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What Disturbs Me Most About You…is Me

Developed & Facilitated by: Nader Shabahangi, PhD, LMFT, RCFE

Time: 10am-1pm Pacific Time; Checkin 9:45am

Online workshop via Zoom utilizing Zoom Breakout Rooms

How do we learn to live in these times? How do we prioritize in our life during such a period of upheaval? Our world is undergoing so much change on a daily basis, so many people on earth are suffering, live in poverty, are dying due to the effects of climate change, of hunger, of disease. Where do we turn for awareness so we can stop and think, perhaps avert the calamity, perhaps an extinction we are about to face? We need a different way of understanding ourselves. We need a different perception of how we can live together on this planet. 

To find such a way, we turn to those who have always been – at least until recently – the shepherds of human civilizations: our wise elders and thinkers. To stop the destructive path of polarization, of us versus them, we shift into a fundamentally different attitude to life and living. This attitude follows ancient wisdom that knows that everything is connected and united. This wisdom emphasizes that as we do to our outer nature, we also do to our inner nature. It believes that if we do harm to what lives outside of us, we also harm what lives inside of us. 

Old wisdom traditions, and now also Quantum Theories, point to the observer participating in the observed, being the observed.What disturbs me about others who have a different perspective from me thus also points to something inside me – else I could not ‘see’ it. This fundamental shift in attitude looks at all that manifests as being part of a whole. We cannot discard certain parts of life thinking we do not desire them, while we preference other parts as acceptable. We move beyond like and dislike, we move beyond good and evil. With such a change in attitude, we look differently at what disturbs, irritates, and angers us in others. Rather than thinking that the other is wrong, we look at the other as teacher. As Carl Jung pointed out, everything that irritates us can lead to a deeper self-understanding. The more we understand, the more we become truly who we are. We are proposing that it is in accepting our disturbances and irritations, we become whole. As whole beings, we can create an opportunity to live in harmony with each other and with mother Earth.  

In this webinar, we will engage in concrete exercises that allow us to feel into the essence of the ‘other’s’ position and viewpoint. This will allow us to not only ’see’ the ‘other’ but also to deepen our own self-understanding. This way we can experience as much our unity as our differences. All is one; one is all.