What Does “Heal The Divide” Mean?

The idea of healing the divide is based on a belief that we humans are spiritual beings born into a physical experience. As spiritual beings, we are all, at our divine essence, loving awareness. We are conscious beings of pure, untethered, unconditional love and we are connected, joined and one in Love.  

When we are born into physical form, we are neurobiologically designed to preserve our survival. Our absorption of information and our expression of needs, physical and emotional, are optimized to increase the likelihood of our continued survival. We are helpless and wordless for our first years, linking our survival to our relationship with others. We learn who we are and how we survive from these first relationships.  

The survival we are learning is less how to survive physically as most (though not all) of us are born into environments that are physically safe. We are mostly learning how to survive emotionally and psychologically in relationships with others and developing our identity as separate human beings.

We learn, through our early relationships on which our survival depends, what expressions and behaviors are rewarded and which are discouraged, which needs will be met and which won’t, what should be acknowledged and attended to and what shouldn’t, what’s OK and what’s not, what’s safe and what’s not, what attributes are valued and which aren’t, who we are and where we stand in relationship to others, From these earliest relationships, in our biological drive to survive, we lose our conscious connection to source. We develop a separate identity, shaped by our relationships. We become divided from our essence, Love.  

Healing the Divide is about reconnecting us to our divine essence. We reconnect to our essence when we begin to see the ways in which we separate ourselves from others through judgment and blame, anger and fear, abuse and neglect and disconnection of all kinds. The ways in which we are separate from others mirror the ways in which we are divided and separate from ourselves and our essence.  

When we can see, allow, accept and be with the parts of ourselves that separate us from others, we begin to accept complete responsibility for our experience. And when we cultivate mindfulness, love, generosity, forgiveness, and compassion toward ourselves and others, we can begin to return and reconnect with our true nature.   

Healing the Divide starts with creating awareness of the ways in which we are separate and the cost of that separation to our well-being.  

One of the key challenges of healing the divide lies in how much of our dividedness lies outside of our awareness. Much of our perceptions, assumptions, conclusions, expectations, and beliefs about ourselves, others and the world reside in our blindspot, outside of our conscious awareness. They are the unnoticed “wall-paper” of our lives. `

Another key challenge to healing the divide lies in our “identities’’” desire to be “right” and our belief that we are “right” about our perceptions, assumptions, conclusions, expectations, beliefs, and motivations for our actions. Our identities have arisen as a result of our survival architecture and we’ve developed defense mechanisms to protect and defend them, reinforcing our separateness and keeping our “rightness”. 

Learning in Action is committed to healing the divide within and between people. We help people see the ways in which their identities have developed to define and separate themselves from others and the cost of that to their well being. We help bring conscious awareness to the aspects of our internal experience (our emotions, assumptions, conclusions, beliefs, desires) that have been shaped in relationship and developed to protect our identities (our separateness).  

The new frontier for Learning in Action is to move beyond creating awareness of separateness and extending our work to:

• Cultivating mindfulness as a means of understanding, accepting and loving self, others and our world.
• Emphasizing the importance of healthy relationships to our well being (and the cost of ruptured relationships to our well being).
• Revealing at a more granular level the assumptions and meaning we are making, the conclusions we are drawing and the beliefs we’ve developed in order to protect our identities and separate ourselves from others.
• Sharing ways to work with our internal experience to bring awareness, understanding, and acceptance of it and ourselves.
• Teaching methods of skillfully communicating with others to resolve conflicts.

Healing the divide within and between is the work that connects the world. Healing our dividedness from our essence will heal the dividedness between us.

We dream of a world in which when one of us hurts, we all feel it. And we run to the aid of the other just as we would to our own. We envision a world in which there is a realization that we are separate and connected and ONE.