Peace Practice: Speaking Truth

By James O’Dea

We need to evolve beyond our current capacities if we are to uplevel our peace work, get out of the sandbox of who is right and who is wrong, and formulate and articulate a coherent and inclusive vision of peace which reflects visionary truth.

Practice speaking your truth from this vision and not reactively to other’s viewpoints. Let your vision be a source and reference point for your work; feel its aliveness and its contagiousness. Learn to contact it as a substance that holds nutrition. As you develop this practice, you find you are less reactive or triggered by viewpoints which disturb you and even those which may be threatening. Actually you may discover that you have been feeding off negative energy rather than the generative energy of your own vision.

This should facilitate another related practice: cultivate empathic connection and compassionate engagement so that you can receive and connect with the way other people speak their truth. Keep a warm sympathetic energy in your heart during a tense or conflicted encounter and when you feel your adrenaline beginning to spike, quietly breathe more slowly and deeply into your heart. What are you are aiming to become more adept at is tuning into when and how other people speak their truth. Once you can focus in you will find that you are more able to build a field of resonance. Once a person feels seen, you cross a barrier that helps truths engage. When a person feels not seen, that barrier only gets denser and more divisive.

Wherever possible, create a dialogic environment in which people are safe to share deep experiences and diverse viewpoints. There are many circle formats but the one central concept is to demonstrate reverence for the truth of another person’s experience. Make it clear if you create a circle like this that you want to learn from people’s direct experience and that there can be other formats for debating ideas or airing opinions.

Evaluate your media consumption patterns and your own participation in new media. Research and support human rights data collection, investigative journalism, and initiatives which apply deep analysis to reveal the root causes of systemic injustices. Part of being a peace ambassador is honing your own capacity to represent truth in your society. How tenaciously or creatively are you speaking out on pivotal peace and social justice issues? Do a little inventory and see where your voice is being made visible and where you remain more passive. You have your own way of seeking and expressing truth, but let it not be said that you remained silent during the most pivotal time in the planet’s struggle to create models of ecological sustainability, economic justice, and enlightened global governance.

Getting at the truth is not just a matter of simply asking questions, is it? So often we ask positional questions rather than genuinely open ones. Let’s face it: we can be sneaky and surreptitious inquisitors out to reveal the wrongheadedness of others. We really do create a kind of entrapment process to prove, at least to ourselves, where others are wrong. We are so conditioned by the need to have the right answers that we can find that our internal process is structured around the reward felt for being in the right. What can appear on the surface as openness can often be a polite veneer hiding impatience with people who just don’t get it. But truth is not an object nor is it about scoring goals. It is about how genuinely and authentically we can relate to each other or even commune together to experience the emergence of higher ground.

When that happens we find ourselves leaving hardened and congealed dogmatic truths and moving into subtle truth processes where shades of meaning are explored and where there are breathing spaces for other’s truth. Paradoxically, it is only then that we can ask the most daring, searching and far-reaching questions of each other. Once the ground of being has been made safe, we can and must push each other to evolve towards even greater truth.

Carry with you a vision of this greater field where we human beings grow together and evolve into capacities which make us truly more loving and wise, and where we experience the ultimate truth of our most profound connection to each other and all the responsibility which that brings.

This excerpt is from James O’Dea’s book, Cultivating Peace: Becoming a 21st Century Peace Ambassador. To order your copy, click here.

James O’Dea is author of Cultivating Peace, The Conscious Activist, Soul Awakening Practice, and other acclaimed works. James is a former President of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, Washington office director of Amnesty International, and CEO of the Seva Foundation. He worked with the Middle East Council of Churches in Beirut during a time of war and massacre and lived in Turkey for five years during civil upheaval and coup d’etat.

He has taught peacebuilding to over a thousand students in 30 countries. He has also conducted frontline social healing dialogues around the world. He is a member of The Evolutionary Leaders group and on the Advisory Board of The Peace Alliance and Kosmos Journal. James also mentors emerging leaders. He is an Honorary Fellow of the Laszlo New Paradigm Institute. James is both an activist and mystic.