Inner work is required to engage in peace building conversations
Many of us are constantly lamenting the state of hate and divides, not just here in the USA, but all over the world. Some people blame religion, racial superiority complex, tribalism -the stubborn identity shaper- that just never goes away; other blame wars or social, economic and cultural humiliation that leads to hate; or generational traumas that never die and are passed down for millennia; or entitlement of power and privilege that is in danger of being upset by global changes. Many books have been written to explain the divides, such as Jonathan Haidt’s “The Self-Righteous Mind” but none has answered my fundamental question:
How could we become less human as we develop more materially?
How is it that the amygdala (our primitive brain) still rules us despite so many evolutions and so much progress? And where is the human heart in all of this? After all, the heart is also a brain from what the newer quantum sciences tell us, so how do we awaken our heart intelligence? As Rumi said, start with the heart, the seat of the divine.
Dialogue and Violence cannot co-exist as has been my belief always. I have practiced peacebuilding and conflict resolution in many different settings, such as inter-faith, corporate silos, and more recently in hosting…
