Have Hierarchy Issues?

January 22, 2010 by  

Hierarchy Issues Holding You Back? | Improve Your Competency to Resolve ConflictI took part in an meditation/meetup last night with the Boston Integral Commons (Ken Wilber group) that included an interesting reading of a dialogue between Andrew Cohen & Ken Wilber: Creative Friction – Community and the Utopian Impulse in a Post-postmodern World.

A lively and challenging discussion followed about how we can use the theories and frameworks in practical ways to continually raise our group’s evolutionary consciousness. For me, the biggest challenge was how to not get caught in resistance to hierarchy, inherent to this evolutionary process theory. I wasn’t concerned, though, and left the meeting in high spirits to go along my entrepreneurial, hierarchy-free way.

That lasted exactly 20 minutes.

I checked my email and saw that I was in the midst of a messy conflict triggered by a communication from me to others in a community very important to me. I suddenly realized that most of my conflicts of the past 2 years were tied to my lack of hierarchy sense. Earlier, one of the Integral Group members piqued my interest when he talked to me about how some people excel in hierarchical spaces, and others (like me) don’t because they’ve not lived enough in that space to develop the requisite competencies. It all made perfect sense to me and I enthusiastically agreed with him totally unaware that I was simultaneously protecting my “hierarchy sucks” belief.

No way was this series of events last night a coincidence; it was a test.

So I want to share this learning. If you do something in integrity that results in conflict and you sense a repeating pattern, you may want to examine your beliefs about hierarchy as unnatural, judgmental or even threatening. If so, that’s the ego in you but also an opportunity to build your vigilance (“V”) discipline and to be more mindful of its practical application to inter-personal conflict and most importantly, to internal contradiction blocking the evolution of your own consciousness.

The instant you believe in the evolution of consciousness, you have to accept hierarchy at the level of the self, at the level of the soul, and that backs narcissism right into a corner. – Andrew Cohen

By mid-morning, my conflict resolved. There was no effort or push-back or sacrifice or guilt or doing much of anything at all. In fact, it was almost as it it never happened – but better.

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Filed under: Belief, communcation, Communications, counter-direction, integral, Metaphysics, self-awareness, shift
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