We Can Heal the Divide

We all live with a mind that loves to be right and make other people wrong. Sometimes this is so subtle it’s hard to see unless you’ve learned how to watch your mind. But this right/wrong kind of mind has come out of hiding. We can see its dramatic escalation over the last few years with social media fueling it like winds fuel a wildfire. Then we saw it escalate dramatically on January 6 when Trump supporters stormed the capital.

Can this divide be healed? Absolutely! And guess what? It happens inside of you! You are the place where, rather than being more armored and reactive, you can become more openhearted. Instead of hardening your heart, creating all sorts of reasons why your view of the world is right and the other person’s is wrong, you can begin to realize that human beings’ opinions will always range from one extreme to the other and you don’t need to take other people’s opinions personally.

Of course, the violence and insurrection on January 6^th is inexcusable and people need to be held accountable. But if you judge those people and put them out of your heart, then you will be supporting a greater divide. I want to say something very radical. When somebody is being very opinionated, even acting like a bully, they are simply feeling threatened and afraid. People in the capital were feeling threatened and afraid because they had been fed lies, told by people who were in positions of authority.

I want to say another radical thing, something that is absolutely necessary to understand in order for us to heal. There are no such thing as good people and bad people. We all received wounding and bruising when we were growing up and out of that we created a survival system, which was fashioned from the views of our family, our community, our teachers and our religion. And we are all trying to do our best with the conditioning we were given when we were young.

Our survival systems, which can be easily threatened, are trying very hard to ride this wild roller coaster called life, especially with the uncertainty of this time. Because of Covid-19, many more people are feeling insecure and unsettled and oftentimes more volatile. When we are uneasy about life, we tend to get even more locked into our opinions, believing that our opinions are the right ones. We see people with differing beliefs as the ‘other’ and as a problem rather than seeing them as a fellow human being. Did you see the news story of the couple and their neighbor who were fighting over how to clear the snow? They were all truly caught in the belief that they were right and the other was wrong and now all three of them are dead.

We pay such a heavy price for the illusion that I am right, and you are wrong, especially when we justify our righteousness. When we react in this way, it causes our blood pressure to rise, stress hormones to cascade all over our mind and body and fuels the fight or flight syndrome, causing such havoc on all levels of our being. And if you’re honest with yourself, you can see the stress this creates in your family, in your church, in your politics, in your work and in the world.

Although our minds love the certainty of their opinions, we can learn to unhook from this unhealthy stance. This is not about giving up your opinions. Instead, you slowly learn how not to react when somebody has a different view. You can be curious about how the other person sees the world. It then becomes easier to create a bridge with them rather than throwing rocks.

As we are maturing as a species, rather than our minds drawing lines in the sand, they can become more flexible, free from the poison that can come from ‘I am right, and you are wrong’. Rather than being locked into the idea that you are for me or against me, we can see that right underneath the surface there is so much more we have in common than what divides us. This kind of empathy wakes up the best inside of each of us, allowing us to emphasize what we have in common.

The Invitation is to use difficult situations in your life to get to know how your right/wrong mind operates. Whether it is your heart beginning to race when you watch a politician speaking on the news or a parent putting down your views or a partner making you wrong or a boss firing you because you didn’t toe the party line, each of these challenges are an opportunity to explore your own reactions, which allows this exploration to bring forth wisdom and more heart.

If you listen, life will show you how to live more and more from your aware heart rather than your dualistic, good/bad, right/wrong mind.  Then you become a part of the creation of a just and compassionate world. Do not discount how the littlest of interactions, which come from inclusion rather than exclusion, truly matter. Like the drops of water that made the oceans, drops of empathy create an ocean of connection between us all.