Conflict Without Drama
Conflicto sin drama
A student explores the connection between inner integrity, relaxation, and the desire to avoid interpersonal difficulty, and the teacher distinguishes between circumstantial peace and a deeper peace that does not depend on the absence of conflict.
Conflict Without Drama
A student explores the connection between inner integrity, relaxation, and the desire to avoid interpersonal difficulty, and the teacher distinguishes between circumstantial peace and a deeper peace that does not depend on the absence of conflict.
There's a connection, it feels to me, between doing this work and cultivating inner integrity. I feel much more connected to my body and much less interested in my usual excuses or habits. The world around me responds really well to that. But as was said before, the next day I tend to revert back to other habits. Commonly what happens is that this kind of openness occurs on a day when I feel luxurious in terms of time, and then the next day I have to make up for it, so I get all busy and frustrated and re-contracted. I don't know exactly what my question is, but I find myself playing with this more deliberately and feeling good about it, while also not knowing how to work with it more consistently.
Having a technique or ability to shift contractions is good and valuable. But ultimately what matters here is something else. I don't want to oppose anything. Everything that has to do with what I call growing up, learning, expanding, getting better at things, all of that is very welcome, and sometimes we can dive into that. I often end up focusing on that for people who really need it, when it seems like the priority. But ultimately, that's not what I'm going after. It's not about finding ways to shift things so that our experience is better. That is valuable, but what I point to has nothing to do with that.
The nature of contraction
It has more to do with this: when you are in that contracted state, what is really happening? Changing that state is valuable. Finding ways and techniques to shift out of it is valuable, and I encourage that. But the main thing is: what is the underlying thing that's happening?
What's happening to get me into that state to begin with?
What's the nature of that contraction? When you started talking about that podcast and telepathy, I'll use that as an illustration. I think humanity is telepathic. There are just different levels of telepathy and different levels of knowing that one is telepathic. I can have a thought and believe it's mine when it actually came from someone else. That is different from having a thought and knowing that it came from somebody else. It's not a big difference. It actually doesn't matter. But if I'm of the kind who are more likely to know which thoughts came from somebody else and be accurate about it, if I have that kind of talent, that has absolutely nothing to do with the consciousness I'm talking about. That's a good party trick, or it could be useful in some ways. But it's like being good at playing the piano.
I've seen it used as a party trick.
What could be valuable about it is to break down the idea and the illusion of absolute separation. But once it does that, there's no more value to it.
I think that's where I am with it. Everything you said resonates.
Specialness through the back door
Just watch the sense of that making you special, having a specialness because of a talent or the ability to be telepathic. Because then it comes back through the back door: "Yes, there's no separation, but I'm special, I'm different."
I think one of the things that feels attractive to me about this is that if I'm not separate, then maybe I don't have to struggle with all the nonsense that comes from trying to operate as though I am. We have to tend the body-mind, but the thing that feels attractive in terms of the implications is that maybe I can just relax into this new paradigm.
You could relax at a deep level and still face all of the challenges. What I'm hearing, and I might be wrong, is: "Maybe because of this I could relax and not bother so much with the pressure of these responsibilities."
Or discern which pressures are dukkha and which are actual responsibilities. Maybe that's part of a way of saying it.
That can be clarified, because the risk is the false surrendering, the false acceptance: "Because I've seen through these delusions and there's no separation, I can just let go and things will happen naturally."
Like another form of spiritual bypassing.
Peace that doesn't depend on circumstance
You can be completely under the most insane pressures of life, fully committed, fully working hard, fully responsible, and in absolute peace and relaxation. It's of a different dimension. Otherwise, you're trying to relax at the level of climbing a mountain while wanting your muscles to be relaxed. That's not going to work. But you could be climbing a mountain, your muscles having a hard time, your body having a hard time, your mind having a hard time, and you're completely loving it. That peace is there. Or you could be thinking about some difficulty in your life, cursing, having a really hard time, and your body is fine.
Using that metaphor, the kind of relaxation I imagine being able to have is like climbing a mountain with a team. Not only am I fine physically, because it's a welcome kind of labor, but I'm also not caught up in a lot of interpersonal drama, insecurities, or comparisons. Because I know on some level that the separation between myself and the team members is not as real as I might perceive it to be in the way I normally operate.
The kind of separation I hear you speaking about is starting, at least, with an intellectual process, an intellectual exploration. That helps, but it's not going to go very deep unless you explore at a deeper level. You could have interpersonal conflict but not have drama. It's not about avoiding the conflict, because conflict is sometimes necessary. If you're climbing a mountain and you're in conflict, that's also fine. That's like the muscles working. The muscles of relational conflict are working hard. You're challenged because you have a difficult person on your team. But you could still be without drama. You could be having a beautiful time. Now, "beautiful" has a different quality here. I'm speaking to the freedom and the peace that does not depend on circumstance. If you are imagining it to depend on there not being interpersonal conflict, that's not what I'm talking about.
Freedom is not the absence of difficulty
It's not the lack of anything. That's all a rejection of what is. It's a trying to manipulate relationships so there's no conflict, so that I could be at peace. Or: "If I develop deeply enough, I will have no conflict, and then I will be at peace." That is the peace you're imagining: "I've developed enough so that there's no more conflict, and now I'm at peace." But it's the other way around. You work through conflict. You become at peace in conflict. And so now, when there's conflict (and by "conflict" I mean any kind of life challenge as a metaphor), you're no longer avoiding it. When you're in it, you're surfing. When you're out of it, you're surfing.
I didn't find an amazing partner with whom I had no conflict. Everyone who knows us personally knows we've gone through conflict.
And that wasn't the goal, right? That wasn't because you realized something that eliminated conflict.
Strawberries
No. What happened, at least for me, is that what was difficult about the conflict was a very deep underlying sensation that I couldn't be with. It was just a big "no." Anything but this. I call it a sensation. You could call it a feeling. It's an aspect of experience at the deepest level, at the level of the heart. I just couldn't be with it.
"No" to the experience of it?
It's like this: the taste of it was like strawberries, and I just couldn't tolerate strawberries. Anything but strawberries. In our relationship, whenever we entered conflict, it had the flavor of strawberries. It wasn't because there was anything particular to the relationship. It's just that that was what I was unable to be with. And the nature of the relationship, because we're committed to intimacy and love and truth and all of this, because our passion was just that, it would go straight to strawberries.
I would almost say we got good at conflict.
For me, there was a complete night-and-day shift where suddenly I was like, "Strawberries." And then all the noise I had been creating whenever there were strawberries just stopped.
I was once told, "Those are just sensations." It wasn't just told to me; it was more experiential. But yes, just sensations.