The Doug Noll Show

Have you ever wondered if you could make a difference in the world? Have you ever wondered what it would be like to commit to peace by doing something more than talking about it? What does it take to focus on peace and how hard is it for each of us to work as everyday peacemakers? Today’s guest has some answers that may challenge our complacency.

For 30 years Dr. Joseph Bernard has been fascinated by the human potential. His work has always been to realizing the incredible potential of each person.

Dr. Bernard, a clinical psychologist, has worked in human service organizations, corporations, colleges, recovery programs, and in private practice. He completed his Masters Degree at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon and his Ph.D. at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco. That’s all the credential stuff.

What is important is that Joe has focused his attention on peace. In this show, Joe talks about the importance of finding peace within ourselves, a sense of stillness and quietness that allows us to work on external peace in the world.
http://www.peace-together.com

Dr. Joseph Bernard
http://www.peace-together.com

Dr. Joseph Bernard
http://www.peace-together.com

Dr. Joseph Bernard
http://www.peace-together.com

What’s the first thing that happens to you when you get into a fight or conflict? If you are like me and most every one else, you get mad. So the first thing I tell people is that Serious Fights Will Piss You Off! Once you can recognize that fights, conflicts and disputes are emotional events in our lives, things can shift and with this awareness come choices. So in this show, let’s explore some of the emotion around fighting and see what can be learned from it.

Our early warning system is programmable by life experience. That programming starts at birth and continues as life experiences accumulate. Most importantly, the programming occurs without our conscious knowledge or choice. Let’s look at how this happens.

While bad news is that we have been programmed without our consent or knowledge, the good news is that we can re-progam ourselves. The first step in re-programming our brains is gaining awareness of our reactivity. Learning to be aware is simple because many of the things that trigger you repeat themselves over and over. All you have to do is identify them one at a time and become of aware of them as they arise in everyday life. Listen and learn how we do it.

Who controls your reality? You? Or Life? It is not what happens to you in life that determines whether you are pissed off or happy. It is how your brain perceives and directs reality that makes it so. Learn how we control the choices of life and how we can use that power to gain inner peace.

What a great Valentine’s Day topic! Mars vs. Venus. Men and women fighting. It seems like every couple, whether dating, committed or married, at one time or another has a fight. In many relationships, the conflicts escalate until the relationship feels like it is not worth preserving. What is going on that we fight with the person we love the most? My co-host is Aleya Dao and together we explore the war between the sexes. Men and women have different perspectives, different communication styles, and different needs at different times. Aleya and I talk about these differences from the female and male perspective.

It’s not about the money! Aleya and I talk about symbolic content issues like shopping, sports, money, sex, children, parents. These seem to be what the fight is about, but not really. Tune in and find out what is really going on.

Learning to make peace with your partner. Aleya and I have some basic tools for you to make peace with your partner and we demonstrate in actual conversations how to do it. Learn how and why to create a safe space for difficult conversations, set some ground rules, and engage in various kinds of empathic listening.

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We expect kids up through their teens to fight with their parents. Its part of growing up and learning. But what we don’t expect are the fights between adult children and their parents. In this show, my co-host, Aleya Dao, and I take up this troublesome issue. Why do adult children fight with their parents? And how can those fights be transformed into peace. We start by identifying some of the common themes of fights between adult children and their parents, including health, money, alcohol and drug abuse, second (or third) spouses, child rearing including discipline, education, and religion, opinions about children’s spouses, and politics.

What are the hidden relationship issues? These issues drive many of the fights, and we are not aware of them. They include respect manifested by disrespect, insults; freedom manifested by unhealthy control; autonomy manifested by unhealthy or manipulative power; safety manifested by fear; love manifested by smothering and guilt; and abundance manifested by hoarding, stinginess, not being generous.

What are the hidden identity issues? They include self-esteem manifested by competition, self-worth manifested by arrogance rather than humility, gratitude and appreciation manifested by resentment, commitment to self manifested by selfishness, self-control manifested by guilt, healthy pride and self-esteem manifested by shame.

Some simple questions indicate much about how adult children respond to their parents. For example:
• Who am I if I am not my mother?
• Who is my father closer to - me or mother?
• What can I do so that my mother accepts me as an adult?
• Is it OK to be happier than my mother?
• Why do I want my mother's approval?

Many people face the chaos of internal personal conflict and conflict with others. It seems that we are expected by our society and culture to deal with conflict as adults, yet we for the most part are not taught the skills necessary to find inner or outer peace in our lives. Imagine if those skills could be taught through horses. My guest Maja Ramsey does just that. Her Steadfast Clinic uses horses to teach people inner and outer peace skills. Maja Ramsey is a mediator and former trial lawyer. She was acclaimed by TIME Magazine as one of the top 10 women lawyers in America. Maja is a graduate of California Poly Technic University and received her law degree from La Verne Law School. She, with three other distinguished women lawyers from the San Francisco Bay Area, founded the Rock Rose Institute, which supports, promotes and advances non-violent conflict resolution through education, improved communication and a deeper understanding of justice. The Steadfast Clinic, for both experience horsemen and people who have never seen a horse before, teaches people to be present, to observe, to be in the flow. Horses are great teachers and communicators. As Maja explains, horses work best with collaboration, and learning to collaborate with horses teaches us much about conflict transformation.

Many people face the chaos of internal personal conflict and conflict with others. It seems that we are expected by our society and culture to deal with conflict as adults, yet we for the most part are not taught the skills necessary to find inner or outer peace in our lives. Imagine if those skills could be taught through horses. My guest Maja Ramsey does just that. Her Steadfast Clinic uses horses to teach people inner and outer peace skills. Maja Ramsey is a mediator and former trial lawyer. She was acclaimed by TIME Magazine as one of the top 10 women lawyers in America. Maja is a graduate of California Poly Technic University and received her law degree from La Verne Law School. She, with three other distinguished women lawyers from the San Francisco Bay Area, founded the Rock Rose Institute, which supports, promotes and advances non-violent conflict resolution through education, improved communication and a deeper understanding of justice. The Steadfast Clinic, for both experience horsemen and people who have never seen a horse before, teaches people to be present, to observe, to be in the flow. Horses are great teachers and communicators. As Maja explains, horses work best with collaboration, and learning to collaborate with horses teaches us much about conflict transformation.

Many people face the chaos of internal personal conflict and conflict with others. It seems that we are expected by our society and culture to deal with conflict as adults, yet we for the most part are not taught the skills necessary to find inner or outer peace in our lives. Imagine if those skills could be taught through horses. My guest Maja Ramsey does just that. Her Steadfast Clinic uses horses to teach people inner and outer peace skills. Maja Ramsey is a mediator and former trial lawyer. She was acclaimed by TIME Magazine as one of the top 10 women lawyers in America. Maja is a graduate of California Poly Technic University and received her law degree from La Verne Law School. She, with three other distinguished women lawyers from the San Francisco Bay Area, founded the Rock Rose Institute, which supports, promotes and advances non-violent conflict resolution through education, improved communication and a deeper understanding of justice. The Steadfast Clinic, for both experience horsemen and people who have never seen a horse before, teaches people to be present, to observe, to be in the flow. Horses are great teachers and communicators. As Maja explains, horses work best with collaboration, and learning to collaborate with horses teaches us much about conflict transformation.

Many people face the chaos of internal personal conflict and conflict with others. It seems that we are expected by our society and culture to deal with conflict as adults, yet we for the most part are not taught the skills necessary to find inner or outer peace in our lives. Imagine if those skills could be taught through horses. My guest Maja Ramsey does just that. Her Steadfast Clinic uses horses to teach people inner and outer peace skills. Maja Ramsey is a mediator and former trial lawyer. She was acclaimed by TIME Magazine as one of the top 10 women lawyers in America. Maja is a graduate of California Poly Technic University and received her law degree from La Verne Law School. She, with three other distinguished women lawyers from the San Francisco Bay Area, founded the Rock Rose Institute, which supports, promotes and advances non-violent conflict resolution through education, improved communication and a deeper understanding of justice. The Steadfast Clinic, for both experience horsemen and people who have never seen a horse before, teaches people to be present, to observe, to be in the flow. Horses are great teachers and communicators. As Maja explains, horses work best with collaboration, and learning to collaborate with horses teaches us much about conflict transformation.

Many of us have experienced a need for vengeance—to get back at the other guy. Sometimes it is a passing desire and sometimes it becomes an all consuming goal. What is vengeance, where does it come from, and what is its relationship to retribution, justice and forgiveness. I will be talking about these common experiences in this show and invite you to email me at info@lawyertopeacemaker.com with your comments and questions. We start by looking at vengeance in literature, particularly as described by Alexander Dumas’ in his famous novel The Count of Monte Cristo. Vengeance arises from a sense of lost honor identity that has been severely attacked. Vengeance is a powerful emotion that cannot be assauged with persuasion or logic.

Vengeance is often wrapped around identity. Identity is at a primal level a right to claim group resources. When identity is threatened by violence or some other act, deep resentment can arise.

Recall how Ahab, the captain of the whaling ship Pequod, is driven to madness in his desire for revenge against the great white whale Moby Dick. In the end, his desire for vengeance destroys him, his ship,and all of the crew except for Ishmael. The key to dealing with this deep vengeance is through empathy. Empathy has its roots in mirror neurons. There are many levels of empathy and the greatest gift is to be able to create an empathic space for a person with deep resentment.

Forgiveness is a process not an event. The transformation from rage, anger, and the desire for vengeance through the process of forgiveness can be profound as witnessed by the story I tell.

Conflict usually involves a lot of emotion and reactivity. When we are reactive, we lose our ability to think things through clearly. Aleya Dao and I will be talking about these common experiences in this show and invite you to email me at info@lawyertopeacemaker.com with your comments and questions.
Reactivity is controlled by deep brain functions located in the amygdala. We have two amygdalae, located in each brain hemisphere. The amygdalae act as early warning systems and trigger us into action if a threat is perceived. Interestingly, the amygdalae cannot distinguish between a physical threat, a social insult, or a bad memory. The opporutnities for triggers is therefore plentiful. Anger and Inner Peace, Finding Peace Within, Reactivity, Difficult People Forgiveness

Conflict escalates in five stages. As people enter the next higher stage, their reactivity is more intense and their ability to reason their way out of the problem diminishes. The only way to de-escalate is work back through the stages one at a time.

The tools for dealing with triggers and reactivity include self-awareness, feeling emotions and identifying them within you, looking for the lessons to be learned from the moment, and practicing that which you wish to master. Aleya tells us about the energetic fields that can be used to shift reactivity.

Learn to read emotional data fields to help others who are reactive and triggered. The emotional data field consists of the layers of emotions a person is experiencing in conflict situations. We can help people de-escalate by acknowledging and identifying their emotions for them in the moment.

Marilyn and I talk about conflicts. We observe that conflicts are often necessary to point out things that need to change. Conflict is also an opportunity for spiritual growth. Cat calls in from North Carolina and adds her sense that conflict is necessary and how we approach conflict determines whether it is healthy or destructive. We begin to talk about what listening is really about. Marilyn points out that because so many of us live in fear, listening is very difficult.
http://www.reenchantplanetearth.com

Marilyn talks about listening with your whole body. By this, she means that we have to listen to ourselves as well as listen to what the other person is saying. Listening to ourselves means being aware of every emotion and feeling as it passes through us. At the same time, we are aware of the emotions flowing through the other person. This is a bit challenging in the beginning, but, as Doug points out, becomes like riding a bicycle with practice.
http://www.reenchantplanetearth.com

Not everyone is aware of what they are feeling in the moment. One of the basic tools of peacemaking is to create a safe, sacred space where feelings can be experienced without fear. Lynn calls in from Long Island and points out that this can allow people to speak honestly and authentically. Marilyn gives the example of a conversation with the principal of her step-son’s school. Marilyn observed that the principal was listening to her own fear rather than listening to her step-son. Once the principal understood the concept of listening, the conversation completely changed. Doug asks Marilyn about her energy model. Marilyn describes the work of Stewart Gellis and the being energy, the doing energy, and the dreaming energy. Being energy is about connection and relationship. Doing energy is about action, critical thinking, and analysis. Dreaming energy is about creativity. We tend to live in one energy to the exclusion of others, which leads to imbalances in life. When we are living in the three energies simultaneously, we are in balance with the Universe. When one or more of the energies is missing, conflict arises. One model of peacemaking suggests that peace comes from re-balancing and awakening the missing energies.
http://www.reenchantplanetearth.com

Marilyn describes her philosophy behind the Re-Enchant Planet Earth project. Re-Enchanters are global citizens interested in sustainability. One purpose of reenchantplanetearth.com is to connect people. Another purpose is to allow a space to talk about fear. By talking about what our fears are, we lessen the power fear has over us.
http://www.reenchantplanetearth.com