Good morning y’all. With sweet anticipation of shifting seasons drawing near, my animal body is stirring with the felt-sense of waning days, fading leaves, cooling temperatures here in the northern hemisphere. I imagine our southern hemisphere family is eager to shake off the winter dormancy and welcome spring. I remain amazed by Earthly rhythms no matter how many cycles I spin here.
I thought I would continue the themes from last week, notes overflowing, but I felt pulled in other directions. We’ll return to that later. I want to share one quick announcement before diving in:
Cultivating Culture is beginning the first week of October! So soon! I invite you so excitedly to explore this post (click the quote to swipe through and read the caption):
And check out more details on the offering to feel into whether it calls you. We have a gorgeous group gathering – I am so awed and honored by each of them – and would love to have you join us. Please feel encouraged to share it out as well.
Space is limited to support intimacy and safety so express interest soon!
Thank you for the ways you co-create with me, y’all.
With love,
Rachel
My breath shallowed. A thousand moths fluttered in the lamplight of my heart, swirling in the dark void beneath my sternum. I wanted this and I didn't. I pressed toward it with steady steps, and I scanned compulsively for exits.
Staccato rings vibrated in my ears. Wing flaps became bomb blasts in my gut.
She answered.
Ok.
Deep breaths.
“Thank you for making time for this. I know you're going through a lot right now, as we all are. . . . And I know this is minor in the scheme of things, but I want to surface this so that I can better understand it. The way you responded to what I said in the meeting landed in a way that was activating for me. I felt dismissed, invalidated, embarrassed... I know that's not how you really feel about me, but it does bring up sensitivities around how I express myself, how I get my points across. If you have feedback for me I want to receive it, but is it something else?”
The faint buzz of a patient listener constellated via satellite, tethered by fuzzy phone line a world away, was suddenly punctuated with short sips of air. I pictured her smooth face as it cracked into a waterfall, her graceful posture crumble into a landslide.
“No... you're right... it's not you at all, and I'm so sorry I'm speaking to you that way. This is not the only space where this side of me is coming forward - my impatience, my judgment, my harshness. This side of myself, the pain it's causing not just with you but with others... it's real and it's up and I see it, and I'm just really sorry you're seeing it too.”
My fears of backlash, my nervousness around vulnerability, my urge to avoid... all of it melted with her honesty. Her scorpion sting was a strike from her own wounded place. It burned me, but it agonized her. Perhaps this part of her laid dormant for years, as other parts rose to the surface. Perhaps this part of her was ready to be seen and liberated. I was able to hold space for her own process to proceed, in large part because my own confidence, capacity, and self trust has grown so significantly that I could pull apart the knot and see - "ok, some of this is me, I want to own that, but some of this is hers too. How do we hold it and move it together?"
Accessing the birthplace of that venom inside her through truth, through trust, bonded us even more deeply. I was invited in to one of the tenderest places within her by being strong enough myself to step into the space of uncertainty, by being willing to own my baggage but also meet her with accountability. And through her own strength and grace, she was able to heal the parts of me that had been scorched by mismanaged, ferocious, disastrous conflict. I'm still learning that healthy alternatives are possible, and she provided me a practice-space to continue this cultivation.
Both of us found each other in the evolution we needed. Together, we created medicine through alchemizing our hurts into salves for one another's inner children. Through this we can recognize that when conflict emerges it is almost never an individual experience – it is reaching toward a place in the dynamic, in the partnership that is asking for growth. But it is also a mirror reflecting what to be responsible for in ourselves.
Our hurt places ask us for witnessing. Awareness is change. When we soften all the barriers we've built to buffer ourselves from intimacy, when we can cultivate safe/brave spaces to practice what we didn't learn in our families, what we don't see playing out at scale... we can avail ourselves to the transformative potential of recognizing all healing is relational, because all wounding is relational, too. If relationships are the site of harm, they can also be the refuge of repair – just like our bodies.
“To heal is to touch with love that which was previously touched by fear.”
– Stephen Levine
In these pandemic times, I have learned to cherish conscious conflict. It has become one of my most treasured tools to use with the precision and discipline of a sacred samurai, a holy warrior, a wise sage. But this is only the outcome of repeated experiences with approaching the discomfort inherent in fracture and friction, especially in a world of extremes where we are conditioned toward either perfection or dysfunction, romance or destruction.
For many of us, conflict is an immediate aversion. In cultures of violence, conflict is often abusive. It's the venue for vengeance and vitriol to explode, it's the arena for cruelty and chaos to unfurl. In mismanaged conflict, there are no boundaries, no breath – it's just rage, fury, storm, and flood – and often because conflict is pursued when we are thrust into fight/flight/freeze mode and our frontal lobe faculties of reason and analysis are sidelined for primal, limbic survival.
Avoidance, in general, threaded itself into the fabric of my being so early it was integral to my becoming, an indiscernible fiber in the tapestry of my formation. I learned this survival strategy young. The fantasy that is: "oh, we can simply not do the hard thing, the uncomfortable thing. We can skirt around it. Wow, why didn't anyone else find this trapdoor?" But after years of avoiding, it all catches up with you. Engraining this behavior pattern into my psyche for decades – avoidance eventually became my prison.
Stepping into conflict is not always as seamless as this scenario. I've fumbled my way through many attempts in the years since I began healing this part of myself, when I grew claustrophobic in my own constraints, unwilling to continue my life with mostly terrible relational experiences that demanded I hide my humanity to avoid exile (as I framed it in my own mind, as was reflected back to me in a million mirrors calling me to heal this program/pattern).
Of the countless lessons I've learned through transforming my own relationship to conflict itself, I see that it is one of the most sacred ways to build a relationship with myself. When I choose conflict wisely, I am choosing not to abandon, betray, suppress, or deny myself. I am choosing to embrace my humanity, to trust that I am worthy of my hurts being seen, to know that relationships can be the container for visibility and transformation – because we need to see it to free it. I am learning to build the kind of relationships that can actually hold what they reveal, and also weaving the wider web where various relationships can support each other even indirectly, as it is not always generative to process everything with the person that revealed our aches to us... sometimes we are meant to be shown the information, and then commune with others, then perhaps return to that person and share our findings. And ultimately, we are always rin relationship with ourselves. Conflict shows us how to nourish our own garden, how to pause and say "what can I learn through this discomfort, this tension, to grow myself into the fullness I deserve?"
Conflict is a gorgeously rich territory, only a few facets exposed to the sunlight here today.
I spoke on more themes several weeks ago in my post "Held Hostage in an Insane World" if you're keen to revisit the archives.
I can't recommend Prentis Hemphill's Finding Our Way podcast episode "Navigating Conflict with Kazu Haga" enough.
What resources have shifted your relationship to conflict? Please share in the comments to nourish a sourcepool for all of us to draw.
Conscious conflict feels like one of the most important devotions for humanity to undertake, now more than ever. May we embrace our anxious hearts as we re-learn/re-member/re-structure old-new pathways toward one another, into belonging, making room for mess and mistakes, honoring each other's gardens and blooming a brighter ecosystem together.
Thank you so much for your generous presence here. If you value what you find here and would like to support my work, consider leaving a heart and/or comment. I always love to hear from you.
Or help widen the circle, by sharing this piece with someone in your life.
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Hi everyone! I forgot to link the podcast episode above when this went out via email. Here's the link, and I've updated the post to reflect it there as well. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/finding-our-way/id1519965068?i=1000523640610
“Avoidance eventually became my prison.” Nailed it. Thanks for being a role model in this regard, it is one of my biggest challenges. ❤️