The following talk is given by Tara Brock, Meditation Teacher, Psychologist and Author.

Good evening. As I was driving here tonight, I was following a car on the beltway, and the bumper sticker said, less barking, more wagging, and I thought that kind of fits a little bit of what I'm talking about tonight.

I taught this last weekend at the Karpallo, and I'm also teaching a relationship seminar online right now.

And one of the most compelling questions that keeps coming up really is, how do we work with conflict?

And of course, conflict is, there's all the different levels that conflict with our cells and conflict with each other, and so on.

But the particular questions were things like, how do I keep my heart open and keep compassionate when I'm with somebody that's continuously wounding me and hurting me?

Our questions like, how do I communicate and express my feelings about a lack of intimacy when every time I try to bring it up, my partner walks away in some way, you know, doesn't want to talk about it.

So these questions come up. They reminded me of one of the cartoons I have of a men and women are arguing, and he's saying, well, the Dalai Lama didn't have to put up with your whining.

So the best relationships are not without conflict. They're not conflict-free. In fact, it's completely natural that conflict arises. It's like saying there's stress or that we have tension in our life.

Conflicts happen, and they arise when we have competing strategies to meet our basic needs. So it's not the needs that cause the conflict. It's that our strategies for meeting them conflict, and I'll come back to that.

But the basic question really is, in terms of the spiritual path, is how are we in relationship with conflict? Do we try to ignore it or avoid it or pretend it's not happening?

Or do we get totally identified and engaged and have to be right? And then, of course, there's the option that we'll be exploring tonight, which is, when conflict arises, is that kind of a wake-up bell saying, okay, so here's a place where there's some dividedness within me and between others.

This is an opportunity to wake up, to enlarge my sense of being. Conflict is always a sign of that we've separated and gotten really fixed and aridged away inside a kind of limiting sense of self. So it's a flag, it's a wake-up.

They describe it sometimes as manure for bodie, you know, bodie's awakening. And so we're going to look at the different ways that the teachings, the practices that we can bring to conflict, and it will be most useful if you begin to sense a place in your life where you know you get caught on some level.

It doesn't have, in fact, I won't suggest that it be where there's trauma, but more where you just sense that there's tension and a kind of repeating pattern of it with somebody else.

In a way, our response to conflict is an evolutionary marker. And I think in terms of our development in an evolutionary way that if we're primarily identified with our survival brain, with the reptilian and the limbic system, if we're primarily in fight-flight freeze, we're going to be caught in a very rigid, inflexible style of dealing with conflict.

And if our identities expanded and we're resting more in that wholeness where we have access to our frontal cortex, the more recently evolved part of our brain, which gives us access to mindfulness and compassion, the compassion networks, we're going to have more flexibility, we're going to have more resourcefulness.

And as many of you know, I like the kind of framing of what we're learning is a shift from fight-flight freeze, from that identity that's in that reactivity to attend and befriend, attend and befriend.

So conflict arises when we have unmet needs, we all have basic needs for love, for safety, we have basic needs for understanding, for gratification, and when our basic needs are unmet, we find strategies to take care of them.

And sometimes our strategies are wholesome and healthy and in mindful awareness, but very often if there's a lot of wounding and the needs that we have are really core needs and we've been in some way abandoned or neglected or abused, really early wounding, our strategies, which were initially the best we could do,

really maladaptive, and they're the ones that create the most obvious conflict with others.

So what are they like? When I talk about these maladaptive strategies, I often, I think Rita Rudner has a number of them that she describes, and she talks about her grandmother.

...