Diane Hamilton on Zen, Meditation, and Conflict Resolution

This conversation comes from A Psychology of the Future, an online summit hosted by Erik Lenderman, where people working in self-development, spirituality, neuroscience, and medicine share how practical psychology shows up in their fields. Erik's guest for this session is Diane Hamilton, a Zen roshi who describes her practice as a willingness to meet reality exactly as it presents itself.

Hamilton has built much of her reputation around dialogue, particularly the kind of dialogue that gets difficult: conversations about culture, religion, race, and the relationships between genders. She takes that work into a wide range of places, from private companies to government agencies to nonprofits, and she also sits with individuals one on one. Her book Everything Is Workable approaches conflict resolution through the lens of recent findings in developmental psychology.

Erik opened by asking where she came from and how Zen found its way into her work with conflict. Hamilton grew up in Utah, and her childhood companion, as she put it, was the outdoors. She spent long stretches riding horses, often for hours, with little around her beyond the natural world.

That turned out to be her first meditation, though she wouldn't have called it that at the time. Once the initial activity settled, there wasn't much stimulation left, and her mind quieted on its own. Being alone in nature for hours taught her a certain way of letting attention come to rest, years before she had any formal vocabulary for it.

Her interest in how people relate, and in what happens when those relationships go wrong, showed up early and without any obvious reason behind it. In her twenties she earned a degree in psychology with a focus on Buddhist meditation. When she began working in conflict resolution in her early thirties, she noticed how much her own meditative discipline was carrying her through the work, and she figured it could do the same for others.

Since then she has gone deep into the Zen tradition and now teaches as a transmitted teacher in the lineage. The practice, she says, shapes how she handles conflict to a considerable degree.