Elizabeth Bader’s passion is the integration of spirituality, psychology and conflict resolution. A lawyer, mediator, coach, author and teacher, Elizabeth’s focus is on working with individuals and groups, coaching, education and training.
As Elizabeth has discussed in her recent publications, the worlds of psychology and spirituality come together during conflict. This is due to the way that issues of self and identity — also known as “face” or “ego” issues — create conflict and impede its resolution. Elizabeth believes we also need a new approach to spirituality — one that includes a psychological understanding of conflict, power dynamics and the tendency toward idealization of “gurus.” In Elizabeth’s work with individuals she teaches what she calls Mindful Somatic Inquiry. This practice combines insights from conflict resolution with somatic inquiry practices based on the work of Peter Levine, A. H. Almaas and Faisal Muqaddam. The goal of this form of inquiry is to facilitate individual insight and opening to the here-and-now.
Elizabeth speaks with Joanna about psychological issues and conflict resolution; dignity, peace, power; doing from a deeper place; trauma work as key adjunct to spirituality; fight, flight…and freeze: playing dead to survive; shaking the freeze.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embed
Subscribe: RSS
I wish to express my gratitude to you Joanna and to Elizabeth Bader for the conversation I just listened to on Future Primitive,org. I feel myself to be a bell struck by the authenticity between you and I reverberate with hope. In the past year I have been working with trauma because I am aware how my brothers and I all have a compensatory indulgence (food, drugs, alcohol, anger) of some kind to act as balm for the trauma we all experienced growing up, as if, we are entitled to exercise this compensation in the hope of having any comfort at all. I so often wonder how much compensation has to do with the level of violence and how in the reality of increased daily violence, we move the cycle, not by acting, but by compensating. Thank you is too small a word. Deep blessing I extend to both of you.