Chapter 9: Holding Differences: Seeing Other Viewpoints Without Losing Your Own
“And so it is in life: if you want to see reality clearly and take action based on all available input, you must be able to hold differences – to maintain your own viewpoint while considering other people’s views.”
“It takes more than one blind man to “see” the whole elephant!” (Sufi teaching)
Holding Differences
- Differences in viewpoint or desires are inevitable. Learning to allow the differences to exist is a good starting place for healing between people.
- Holding differences gives you the capacity to accept that differences do exist. When you learn to hold two apparently conflicting views side by side, the difference doesn’t seem so threatening, you view expands, and often, the contradiction vanishes.
- Active listening is one of the best communication tools for learning to hold differences. Another good tool is observing, with awareness, your own and your partner’s differing contact-withdrawal rhythms.
- When you accept that there is no effective way to control what another thinks, and that all attempts at such control simply introduce static into your communication, then you are better prepared to deal with diversity. You can start to value being honest about disagreements and diverse perspectives – because of what you can learn from other people.
- Once you learn to embrace paradox, you see that “all is one”, that everything that exists is part of a great universal oneness.
- Life becomes a painful battle when you struggle against what is, including differences in perceptions and styles of relating. We create unnecessary suffering when we cannot accept our differences from others and the seemingly contradictory impulses within ourselves.