Celebrate Conflict

Conflict is safe. It is the avoidance of conflict that is dangerous. I am extremely passionate about passionate fighting. And fighting well. 

Foundational to this art of Loving Confrontation is the ability to deeply feel one's body and to express its hurts, needs, and longing with poetic precision.  

Secondarily is the ability to open into another's intensity -- or at least not shut  down -- a capacity built by expanding one's own energetic-emotional range  through discharge therapy and adventurous living. 

This way of relating is natural and built-in, and we see it in indigenous cultures, and even within certain socio-political constituencies where they cannot afford to avoid conflict. 

I can think of no better example of this way of being than in Martin Prechtel's beautiful Mayan village of Lake Atitlan, Guatemala. In his writings, he describes a culture of sophisticated, elegant, wholehearted confrontation.  

I remember reading how teenage boys would "haze" each other. Rather than  fistfight, they would brawl in poetry, provocation, and praise.  

"How dare you hide your light!", they'd call. "You're too beautiful for this -- What  gives you the right to turn away from your glorious nature?" 

This is one way boys would gain each other's respect while also coming into their power and potency. 

A man who could stand in dignified disdain, who could flow his rage and longing  into the river of love, who with the sword of his soul could win the heart of his  enemy,  

would "win" the girl.  

While things did get physical -- and always necessarily, to exalt passion and to  wake the other up and to drive the point home -- that was never the point. Or a  problem. 

Village people see and understand Nature. And the Maya understood and saw into  the nature of relationship and emotion.

They saw that the deeper the rage, the stronger the love. And the greater that  love's gift to the relationship and the village. 

So a stronger fire necessitated brighter poetry. Mighty words. Fights could be  blood-boiling, and they remained safe because people understood this. Everyone  practiced sublimating emotion into desire, into longing, into love. All the time. For that was Mayan culture. That was literally Mayan Law. 

Writing this, my heart aches for village life. I remember it deeply.  

Villages know we need every person, every part, and every emotion fully alive, fully expressed, and smack dab in the center of the circle. Without distrust, denial, or delay. 

Villages understand and are built on the understanding that we are human. Fucked  up and divine, always doing our best and always reaching for more closeness,  connection, and care. Even when it doesn't look like it. 

If we can embody and practice this wisdom even in the heat of battle, through visors and veils, behind armor and swords, within judgments and projections, if we can with our bodies and beings and breath claim the goodness of our self and our enemy, if we can summon the brutal words to express the longing of our livid &  anguished love, if we can in one fell swoop of sound pierce the head and the heart and the soul, then time itself will melt as winter flowers and stones cry.  

The world will shift around us and we will be close. Close to ourselves and to each  other, with the compassion and understanding and trust that can really only come  from a really good fight -- seen to its glorious end. 

In this elegance, each altercation is an initiation where we experience ever-deepening power, passion, and providence with all things. Life becomes rich and radical and alive. Our greatest adversary becomes our best friend, and bloodied and in tears and in song we join arms to create for the world something truly worth fighting for.  

And that is each other. 

True safety is not the absence of conflict but its full and feral celebration.  

I teach this. Couples, Individuals, Families. It has transformed my life and could yours, too. 

Love you. Reach out

Biggest of hugs, 

Blake