Conflict and Spirituality

I've been overwhelmed by my own inner conflict regarding this very important topic of Conflict. I've written a piece called "Narcissism & Spirituality," which got rave reviews when delivered to both general public audiences as well as to colleagues and students of psychotherapy, and encouraged me to write on this other related topic I'm entitling "Conflict & Spirituality". Without getting into defining Spirituality or Soul (you can offer definitions if you like) at this point, I simply want to launch into collecting material for this paper, which I'll post and solicit your responses.

Conflict, at it's best can be very difficult, and even when we are most adept at creative conflict, it has within it, risk. Avoiding conflict, however, often is not an option either and is decidedly riskier in the end. It seems the predicament of human kind to engage it, for better or for worse. I'd like to think that it is for better. I've learned the most about conflict in the intimate relationship of my marriage. When engaged in the most vulnerable and self reflecting way, speaking for both my wife and myself, working through inevitable conflict has helped us get closer, made us more mature, and created more understanding between us. It has increased our love for each other and respect for innate and sometimes unresolvable differences. This is quite rewarding and creates the template for the expansion of love to our fellow human beings through engaging with genuineness revealing our shadow and soul.

Here is a quote from the book, Difficult Conversations" by members of the Harvard Negotiation Project, Stone, Patten, and Heen:

"No matter how good you get, difficult conversations will always challenge you. The authors know this from experiences in our own lives. We know what it feels like to be deeply afraid of hurting someone or of getting hurt. We know what it means to be consumed by guilt for how our actions have affected others, or for how we have let ourselves down. We know that even with the best of intentions, human relationships can corrode or become tangled, and, if we are honest, we also know that we don't always have the best of intentions. We know just how fragile are the heart and soul.

So it is best to keep your goals realistic. Eliminating fear and anxiety is an unrealistic goal. Reducing fear and anxiety and learning how to manage that which remains are more obtainable. Achieving perfect results with no risk will not happen. Getting better results in the face of tolerable odds might.

And that, for most of us, is good enough. For if we are fragile, we are also remarkably resilient."

The opportunities for conflict are limitless. Living life fully will bring them on. Living in a cave will help you avoid conflict and bring you peace, and also help you avoid the richness of maturity, the beauties and rewards of adulthood, and the sense of deep love for one's fellow man. A simple conflict may exist when two friends are hiking down the forest trail when there is a fork in the road; one wants to climb to the lake and the other wants to follow down to where the stream leads. Conflicts increase in nature with the level of intimacy. They increase in complexity as we attempt to live in community. We are all too aware of the conflicts between Democrats and Republicans, Arabs and Jews, the Iranian government and its people. In Omaha, my home city, there is a conflict of neighborhoods, where the minority races are still kept in ghettos, and the white majority doesn't realize it's unconscious pressure or will, naively.