cherry trees along the Charles River, photo by Terry Rudderham
by Shastri Jennifer Woodhull
Cape Town, South Africa
Among those of us committed to building an enlightened society, there is a widespread perception that our failure to “fix” the personal conflicts that arise in our communities somehow takes us in the opposite direction from enlightenment. Therefore, goes the assumption, that we ought to get our act together and figure out how to resolve the conflict. The community will often enthusiastically support this interpretation of “enlightened society”, since it confirms the conviction of all involved that the troubled relationship is responsible for their suffering.
Editor’s Note: We are currently on hiatus from publishing new articles; in the meantime, please enjoy this classic item reprinted from our back issues.
Where there are humans, there will be conflict. Even those of us who are sincere meditators, pacifists or activists dedicated to building a kinder world will inevitably run up against situations where we simply can’t get through to one another. Our best efforts at honest, courageous communication backfire, fueling a dynamic that serves instead to exacerbate our suffering. Parties on both sides of the divide feel unheard, misunderstood and even deliberately sabotaged. Finding ourselves in such a situation can lead to intense feelings of failure and shame.
It’s at times like these that we can draw significant guidance and support from the foundational teachings of Buddhism. The Buddha taught that suffering is part of the human package. It’s not the result of anyone’s error or failure; we can simply expect it as an aspect of ordinary experience.
In this life, conditions will reliably continue not to meet our preferences. Our reflexive tendency in the face of the resulting discomfort is to blame the conditions that give rise to it — and when those conditions originate with other people, we imagine those others need only change their attitude and conduct for our discomfort to be resolved. In fact, the greater our discomfort, the more convinced we are that those others have a duty to resolve their conflict. We’re typically very skilled at justifying our opinion that, as the source of the “problem”, they should “fix it”. We can get quite angry at them for not doing so, further spreading our distress to others who compulsively react to their anxiety by adding their blame to our own. The all-too-familiar result is factionalism fueled by assumptions and gossip.
The dharma — and by extension, the Shambhala teachings — urges us instead to make a relationship with whatever discomfort life brings us, and leave others to work on their own conflicts as best they can.
An enlightened society is not one in which everyone gets along. Rather, it is one in which all do their best to be authentically who they are, to take care of themselves with as much kindness and as little self-delusion as they’re capable of, and to organize their lives so that they can be of as much service to others as possible. Thus, an important quality of an enlightened society is that it’s spacious enough to accommodate conflict for as long as it takes for that conflict to realize its own resolution. This view of conflictual situations doesn’t absolve the parties involved of the responsibility to do their own work, but it challenges everyone affected to do likewise. Rather than applying pressure to the warring parties to stop warring, community members can create a strong, caring container for the chaos of war by taking responsibility for their own hopes and fears.
One or more people engaged in conflict might decide to suspend social interactions and restrict their contact to necessary business exchanges — or even to refrain from any contact whatsoever. In an enlightened society such a choice would arise, not out of hatred or rejection, but rather from an honest realization that attempts at mediation, communication and other forms of contact are not yielding the intended results. When instances of contact are clearly triggering further conflict, both the parties involved and the entire community are best served by minimizing such trigger points. Perhaps counter-intuitively, suspension of contact in such situations may not be a sign of cowardly withdrawal from the challenge, but rather an expression of loving-kindness, compassion and sanity.
The lojong teachings of Mahayana Buddhism offer us another helpful practice: abandoning any hope of fruition. From inside the fire of conflict, we can’t see what its resolution might look like. But we can be certain that approaching it from an insistence that conflict and confusion be banished will only create more conflict and confusion. Given the truth of impermanence, we know that the situation will continue to move — if, that is, we refrain from freezing it to fit our hopes, fears, preferences and preconceptions. Getting interested in its movement may prove to be the best way forward.
How, then, might those of us proceed who are affected by conflict between people we care about? How can we best support their efforts to move through the messy, painful territory that lies before them? How do we deal with our distress, our longing for the warring parties to resolve their differences, our nostalgia for how things were before the conflict arose? How can we support one another in working with the fear and anger that inevitably arise when others’ failures of sympathy make our own lives more difficult?
Shastri Jennifer Woodhull
From the perspective of enlightened society, we can respect the choices of those involved in the conflict to handle the situation according to their own best judgement and capabilities, without pressure from us to conform to our ideal scenario. And meanwhile, we can aspire to bring our personal discomfort to the path of practice. Since the situation is painful, we can practice kindness. Since the situation is unfathomable, we can refrain from judgement. Since the situation is stuck, we can practice patience. Since the situation is confusing, we can practice curiosity. These are the practices of an enlightened society.
The personal conflicts in which we find ourselves and those we love are a reflection of our world: basically good, and doing its best to meet its challenges by bringing its innate intelligence to creating the conditions in which kindness and sanity can flourish. This world never ceases to lavish its generosity upon us. When conflict arises, we can show our appreciation by recognizing it as an expression of our humanity, and resolving to use it to become more fully and genuinely the quirky, loving, unconditioned, provocative, heartbroken, brilliant beings we truly are.