The Key to Peace: Resolving Internal Conflicts
The Union Path Podcast
"The Key to Peace: Resolving Internal Conflicts"
Episode Transcript:
00:21
One of the most useful, helpful things to do in life can also be the most difficult. It can exist and persist without us ever really being fully aware, without ever really acknowledging that there's even a problem, and that's the idea of resolving internal conflicts. It seems so normal to walk through life conflicted so many of us are. I've spent a lot of my life in internal conflict and it wasn't until a conversation, or at least a question, from my daughter the other day that really got me to thinking about this more and she asked me the question so when you sit, when you're quiet, you don't feel any anxiety? And I had to think for a second and really kind of probe around for a second and the truthful answer is no. And I think about it because I definitely used to. That definitely used to be a thing. It felt anxiety and it's shifted throughout my life.
01:24
I have vivid memories of being eight years old, being by myself, no one's around, feeling profoundly embarrassed. And it was embarrassed not for anything specific, I hadn't made a fool of myself, I hadn't done anything stupid, I hadn't really done anything, I hadn't really been witness doing anything. I was by myself. I just had this internal feeling of deep embarrassment. It was probably the manifestation of a deeper shame. My point is it's a manifestation of inner conflict, of not feeling at ease in my world, not feeling at ease in my life, not feeling at ease in the now, in the present moment. And that has an effect. That constant churning stress, that constant churning discomfort, that constant churning conflict has an effect. It affects our being, it affects our state of being, it affects how we feel, it affects how we think, it affects what we do, it colors the entire content of our life. And one of the worst things it does is it causes us to leave ourselves. It causes us to lose touch with the present moment, it causes us to just kind of blast off to somewhere or some place or some time else. Due to our discomfort within ourselves, we can never really inhabit ourselves fully. A part of us, maybe a large part of us, is always trying to flee, always jumping to some new experience, always jumping to some excitement, always jumping to some intoxication, always jumping to some distraction to get away from, to escape the discomfort within. And I think where these kinds of awareness can get really profound and when we start to look at all the ways in which, how we live and what we do is affected through negative choices, and what I mean by that isn't so much doing something to do that thing, it's doing something in service to counteract something else.
03:33
We act in our lives indirectly. We kind of build this behavior, ricochet effect or bank shot that we're trying to get what we want but we're not actually really directly going for what we want or even acknowledging or knowing what we want. We try to get it indirectly but we don't really reckon with the experience of our life how things actually are for us. Our life actually feels what the truth really is of our life, and thus we distract ourselves, we ignore, we pretend, we do anything we can to avert our own gaze back at ourselves. We overly focus on other people. We get overly involved in other people's lives and people we not only don't know but will never know and don't actually know anything about. It's kind of a funny thing.
04:27
I was thinking the other day of looking at a lot of quote unquote news and oftentimes, when news is about another person, it really is set up as fodder for criticism. It really is set up in a way that we can not only have our outrage or disgust triggered, embedded in that the subtext of that is our own superiority, is being able to see someone else's bad behavior, someone else's fall, someone else being exposed for not being the person we thought they were, as a way to make ourselves feel better, as a way to elevate ourselves by being able to diminish someone else. So, getting back to that question of having a persistent latent anxiety in hindsight, that really is something worthwhile of attention. I hear that and, even though I occupy that space, I lived that life. I had that experience for an incredibly long time. When I hear about someone else having that experience, especially someone I care about, I'm filled with compassion, I'm filled with a sense of I want to probe deeper, I want to understand this more, I want to try to alleviate that suffering, because living with undoubt, with unacknowledged internal conflict is suffering, even if we're not aware of it. It still exists and even more than that, even if we're not aware of it, it still has an effect.
05:56
Suffering is suffering, whether we acknowledge it, whether we know it or not, and kind of the paradox or the irony embedded in this is that the solution for these internal conflicts, even though they feel external, we feel conflict with the external, conflict With the world. We feel a conflict with another person. We feel a conflict in a relationship. We feel a conflict in a society. We feel conflict in a job. All this conflict seems to be manifested, seems to be rooted and seeded in the external, but the only way to reconcile it is internally. We're the ones that have to figure out how to resolve the conflict, even if it feels like someone else is doing it. Anyone else is acting upon us that we're put upon or victimized or taken advantage of or mistreated in some way. It's the internal conflict, it's how we hold on to that that truly affects us over the long term. It's the internal conflicts that are the durable and lasting effects of the mistreatment from others.
07:02
In a lot of ways, it's not so much what happens to us but what we do with that information. But we process that with meaning, we attach to it, what we do with and about it, and always that choice is up to us. We're not only the ones who get to decide. We're the ones who have to decide Our living with. Whatever that circumstance or situation is is completely up to us. We have full agency, we have full control, we have full dominion and domain over our own experience, over the meaning that we attach, over what we think about things, over what we feel about things, which is the majority of the content of our experience of life. Life isn't so much lived externally as it is lived internally, as lived through our responses, our meaning-making, our feeling, sense of what happens to us.
07:58
And so, if it's peace we seek, if it's freedom from anxiety in just the latent sense that we are walking around with a hive of bees in our chest, then the onus really is on us to reconcile these conflicts ourselves, to listen to this anxiety, listen to this conflict, endeavor after reconcile, endeavor after alignment, because ultimately, that's what these feelings are telling us that we're out of alignment somewhere, and usually it's us out of alignment with ourselves. We're saying things that aren't really true, we're doing things that aren't really us, rebiting situations which we don't actually tolerate. The sense of the inner conflict is a sense of us working against ourselves. Ultimately, the inner conflict is a totem of our own resistance towards the truth, of our own resistant attitude towards what actually is. And usually that conflict is from the invention and the perpetuation of the artificial, due to doing things, saying things, being things that aren't really true. And there's a part of us deep within us that knows that not only knows the truth, but knows when we're not acting the truth, when we're not being the truth.
09:26
And even though these ideas are simple doesn't mean it's easy. Anyone can know the truth if they pursue after it, if they want to. You don't have to be special. You don't have to be imbued with some magical talent in order to know the truth. The truth is actually one of the most basic common things there is. It's all of the artificial artifice that we build on top of the truth, claiming it's true. It's complex and difficult to know. At its core, the truth is often very simple. It's very easy to understand. That doesn't mean it's easy to live. It doesn't mean it's easy to put into action, but it is one of those things where its value is greatly trivialized when it's not put into action.
10:13
Truth needs to be applied. In order to be valuable, it needs to be used. That's the whole point. We don't have realizations of the truth. We don't have awareness of conflict so that we can either understand our conflict or so that conflict can actually feel worse. We have awareness so that we can actually do something about it. The whole point of recognizing conflict is to reconcile it, it isn't to live with it, it isn't to be tortured by it. We become aware of these things at the precise moment that we're capable, the way of the opportunity to do something about it. Again, it doesn't mean it's easy.
10:53
Oftentimes, living the truth is challenging, is hard. Oftentimes, living the truth can create greater conflict on the outside because there's been a reason we haven't, there's been a reason we've been abiding this inner conflict, because we know the outer conflict that will happen if we tell the truth, if we live the truth. We don't bop through life avoiding conflict for no reason, out of laziness or poor character. We avoid conflict for a reason. Usually we avoid conflict so that we can avoid conflict. But what happens in that avoidance is that we don't realize that by avoiding external conflict we can set ourselves up for internal conflict that not only can run much deeper and be much more affecting and impactful to our life, but can also endure much longer. We can imprison ourselves in a life of unprocessed, unreconciled inner conflict and then go through our life constantly trying to soothe ourselves, constantly trying to distract ourselves from this conflict that lies within, but ultimately, eventually, all of that comfort, all of that soothing will actually fail because, no matter what we do, we can't fix our insides on our outsides.
12:05
It doesn't work that way. Ironically, it does work that way the other way around. We can create change, we can manifest change on our outsides by dealing with our insides. That's the way life works. That's the way growth happens from the inside out. All growth exists and persists outward. And the same with our life, because life is growth, life is change, and obviously we run into a lot of trouble. We make our path extremely hard when we try to live life backwards, we try to live life from the outside in, when we take the change that life gives us and try to compress it internally, when we absorb change rather than express change. I think we can see the juxtaposition there that the fault in that is that it's backwards, we're not actually moving forward, we're not actually moving with life. In a lot of ways we're trying to stop life, we're trying to absorb life, we're not letting things flow, we're not really flowing through our own life as long as we're just accumulating life within ourselves.
13:15
And so if you have that experience where you sit there, when all stimulation is gone, you're just sitting by yourself in a quiet room and you feel a sense of anxiety. You feel those bees within yourself. Maybe it's time to start looking for conflict. Maybe it's time to start looking at the ways that you're in conflict with your own life or, to put it another way, that your life is in conflict with you, with who you really are, with the truth. And then, once you have this awareness, it's worthwhile to do something about it. Do something with this information to strive to reconcile these conflicts Because, at the very least, even if none of the circumstances of your life change, your life will feel better, you will quiet those bees, you will get access to peace, to calm, to equanimity.
14:08
You won't feel so battered around by needing to constantly make yourself feel better, because you already feel fine. You're not constantly trying to make up for a deficit. You're not constantly driven to distract from the noise within, because within is quiet, and it's quiet because it's been listened to. It doesn't need to try to get your attention anymore. You've already given it your attention. It doesn't need to get you to do or change anything, because you're already aligned with it. You're already one. It's the separation with yourself that drives the conflict. That's what that feeling is. That's what that conflict means Of a created separation within yourself and you can choose to rectify and rejoin yourself whenever you wish, because, at least speaking from my own experience, it's absolutely worth it.
15:06
It is unquestionably and demonstrably better to live life without internal conflict, to live life in a way where one not only reconciles and addresses their internal conflicts by making whatever changes they need to make, and oftentimes, a thing that needs to change is ourselves. We need to drop our selfishness, we need to drop our self-centeredness, we need to drop our judgment, we need to learn compassion, we need to learn grace, we need to learn to be of service, we need to learn to be part of a greater whole, and sometimes we need to leave situations. We need to leave situations where the truth cannot abide. We need to leave situations that even the best-case scenario is still bad, is still diminishing for one or more people involved. We need to honor the truth and we'll know the truth if we really earnestly and fully endeavor after it. We'll be told the truth when we want to be told the truth, when we need to be told the truth, when nothing less than the truth will do.
16:15
Maybe what we need to do to align with the truth is to tell the truth to someone else, not in a mean or hateful way, not have a sense of vengeance or retribution, but because not being able to tell the truth is corrosive, having to live in a situation that can only persist through a means of secrets and lies, that the only way you can exist, the only way you can potentially thrive, is by keeping secrets and telling lies. And oftentimes the best thing you can do in this situation is to refuse to keep secrets and refuse to lie, insist on the truth and oftentimes those situations will rectify and reconcile themselves. And all these potential solutions, these identified inner conflicts, are myriad. The important thing is that we become aware of them. The important thing is that we listen. The important thing is that we feel and then, once we do, we do something with that information, we translate that awareness into our own action. We let that awareness change us, not only change what we know, but change what we do, change how we do what we do, change why we do what we do. That's the whole point.
17:26
And as we progress and endeavor after the truth, we can't help but be changed. We can't help but be brought more into alignment with ourselves, with who and what we really are, with what actually matters to us, with what we actually want, with how we want to actually be, because it's integrated and aligned with who we actually are. And again, at the very least it's worth it. It feels better. A life aligned automatically feels better than a life lived out of alignment, even if precisely zero circumstances change.
18:04
The funny irony is, or the bit of a paradox is, circumstances almost can't help but change.
18:10
We know that's not the point.
18:13
The point is the alignment, the point is the union, not the circumstance, not the achievement, not the gratification, not the appearance, because we've grown tired of all of that.
18:24
We've grown tired of living our life based on appearance, based on achievement, based on everything outside of ourselves, because nothing is really addressed, nothing is really fixed. The conflict that we feel within ourselves. Because when we come to a point where that's all that really matters, where we reach a point where we just can't live with internal conflict anymore, then we'll do something about it. And then, once we've done something about it, once we've really healed and reconciled that inner conflict, then all of that discomfort will have been worth it, because it brought us back to ourselves, brought us back to alignment, brought us back to who and what we really are brought us back to expression of who and what we really are, of being able to live our life from the inside out, to get back in line, to get back in harmony with life, with growth, with contributing to what is, because we're expressing ourselves freely and fully and authentically, because we're aligned with and we're expressing the truth.