Diane Hamilton on Zen, Meditation, and Human Development

My work sits at the meeting point of a few different traditions, so maybe it helps to start there. I think of myself as an integralist. That means my thinking has been shaped, over many years, by Ken Wilber, who is a significant figure in philosophy and also in transpersonal psychology. When the question is where psychology might be headed, the things I've picked up from working with Ken feed directly into how I practice.

There's a second thread too. I've meditated for a long time, and the current of mindfulness practice that's been moving through Western psychology is familiar territory for me. Plenty of therapists and counselors are also meditators now, and I know that overlap from the inside. On top of that, my own field is relationship work: conflict resolution, mediation, the skills that help people get through disagreements. Put those pieces together and I end up with an unusual vantage point. As we get more skilled at reading our own interiors, our inner states, perceptions, the belief systems we carry, we also get better at seeing how all of that shapes the way we deal with other people. An integral approach runs through most of what I do.

People ask what integral actually means. It isn't tied to one subject. You can bring an integral perspective to healthcare, to law, to education, really to any field. The idea is to step back and take a meta-view of the different areas within a discipline, then try to bring those areas into relationship with one another. Wilber describes four quadrants. He talks about the interior of the individual and the interior of the collective. What does the group value? What does it believe? And on the personal side, what is your own relationship to yourself, your own inner life? Then there's the exterior. What behaviors and skill sets does the work call for, and what structures or systems are already in place that shape how the work gets done? Integral is that wider-angle look at whatever field you're standing in.

So how do the integral view and Zen land in conflict work? They help in a lot of ways, but let me start with the simplest. Someone who meditates gets practiced at watching their own inner experience. You notice bodily sensations as they come up. You watch feelings arrive and pass. You pay attention to your thoughts and to what kind of thoughts they are, and that matters most right when a conflict flares. That kind of attention puts you in a far stronger position to change the pattern.

Take the amygdala hijack. The brain fires a distress signal, cortisol and adrenaline flood the system, the heart speeds up, the breath turns shallow, and the limbs get ready to run or to swing. Without any mindfulness or meditation practice, it's genuinely hard to even register that this is happening to you. With practice, you can stay with the whole cascade. Just by working with the breath and with awareness, you can take part in settling your own system back down. That's something most people can't do well without having trained for it. On that side, the benefit is very practical.

The integral side does something different. It lets you look at the conflict you're in with more texture. In integral language we ask what the cosmic address of a conflict is, which is a way of locating exactly where and from whose perspective the trouble is actually arising.