www.patriciapearce.com/podcast
In this week’s episode I share a conversation I had in 2018 with acclaimed peacebuilder, Dr. Paula Green, who died on February 21, 2022.
For decades, Paula crisscrossed the globe to foster conflict transformation across cultures. In 2009, in recognition of her international work for peace, the Dalai Lama bestowed upon her his “Unsung Hero of Compassion” award.
Following the 2016 election, she directed her peacebuilding expertise to helping heal the political divides between communities in the U.S.
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Transcription
Patricia
Hello Beautiful Souls.
Today I’m sharing a conversation I had with acclaimed peacebuilder, educator, and trainer, Dr. Paula Green.
For decades, Paula crisscrossed the globe to foster conflict transformation across cultures. In 2009, in recognition of her international work for peace, the Dalai Lama bestowed upon her his “Unsung Hero of Compassion” award.
She served on the national council of Fellowship of Reconciliation, and the steering committee of the International Network of Engaged Buddhists, and in 1994 she founded the Karuna Center for Peacebuilding in Amherst, Massachusetts, an organization with international outreach dedicated to bridging deep divides, transforming violent conflict, and fostering reconciliation.
Deeply concerned about the growing polarization in the US following the 2016 presidential election, she helped birth Hands Across the Hills, an initiative to deepen the connection of common humanity between polarized groups. This ongoing endeavor received national media attention, including The New York Times, NPR and CBS.
In Paula’s words: ”It has been my mission to encourage those separated by war, enmity, prejudices, or perceived differences, to seek understanding, discover common ground, learn new skills, and increase their capacity to promote peaceful societies for the benefit of all.”
Paula died on February 21st. I am rebroadcasting this interview from 2018 in honor of her life and legacy and to help us all be inspired by her compassion and unwavering commitment to a world of peace.
Patricia
Thank you, Paula, so much for being with us today. I’ve really been looking forward to our conversation, and to get us off, I wonder if you could share with us what led you to the work of peacebuilding?
Paula
Well, I’m a product of the 1960s counterculture. And we had a great deal of confidence and hope in those days, that we could have a political and cultural turning, I think away from violence and toward greater equality. And that was represented for me by the twin movements of civil rights and anti war. And I think that launched me into what became a lifetime of advocacy and passion for both social justice and peacebuilding. And of course, those two were linked.
Paula
And I kind of had two tracks in my life. One was a social justice and peace activism track and the other was an urgent need to understand myself and human behavior generally, through both psychological and spiritual lenses, and putting all that together, got me to peacebuilding.
Patricia
Okay, and you’ve been doing this for for quite a while, you’ve been working in—your center has worked in over 30 countries, as I understand it, places where there’s been at considerable conflict. I’ve noticed that in your work, you often talk about conflict transformation, rather than conflict resolution or conflict management. So can you tell us more about how how you approach conflict, your perspective on conflict as an opportunity for transformation?
Paula
Yes, I’d be happy to talk about that. I think that comes out of two strong threads to my own development. One is I’ve got a doctorate in counseling psychology and applied behavioral studies. So I’m very interested in the human potential for change individually and in communities. And I’ve also been prepping, studying and practicing Buddhism for 30 or 40 years, and that gives me another lens into how people change and what’s possible in the human condition.
Paula
And I think for both of those, because of both of those threads, I much prefer the word transformation to resolution. Resolution sounds a little bit like hammering nails to me, you know, kind of bang the nail in and you’re done. And manage, management, sounds very impersonal, and my work is quite personal. And what I’m aiming for both in the international work that I have done for the past 40 years, and more recently, now, when we’re bridging divides within the United States, it’s for people to really transform their attitudes and behaviors. So I’m interested in digging deeply and that’s why I use the word transformation.
Patricia
Can you give us maybe an example or two of, of places where you’ve worked where you really have seen that kind of transformation occur?
Paula
Well, it’s, it’s remarkable, Patricia, it happens just about everywhere. One of the things I’ve learned is that after armed conflict, wonderful people rise up, sometimes literally out of the ashes. And it’s an attempt to create peaceful conditions for the future, and to reach out across the dividing lines to those who caused them harm in many cases. And there’s a kind of readiness in the people who stepped forward. And some of them said to me early on, I could never sit in a room with somebody from the other side, I could never talk to that person, I could certainly never be in connection with that person. And then they get together and begin to meet the other side, discover the humanity of the other, reduce their stereotypes, and commit to working together. And it’s it’s a remarkable process.
Paula
And I’ve seen it this past year within the United States, which I’ll talk about a little later. I could cite examples from almost all the countries that I worked in. Rwanda is one where people were shattered by a 100 day war that killed a million people, which means it was a tremendous amount of murder and mayhem in a very short time. It was a tribal conflict. These are people of the same religion, but different tribal backgrounds. And they were incited, as people tend to be, by various kinds of warlords for their own gain. And they now, it was 1994, so it’s a long time ago, and they are still working on rebuilding their relationships and learning to trust each other, and they’ve come many more miles than they or anyone else expected. That’s one very strong example.
Paula
I worked in Bosnia, that war also happened in 1992 to 1995, in that same era, and there I worked with educators and women’s groups. And in both cases, they said, “We don’t want to talk to the other.” And then finally, they said, “We have to talk to the other. We can’t continue to live with such divisions.” And then the relationships begin, and some of them now work in organizations together. So transformation does happen.
Patricia
And in situations like that, do you find where there has been such a deep divide and hostility and mistrust, do you find that someone coming from the outside can serve as sort of a catalyst for that to begin to shift? Do you think that, that it’s essential for someone else to come in and help build that bridge, when it seems like maybe they’re beyond the point of being able to do it themselves?
Paula
Well, I would say that’s probably been my greatest usefulness, is being an outsider in these international conflicts, and not coming in with the story from one side or the other embedded in my psyche from a lifetime of living in the community. And it seems helpful to people. I don’t believe that impartial or neutral is a very good way to describe human beings, because I don’t think that’s even humanly possible. So what I like to say instead is being multi-partial, which means I’m partial to both sides, I care about both sides. I want to respect the story of all the people in the drama. And I think when people feel that they come to trust me, and in some ways that trustingly becomes a bridge to the other side.
Patricia
You’re gaining their trust, because they they understand that you value them, that you’ve heard their truth.
Paula
That’s right.
Patricia
And and you’re not choosing sides, but neither are you, like you say, maintaining a neutral stance that seems to be kind of like an uncaring stance or a disengaged stance.
Paula
Yes. And also a stance that ignores the reality of the harm that was done, you know, that that disengagement doesn’t allow for recognizing that there was a war, people have been destroyed, lives have been lost, futures have been put into great disarray. And I’m willing to acknowledge all of that, but not with the sense of somebody is wrong. This is this is how it unfolded, this is what happens. And trust does build, and people do really change their relationships to each other. It astounds them because they don’t think it’s possible.
Patricia
And I suspect just having their story heard, moves them quite a bit along the road to to transformation.
Paula
I think one of the biggest factors in all of this work, Patricia, is that people want to be seen or heard, acknowledged and validated for who they are and what they’ve been through. And I think, and I’ve said this a lot to people, that I get a lot of my points for just showing up, because I show up in very difficult circumstances after a war when when lives and communities are ravaged and devastated. And there I am this strange American walking into the scene and just the courage to be there is very validating for people and meaningful.
Patricia
So how is it that you actually make those contacts so that you can come into a community. How does that happen?
Paula
Well, that’s kind of a mysterious process, but it does unfold. In some cases, people have heard about Karuna center for peacebuilding, or heard about me, or because of my teaching international students people have met me and want me to come to a certain country.
Paula
And then there’s a kind of underground grapevine, where a story spread about what people were doing in one country, and people in other countries hear about it. And they want it. One of my first my first big international projects was Bosnia. And I worked at a event at the Auschwitz concentration camp at the end of 1994. It was still the middle of the Bosnian War, which ended in ’95. And there was a videographer there, a New Yorker, who was filming this event, it was a healing event for a couple of 100 people. And she went from there to Bosnia, and she told the Bosnians what she had just seen happen in Auschwitz. And the next thing I know, I got a call from a Bosnian woman. So these are the kinds of ways in which these these projects unfold. And then we worked in Macedonia, which is near Bosnia, because one country heard what the other country was doing. And they wanted the same thing.
Patricia
So there’s a way in which the work itself has its own power and finds its way, finds its way to where it’s needed.
Paula
I would say that’s true. And now, you know, I’ve been doing this overseas for 25 years or so. And now, the next generation is taking over, people that I’ve trained are running organizations and doing the same things that I did. And that’s so sweet for me, because it means the work has a future.
Patricia
Absolutely. Absolutely. So over the 25 years that you’ve been working in various places around conflict, have you noticed any significant changes in the global landscape and how the human population is dealing with conflict?
Paula
Well, I think I could say that it gets better and worse all at the same time. I truly, there are ways in which we’re in such a crisis now, and things are much worse and much more dangerous. There are also places where there’s much more peace, and much less tendency to go to war again. And I think this all happens simultaneously. We have terrible tragedies we’re living with in dozens of countries around the world, in terms of armed conflicts, and injustice, and oppression and poverty. And then we have other countries where they seem to be moving in a different direction, a more peaceful direction. It’s a big world, so it’s all happening the same time. And I wish I could say there’s a definite trajectory toward peace. But people who who do these things, there are people who study, institutes that measure all of this, that track the amount of peacefulness and war making going on in the world, and it’s a jagged line. It moves up and down. It’s not it’s not a steady projection. Martin Luther King said, the moral arc of the universe bends toward justice, but it’s a long, slow bend.
Patricia
Yes, indeed. So in, in your work, what have been some of the key learnings about peacebuilding that you’ve acquired along the way?
Paula
Well, I want to start first with resilience. Resilience is an awesome factor in human life, and then recovery from some of the world’s most challenging circumstances. And resilience exists everywhere. It’s spread throughout the population, and exists in both violent communities that committed violence and communities that were violated. So it comes up everywhere. And it’s extraordinary. It feels like these are the people who begin the repair and rebuilding of a shattering. And I’m always astounded, respectful, and sometimes overcome by their capacity to keep on giving and caring, in the midst of so much destruction and loss. But if they didn’t exist, there wouldn’t be any repair at all. So they’re wonderful stores. So I would say that for me that has been a great learning. And I’ve seen it in cultures that are as different as Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, which have all been part of my beat over these decades.
Patricia
And it seems to me that resilience, think I’m thinking about your background, both as a peacebuilder and a psychologist, that resilience is an inner dynamic, and like you I’m sometimes astonished at what people can live through and continue keeping their eyes on the prize and keeping moving forward. And do you find, I guess now I’m asking a question about your experience as a psychologist, do you see that resilience is something that we can cultivate inside of ourselves? Or it’s or is it something that we either have, or we don’t have,
Paula
I would say both both of the above. I would say some people may, because of their life circumstances, be more amply endowed with that capacity. But I’ve also seen families where one of the adults in the family is very resilient, and one of the adults in the family has a very hard time recovering. So it’s not necessarily just learned behavior, I mean a great deal of learned behavior, and I think it’s absolutely something we can cultivate, because it’s part of learning about our own tolerance for difference, and our own resolution to rise up and not be caught in the inner grief, in the anger for our entire lives.
Paula
I think one of the things that’s really, really important here is how people deal with their anger. Does that anger get transformed? And I learned a lesson from a wonderful colleague in Rwanda, who had lost 35 family members, families were large in those days and he was broken, and he was angry. And he felt like the way he described it as that he was walking around with a closed fist, that his mind was a closed fist that it could never open. And at some point, he realized he could never recover that way. And he could never love that way. And that his children would carry the anger that he was he was having in his being. And so he made a shift, to open up that fist, that fist in the mind, that fist in the body, in order to be able to love. And today he’s a profound healer.
Patricia
And that that speaks to so much about doing our own work so that we’re not inflicting our unresolved suffering to the next generation.
Paula
Yes.
Patricia
And I’m wondering, so your experience with Buddhism. I’m presuming that that factors quite a lot into the work that you do
Paula
Enormously.
Patricia
Yeah. Can you share more about that, how that provides you a foundation or maybe a framework for what you do?
Paula
Well, some of the things to say the first one I want to say is that there’s a kind of groundedness and calmness that I carry with me in some very difficult situations. There were times when I brought people into a room together into a circle for the first time from opposing sides of a conflict. And I think to myself, I have no idea what’s going to happen here. Are these people going to sit down and have a real conversation? Or are these people going to walk out on each other, yell at each other? There are just ways in which I don’t know. And I take some deep breaths and ground myself and make myself ready to be able to hold in my heart whatever is going to emerge.
Paula
So there’s a groundedness that comes from meditation practice,that seems very solid to me, that and that goes with me everywhere. And people notice that about me. And they will say, you’re not afraid of silence. Because when people speak in circles, there’s often a tendency to speak right away after that, and to counteract and contradict, and I’ll just say to people take a breath, slow down, let’s have a little silence, hear what was just said, and then respond from a greater depth. And that’s comforting to people. They feel held by that. And that has also come out of practice.
Paula
And then I want to talk about a couple of concepts that are really important. Two that I want to mention for now: interdependence and impermanence. One of the things that Buddhism teaches that all of life is ephemeral, and everything changes, and everything passes away. And there is no permanence. And I hold that when I’m going into situations where there is war, or has recently been war, reminding myself someday there will be peace here, you know, and reminding people that what they’re feeling now will be different in five or ten years. They won’t be feeling the same thing. They won’t be living in the same circumstances. And that’s actually generally true for people. But when we’re when we’re afraid, and when we’re shut down, we think it’s never going to change. When we’re in pain or grief, we think it’s never gonna change. And it’s another it’s another kind of thought about the outbreath. You take the outbreath, things do change, your life will move on, it will feel different in the future. So holding that impermanence is very helpful to me, because people that I meet are very frozen situations, both the political situation and their psychological situation are both very frozen, and being able to help people remember that change is happening at every moment, and will happen in their lives, and they will smile again, and the sun will shine again, and the community will rebuild itself again, that really matters.
Paula
And the other one is interdependence. It’s a lovely concept about everything is related to everything else. And one can learn about this not just through Buddhism, it just happens to be the way that I grappled with these issues was through a lot of Buddhist teaching. And the causes and consequences of war are related to each other, and what’s happening now is related to what’s going to happen in the future. And no person and no event is separate and isolated, that we’re all a product of our times, our circumstances and our relationships,
Patricia
Which goes counter so much to our, to our culture where there’s so much focus on individualism as though any of us could exist as separate beings.
Paula
Exactly, exactly.
Patricia
So what I’m hearing you say is that you are, you’re able to be present in the midst of, of uncertainty, you are able to understand that nothing is static. So yes, there was a war, but that story is going to change, it always changes. One of the things that as I’m hearing you speak, one of the things that I’m thinking about is how we tend to get locked into a story. We have an experience and we interpret it in a certain way, and we come up with our narrative about that. And then going forward, we only integrate information that supports that story. And we can tend to shut out things that that fall outside of our preconceptions. You talked about the man with the fist, his mind was a fist, and how he recognized that he needed to open up and his own story needed to open up. And I’m curious how when you’re working in a situation, how you begin to help people open up their own understandings of what might be possible?
Paula
Well, what you said about the narrative is a good is a good place to start. Because I think encouraging people to look at that narrative, and to find where there’s some light that can get into the narrative is a very useful way of people beginning to get on this journey of change, because attachment to an old narrative keeps us stuck. And so I ask people questions about what other story is possible here, what do you hear in the circle that can help you embroider and enlarge your own story, your own understanding about yourself and the circumstances? Because I always work in groups, I’m not working individually. So I’m working with a community that is that is interrelated at all moments, and I’m wanting people to use the stories and perceptions of others, to open up themselves. And people do, because you’ll begin to hear things that are very different narratives from your own. And you’ll wonder, well, how can these narratives coexist at the same moment?
Patricia
And in your work in various places, what have you observed in terms of maybe dynamics or norms that make it more challenging for groups to move beyond their their stuck places in their conflict?
Paula
Well, I think one very difficult human behavior is denial. And for people who are coming into these workshops, you see these programs, who were on the side of the perpetrators, not that they were perpetrators themselves, but there was perpetration done by members of their community and perhaps of their family. For them to acknowledge what actually happened is very difficult, because of the shame and humiliation of what their “people” did to these other people who were sitting in the room with them.
Paula
So one, one very good story of this is Bosnia where I was working with two city pairs, and they had been mixed ethnic and religious communities prior to the war. And then during the war, they became separated so that one community became entirely Muslim, and the other community became entirely Serb Christian Orthodox. The Muslims now call themselves Bosniaks. In those days, they called us just call themselves Muslims. And the Serbs had been the perpetrators in that conflict in that region of Bosnia. And there were three concentration camps in this city in which, was one of the two city pairs that I was working, and I had actually been to see them—this is post war, of course—but I had visited them. And in our circles, I spent six years working with Bosnians, and in our circles for several years, the Bosnian Serbs refused to acknowledge the presence of those camps in their city. But I had Bosnian Muslim sitting in that circle who had been locked up in those camps. Sdo that was s very crazy making experience for the Bosnian Muslims who had been there, who had the scars from those years in those camps. And I understood how long it took for the Serbs to be able to get over this humiliation enough to say, Yes, this happens and it happened in our city. And it happened in many cases with people that we know who were violators there. But what a hard thing that is to acknowledge.
Patricia
Absolutely. So after the the 2016 election, you felt called apparently to turn some of your attention towards the US because we find ourselves now in this polarized state.
Paula
Absolutely.
Patricia
And so you’re bringing your experience of peacebuilding home as it were. And you started the the project Hands Across the Hills. Can you tell us about that project?
Paula
Okay, well, I co started it with others, and it’s was started in the little town I live in which is Leverett, Massachusetts, it’s just a little bit north of Amherst Mass, which is better known. And right after the election, a group of us called a gathering in town. We asked people to just come to the library to talk about what people were feeling as a result of the election because our town was 85% voted for Hillary Clinton. So a very small percentage for Trump. And 70 people showed up, which is a lot for a very tiny town. And we divided ourselves into committees and one of the committees was called the bridging committee because we wanted to talk to Trump voters and find out why they had voted the way they had and how they were feeling about their votes. So I eventually became the chair of that committee. And we began searching for neighbors in our own town or close by towns, who would want to partner with us for some dialogues, but we actually didn’t find any interest. I think the timing was very shortly after the election, and I think that people might have felt that they were going to be scolded by us or be the butt of anger, our anger, and so we didn’t get any nibbles.
Paula
So we also thought we better look further afield, and one of our colleagues found an article online, written by a wonderful human being who’s living in Eastern Kentucky and coal country. He’s not from that region. He’s from Hartford, Connecticut. He has a PhD in cultural studies. And he wrote about wanting dialogue. And so we began an email correspondence and then a phone correspondence and founded a partnership. And it was through that conduit that we developed this Hands Across the Hills project between our very progressive town and their county, which was about 85 or 90% for Trump. So it was the polar opposite. One of the lessons there is without a wonderful conduit like that these kinds of exchanges can’t happen, because there has to be somebody in that community who has the credibility to bring a group together. And we wouldn’t have that, we were strangers there.
Patricia
So a group from your town went to Kentucky, is that right?
Paula
Well, it took us a year of preparation. We spent so many months getting to know each other. They were suspicious, properly suspicious of us, what were we doing what can we really launch and so it took a lot of trust building on Skype and phone calls and emails, to just get to know each other a little bit and, and build interest in this.
Paula
And my colleague, Ben Fink, the man who was from Connecticut, but lives there, did a very good job in his community of bringing people in. And he had a group of people, not all Trump voters, but almost the entire county was, so many of our people in that group were Trump voters also. And I worked with our group to form intimate bonds. We met frequently, we had a lot of organizing to do. I also did some basic dialogue training with our group and Ben’s—it was a Kentucky group—so people would understand something of the framework. And we designed a three day weekend because one cannot sit in a dialogue circle all day for three days . That’s not humanly possible or productive. And I based it on the international work that I did, where the dialogue was embedded in cultural exposure. We had art, music, dance, theater, sightseeing, potlucks, homestays, all the kinds of things that would truly expose our our community to them and have them understand who we are.
Paula
So last October, they came here, and then a few weeks ago, we went there. So we’ve had now one exchange both ways and embedded in those days was daily dialogue for about three hours, but also All these other wonderful, joyful, exploratory ways for us to get to know each other and see the reality of each other’s lives, which in many ways are quite different.
Patricia
And what were some of the things that you and or your group took away from that experience?
Paula
Well, the first one is that stereotypes are really a tragedy. And we all live in our heads with awful stereotypes about those people we don’t know. And dismantling them was a major challenge. And as the stereotypes came down, the fact of each other’s humanity came in to fill the empty spaces. And that was, that was such a joy, because we met wonderful human beings. And we discover there’s so much more to a human being than their voting record. And we really, really came to care deeply about each other in ways that flabbergasted every single one of us. We didn’t expect that kind of an outcome. But we went, we were so deep and so tender and so honest in our explorations, in our conversations, in the dialogue, that people just bonded at a very intimate level.
Patricia
So are there ways in which that project is going to continue? Or have you completed what you set out to to do?
Paula
Well, it’s interesting, Patricia, when when we went to Kentucky after the six months of their being here, we didn’t know what to expect, we didn’t know how we’d be received there, we didn’t know how strong or not strong the bonds between our dialogue partners and us as a dialogue group would be. And we didn’t know if it’d be a future.
Paula
And what we discovered is that the bonds were still there in all their glory. And we were able to start the first dialogue, picking up where we had left off six months before. So we weren’t starting from the ground. Again, we were starting from a much more bonded, trusting place, and were able to go more deep in our conversations, because we had had the three days before in the spring and all the subsequent six months online in between time. And by Sunday, it was totally clear to me that we couldn’t say goodbye. It was unimaginable to us that that would be the case, but it was. And so Sunday night, in our closing events, we sat in a circle and we brainstormed about 25 different things that we might do together. And then we got names attached to about 10 of them. So the other 15 fell away quite quickly. And about 10 of those 10 projects, got names attached to them of somebody on on either side, who would take responsibility for convening that group, by email or by Skype. And some of those will also fall away, but some will remain.
Paula
And so we are in connection with our friends there. And and it’s wonderful. And my hope for this is that what we experienced will move gently and quickly into other communities that that the Kentuckians, who no longer see us as their stereotypes of North Easterners, Democrats, progressives, over educated liberals, whoever they want to see us, because that shifted away from them and they see us in all our humanity. We hope that more people in their community will learn that from them. And certainly more people in our community have learned an enormous amount from us because we had a public event and 300 people showed up. We had set up 50 seats. We didn’t know this was happening. But our region was so eager to meet these Kentuckians who they had been hearing about because of some local media, radio interviews and press that they really wanted to meet them. And they came out in droves to do this and to spend an afternoon actually almost a day in a school gym, listening to or Kentuckians talk about their lives. And, and it was beautiful. It gave a great deal of hope to our community, which didn’t have a lot of hope because of the political situation. And this was a very hopeful experience for everybody. So clearly, a lot of people no longer hold stereotypes about coal country, Kentucky Republicans that they might have once held. They understand who these people are, their vulnerability, their fragility, the reasons for their voting, the reasons for their fragility, their hopes for the future, their challenges and so forth.
Patricia
And I believe that there was a video made of that gathering is that right?
Paula
There’s a seven minute trailer made of the first gathering which is already on the Hands Across the Hills website, and there will be another trailer made of the second gathering in Kentucky. There were already probably 100 photographs of our time in Kentucky, which everybody can see on the website, as well as probably 10 or 12 different newspaper stories and podcasts and radio interviews that people can listen to. And then our videographer hopes to make a full video, a full 20 minute or so video, in the future. But that’ll that’ll take some time.
Patricia
Yeah, that’s great. And there’s a separate website for for the project, if people want to find it.
Paula
Yeah, handsacrossthehills.org. All one word. And we named it that because we live in the hills. And so today, and it’s kind of a positive image for what we were doing together. One of the things that we’re talking about now with some of our Kentucky colleagues is the possibility of doing another dialogue with a third region in the country, and bringing all of us together, or some of all of us some of each of us together. And we don’t know if that’s gonna happen quite yet. But we have a couple of warm leads. And we’d like to see that in the future so that we expand our capacity to reach out to people from yet a different set of circumstances.
Patricia
So if if someone listening to this conversation that we’re having, I’m guessing that a lot of people listening to this will be will feel quite inspired by by what you’re doing. And if somebody wanted to start some sort of a dialogue experience in their community, partnering with some other community, how might they go about that? What would you suggest? Or can they find materials on the Karuna Center website? How should people proceed?
Paula
They can find lots of materials on the Karuna Center website. There’s a whole training manual that I wrote for international peacebuilding. And one of the chapters in there is about dialogue. And there are lots and lots of handouts, this is available free, and people can download it, print out the handouts and use it as a guideline.
Paula
There are also materials on the Hands Across the Hills website, some are same, some are different. But those are also available for people to use freely as they wish. They might look in their communities and see if they can find somebody who’s had some dialogue facilitation experience, or group leadership experience of one sort or another, who might be a good person to lead the dialogue, actually better to get two people, that makes it a little bit easier, especially when you’re starting out. And then to bring together, it could be a small group, it can be, you know, five or 10 people from each side is plenty, even five people from each side as a starting and just to begin to have conversations together.
Paula
And I always encourage people to set up some guidelines, which I do with every single session that I run and dialogue, guidelines around communication skills. How do we talk to each other? What is respectful listening? What is the Buddhists call right speech, which is a wonderful phrase, what does it mean to speak carefully to speak kindly, to speak respectfully to other people? How do we listen fully to each other, not interrupt, not make side conversations, try to shift away from the judging mind.
Paula
We also talk about confidentiality, which is really important. And we ask people to take their cell phones completely out of sight because that is a real dissuasion from serious listening. So those kinds of ground rules enable people to feel safe.
Paula
And then when there are disruptions happen, and people are behaving with perhaps a lot of anger or blame, I go back to the guidelines that we just review them again, to try to keep respectful conversation going at all times. We’ve learned that anger and blame just lead to more of the same and don’t really help us. People always want to know, Well, did they change their minds? Would they not vote for Trump next time? There’s always that in our community. Why didn’t you push them to change their mind? And why do they still feel the same way about abortion or immigration or guns or any of our issues? And I said, our purpose was not to push people. Our purpose was to listen, learn and build community together. And then what people do with that is up to them. But if we push we’re gonna get pushed back. It’s not a recipe for change.
Patricia
Right. That’s not the purpose. The purpose is understanding.
Paula
That’s right. And that’s the purpose is building trust. The purpose is shifting stereotypes. The purpose is, is knowing that there are other realities. And we heard stories of why people voted for Trump. One story from one of the women there who we’re very, very close to, she said she had promised herself that whenever any woman ran for president on either party, she would vote for them, because it was really time for a woman. But they were told that Hillary was going to shut down the mines. And Trump said he was going to bring back coal, and she said in the end, this is her community. I couldn’t betray my community. And so I voted for Trump. And she did it with with regret and hesitation. But her community was first. And we don’t know stories like that. We don’t know that people voted on one issue, which was coal. Because for the past 100 years, it’s been the only thing that’s, as they say, put food on the table and shoes on their babies. And that’s why they voted that way. And we have to understand and not blame.
Patricia
Yes. Because getting back to the interdependency, there are such big systemic issues that we are all part of.
Paula
That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. Yeah. And you know, we’re always in our personal lives and our political lives, we’re always trying to get someone else to change. And we forget that the buck starts here.
Patricia
Exactly.
Paula
Yeah, and open up our own minds in our own hearts. But, boy, when we did, people can come galloping in when you do that, they’re ready, you know. So we did a lot of our own changing of minds and hearts.
Patricia
Well, Paula, I really want to thank you for this for taking the time. Is there anything else you’d like to share with us, before we wrap things up?
Paula
Yes, I would say that there’s no place to go. We have to make friends with other people in our country. There’s no third country we’re going to move to there’s no, there’s no place that people can go after a war, even the Israelis and Palestinians after all these decades, there’s no place else they can go, they have to make it work there. We have to make it work here we can’t all move to Mars to form a new society.
Patricia
Right. Canada some people think.
Paula
It’s really tempting. I’m not sure the Canadians want us.
Patricia
They’re the ones who may end up building the wall.
Paula
Exactly. So there is no place to go. And we are responsible for what’s happening our own country, and we don’t want to fight the civil war again, we really want to live with each other in peace. And that requires great effort and compassion on the part of every one of us.
Patricia
And recognizing that, you know, there are people who are getting left behind in a global economy, and how can we begin to address these systemic issues, so that so that there isn’t this divide, where some, you know, one group wins, and the other loses.
Paula
That’s right. And we need to put a human face on everyone. And we don’t have a very human face, the media isn’t helping us at all, to have a human face. And you asked about Buddhism before, and maybe I can end with compassion, because compassion is such a wonderful value that again, comes from me out of the Buddhist teaching, but that kind of empathy and generosity toward others is is a way to open up our hearts to those in our country, who voted differently, who live differently, and who also want the best future for the self, their children.
Patricia
Well, thank you again, Paula. And I want to encourage listeners to visit the Karunacenter.org website where you can learn more about Paula’s work and the work of the center and the handsacrossthehills.org website to learn more about this specific project in the US. So thank you, Paula and to all of the listeners until next week, peace.
Paula
Thank you Patricia. Goodbye to all
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