Diane Hamilton on Zen, Meditation, and Taking Perspectives
Start by loosening your grip on your own vantage point. You step out of the embedded way you usually see things and begin to wonder how the other person sees the same situation. That alone shifts something. If you want to push the exercise further, you move into what I'd call a third-person view. Picture an outsider looking in. How would a stranger read you right now? How would they read your family? What might they notice watching all of you that you can't easily catch from inside the moment?
At that point you're already holding three different vantage points at once. You can go one step further and drop the conflict altogether for a little while. Take no perspective at all. Notice what happens when you let go of the quarrel momentarily and just sit, without clinging to anything that's going on around you, present and unhooked. That settling into nothing is what I mean by taking zero perspectives.
Each of these vantage points carries its own skill. First person is about knowing your own wants and needs and finding the words to say them out loud. Second person is listening. If we genuinely want to be with our family in a new way, we have to be willing to treat what they say as legitimate and actually hear it. Third person is observing. You turn yourself into a careful watcher of what is really happening, catching details that slip past you on an ordinary day.
The zero perspective, the one that sits outside the argument entirely, comes with the skill of meditative stillness. No agenda. Nothing arriving or leaving, nothing to look at or listen for. Just being present. Taking the perspectives and practicing their matching skills is the groundwork for the whole thing.
Erik asked whether I'd walk people through an inner process they could feel for themselves, and I said we could spend a few minutes on it. Here's roughly how I'd begin. Find a comfortable posture, a chair or the floor, whichever suits you. As a way in, bring your attention to your body. Keep the spine upright while the shoulders stay loose. Draw a breath in and release it. Then take a second breath.