Is there a place for reconciliation in the workplace? Is it spiritual claptrap to consider forgiving that guy who stymied your career, that interviewer who tore into you like a deranged terrier, the associate in whose presence you feel like a five-year-old or the subordinate who turns your managerial work into a daily nightmare?
We probably spend more time in the workplace than with our spouse, partner, children or close friends, and so the opportunities for conflict may be greater. In the world of work, we can perhaps from time to time feel bruised, ignored or made to feel like an object.
If it is often difficult to reconcile with family or friends, it could seem next to impossible in the workplace. Or what would we talk about in the office if we weren't complaining?
Relationships out of kilter in the workplace, as in the home, can affect our physical, mental and emotional health. The absence of reconciliation at work can lead to reduced productivity, ineffective teamwork, poor service to customers and reduced earning power for the parties involved.
According to Ms Miranda Holden, author of the booklet Relationships and Enlightenment, "relationships are the yoga of our time".
Addressing an audience of some 900 at a seminar organised by Source Sessions at the Burlington Hotel in Dublin last Sunday, she proposed that if someone in your family - or workplace - is a thorn in your side, it could be beneficial to regard that person as a gift. And whoever we end up with in our workplace or families could be seen, in a certain sense, as perfect for us.
Speaking of her personal experience in her family, she said she grew up hating her father who she felt played the role of the archetypal bad guy of the family. Her mother played the martyr role and, at 13 years of age, Ms Holden was admitted to a psychiatric unit feeling unable to bear the stress and wanting to die.
While she recovered, she found it difficult to "speak her truth" in her family, not unlike how people in the workplace can feel stymied or unable to express themselves or some truths as they see it.
The turning point came when she stopped considering her father as an ogre. This she achieved by imagining herself joining with him "in the light in which he stands". It was as if Dr Ian Paisley imaginatively joined Mr Gerry Adams and saw the world as he saw it, or vice versa.
The first time she tried to stand in his shoes she took some 20 minutes out to do this imaginative exercise and it seemed horrible.
The second time, she had a feeling of detachment. By the third time "some tender hand burst through and pulled apart this monstrous face and revealed the face of an 18-year-old young man. He had light and hope in his eyes and wishes to be happy."
She understood that the exercise involved perceiving her father "at the level of who he really is".
That insight enabled her to relate to and be reconciled with her father rather than the ogre she had perceived before.
"Real forgiveness takes you to empowerment, not victimhood," says Ms Holden.
jmarms@irish-times.ie
