations between us as threatening, we have tremendous difficulty simply talking about them.
The harmony that includes our differences is deeper and more durable than the one that doesn’t.

1. Same and different

With the value difference of better and worse comes an array of disadvantages. Those disadvantages lead to injustice; that injustice hardens into oppression.

2. Together, then apart

Sometimes we leave with resentment, sometimes relief, or most often with a combination of both.
It takes courage to move from the security of our sameness into new and different worlds.
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.
We want to notice the differences: not to judge them as wrong so quickly, but to name and explore them.
We are willing to take risks and make mistakes. We begin to develop a love for the flavour of difference and its enlivening and disrupting impact.
Our deepest nature is the unity that includes diversity.
It is a very freeing experience to suddenly realize that differences between us are not only OK—they are stimulating and worthwhile. This realization heightens our confidence to bring them out directly and openly.

3. The Ego Divides

When the brain perceives a threat, the amygdala sounds an alarm, releasing a cascade of chemicals in the body.
Stress hormones, such as adrenaline and cortisol, flood our system, immediately preparing us for fight or flight.
If there is one thing that creates an intense feeling of separation from others, it is the fight-or-flight response.
When the amygdala fires, it creates other changes in the brain. It shuts down the pathways to the prefrontal cortex, the center of consciousness where we maintain our intention.
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.”
In addition, our memory becomes untrustworthy.
When our memory is compromised like this, we can recall almost nothing from our past that might help us calm down.
Stay Present, Let Go of the Story, Focus on the Body, Breathe

4. Mindfulness and meditation

Deliberate and focused, yet relaxed.
Deeply concentrated in the here and now, free of judgments about yourself as good or bad, right or wrong, as you attends to your task.
Bringing fluid and focused attention to our activity here and now, while remaining free of the stream of discursive comments and judgments that so often distort our experience of the moment.
If we want to change, we have to begin by studying what happens to us in stressful situations.
Can I remain aware with my sensations, feelings, and thoughts, or is my mind rushing mindlessly to replay the past or strategise a response in the future?
What story do I tell myself about my role in the conflict?
sameness equals peace.
If there is one basic practice that will help us be present to ourselves and, therefore, capable of being present to others, sitting meditation is it.
Create an open space of unbiased awareness in which the entire play of experience is simply observed and noted.
Commit to allowing things to be just as they are until tomorrow, and then think about whether to take any action.

5. Listening. The supreme skill.

Listening is the best tool there is to lower anxiety, diminish division, and open into sameness, into togetherness.
Listening has a lot in common with meditation. Both involve a clear intention of bringing attention to this moment, opening up, and letting go of the preoccupations of the self.
Listening and meditating involve letting go—releasing our tight grip on things in the mind. We become familiar with the sensation of release. At first it feels like falling, but once we have befriended it, once we have learned to relax with it, it feels good to let go.
Are we ready for a different set of perceptions, a different way of seeing things? Most of the people I know would say we are, and yet, we often behave as if there is only one correct perspective—and it just happens to be mine.
Listening to another perspective doesn’t necessarily mean we agree with it.
Listening is an act of emptying out and receiving. Although it is a surrender, it isn’t a defeat. It is simply letting go and for a moment becoming one with another point of view.
Our judgments create barriers between us. These become little fences of difference that make the open field of genuine listening much harder to enter.
We have a habit of giving people advice, but how often do they really want it? Almost never. But everyone responds well when we are present, receptive, and curious about their experience.

6 Expressing our uniqueness

If listening opens up the wide territory of sameness, expressing difference catalyses conversations. Listening soothes and harmonizes; self-expression stimulates and energizes.
Our pain is our own to feel and transform, and if we don’t, no one can do it for us.
We don’t have to practice expressing ourselves; it is built in. Even our silence shouts who we are. If we are the type to disappear in a crowd, that invisibility communicates something.
Including differences in conversation, allowing them to energize and provoke us, but not to alienate us, requires a lot of skill.
“I” statements are like magic. Using “I” locates our unique point of view inside of our direct experience, freeing everyone else from the need to agree or disagree.
We can learn from Martin Luther King Jr. how important and persuasive it is to include feeling in our speech. He recognizes pain in his speech, fatigue, and struggle. And by the end, he still raises up hope and instills exaltation.
Anytime someone else shares their truth with us, we should be grateful that we are given the opportunity to see and feel more than we did before. It is a privilege to feel.
Often in conversation, particularly when we are discussing our differences, we don’t take time to either prepare or to simplify our message.
Instead of criticizing me and retreating, he stayed right there with me, urging me to communicate better so that we could succeed in understanding one another.
It is vitally important that if we have a want or need when expressing our differences, we make a simple request.
With one true expression, the tense atmosphere of difference was transformed into mutual curiosity and exchange.
Why isn’t it easier to speak simply about our thoughts and feelings? Because, as I said earlier, we are very sensitive to safety in communication.
Notice the impact of having your viewpoint valued.

7. Depth of feeling

I wouldn’t want to choose between my mother’s capacity to feel and my father’s ability to ignore intense feelings. It would be like choosing between truth and beauty.
Every emotion is a state of consciousness, an experience composed of thought, mood, and bodily sensations. We refer to them as “states” because they come and they go.
The problem with our emotions is that we don’t relate to them as states.
Feelings are meant to be felt. They are a potent source of information. But we don’t want to be trapped in them. We want to be free to feel them completely and let go of them entirely.
The first step in becoming emotionally literate is to simply begin to recognize feelings in the body.
When sharing feelings can create more intimacy and depth in relationship, I want to express them.
Notice the richness of different sets of feelings as part of the conversational landscape.

8. Talking About Difference

We can pay attention to judgments when they come up, such as who is right and who is wrong, and how those judgments intensify our feelings of threat.
If negative emotions, such as anger, jealousy, or pride, also arise, we can see how quickly these affect our view of our differences and help propel the differences into deeper, more intractable conflicts.
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. Well-placed differences bring life to a conversation. They create contrast and spark energy.
We can develop a taste for working with the disruptive energy.

Five steps

Prepare. Thinking ahead gives us a chance to calm down, prepare to listen, and clarify what we want to say. Preparing will also help us listen better.
Listen. Don’t mix listening with problem solving or negotiating. Wait until both of you have heard each other out to start the next step. Listening does not mean agreement. If you can keep that clear, your listening will improve.
Share Your Perspective. The use of the third person asserts a truth and invites disagreement. The first person expresses a relative perspective and is easier to hear because it doesn’t claim the position of truth. Including our feeling states humanizes our communication and helps bring the heart online.
Relax and wait.
Problem solve. Skillful negotiation involves seeing where our wants and needs overlap.

9. Negotiating with David

“It is what it is.” But this is challenging because we almost always attach a judgment to the difference.
We can see that we have the same basic values, and together, we have more of those values.
We don’t need to get rid of the difference; we couldn’t even if we tried. Rather, we can reach below it to find the wants and needs being served by it.

10. The Great Divide.

It is a very freeing experience to suddenly realize that a difference between us is not only OK, but it is also intelligent and worthwhile.
We must learn to see conflict not as a problem to be solved, but an opportunity to be engaged.
When we lean toward conflict, we are literally overriding our oldest, deepest protective habits.
As we learn to include more difference, our relationships become more interesting, more authentic, more trustable. We have more bandwidth for the challenge of being human, and we can engage that challenge together.

11. Differences in style

In Buddhist terms, we belong to one of five different energetic styles called the five wisdom energies.
The five wisdom energies are sometimes referred to as “wisdom families,” and include the vajra, buddha, ratna, karma, and padma style.

12.You and me, us and them

Using an adult developmental framework to look at differences can show us real possibilities, and also limits, in relationship.
We can probably all think of someone in our life who cannot consider the perspective of others because this person’s own viewpoint takes up the full bandwidth of his or her awareness.
True egocentrism is a form of suffering.
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.
Most of us move beyond our self orientation to the ethnocentric level.
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.
We recognize, maybe for the first time, neither of us is entirely right, and neither of us is entirely wrong. All of our previous black-and-white thinking softens, taking on shades of grey.
Kosmic-centric perspective, and I use Ken Wilber’s spelling to indicate that the shift in perception affects us inside, as well as outside.
From this point of view, there is no fixed boundary. Reality is as it is. Complete. Continuous. Whole. Including all life and even death.
Because attention is right here, right now, our eyes see colour and shape more vividly, our ears pick up the tiniest sound, and the full detail of each moment is real and apparent.
- (Our senses haven’t changed. It’s just that we are filtering out less.)
Our task is to open up the widest possible perspective and allow it to inform all the details and the differences. In doing so, we serve me, us, all of us, and all of it.

13. Free from Identity

Under threat, the ethnocentric part of us will do its part to protect our own.
Sometimes ethnocentric identity is not all it is cracked up to be. The very thing that creates the safety creates the suffering.
World-centric identity is much more fluid than ethnocentric identity is.
Any time we are fully aware of this moment, so absorbed by it that our mind is free of self-referencing, identity sleeps.
Each of us exists in complete relationship to all things, and we are enlivened, shaped, and, you might even say, evoked by everything around us.
There can be an experience without a story of the self, free of reference points to the past. And without the story, we just might feel free to act naturally, spontaneously, even joyfully.
Ever-present awareness is our true identity. It doesn’t change with circumstance or culture or even personal development.
Identities also arise, enact their role, and fade away.
The human heart is universal, beyond the limits of identity.

14. Natural Compassion

It is refreshing to receive and refreshing to respond with compassion—to your family, to your friends, to the people you encounter throughout the day.
Most importantly, we must have compassion for ourselves. Without it, we cannot truly offer it to others.
This is the freely functioning quality of compassion, which simply gives what the situation asks for.
When we are identified with an open heart, giving and receiving are not separate. It is not like a typical transaction because we receive through the very act of giving.
Simple presence is, by itself, deeply comforting.
Compassion is activity—the embodied gestures of an awakened heart.
I ask them to imagine an ideal coach—someone who is kind, yet firm, and totally committed to getting the best from them.
We are eternally the giver and receiver, and as human beings, we are only complete in this back-and-forth.
Instead of being motivated by lack, we are now moved by our fullness.
Instead of striving to be of service, we learn to show up—ready, available, offering our perspective, our heart, and our skills, with no residue.

15. Practice is The Way

The practitioner does not let doubt or fear get in the way of the successful completion of an objective.
Our fundamental practice is simply being present to everything, including negative emotions and when things go awry, and just seeing it all clearly.
As life evolves, nervous systems become increasingly complex, and the capacity for consciousness and self-awareness also evolves.
There have been many times when I have failed my practice, but it has never failed me.

16. Taking Heart

learning to deal with our differences is a surefire way to grow as a human being. We are stretched every time we turn toward our differences instead of away from them. Resolving a conflict creatively is an exercise in growth.
Mindfulness practice offers us a discipline for becoming intimate with our own fear, anger, and other emotional states.
Notice that your heart is big enough to include things that get you down and what inspires you, lifts you up, or gives you hope.

16. Not one, not two

The healthiest ecosystems are those containing the most diversity.
The Buddha said that the mind that separates is the source of our suffering.
Solitude is only satisfying when we find oneness with ourselves and our environment.
The lived experience is not of one, nor two: not of sameness nor difference. It is immediate, thorough, and intimate.

Added 2024-02-21.