The True Flavor of Love

The Babylike Sweetness of Love An excerpt from Love Unveiled Let me see if I can give you some feel, some taste, some flavor of what love is like when it is active, manifesting, and we are feeling it. When we say “I love you” to somebody, what do we usually mean? Many of us use those words more often than we should. I am of the opinion that it’s better to not say “I love you” unless you actually are feeling it in that moment. Saying “I love you, honey” before going to sleep or hanging up the phone can become just a habit. After a while, I wonder what kind of love these people are talking about. If they really meant it all those thousands of times, the phone would have melted from being exposed to so much love. But when you look at the phone, you don’t see it melting. Beginning with the word “I” means that I’m experiencing and feeling something directly; I’m tasting a certain flavor, a certain presence, a certain consciousness. I can taste it, feel it, smell it, see it, and it makes me feel a certain way, have a certain attitude. It makes what I do go in a certain direction. When I feel love, there is the feeling, a sense—at least in the heart, if not all the way through—of something very soft. A consciousness that is soft, delicate, smooth, that is gentle and tender. And as you feel it, it is doing something to your insides. It’s tickling your insides in a delicious way; it’s tickling your heart from the inside in such a way that your heart can’t help but relax and melt. It caresses your heart as though an infant were touching you, caressing you on your cheek. You know how an infant’s skin is soft and tender, and it smells almost like baby powder. I think the makers of baby powder wanted to duplicate the softness, the powderyness, the fluffiness, of how a baby’s skin feels and smells. Imagine the softness, the tenderness, of the skin on an infant’s cheek. Love is even softer, more malleable than that, because it doesn’t have the form and substance of flesh. Your heart is that softness, that gentleness. It’s as if its very atoms were constantly getting softer and melting. And this softness has a sense of being light, of being fluffy. Take baby powder and make it even softer, much softer and fluffier, until it becomes like a cloud, and you’ll get closer to what I’m describing as the nature of this love. But even then, the cloud still has some substance; it’s not as though absolutely nothing is there. That cloud is as fluffy and tender as cotton candy. When you touch cotton candy, it is so soft, but it still has a form. But when you put it in your mouth, it disappears; it just melts in your mouth, into a soft sweetness—and then it is gone. Now imagine your heart being just like that—your heart is a mouth tasting a softness, a tenderness, a melty sweetness. There is nothing like it; it is not exactly like sugar or any form of sweetness you can find. The closest to it would be to take a strawberry—a very ripe, sweet strawberry—make it fluffy and soft, and add a bit of rose water. That’s close to how it tastes and smells. It has that nice light pink look to it too. That is why I sometimes call the aspect of love that we are working with “pink cotton candy” (candy floss). It is as though your heart were full of pink cotton candy that is always melting—but always replenishing itself too. The more it melts, the more it replenishes itself. And love is not simply a sweetness all by itself; in its very sweetness is a feeling of liking. When you deeply love someone, it not only tastes sweet but you also like it. The sweetness itself is an affect of the liking, of the loving, of the very feelings themselves: “It’s so wonderful; I really like her!” When you think of somebody you really like, you may not even be able to say why she is wonderful. There’s just some kind of wonderfulness to her. You find in her a beauty that you can’t quite call beauty, because it’s more like yummy, sweet, magnificent, exquisite. All of this brings into your heart a sweetness that feels like an appreciation, a liking, as if that wonderfulness you are feeling were your very own heart. That wonderfulness itself is the liking of the wonderfulness; and that liking of the wonderfulness is that melted sweetness; and that sweetness is itself the softness that is melting into itself. Love makes your head disappear; you swoon, in some sense. Everybody has had that happen when they’re in love, right? And everyone has the idea that this only occurs in the presence of somebody else—for example, that you have to look into that person’s eyes for it to happen. But you only need to feel the love inside yourself. The swooning is not created by looking into the other person’s eyes. It’s the love in your heart that is melting you within, dissolving you from the inside out. When I say “I love you,” I am feeling that it’s what I’m experiencing about you—the sight of you, your presence—that is making me feel all those feelings in my heart. This wonderfulness that you make me feel has to do with you. It’s not necessarily that you are giving it to me, but I feel it about you and toward you. And this wonderful pink, soft sweetness and liking that I’m feeling about you and toward you is not only in my heart; I’m feeling it in your heart as well. So when I say “you,” I am taking this pink cloud and placing it in your heart. And if that feeling increases, if the love gets stronger, it goes beyond even feeling that what is in my heart is in your heart too. It’s more like the love inside of me expands and expands until it melts my chest. After a while, the love expands so much that it becomes a cloud that envelops me and envelops you and melts your heart at the same time that it is melting mine. It melts the boundary between us. How Sweet It Is! At that point, what does “I love you” even mean? It gets difficult to say who is loving who! When love gets that strong, it reveals a unity between my heart and the heart of the other person. If love decreases, then “I” am separate from my heart, and then it’s more accurate to say “I have love in my heart for you.” Many people think of love as “I love you, and I really, really want to be with you”—with all the longing and sadness and tears that go with that. Most movies portray love as inseparable from pain and sadness. That’s not what I recognize love to be. For me, love is a joyful, happy, light feeling. When I feel love, it’s more like, “Isn’t it wonderful? I like you so much. You’re so beautiful, you’re so wonderful.” After a while, I can’t even tell who’s wonderful. Is it you? Is it me? Is it the love that is wonderful? No wonder Rumi talks about flying. Love has a lightness, a carefreeness, a spontaneity, because the mind that is self-reflective, that is self-controlling, is melting away through that force of love. And that melting away is what we call rending the veils—the veils that are around our heart, around our soul . . . wall after wall after wall. Love is like a wonderful sweet acid that melts those walls in complete pleasure. The effect of love on the soul is to melt her boundaries while the soul feels ecstatic. You’re being consumed while you’re feeling wonderful. It’s a palpable feeling. When love gets that strong, it reveals a unity between my heart and the heart of the other person. You see, love is not a strong desire; it’s not a longing. Nor is it “I know I love you.” These things can be there, they can mix with love—but they cannot be love. They are actually the limitations of love. Love itself is the wonderful, beautiful sweetness that makes you happy. And when you feel it, you can’t help but want the other person to be happy. That’s because love eliminates boundaries. As it is melting your boundaries, it’s natural that you feel happy when you make the other happy. That’s because you are getting nearer. The soul is doing its thing. It’s getting ripe. It’s bearing its fruits. And the pink that I’m talking about is a very beautiful pink. It is very light and has a purity to it. It is so purely pink that it exudes innocence. You know how innocent and tender infants are. That innocence, that purity we are perceiving in the infant is love. We’re not only perceiving skin that has not yet been hardened by life but we’re also seeing skin that is soaked with love. It has not hardened against love. Love has that effect. It makes you luminous, it makes you radiant with happiness, with delight, with lovingness, with liking, with an appreciativeness. S: Can you talk more about liking and loving, and the difference between them? AH: Liking is easier for us to feel; it is closer to everyday life: “I like this dessert. I like this flower. I like this movie.” As I say these things, feel the affect itself of liking. I don’t mean our ideas about why we like this or that—there’s an actual feeling, an actual enjoyment, an actual sweetness to the liking. And that sweetness is not just the sweetness of sugar; it is a sweetness that is a feeling, an affect. So, the sweetness, the appreciativeness, and the liking are the same thing. Now love has this quality of liking, but that liking now has an ecstatic, pleasurable quality; so we say that what we love is wonderful. S: When I feel the pink, it’s almost like I’m blushing. AH: That happens to people. They blush, they get embarrassed, because their heart is showing. Love tends to open you up just like a flower. This is one of the things we will discover more about: how love expresses itself. It’s as if the atoms of your skin were moving and creating space between themselves so that there’s more room between the molecules when the pinkness and wonderfulness and appreciativeness start coming through. The Purity of Love Each time we focus on another characteristic of love, it helps us to see more about the veils that need to be rent. Let’s take a look now at what it means that love not only has a softness and a tenderness and a fluffiness but also a sense of purity to it. This purity is like the purity of the newborn infant, like the purity of the flower when it opens up. The purity of its own nature is newly arising. It’s virginal. It hasn’t been contaminated by anything. Nothing has touched it. This purity will be experienced as a spontaneous innocence, as though your mind were not there—or at least not relevant. An infant can be full of love, but he’s not thinking “I love you” or whether that feeling is good or bad. There is an innocence, a carefreeness, a lack of self-consciousness and self-reflection. When we feel that type of innocence, that purity, it will feel like an unknowingness. We don’t know what is happening. Our thoughts themselves are melting, becoming syrupy. There is a softness, a fluffiness that melts easily, and could disappear like a cloud. And along with that, there is a virginal innocence and sense of purity. But those qualities also bring in certain barriers to love. When we become adults, that innocence, that purity, that delicacy, can be threatening. We’re scared to experience ourselves that way. Those are the most important qualities of love, but the adult who is not used to the experience of love will see them as a loss of protection. That is because our mind and our knowingness have become a protection for us: “I know who I am. I know who you are. I know what to do.” Right? The fear is that love will erase that hedge of protection. If you really allow the love, you might end up sitting and staring at nothing, feeling wonderful but without the vaguest idea that there’s a world still out there. For all you know, it might have disappeared when you began staring into space—and you don’t care! But if you’re not used to allowing love in, you say, “Wait a minute. What’s going on? I’m not going to be able to take care of myself. Not only that, I’m not going to have any protection. What happens if somebody comes in, somebody who is mean? Or somebody who doesn’t understand? She could crush me just like that! I’m so soft and delicate. If I let her in close, I’ll lose all the structure that gave me that padding, that thickness, those metal doors, those rubber tires surrounding my castle.” So, if a Sherman tank comes through, what is going to happen to you? Imagine taking a whole lot of pink-cotton-candy love and putting it all around you for protection. Anybody can just lick through it. They can just lick you out of existence. That is how it will feel if you let your heart be full and effulgent with love. Pretty scary. You have learned very early on that “I need some padding, I need some doors, some walls.” So, in allowing love to reach you, you will feel as though you are that vulnerable, unprotected, delicate, fluffy presence. When we become adults, that innocence, that purity, that delicacy, can be threatening. We’re scared to experience ourselves that way. Part of our fear or hesitation about love comes from the nature of love itself, and part of it is the result of our associations with feeling love when it was full in us as infants. So love brings with it a sense not only of unprotectedness but of helplessness as well. We associate our delicacy with helplessness, weakness, incapacity. We think that if we allow ourselves to feel the fullness of love, then we are going to be a helpless infant. When did we feel ourselves as this ball of pink, sweet fluff? When we were three days old or, if we were lucky, maybe six weeks old. Allowing ourselves to be this ball of fluff again will bring in all these fears: “I’ll be weak . . . I’ll be helpless . . . I’ll be at the mercy of everybody . . . I won’t have any protection.” The innocence, the softness, the purity . . . even though all of it is wonderful and we want it, it scares the hell out of our ego. And that fear generates various barriers, various veils. So, let’s begin an inquiry into our experiences of this innocence, this purity, this delicacy, by becoming more familiar with one of the veils that arises—the barrier against babylike sweetness. Each one of us is somewhat babylike when we allow our heart to come through. I don’t mean babyish in the sense of slobbering all over ourselves or needing diapers. I mean that whatever it is, we feel it purely and in an undivided and wholehearted way. In this case, what we’re feeling is the lovingness, the liking, the enjoyment, and the celebration that go with the openness and softness. That’s what I mean by babylike sweetness. Everybody has a babylike sweetness, because that is just the nature of love. You could be a mature person, see yourself as a grownup, and still have that babylike sweetness. Babylike sweetness does not have to go away just because you’re grown up. It does not mean you have to be a baby. It’s simply the softness, the delicacy, the innocence, the purity of love. We want to rend that veil, penetrate that particular puzzle of the heart. Practice Session 1 Time to explore. You will do a repeating question with one other person, fifteen minutes per person, or you can practice by writing out answers yourself: What prevents you from experiencing your babylike sweetness? Questions and Comments S: During the exercise, it seemed that there were a lot of reasons why experiencing my babylike sweetness is bad—especially if I didn’t get recognized when I was young. It also seems that if I were to experience it even now, as a grownup, I’d still dissolve. AH: Right. So that becomes a big fear. And that has to do with not understanding the nature of love. As long as we take ourselves to be that which is going to dissolve, love is scary. The more we recognize that the love is who we are, the easier it becomes to let ourselves dissolve. S: One thing I noticed is that there was much more of a childlike playfulness in this exercise and less of a serious, adult feeling. I sort of melted away. I think that is one of my barriers, that I should be serious. I have some kind of image about that. AH: Can’t be serious and innocent at the same time, right? You might giggle at any moment! And you might not even think that’s wrong. S: My experience was almost the opposite. It felt dangerous and incredibly powerful. An image that came up was of a tiny, powerful bomb with a very short fuse. I couldn’t really touch it because it would overwhelm me and everything else. AH: Yeah, it’s very dangerous. And it’s not so small; it’s much bigger than you imagine. S: Well, that’s all I would let myself see of it. AH: Right. You saw it as only so big, so you wouldn’t be scared. S: A big barrier for me has to do with having been deeply hurt in that place and being taken advantage of. I think that is why I was sexually molested—I didn’t have any barriers or boundaries and was totally trusting. So now it does feel dangerous to be without any barriers. AH: Very good. That’s why we have built up all these protections—because we felt danger at that time. Our environment wasn’t empathic to that softness, that innocence. It didn’t understand it, see it, respect it. Not only that, it sometimes exploited it. But with these types of experiences comes the belief that as adults, we are as helpless as that little kid—which is not the case. Share Related Books A. H. Almaas is the pen name of Hameed Ali, the Kuwaiti-born originator of the Diamond Approach, who has been guiding individuals and groups in Colorado, California, and Europe since 1976. Learn more.

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Leading From a Place of Wholeness

by Kimberly Myosai Loh, co-author of Compassionate Conversations This article is the third in a series of three, sharing perspectives from the book Compassionate Conversation: How to Speak and Listen from the Heart, co-authored by Diane Musho Hamilton, Gabriel Menegale Wilson, and Kimberly Myosai Loh. Read the first article in the series, “What Makes a Successful Conversation?” Read the second article in the series, “Conversation Skills to Catalyze Growth” Across the world, our ways of holding power have evolved enormously in even the last 100 years. Trends in governance demonstrate how we’re moving away from dictatorships and autocracies. The waves of revolutions and social change movements show us that people are no longer submitting to being ruled solely by force and fear. Instead, capturing the hearts of those we may seek to guide and direct is vitally important. This means that people’s core needs, values, and potential must be woven into the shared path forward. Anytime we are providing direction, advancing the path, or offering our vision in service of a collective group, we are expressing leadership traits. The way we communicate with others involved has everything to do with the success or failure of our proposition. What Does it Mean to Lead from a Place of Wholeness? Wholeness is the inclusion of all parts into a cohesive entity. It’s drawing the pieces together to feel their fullness, unified in one place. Both relieving and empowering, it is both a concept and a practice. Leading a team is complex. When leading, it’s vital to understand the context in which one is navigating: the mapping of connection points and levers, the timeliness of action, and the availability of resources. We must also grasp our internal landscape: the team’s individual and collective strengths, all of the myriad interrelationships, systems of operation, and, importantly, how aligned each person is with the common intention or aspiration. While it’s a lot to take in, we can keep some priorities in mind. Leaders who lead from a place of wholeness are guided by three important traits: 1. Conscious, clear values Values in this context are simply what one considers most important. In this article I’m choosing to focus on humility, integrity, and ethical intelligence as examples, but it is for each person to choose for themselves what values they subscribe to and how they will hold themselves accountable. If we accept that power brings with it responsibility, leaders must take on the additional responsibility of ensuring that their decisions are being made in line with chosen value sets, and not consciously or subconsciously corrupted by self-interest. Humility is the knowledge that each of us is subject to our own limitations. Once we recognize this, we can become curious about opening to others’ perspectives so that we can gain a fuller, more accurate picture of reality. When we can incorporate more points of view, especially from those whose lives will be impacted by those decisions, our strategies and solutions will become more durable and effective. Integrity guides us to stay true to carefully chosen values and principles that are appropriate for the needs of all relevant stakeholders, even when the circumstances don’t feel convenient. Having a strong sense of integrity is what makes us reliable. In times of increased fear and volatility, being able to trust in our leaders to keep what’s most important squarely at the fore is absolutely invaluable. Ethical intelligence refers to the soundness of the process we go through in discerning what our chosen values and principles are. For some, this uncovering process is a foundational commitment throughout our life’s work. We can hone our moral compasses by ensuring we take the time to question for ourselves what we believe to be right and why, rather than relying on common opinion. 2. Mature communication skills In Compassionate Conversations, we discuss basic communication skills, such as listening, reframing, and working with strong emotions. We also discuss more nuanced skills, such as perspective-taking and working with power. In my previous article I explored and offered reflection questions for practicing the key skills of Listening Well, Talking Straight, and Giving Support and Challenge. Other important domains of practice for leaders include giving and receiving feedback, cultivating emotional maturity, and using language skillfully to engage, guide, and motivate members of the team. While we all benefit from doing this work, leaders have the potential to amplify those benefits because they are modeling a culture of communication for the entire company or organization. When the person in charge habitually interrupts others and diminishes their opportunities to contribute, they are sending a signal about what kinds of behavior are acceptable, and whose voices are worthy of listening. However, if that person instead makes a habit of actively listening to others and seeking their inputs while staying oriented to the main purpose of the group, they are communicating that they care about others’ insights as they discern how to proceed on that issue. 3. Continual development Leaders who consciously engage their own process of evolution potentiate their growth and allow them to access new perspectives that can inform how they think and act. Here is a passage from Compassionate Conversations that expresses how adult development expands us to include more. At one time, human development was thought to be complete with adolescence. But research shows that it continues throughout the entire adult life span. (1) . . . In one model of adult development, identity moves through four basic stages: egocentric, ethnocentric, worldcentric, and Kosmocentric. Through this simple model our sense of self grows from smaller to larger, encompassing more and more experience. As the sense of self becomes more expansive, it also becomes less fixed and more flexible. These developmental waves of identity have powerful implications for conversation, and while they cannot capture the totality, uniqueness, or mystery of any particular person, they reveal certain broad patterns that can help us understand why our conversations often take the turns they do. (2) As we describe, development is strongly linked to our notion of identity: who we believe and say we are, our values, and how much we might cling to that. (3) The counterpoint to this mode of being is flexibility. As we practice our willingness to shift away from ways we’ve habitually performed in the past, we can transform in the direction of becoming the leader who is actually needed in the moment. The beauty of this is that not only are we more available and responsive to what our environments are calling forward from us, but we actually align with the true nature of reality itself. The world, nature and culture are all evolving, and so are we. Closing the Loop As a leader, your approach to relationships and communication is mirrored by others throughout your organization. In the complexity of today’s world, anchoring your values in what you deem to be most important will support the soundness of your decisions and others’ ability to rely on you. Committing to practice communication skills and continually grow will show you results over time. People desire to be led by inspiration and emotional connection. When you come from a place of greater wholeness, then you will be able to engage others more deeply and incorporate differences in an interdependent flow. In so doing, you can reduce unintended consequences or harms, and genuinely create better outcomes for everyone involved. The Practice Think of a situation in which you have influence where you feel challenged in taking in other points of view and might be defending what you think is the “right way.” Take the time to journal responses to the following prompts, as applied to your scenario: 1. Consciously choose your values What values are you relying on? What values are others expressing through their points of view? Are these sets of values mutually exclusive? Is it possible to weave these values together into a path forward? 2. Take inventory of your communication skills When have you been listening well or poorly? When do you talk straight or speak in ambiguities? When are you offering support and challenge, and to what degree? Have your efforts helped result in the outcome sought? If not, why not? 3. Take initiative in your development Note down three occasions when someone in your life has disrupted your way of thinking by presenting you with a different perspective. How did that information allow you to perceive things from a wider or broader or deeper point of view? What did that new vantage point teach you about wholeness in those situations? (1) Natalie Morad, Part 1: How to Be an Adult—Kegan’s Theory of Adult Development, Medium, November 19, 2017. https://medium.com/@NataliMorad/how-to-be-an-adult-kegans-theory-of-adult-development-d63f4311b553 (2) Hamilton, Wilson, & Loh, Compassionate Conversations: How to Speak and Listen from the Heart, Shambhala Publications, May 19, 2020, 29. (3) For a good description of the different stages of consciousness, including corresponding values and self-identity, check out Barrett C. Brown, An Overview of Developmental Stages of Consciousness, Integral Institute April 3, 2006. https://integralwithoutborders.org/sites/default/files/resources/Overview%20of%20Developmental%20Levels.pdf Share Related Books Kimberly Myosai Loh is an author, coach, and peace specialist working to foster conflict transformation and ethical leadership. Her work includes international peace research at the United Nations, post-graduate conflict resolution at Columbia University, and individual and group coaching to expand our personal and collective potential.

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Conversation Skills to Catalyze Growth

By Kimberly Myosai Loh, co-author of Compassionate Conversations This article is the second in a series of three, sharing perspectives from the book Compassionate Conversation: How to Speak and Listen from the Heart, co-authored by Diane Musho Hamilton, Gabriel Menegale Wilson, and Kimberly Myosai Loh. Read the first article in the series, “What Makes a Successful Conversation?” Read the third article in the series, “Leading From a Place of Wholeness” At each stage of our development, we are stretched to accommodate ever-deepening levels of complexity—in regard to our experiences and ways of knowing ourselves as well as our relationships with others and the rest of the natural world. Our conversations are being called to evolve in parallel with our development, which is also playing out in the collective field. All of the global challenges we face today require an evolution of our human consciousness and a significant boost in the skills with which we communicate. The emergence of new and different perspectives is, in itself, a hallmark of our cultural evolution. We want to talk about the objective world but also include our subjective, lived experience, feelings, and emotions. As we better understand our wider social conditions, conversations about social justice, diversity, equity, inclusion, and power relationships become necessary. Cultivating empathy and compassion for others helps us speak more effectively and process it all together. It’s a tall order. Our conversations naturally evolve in response, calling on us to hone our skills and develop our capacities. Sometimes it’s difficult, sometimes awkward, and sometimes extremely frustrating. Yet, for those of us who care about our connections with those around us, and the future world we seek to co-create together, practicing our communication skills is worth our time and energy. Through practice, we can gain flexibility to entertain more perspectives, listen attentively to one another, and see truth in our different experiences of life. What exactly are the skills that can support us in this endeavor? 1. Listen Well If we could make only one suggestion for improving our conversations, it would be to practice reflective listening skills. Reflective listening is simple and involves just two steps. First, the listener opens up to hear and fully receive the speaker’s message. Second, the listener repeats the message back to the speaker to confirm they were understood accurately. By taking the time to thoroughly receive the messages of one another, we make room for each other’s versions of reality, without invalidating them, shutting them down, or fighting back. It can be helpful to remember that listening doesn’t mean agreement. When we can learn to soothe our nervous systems, stay present, and reflect back what we heard them say without distortion or judgment, the other can experience the relief of being heard and respected, which is fundamentally what we all want. Reflection Question: Think of a conversation you had recently in which you struggled to listen to someone else’s point of view. Notice (a) what was happening in your body, and (b) what thoughts or defenses were racing through your mind. Consider what it was that you were resisting. How would the conversation have changed had you been able to let go of your resistance, listen to their point of view, and reflect back what you heard them say? 2. Talk Straight Talking straight means speaking our truth simply and straightforwardly. Sounds easy but the pitfalls are equally as easy to come by. Sometimes, anxiety about expressing ourselves leads to a tentative or insecure communication style that has us trying to say just the right thing and avoid making any mistakes. On the other hand, we can also overstate our positions and overdo our demands in a way that kills inspiration and discourages others from engaging further. In conversations we facilitate, we invite participants to speak primarily from the first person perspective. This means using “I messages,” as in “I think . . .,” “I feel . . .,” “I want . . .,” or “I will . . .” By conveying only what is true for us, we don't imply big empirical truths that need to be verified or that invite rejection from others. Nor are we attempting to speak on behalf of a wider group who may or may not fully agree. We’re simply capturing our own direct experience and personal perceptions, and in doing so, we acknowledge that our truths exist in relation to other relevant truths. Talking straight develops our bravery; it requires us to be forthcoming with our views and it opens us to to receiving feedback or disagreement. Speaking clearly without traces of aggression or negative judgments takes time and practice to accomplish, but through this we learn to trust ourselves and, in turn, to trust others. Eventually we find out how to hear, respect, and integrate our differences. Reflection Question: What patterns do you notice in your way of expressing things that are important to you? Do you tend to downplay their importance or rush over them, or do you make your point repeatedly with greater and greater insistence? Or do you tend to do something else entirely? What would it be like to “own” what is true for you? What is a way of talking to others that would comfortably convey your truth? 3. Give Support and Challenge Both support and challenge are necessary dimensions for our growth. Safe environments offer the benefits of mutual support, belonging, and rapport between group members. This helps us perform better, take healthy risks, and make mistakes. We create safety in our groups by giving everyone a voice, using listening skills, asking questions, and extending goodwill. On the other hand, we need challenge in order to grow. Challenges keep groups exciting, dynamic, and creative. When we challenge one another, we expand our perspectives to include new information and learn to tolerate the creative tension of our differences. Finding just the right combination of these two qualities is key, so as to avoid imbalance. Too much support and safety subdues energy and inhibits creative difference. Too much challenge, however, can quickly lead to power-games, heightened intensity, or even aggression. In these cultures, people often shut down and stay silent for fear of attack or criticism. When we get the balance just right, our teams evolve through encounters and conversations. People in healthy, dynamic teams have one another’s backs and stand for each other’s well-being, while knowing how to ask each other questions and contrast perspectives with the right level of timing, frequency, and intensity to keep things lively and exciting. Reflection Question: Which do you tend to emphasize—support or challenge? How would you invite more of the other quality into your life? What difference would that make to your growth and development? Going Forward Together Incorporating the three skills of Listening Well, Talking Straight, and Giving Support and Challenge can give us a firm foundation as we traverse the growing complexity in our world. By practicing these, we serve our relationships by showing up more wholly as ourselves and inviting others to do the same. Together, we can grow through hearing and integrating our differences. No matter how new or experienced we are, and no matter how well or poorly the conversations go, our efforts to learn and try are in themselves worthy. Learning is itself a form of evolution, and although it’s sometimes hard to believe, we have faith that our conversations are changing us for the better. Share Related Books Kimberly Myosai Loh is an author, coach, and peace specialist working to foster conflict transformation and ethical leadership. Her work includes international peace research at the United Nations, post-graduate conflict resolution at Columbia University, and individual and group coaching to expand our personal and collective potential.

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What Makes a Successful Conversation?

by Kimberly Myosai Loh, co-author of Compassionate Conversations Photo by eberhard grossgasteiger This article is the first in a series of three, sharing perspectives from the book Compassionate Conversation: How to Speak and Listen from the Heart, co-authored by Diane Musho Hamilton, Gabriel Menegale Wilson, and Kimberly Myosai Loh. Read the second article in the series, “Conversation Skills to Catalyze Growth.” Read the third article in the series, “Leading From a Place of Wholeness” We take the view that successful conversations do not seek to persuade one another of our positions. They aren’t about reducing or ignoring our conflicts, nor even necessarily about getting on the “same page.” Successful conversations have an incredible capacity to deepen relationships. They allow us to bring forward and reveal our differences, rather than simply cope with them. When we learn to connect through our differences, our conversations may still traverse challenging, awkward, embarrassing, or tense terrain. Nevertheless, by learning to bring forward our truths with honesty and compassion, we fortify our relationships with one another, helping us become more flexible, forgiving, and inclusive. What does this mean, exactly? Here’s a passage from our forthcoming book, Compassionate Conversations, that speaks to this: We rely on one another’s different perspectives in order to see beyond our limited viewpoints, so that we can act, in any given moment, in a way that honors all of us. But this means we have to practice. We have to rouse our good faith, listen intently to one another, ask real questions, and stay present to new perspectives. We must learn to surrender our fixed viewpoints and allow our egos to quake and shutter when we don’t agree or when our perspective is challenged. Through encountering the discomfort of the unknown, we have learned to expand and change. We have so much in common to work with, but we are so distinct, individually and culturally, that we need to openly acknowledge our respective differences so as not to be imprisoned by them. (1) Learning to have successful conversations takes practice. This takes place in relationship, through the conversations we have. We cannot do it alone. From my work with mediators, peacebuilders, and conflict resolution practitioners, it is clear to me that all of us have a tremendous capacity to cultivate skills that support successful conversations. These skills include listening deeply and actively, speaking clearly, and giving support and challenge. I’ll dive deeper into these in the next article in this series. Going beneath these skills, however, we can seek to inhabit a curious mindset that understands that there is a wider, deeper reality beyond any one of our personal points of view. As Robert Kegan teaches, conflict may be arising because we need to recover our truer complexity; our conflict could be a consequence of one or both people making their partial position more true, distinct, and whole than it really is. When in actuality, if one’s view excludes the other’s, and their own valid needs, desires, and questions, then it is incomplete. (2) When we understand and embody this with humility and an openness to learn, we can genuinely enter into the domain of successful conversations. These conversations will grow us—through becoming open to changing what we think, how we feel, and how we see the world. In this way, our conflicts can be conceived of as teachers, as invitations for us to deepen into relationship, ultimately including more of ourselves and more of the other, in service of creating a more inclusive whole. (1) Hamilton, Wilson, & Loh, Compassionate Conversations: How to Speak and Listen from the Heart, (Boulder: Shambhala Publications, 2020), 16. (2) Robert Kegan, In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 319. Share Related Books Kimberly Myosai Loh is an author, coach, and peace specialist working to foster conflict transformation and ethical leadership. Her work includes international peace research at the United Nations, post-graduate conflict resolution at Columbia University, and individual and group coaching to expand our personal and collective potential.

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On Compassionate Conversations

A Foreword to Compassionate Conversations by Ken Wilber One of the most gratifying and encouraging developments on the recent cultural scene is that, after literally decades of polarizing and increasingly nasty culture wars, there are individuals who do not simply join in the fray and thus only contribute to the mess, but rather have started to actually stand back and seriously reflect on the situation. They point out not just how one side is totally right and the other side totally wrong but how all sides are actually limited, partial, and broken in their own ways. In pointing to a larger, more inclusive, more whole perspective that is equally friendly to all parties, they are usually and loudly disowned by all sides. But they are almost certainly pointing to a much deeper truth here, and one I believe we need to take very seriously. In a sense, they are pointing directly to a tomorrow in which society has become much more coherent, integrated, and meaningful. Yet, as important as these voices are, almost all of them are still missing at least one very important piece of the puzzle. Take Douglas Murray, for instance. After writing the very perceptive The Strange Death of Europe about the serious problems caused by the recent massive influx of immigration into Europe, he authored The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity. Although admittingly tilting to a center-right politics, Murray outlined some of the serious problems and limitations that have thus far plagued the public discussions of LGBTQ, gender, and racial rights. As important as some of these insights are, in Murray’s final analysis, all he can do is essentially what all the other parties in the debate end up doing—namely, outline his own position and then advocate strongly for it. There’s nothing wrong with that; it’s the essence of public conversation. But when it comes to creating an overarching framework that could actually unite and integrate the various warring parties, Murray basically says, “We just don’t know how to do this.” But we do know. Enter the book Compassionate Conversations by Diane Musho Hamilton, Gabriel Menegale Wilson, and Kimberly Myosai Loh. What’s so extraordinary about this presentation is that it not only addresses the fundamental issues involved in these debates, it does so using a framework that can actually unite and integrate the various parties in the fractured culture wars. Thus, what you will take away from this book is not just a series of incredibly useful skills to help you advance genuinely compassionate conversations, nor just the combined wisdom of three extraordinarily gifted facilitators who have spent their professional lives working as conflict counselors, mediators, and interpersonal guides. But, just as important, you will find an unusually helpful framework that will straightforwardly show you why “everybody is right”—or more accurately, why everybody has ideas that are “true but partial”—everybody—and thus there really is a way to make room for all the parties that are engaged in this brutal and polarizing conflict. The catch is, each side has to genuinely recognize the ways that it is indeed “true,” but also the ways that it is definitely “partial.” Essentially all sides recognize that the other sides are “partial,” but almost nobody wants to acknowledge how the other sides are also “true.” Yet, as I often point out, no human brain is capable of producing 100 percent error—and thus, it literally follows that each of us has some degree of truth—but that truth is indeed partial and can always be expanded by including other perspectives. It is a failure to acknowledge that obvious reality that has produced the profound deadlock at the very core of the culture wars. And hence, the necessity for a meaningful framework that itself will make this truth come alive by providing a bigger picture in which all sides have some genuinely important contributions to make. Just as important is understanding the attitude, actions, and skills that can fruitfully apply this unifying framework and make it a vibrant reality for all. And that is especially what you will find in page after page of this book. In chapters with names such as, “What We Have in Common,” “An Exploration of Difference,” “Talking about Social Privilege,” “Politically Correct,” “Becoming Wholehearted,” and “Freedom Here and Now,” you will find example after example of wondrous conversations helping individuals, groups, and even nations come to terms with the fact that reality is just a little bit bigger than any of them thought, and that a genuine peace in their own conflict requires not only a direct and authentic realization of an honest self‑esteem but an expansion of their own esteem to embrace a multiplicity of other perspectives. All of us, indeed, are true but partial. The unifying framework itself is composed of several factors. Two of the most prominent, as the authors explain, are Zen Buddhism and Integral Theory. Zen is fairly well‑known and embodies one of the oldest and most effective spiritual practices for helping individuals realize an awareness that is more open, awakened, enlightened, and free. This is an awareness that is both fully transcendent and deeply immanent. Transcendent, in that it helps people let go of their narrow, partial, and limited views in favor of an awareness that is more radically encompassing, whole, and inclusive. And immanent, in that it is nonetheless an awareness that is the very core of our everyday mind, fully present here and now. This type of radically open awareness—versions of which are often called “mindfulness”—can be used in an enormous number of settings to help individuals as well as groups become more relaxed, alert, grounded, and expansive, and the authors put this all‑embracing awareness at the very core of their work. Integral Theory is a metatheory that has many historical precedents and is today embraced by thousands of people around the world. Although there are numerous individuals who have contributed to its present‑day form, my name is usually mentioned as its major founder. But the stated aim of Integral Theory (or technically, Metatheory) is to provide a meaningful framework that can unite virtually any type of human understanding. To give only one example, when it comes to the important field of developmental psychology, Integral looked at over 100 different developmental models, East and West, ancient and modern, and then did a meta‑analysis of all of them to determine the most commonly accepted features in each. This created a general overall developmental spectrum that has an enormous amount of evidence. (You’ll see how the present authors use this developmental spectrum in just a minute.) The point is that through these types of comparisons, Integral Metatheory has been able to spot several extremely fundamental elements that various types of human understanding (maps, models, and theories) all have in common. These fundamental integral elements are known by many names, one set of which is: Waking Up, Growing Up, Cleaning Up, and Showing Up. “Waking Up” is indeed exemplified by practices like Zen Buddhism, as well as many of the other great meditative and contemplative schools around the world (Vedanta, Taoism, Kabbalah, Christian mysticism, Sufism, and so forth), all of which involve some form of “enlightenment” or “liberation” or “awakening” to a fundamental reality (hence “Waking Up”). Although there are various degrees of Waking Up available to people, one of the very highest forms is universally said to be that of “being one with everything” (a state that is often said to reveal, by whatever name, an ultimate Ground of All Being). We have to be careful here, because Waking Up itself is not any traditional religious stance, mythic story, or fundamentalist zealotry—it’s much more what the common phrase today calls “spiritual but not religious.” But one thing is certain: when you really are one with everything, you are no longer exclusively identified with your own limited self—and thus your awareness becomes incomparably roomier and more open. This is an excellent place to ground any conflict resolution, mediation, or growth‑enhancing endeavor. The authors make abundant use of this radical openness. But they also realize that, as profound as Waking Up can be, it’s not the only kind of important truth there is. You can authentically experience being one with everything, and yet this will not give you any specific information about any individual thing in particular. When people thousands of years ago first experienced some of these authentic Waking‑Up or “oneness” realizations, they would indeed feel that they were one with the sun and one with the earth and one with the moon and the stars. But they still believed that the sun circled the earth, and that the earth was flat, and that the stars were holes poked in an overhead dome. They might indeed have directly realized a Ground of All Being, but since that Ground is fully and equally present in every single thing in the universe, it tells you nothing specific about any particular thing. The “oneness” was very real; it’s the “manyness” that wasn’t well understood. And this is still true of Waking Up or Enlightenment or Satori experiences today, and thus Waking Up needs to be supplemented with other forms of truth. Such as Growing Up. This refers to the developmental process that I previously mentioned, where individuals have been found to grow or evolve or develop through various stages or waves of increasingly more mature and inclusive forms of identity. I mentioned the more than 100 models of this process that Integral has carefully analyzed, and although some models have more stages and some models have fewer, on average most models have found around 6 to 8 major stages of human development—growing and maturing from infancy through childhood into adolescence, adulthood, and elderhood. Now technically this Growing‑Up process refers to stages of interior development—stages of self or values or worldviews that all humans go through. (Some of these developmental models have been tested in over 40 different cultures worldwide—including Amazon rain forest tribes, Australian aborigines, and Harvard professors—with no major exceptions yet found, although individuals themselves are each at different stages. Indeed, these overall stages are clearly an important aspect of any human understanding.) Now the strange thing about these waves of Growing Up is that you cannot see them by introspecting or looking within. These stages are part of the self that is doing the looking; they are not things that can themselves be looked at. All of us are at some of these stages right now, but most of us have no idea that this is so. For this reason, these stages weren’t even discovered until around 100 years ago. And for just that reason, we find none of these stages present in any of the world’s great religions or meditation systems, and thus one thing that you will not learn from any religion is how to actually Grow Up. So what are some examples of these actual stages? I mentioned that on average there are around 6 to 8 of them that are most commonly given. But these can be summarized and simplified in various ways, and one of the most common is to summarize them in 4 broad, general stages. Thus, a person’s identity moves from egocentric (identified only with itself) to ethnocentric (identified with an entire group, clan, tribe, or nation) to worldcentric (which, unlike ethnocentric, attempts to treat all people fairly, regardless of race, color, sex, gender, or creed; in an early or modern form, it’s marked by rationality and a scientific method, and then a later or postmodern form, marked by egalitarianism and multiculturalism), and finally to integrated or integral or Kosmocentric stages of growth (identified with all beings and aware of, and integrating, the previous stages themselves). Overall, a move from “me” to “us” to “all of us” to “all beings.” You might immediately be able to see that today’s culture wars are indeed primarily a war between three of those stages—the traditional or ethnocentric (often magic or mythic), the scientific or modern worldcentric (usually rational), and the later postmodern or multicultural diversity (very pluralistic or even relativistic). Traditional ethnocentric wants special privileges for its group or tribe; modern rationality wants equal opportunity for all; and postmodern pluralism wants equal outcome for everybody. In various forms, those are indeed the three most widely contested values in the culture wars. But what none of those values offers is an integrated or Kosmocentric viewpoint, which can indeed integrate or unify all of them. That is the fundamental perspective of this book, and by adopting this bigger picture that makes room for all of them, the authors are able to successfully facilitate the many battles between each of them. This is part of their unifying framework or bigger picture, and it does indeed make room for all. A bigger picture that also includes “Showing Up.” Showing Up simply refers to some of the most fundamental and important dimensions or perspectives through which anything can be viewed; and thus for each of us to be able to fully show up for our lives, we need to include all of these or else we’re missing out on some of our most crucial realities. Our lives never feel fully whole because we’re actually not including the whole. As with the other major elements of Integral, there are many different names for these perspectives. Traditionally, they are referred to as “the Beautiful, the Good, and the True,” or art, morals, and science. These turn out to be correlated with 1st-person pronouns (defined as “the person speaking”: I, me, mine, which includes the “Beauty in the eye of the beholder”); 2nd‑person (“the person spoken to”: you or thou, which includes how we are supposed to ethically treat each other, or the “Good”); and 3rd‑person (“the person or thing being spoken about”: he, she, it, its, which includes the objective Truth of science). Since an “I” and a “you” make a “we,” these three dimensions are often referred to simply as “I, we, and it.” The main point, as the authors explain, is that anytime we confuse and conflate any of those perspectives, we will get into serious trouble and almost certainly generate an enormous number of conflicts (with others as well as ourselves). If we confuse “I” and “we,” either the “I” will try to dominate the “we” and become pushy and bullying, sometimes monstrously so; or else “I” will succumb to massive conformity with the “we” and a consequent herd mentality, afraid to stand up for itself or even speak its mind. If we confuse “I” and “it,” we will mistake our subjective values and opinions for objective facts, leaving us open to becoming one of those insufferable know-it-alls whom pretty much everybody despises (their motto is “The last time I was wrong was when I thought I made a mistake”). As the authors demonstrate, a simple clearing up of these fundamental confusions will go an enormous way toward resolving many of our most recalcitrant and difficult conflicts, and make compassionate conversations all the more likely. Then there’s “Cleaning Up.” This refers to the various ways that individuals can recognize, integrate, and heal their shadows. (“Shadow” refers to repressed or dissociated material that becomes split off or alienated from consciousness and relegated to the “unconscious,” where it generally causes enormous pain and suffering.) Shadow material is often projected onto others, so while I seem to completely lack any of the nasty shadow quality, others seem full of it. If I repress my own hypercontrolling qualities, for example, I know somebody is an overcontrolling monster, but since it can’t be me, it must be somebody—anybody—else, and suddenly the world seems full of people trying to control me and tell me what to do, and I react angrily to all of that—which does none of my relationships any good and gets me into more conflicts than I can count on appendages. This, needless to say, is a very difficult and delicate area for any mediator or counselor to explore (especially since it directly implies that those things that I loathe in the world around me are those things that I first loathe in myself—nobody really wants to hear that). But it’s only a slight exaggeration to say that almost every conflict in existence has some degree of shadow material present, and all you will get by ignoring it is a failure to resolve the conflict. The authors of this book, at any rate, are generous enough with their clients to fully include shadow material if warranted. I think you can start to see how all of these areas that I have briefly outlined are incredibly important for any successful conflict resolution, mediation, or simply growth and development in general (in oneself or with others). These areas point to elements that all of us have but few of us recognize as well as elements that are present in virtually all conflicts but rarely engaged (so the conflict remains unresolved). Yet there isn’t a human being alive, I don’t believe, who cannot truly Wake Up, Grow Up, Clean Up, and Show Up. How astonishingly rare it is to find any of those—let alone all of them!—in any sort of counseling or growth‑facilitating process. This is one of the genuine gifts that this book offers. At the same time, I don’t want to overemphasize this general framework, either the Zen or the Integral Metatheory. Rather, at the core of this book is the brilliance and enormous talent of three rather extraordinary people, who have dedicated their lives to deeply engaging the most difficult topics and important issues of our times. They did not get their sagacity from any of these component elements, much as they have incorporated them. The insights are theirs. The brilliance is theirs. The wisdom is theirs. The compassion and concern and care are all theirs. And in the beautiful wonder of their presentation, I think that we can finally see the actual contours of a tomorrow where compassionate conversations are the very core of our society, where an all‑inclusive love is the coin of the realm, where we embrace each other in all of our dialogues, and where the radiance of awareness shines on us all like the light of a thousand suns—with not a single one of us left untouched. In this, we see the very next stage of our own evolution, where culture wars have given way to culture harmony, where compassion is in the very air we breathe, and where each of us is absolutely and indisputably one with everything. Welcome to tomorrow. Share Compassionate Conversations empowers us to transform our conversations into opportunities to bridge divides and mend relationships by providing the basic set of skills we need to be successful, including listening, reframing, and dealing with strong emotions. Addressing the long history of injury and pain for marginalized groups, the authors explore topics like intersectionality, power dynamics, and white fragility, allowing us to be more mindful in our conversations. Each chapter contains practices and conversation starters to help everyone feel more prepared to talk through polarizing issues, ultimately encouraging us to take risks, to understand and recognize our deep commonalities, to be willing to make mistakes, and to become more intimate with expressing our truths, as well as listening to those of others. Learn more about the book.

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Dialogue

Purposeful Communication & Negotiation An Excerpt from Politics and Conscience Hammarskjöld cared about nothing so much as dialogue and its formal version, negotiation. It was the heart of his activity as secretary-general, and the hum of purposeful dialogue is needed throughout the world if we are to find our way. From his perspective, dialogue isn’t day-to-day conversation; it calls for modest but definite discipline. “I do believe,” he said in 1960, “that . . . dialogue is badly needed, but dialogue requires quite a few things: objectivity, a willingness to listen, and considerable restraint. Those are all human qualities. No one of them is very remarkable, but they are all called for.” Quite touchingly, some part of Hammarskjöld’s emphasis on dialogue came itself from dialogue: on the printed page with certain essays by Albert Camus, the French Nobel laureate, and in direct conversation with Martin Buber, the elderly Israeli religious philosopher and social thinker with whom he developed a remarkable rapport. Though I can’t be sure of what he especially valued in Camus, I suspect it was an essay called “Toward Dialogue” from the late 1940s and a published talk, “The Unbeliever and Christians,” which would have interested him. I want to quote a few lines from the latter because we shouldn’t speak for long of Hammarskjöld without acknowledging the place of honor, even love, occupied by literature in his inner life. Serious reading from an early age had not been a diversion; it had refined him, helped to teach him how to think, how to see, how to question and record things seen. His mind and voice were deeply akin to Camus’s. There is an undeclared company of European authors who valued moral clarity, an inquiring attitude, the music of language, and a certain austerity: not one word too many. Hammarskjöld was deeply versed in French language and literature and belonged to that company of authors and thinkers. (This notwithstanding Charles de Gaulle’s almost comically rude treatment of both Hammarskjöld personally and the UN as an institution, which left him amused and unmoved.) “What I want to say to you today,” said Camus in 1948, as an unbeliever speaking with an audience of Dominican religious, “is that the world needs true dialogue, that the opposite of dialogue is just as much lying as it is silence, and that dialogue is therefore possible only between people who remain what they are and who speak truly.” From Buber, author of the classic I and Thou and many other explorations of dialogue, Hammarskjöld gained both fresh ideas and a sense of fellowship: Buber was there, he was a friend, he understood the primacy of honest and searching communication. “Have you read Martin Buber?” Hammarskjöld asked one of his friends in the Swedish Academy. “The old Hasidic mystic has in his old age given some of the purest and most touching expressions for the ‘conversion’ in which he as one of the old prophets sees the only salvation. ‘The only reply to distrust is candor.’ ‘We must create the simple trust which alone makes human speech possible in a world where we have forgotten how to talk to each other.’ . . . As a practitioner in the hazardous field of international politics, I can only confirm how right he is.” Hammarskjöld was dedicated to dialogue; he practiced the human qualities that aren’t “very remarkable but are all called for.” For which his colleagues gave him high marks: “Hammarskjöld’s talks with the press combined in an unusual way the language and method of the articulate and careful diplomat with a deep philosophical commitment to genuine dialogue and mutual understanding.” However, the Cold War was still dominant, as it would remain for several decades more, and that was not the only motive for the leaders of nations and their diplomats to talk past each other and posture for home audiences. Hammarskjöld’s assessment in March 1960 wasn’t sanguine: “We are sadly lacking in the art of dialogue generally, within the political field and outside it. We make all sorts of attempts, and whether they will prove successful or not depends very much on the spirit. So far, I have not on that point revised my opinions in a more optimistic direction.” So be it. He hadn’t signed up to a carefree job. And dialogue in its most intense and formal version, negotiation, would of necessity continue. Share Related Books Roger Lipsey is a biographer, art historian, editor, and translator. Among his many books is  Hammarskjöld: A Life, hailed as the definitive biography of Dag Hammarskjöld​. Lipsey speaks regularly at United Nations gatherings and under other auspices about Hammarskjöld's life and legacy.

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Relationship Triggers

Exploring Healthy Communication An excerpt from Triggers Building Trust Partners in romantic relationships naturally trigger one another. This follows from the fact that our choice of a partner has so much to do with transference from our past. We often unconsciously choose a partner who reminds us of the parent with whom we have unfinished emotional business, hoping to work out as adults what we could not work out in childhood. We are often triggered by something a partner says or does because it has resurrected a pattern of abuse, distress, or unfinished emotional concerns from our past. We might say that the part has triggered the whole. That explains why our reaction is overblown. It also shows us the real issue a trigger points to: the need for our own work on our own past. When we do this work, we still speak up about what triggered us in our relationship. What changes is that we do it in a matter-of-fact way. We are reporting an impact, not heaping blame and pouring out vitriol, not triggering our partner but communicating with her; this is an act of love. We don’t have to fall back on using a trigger finger in our relationships; we can move away from being at the mercy of triggers. An essential feature of healthy communication is to know one another’s triggers. We tell one another from the very beginning of the relationship what our triggers are. Then our partner can avoid going there, or he or she can help us work on the issues from our own past that activate our trigger reactions. Once we know each other’s triggers we agree not to pull them. This builds trust: “I can be vulnerable by telling you my trigger points, what my buttons are, and you will not use that information to push my buttons.” To know what triggers the other and to use that information to manipulate or frustrate him or her is the style of a toxic partnership, not the style of a loving one. We can distinguish two kinds of triggers that appear especially in relationships. The first trigger is one that a partner pulls purposely to annoy or hurt the other, with a malicious or mean intent. In this instance, the triggering partner may later feel appropriate guilt and can make amends. The second kind of trigger is one that is simply a given of life, a possibility that is implicit in any relationship. For instance, one partner announces her desire to break up. The other partner is triggered, but a breakup is something that can happen to anyone; it can be an ending with no intent to hurt. The partner who is leaving needs to feel no guilt, only grief and compassion. When we are triggered, we tell our partner that it is happening and where it comes from, and we can ask for help getting ourselves back on the matter-of-fact track and off the trigger mode. That kind of communication is another way to show healthy vulnerability and build trust. Such vulnerability is not self-victimization, but courage. We are reporting an impact, not heaping blame and pouring out vitriol, not triggering our partner but communicating with her; this is an act of love. We usually treat triggers entirely as interactions: “You triggered me, and you are to blame.” We can instead look for our inner reactions: What happened in us during the interaction? The partner who triggers us is then a more minor player in our drama. Blaming is always an avoidance of our own work, whether that work involves looking into ourselves or making a decision about where to go from here. Blaming means that the ball is never in our court, which is a no-win game. Attention and Respect A trigger is subjective most of the time. When one partner is triggered, the other cannot discount the impact of what he said or did simply by protesting “I did not mean it that way.” Our personal list of trigger points calls for respect from our partner because they are real for us—but that respect works in reverse, as well. If our partner tells us she is triggered by what we said or did, we cannot reply, “That doesn’t make sense. That should not have triggered you!” In a respectful relationship, any trigger reported by a partner should evoke attention and respect. It does not have to be logical to us. Indeed, all of us, anyone, can feel anxiety sometimes out of nowhere, for no logical reason. Our compassion grows when we see that triggers work the same way. On the other side, the partner who was triggered may become strident and repetitive about her pain when it is dismissed as illogical. Conflict persists in relationships from such frustrating interactions. Hearing and being heard go a long way toward healing. So can an “Ouch!” and an “Oops!” Partners can foster an attitude of taking care of one another’s triggers whenever possible: For instance, one partner is triggered by dishes left in the sink, so the other makes sure to wash them consistently. One partner is triggered by going to the dentist, so the other partner goes to the appointment with her. When a partner triggers us we can override our reaction and go directly to what she is saying, feeling, needing. We put aside the personal hurt or defense the trigger would normally evoke in us. For example, say a partner says something critical. We are triggered because our mother criticized us in the same way. Instead of going with the triggered reflex of anger, we swat away that old pterodactyl and focus on our partner, without complaint or comeback. Instead we become curious: We pause and direct our attention to what our partner is really saying, needing, feeling. Eventually, criticism from a partner may come through without a mother association. A statement then no longer triggers—it only informs us of where our partner is coming from. Soon we come back to what we both want to say, what we both need, what we both feel. Then, later, when we are alone, we can look at whatever personal work, especially childhood-related, we ourselves need to focus on. Sometimes a thing that was endearing and charming in a partner’s manner or actions in the romance phase may, in the conflict stage, become quite obnoxious and triggering. And sometimes partners continually trigger each other with no letup and with no commitment to changing that style; they seem invested in only blaming one another. There is then, sadly, very little hope for the relationship to survive. Healthy relationships can only thrive when partners acknowledge and work on their triggers in a no-fault zone. Blaming is always an avoidance of our own work, whether that work involves looking into ourselves or making a decision about where to go from here. A partner who is triggered may come back with criticism, which then triggers the other. The healthy alternative is giving constructive feedback—such feedback is less likely to be triggering. The stress level caused by a trigger will lessen exponentially when what the other person does or says no longer hits us so hard. This lightening up of an impact is ultimately the goal in working on triggers. As we gain equanimity, we take what a partner, or anyone, says or does more in stride. We find it easier to make allowances; we no longer become so ego-affronted. When the arrow of upset does not penetrate so deeply, we are more apt to witness our relationship with patience—and even curiosity. We spend less time causing fires and putting them out, and more time on understanding one another. In this way, the even-keel relationship with its close co-captains on the ship Commitment is more likely to find clear sailing. Some triggers are based on an image of or belief about a partner or friend implanted in us by another person. As a mindfulness practice, we can eschew such secondhand triggering, especially in familial and intimate relationships. We can commit ourselves to relate to people in our life based on our own daily experience, not on gossip about them by others. We decide not to allow others’ judgments or impressions to contaminate our relationships. We ask for the same respect toward us: “You are who you are to me only because of how I experience you. I ask that I be who I am to you based only on how you experience me.” How others are triggered can’t recruit us to abandon one another—though it may open a sincere dialogue about what we have been told. Sometimes the problem is not being triggered to action when it is appropriate! In all my now fifty years of being a psychotherapist the single most common problem I have encountered in clients has been staying too long in a relationship, situation, job, or belief system that does not work—that is unfulfilling or even painful. We are not really staying; we are idling, not moving and wasting resources at the same time. We blunt the trigger that might lead us to change something for the better or to abandon ship. We should not feel too ashamed to undertake change when it is called for. After all, this passage in the Declaration of Independence, written in 1776, makes that very case: “All experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But . . . it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.” No one will make our changes for us. It will take “independence,” the resource in all of us, so often inactivated or, sadly, even feared. Finally, we can gently remind ourselves that trying to hold on to a relationship—or anything—beyond its expiration date does not align with the Buddha’s teaching on impermanence. True Companions We are social beings, so it is appropriate and praiseworthy that we enlist others to come through for us when we are in need. People share their resources with us. We then discover our own similar resources. We might say we gain from others’ strength and then can find it in ourselves. For instance, when someone stands up for us, she is showing us her assertiveness and helping us find our own voice too. When someone assists us in facing something, he is showing us how to remain present to ourselves. Such mutual support is an essential feature of friendship and intimacy. All relationships that work, intimate or otherwise, reveal and build resources. The alternative is a sense of isolation and we feel it like a punch in the stomach. The stuffing being knocked out of us is a metaphor for our store of resources being ransacked. Companionship through thick and thin, accompaniment through storm and stress—this is our vital need when the going gets rough. These are the resources a healthy relationship offers. “She’s the one” does not necessarily forecast “We can be together successfully.” Sometimes the fact that we still love someone is used to hold us back from moving on with our own life when the other is no longer a true companion. When someone says, “My needs are not fulfilled here but I love him and therefore I will stay and endure,” love has become an excuse for an interrupted journey. The healthy adult choice in any relationship is to form connection and experience self-actualization—not one at the cost of the other. We seek to maintain the connection while simultaneously increasing an appropriate sense of our own autonomy. That is the advantage of the inner resource of self-confidence to a relationship. It is paradoxical that we keep trying to get our needs met from those who failed us before and fail us now. We might keep trying to change reality when we are afraid of facing it. The more empowering approach is to give up trying to get our needs met from those who failed and fail us. Instead, we mourn for what isn’t there to be had, and we move on: We accept our own reality without resentment toward or censure of anyone else. The hope for change in the other and the attempt to get our needs met when the evidence is against it happening are ways of avoiding our grief about the fact of what has been lost or missing, the fact of refusals to our requests for closeness. The healthy adult choice in any relationship is to form connection and experience self-actualization—not one at the cost of the other. An enduring sense of nonfulfillment shows us we have hung around too long in a ghost town. If we really want intimacy, will we find it from loitering longer in the dry saloon? What if we are simply taking turns spinning the roulette wheel? We come to know our authentic agenda in a relationship by asking searching questions of ourselves and one another, without demand or blame: Do we want assurance of connection but not really want to do what it takes to establish commitment or communion? Have we been programming our choices and responses for more closeness or more distance? Have we let go of our attachment to being right? Do we still demand that the other should change with the idea that “and then all will be OK”? Do we keep one another in an uncertain state so that we, or one of us, can be justified in not being in the relationship in a fully committed way? When ruptures occur, do we immediately move toward repair or do we resist it? When our partner upsets us, do we disconnect or do we simply take a time-out and then come back to address the issue? Can we both report thirty consecutive days of friction-free happiness? (It is not safe to discuss marriage or commitment until at least that amount of time elapses. And it is understandable to consider an end to the relationship when a stretch of happiness has not happened for longer than we can remember.) Have we settled for mediocrity in our relationship because life together has become so comfortable? Or are we earnestly working together to make it as good as the best it ever was? Is drama the real goal in the relationship rather than lying down together in green pastures to restore our souls? How clear, or even appealing, is Mom or Dad’s picture in the locket of our relationship? How are we giving and receiving the components of love, the five As, to one another? In a healthy relationship, the five As happen most of the time in a good enough way. We don’t expect constant attunement to our needs by our partner, only moments of it. We know it is enough when the last instance was so recent that we can remember it. Misattunements are to be expected in any relationship. They happened to us in infancy when our parents missed our bids for attention to our needs. Yet, very early on we learned to recover from misattunements. That recovery is the origin of self-soothing, an inner resource now. Attunement is responding to a need or mirroring a feeling with attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection, allowing. We attune to others’ needs and we can also attune to our own. The five As are our inner resources, reliable and enduring. With a loving focus both on ourselves and others we begin to notice our own anxieties diminish. Finally, we can apply the five As to our practice of remaining mindfully present: We bring to the here and now an attentiveness to what it is in itself, an acceptance of it as it is, an appreciation for the opportunities to practice—the graces—that it offers, an affectionate holding of it, a full allowing of it to open in its own way—and we make allowances for our repeated failures. This is how we mirror the moment with self-compassion and thereby access its richest resources. What arises next is a calm trust in our ability to handle any old trigger. Share Related Books David Richo, PhD, is a psychotherapist, teacher, writer, and workshop leader whose work emphasizes the benefits of mindfulness and loving-kindness in personal growth and emotional well-being. Learn more.

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Free Download | "The Fourfold You" Exercise from Being at Your Best When Your Kids Are at Their Worst

Being at Your Best When Your Kids Are at Their Worst Practical Compassion in Parenting ENTER YOUR EMAIL TO RECEIVE "THE FOURFOLD YOU" EXERCISE AS A PRINTABLE PDF FILE. Find support in your journey toward compassionate parenting with an exercise from Being at Your Best When Your Kids Are at Their Worst! The path of parenting is littered with challenges. Turmoil, anger, and frustration vie for the spotlight, leading to harmful behavioral patterns and communication methods, jeopardizing your journey of compassionate parenting. Being at Your Best When Your Kids Are at Their Worst offers techniques that simply and directly shift these damaging patterns in communication and parental behavior. It lifts you out of old, unwanted patterns of action-reaction and prepares you so that the voice you speak with is closer to the parent you want to be. Download the “Fourfold You Exercise” from the book to learn techniques to better connect with and understand yourself in times of harmony and turmoil, so you can foster a stronger relationship with your kids one challenge at a time. Email Address * First Name *     *You are agreeing to receive promotional messages from Shambhala Publications. You may unsubscribe at any time. Share

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