9:00 AM – 12:00 PM Pacific • 12:00 PM – 3:00 PM Eastern • 5:00 PM – 8:00 PM Central Europe

We are living in an age of outrage and division. Many of us feel called upon to stand up for our beliefs–and to find ways to reduce the animosity that we see online and all around us. Now, we are also grappling with new realities in the wake of the current global pandemic. This is difficult work, and it can’t be done without clarity about ourselves. Join us for our Conflict and Compassion online training as we explore how our emotional reactions to the problems of the external world—from climate change to politics to interpersonal conflicts—influence our outward responses. Together, we will investigate how deeper internal work can make us more resilient and useful in the complicated world we inhabit.

People who work in conflict experience powerful emotional currents, whether they want to or not. From mediators to journalists to politicians to therapists, we can’t help but carry judgments and gut feelings into our work. Exasperation, fear, anger and other difficult emotions go with the job. But they don’t have to drain our spirit and motivation. We can learn to use these reactions to help us form deeper connections to the problems and people we encounter. And with connections come new possibilities for  helping people find their way through conflict.

In this Inside Out: Conflict and Compassion program, we will use reflective exercises, role play, dialogue and meditation to intimately examine our work lives and our relationship to conflict.

Facilitators

Gary Friedman

Gary J. Friedman has been practicing law as a mediator with Mediation Law Offices in Mill Valley, California since 1976, integrating mediative principles into the practice of law and the resolution of legal disputes. Co-founder of the Center for Understanding in Conflict (formerly the Center for Mediation in Law), he has been teaching mediation since 1980. Prior to his work as a mediator, he practiced law as a trial lawyer with Friedman and Friedman in Bridgeport, Connecticut. After several years as an advocate, he sought a new approach to resolving disputes through increasing the participation of the parties in the resolution of their differences. At that time, he and his colleague, Jack Himmelstein, began to develop the Understanding-based model that is now practiced extensively in the United States and Europe. As one of the first lawyer mediators and a primary force in the current mediation movement, he has used this model to complete over one thousand mediations in the last two decades He has mediated numerous two-party and multi-party disputes in the commercial and non-profit realms, in the area of intellectual property, real estate, corporate, personnel, partnership formations and dissolutions, and family law.

Norman Fischer

Norman Fischer is a poet, author, Zen Buddhist priest and former abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center. As founder of the Everyday Zen Foundation (www.everydayzen.org), his work with meditation practice has taken him into many corners of contemporary American life including the arts, education, hospice training, education, and lawyering as a spiritual path. Recently, he began offering meditation training to engineers at Google. Norman has worked with the Center for Understanding in Conflict on inquiries that focus on bringing the calmness and insight of meditation practice directly into conflict situations. Norman has written 29 books. His latest books are Untitled Series: Life As It is and The World Could Be Otherwise: Imagination and the Bodhisattva Path.