An Everyday Approach to Harmony with Others:

A Toolkit for Practice

On all the various playgrounds I find for myself (leadership and organization development, personal growth, relationships, community, recovery and spirituality), I’m often struck by how we don’t always play well with others. A lot of us get crossways with a whole lot of others. Sometimes it becomes terribly problematic, as we can see when we look at our larger divisive and combative times.

Harmony is not simple or easy, yet I’ve found a few viewpoints that are useful. Perhaps what follows may be a small toolkit for you. 

Allowing Others to Learn

I once asked a wise elder what he thought was a most important lesson learned. He told me, “I wish I had understood that we can’t make shortcuts for others to learn, that each of us has to learn things for ourselves. Had I been wiser, I would have allowed much more room and opportunity for people to use a little of my knowledge but much more practice for themselves including the unfortunate and awfully painful ways we really learn deeply.”

Interestingly, this parallels one of my lessons learned from my younger daughter, Brianne. We were crossways one day, and it was not going well. In essence she told me that her life has a plot, and that when I insert myself into her plot when there is not a role for me, it screws everything up. Rather than dealing with the core issue or learning, she had to battle me.  

Let’s just say, “Ouch!” in response to these. It is not pleasant to see that too often our good intentions and motivations create problems. Some humility based in that awareness can go a long, long way.

In the words of the Al Anon Family Groups in framing the issue of loved ones caught up in addiction, the following has great application much more broadly.

We did not cause this problem. We cannot cure it.

However, if we are not aware enough,

we will contribute to it in very unfortunate ways. 

To Each Their Own Path 

Kahlil Gibran said this so well in The Prophet when he wrote about children. Of course this too can apply in many more settings and circumstances.

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite, and He bends you with His might that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer’s hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies, so He loves also the bow that is stable.

Unconditional Positive Regard (aka Love)

It was the great therapist and teacher, Carl Rogers, who provided practice-based wisdom from many years of lessons learned. In short, it is that we will be our most effective when we hold no judgment upon others. That we minimize expectations of others as much as we are able.

He called this “unconditional positive regard,” which means simply that who you are and what you do will not compromise the regard with which I hold you.

Some would call this love. (Unconditional love is an oxymoron.)

In order to do this, we have to clean up our own inner shadow selves, to use Carl Jung’s phrase for it. Each of us has within us blind spots, both light and dark, that we project upon others, often to great detriment.

So the simple answer in this arena is to find our way to being wounded healers. We seek to be those who have transmuted wounds and misunderstanding in order to transcend ourselves, and through that, to be more effective with others and in the world.

Seeing True in Reality and In Practice™ 

Harmony with the world, others and ourselves is a dynamic state. We need practices that bring us back, over and over again, to allowing people and things to be as they are. Better still, we need enough situational awareness to then act according to what will be most effective.  

“The world is a messy place. We’ll do much better if we can let it be so.”

~Patricia O’Gorman