The following talk is given by Tara Brock, meditation teacher, psychologist and author.

Our last class was on the theme of conflict.

We were exploring the movement from when we get caught in an inner dividedness or conflict

with someone else towards reconciliation and how does that happen.

In a way this is a real artippal theme of all spiritual paths, just the word reconcile.

We see in so much a religious literature that in a sense we have, just by nature, being

incarnated, we leave the garden.

We, in some way, through our ignorance, our craving, our resistance, we leave the garden,

we leave our at-homeness with the divine and go off and get caught up and stressed

out and reconciliation is finer or way back home into that sense of oneness or connectedness,

which includes home with each other.

The notion is that leaving home is a given for all of us in terms of the conditioning of

the ego, that we all have that sense of separation at times, at least, and disconnection from

our inner life and from each other.

That's kind of a given and that we're conditioned to react to our unmet needs, our unmet needs

for love or safety in ways that affect and influence other people.

So that's what conflict comes out of, the ways we're reacting to unmet needs.

So the big question that we were exploring and we'll continue to explore is, do we continue

to use the same old strategies of dealing with our stress, in the same ways that we get

defended or aggressive, judgmental, whatever it is, in which case we perpetuate conflict

in a sense of ego itself.

Are we do we let the stress of conflict in our life, whether it's internal conflict or

...