Clinical training in psychoanalysis has a deficit. It teaches how to sit and think about what a person is saying and how to interpret it intellectually, but not how to be fully present to this person.

Upset? Ask yourself what this person does that is a trigger for judging them?

I wouldn't expect someone who's been injured to hear my side until they felt that I had fully understood the depth of their pain.

Everything we do is in service of our needs. When this one concept is applied to our view of others, we'll see that we have no real enemies, that what others do to us is the best possible thing they know to do to get their needs met.

Never connect yourself with the other person's pain. Just hear their need. Leave yourself out of the other person's feelings and needs.

While we may not consider the way we talk to be 'violent,' our words often lead to hurt and pain, whether for others or for ourselves.

My ultimate goal is to spend as many of my moments in life as I can in that world that the poet Rumi talks about, 'a place beyond rightness and wrongness.