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Introduction:
Louise Diamond, founder of
Peace-Tech and formerly the co-director of the Institute for MultiTrack
Diplomacy, omes from a spiritual background and brings this to bear on her work, which she sees as a kind of "national therapy" which goes far beyond getting a signed agreement to influencing how people think and feel.
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This rough transcript provides a text alternative to audio. We apologize for occasional errors and unintelligible sections (which are marked with ???).
Spiritual Centeredness
Louise Diamond
President and Founder of Peace-Tech
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Q: What sort of personal qualities should someone doing this kind of
work should exude?
A: I am going to talk about something that doesn't get talked
about very often in the field and that is a spiritual centeredness. I have had a
lot of spiritual training. I come to the work of peace from two streams. One is
the spiritual streams and the other is human behavior and organizational
development. My work is with people on every level of social organization; being
a therapist for individuals, couples, families, then businesses, organizations,
communities, and nations. Inter-group relations is a particular professional
specialty of mine. By the way, people come to this field from may different
streams, these just happen to be mine. I can't tell you how many experiences
that I have had when being able to call on my spiritual training has made a huge
difference. When I try and talk to some of my colleagues about this they are not
there, they come from more of a rational place. For years we would use the words
healing and reconciliation and we would be laughed at. I had an academic whose
name you would recognize in the field say to me," Sounds like what you are
doing is national therapy." To which I said, "Yes, what else are you
trying to do?" You get a signed agreement and that is just the beginning,
of course you have to work with the psychology of the people, how they are
feeling, thinking, wanting, and how they are interacting.
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