Teaching Meditation, Teaching Resolution
My colleague Martin and I kicked off our Meditation Training for Mediators (@Community Mediation Services) yesterday. Something we have envisioned for the past few months is now being implemented. I need to digest a bit how things are coming together for me now; at their very own pace, in their very own form. But when I reflect and sense into them, they carry my very own energy and style and this is beautiful to witness and realise, when having been used for suuuuch a long time to think, do, and act things out in a more streamlined and conventional way. I guess this is what they call wisdom :)
It was during my studies in Israel when I dived into the connection between meditation, its Buddhist framework, spirituality and its connection to conflicts and their resolution. At that time I thought this to be the most natural, accessible connection - not only for me obviously, but for everyone else. How would anyone deny the impact of our spirit, our values, our personal insight to how we deal with conflicts? And yet, it was this setting, in which I backtracked again from my newly formed and formulated insights.
Far from self-evident was the connection between our spiritual state and peace for many of my fellow students and professors. I wrote paper after paper shedding light on this, advocating for the inclusion of our personal state of being into peace building (that is, acknowledging that sustainable peace requires peaceful actors in word and deed). I tossed them to the side when I noticed that they did resonate with everyone. And semi-returned to my habitual path.
Now, almost 5 years later, I have started building my outlets and my collaborations to connect the dots, more profound this time.
In our 8-week training, Martin and I will not only teach meditation but also jointly investigate how meditation and Buddhism help to explore our own "un-peace": Biases, prejudices, aversions, attachments, a lack of true listening and heartfelt communication. All those pieces are very well known to everyone of us. It is worthwhile exploring how this states of mind and heart relate to violence (not only physical) and conflict. Even if we believe, we are on the right side of things, fighting for the right cause etc., we may not do so skilfully but rather on the basis of above mentioned conditions.
Mediation is not just a technical process. It doesn't only require listening to the one side, then to the other, and repeating the process until parties may come to a resolution - or not. It is way more interactive than that and since it's a form of communication, the energy, the state of mind, the presence of the mediator is conveyed as much as those of the conflict parties. When being trained in awareness and presence, a mediator can facilitate the transformation of the conflict to a degree that the relationship between the parties shifts. From positional to collaborative. A whole bunch of creativity lies underneath conflicts, and a "meditative" mediator will probably be better equipped to unravel this potential for everyone at the table.
It is incredibly cool to explore meditation and conflict resolution together with a bunch of participants, who seek to become mediators themselves or simply want to contribute more constructively to conflicts in their environment.
Grateful to have collaborators like Martin and Community Mediation Services at my side.