Dealing With Conflict

Hi, and welcome to your Daily Mindfulness. Today I'm going to talk about mindfulness and conflict. So I think something that we often misunderstand about practicing mindfulness is, you know, in the beginning we might practice mindfulness and feel like it's going to help us rise above all the challenges and all the messiness of everyday life. So the thinking kind of is that you can generate so much of a feeling of bliss in the mind, permanent kind of state of bliss and that will mean that we will never again be confronted with difficult situations and you'll be so at peace that he'll never again, argue with anyone or experienced conflict with anyone. The reality is, is that conflict is really a part of life in the sense that people will have different opinions to yours, people will probably still be triggered by you and you buy them.

Other people will probably let you down, disappoint you and disagree with you and vice versa. And know, no matter how much inner peace we generate, the conflict in the world is also still going to be there. And you'll probably still feel a bit of tension at some point during Christmas dinner every year, you know. There's an old saying actually, um, If you want to know if you're enlightened go home and live with your parents. I think it was Ram Dass who said this.

So I guess what he's pointing to here is the fact that mindfulness cannot magically remove all the conflict and difficulty in your life. It's still going to be there. And for most of us, it would be there if we went home and lived with our parents. But what we can do, what mindfulness does offer, is the ability to change how you respond to conflict when it inevitably does arise. So mindfulness helps us become less reactive so that we don't immediately get pulled into our old conditioning, our old reactive patterns and go ahead and say, or do things that we later regret.

It does help us respond with greater wisdom, greater compassion and greater self awareness. So very often in a moment of conflict, we can get taken over by our old automatic reactions, right? We've all been there. Maybe we shut down. Maybe we walk out. Maybe we become angry and annoyed.

Mindfulness can help us in those moments when we feel ourselves slipping into that reactivity, because it allows us to pause for a moment. And in that pause, we can choose to shift our behavior. In that way millisecond of a pause of awareness, when we can become present, we can choose to shift the energy of the conversation to one grounded in non-judgment, curiosity, open-mindedness and kindness. You might not end up agreeing with each other, but no matter which way the conversation goes, you'll be more able to stay centered, calm, and composed, and then feel much better about the interaction later. So whenever conflict does come your way, see it not as something that shouldn't be happening, but as an opportunity to learn, evolve, and to make the choice to bring greater connection and unconditional acceptance into your relationships and into your life.

So as always thank you for your practice and your presence here with us, and now inviting you to settle in for today's meditation.