Janmarie is the CEO of a construction company. A wife, mother and grandmother, Janmarie has spent her adult life bringing heart into predominately male spaces. It’s a continual journey of exploring the heart’s capacity to open, uplift and transcend life’s circumstances. She enjoys seeing this unfold through her volunteer work serving underprivileged Latino youth, and in her work as a certified trainer with the Heartfulness Institute.

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JANMARIE CONNOR

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 JANMARIE CONNOR explores some practical
 ways to create harmony and balance where there is tension, conflict and
 disagreement. How can polar opposites coexist?
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 Years ago, I facilitated a weekend workshop with a group of Catholic
 Sisters. They were having great difficulty envisioning a way forward for
 their religious community. From their vantage point, the world they knew,
 including the Church and their place in it, was on its head. Their capacity
 to meet the needs of the inner-city population they served was strained. The
 Sisters’ advancing age and shrinking numbers made it increasingly difficult
 to fulfill their mission. And their mission was bound to their reason for
 being – their purpose in life.
 
 
 The complexity of the situation and the chaotic circumstances around them
 had taken a toll on these dedicated women. Fractures began to appear within
 the group, resembling the fractures in the community they served, and in the
 broader societal landscape. Individual perspectives on how or how not to
 advance had become hardened and polarized. Even simple decisions, like where
 to have lunch, required facilitation. By their own account, the group
 members were feeling isolated, angry and sorrowful.
 
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 Sound familiar?
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 The sisters might have been channeling the voice of our present collective
 experience. You don’t have to go far to find an angry disagreement on just
 about anything under the sun. Rigid perspectives and emotional outbursts are
 no longer confined to topics on religious, economic and political power,
 although they remain root culprits. For example, an online forum of
 neighborhood birdwatchers that I previously enjoyed is now off my list after
 several group members came to verbal blows. Was it a Black-headed Grosbeak
 or a Spotted Towhee? It wasn’t a battle over the birds, per se. It was a
 battle of who was right and who was wrong, and neither side would relent.
 Whichever side you were on depended on your vantage point – quite literally.
 
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 How have we come to this?
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 We are under an extraordinary amount of pressure as a society, with problems
 so big they boggle the mind. No need to name them as we can all fill in the
 blanks. If left unchecked, this sort of pressure short-circuits our ability
 to stay grounded and make space for a variety of perspectives which are
 needed for creative problem solving. The greater the pressure or complexity,
 the more polarized the reaction.
 
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 If left unchecked, this sort of pressure short-circuits our ability
 to stay grounded and make space for a variety of perspectives
 which are needed for creative problem solving.
 The greater the pressure or complexity,
 the more polarized the reaction.
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 Fortunately for us – an expanded vantage point on polarity
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 It is our good fortune that there is a principle inherent within polarity
 that eases the pressure and provides a bridge which unites divergent poles
 and perspectives. When we think of a polarity, we think in terms of
 dualistic pairs: up-down, good-bad, right-wrong, etc.
 
 
 Polarity can be described as two sides possessing a high degree of contrary
 tension, as in the positive and negative poles of a magnet or the
 Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In cases of extreme polarity, it is easy to
 believe that polar opposites cannot co-exist. But the integrative principle
 is operative at every level, until such a high level is reached where
 opposites no longer exist. Nature provides endless examples.
 
 
 We find it easy to accept tension in contrast when appreciating color or
 pairing flavors in a recipe. Opposing colors on a chromatic wheel are called
 complementary contrasts. Our sensory perception heightens the contrast while
 our brain works to unify it, resulting in a coherent experience. It’s a
 hard-wired response.
 
 
 According to The Art of Color, by Johannes Itten, “Two such colors
 make a strange pair … they require each other. They incite each other to
 maximum vividness when adjacent; and they annihilate each other, to
 gray-black, when mixed – like fire and water.”
 
 
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 Bringing water to the fire is a nice analogy for finding balance in our
 polarized world. From this expanded vantage point, we can have faith in our
 and others’ inherent ability to integrate what presents as fixed positions
 and polarities. In the material realm, we are crossing the bridge from
 reaction to response.
 Now we have possibilities for a more balanced way forward.
 
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 Even greater fortune awaits us
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 Even greater fortune awaits us when we begin exploring this same inherent
 principle, but now in the subtler realms. Take another look at the color
 wheel. Consider again that opposites require one another when divining a
 more holistic and balanced life flow. Now look at the gray circle at the
 center and consider it as the heart of the wheel. And the white space around
 it as the field that supports the wheel. Has the gray circle in the center
 been formed by the opposing color pairs, or vice versa? And could the color
 wheel even exist without the field?
 
 
 Dr. Joe Dispenza beautifully describes this:
 
 
 “The heart serves as our connection to the unified field and represents the
 union of duality or polarity. It is where separation, division, and
 polarized energy merge to become one – where opposites unify.”
 
 
 The heart waits patiently for us to shine the light of our attention on it.
 When we do this, through heart-focused meditation, we begin to experience
 the union of polarities that Dr. Dispenza describes. And when we approach
 the heart with humility and an openness toward what we might discover, our
 union can take us to indescribable heights. It’s as if the loving light of
 our attention is mirrored in the heart, and the heart shines back on us.
 
 
 From this vantage point, balance is very real, and practical. We are
 released from the play of action and reaction. We are given divine resource,
 allowing the heart, the field, and all of the contrast to carry out their
 unified purpose.
 
 
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 “The heart serves as our connection to the unified field
 and represents the union of duality or polarity.
 It is where separation, division,&nbsp;and polarized energy merge&nbsp;to become one – where opposites unify.”
 – Dr. Joe Dispenza
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 <h4>What happened to the Sisters?</h4>
 
 You might wonder what happened to the Sisters. Me too. I can tell you this
 much. They came to the weekend with pressure to consider ten vital questions
 and to make movement in some direction. We spent the first half of our
 weekend in silence, standing side by side on a masking tape line. The line
 represented Zero. It was the position in the room without a position. It
 held the heart, the field, and the Sisters. It was where they were silently
 reacquainted with the Essence of their mission – their reason for being. It
 was the place where they stood together, with open hearts, tenderly
 receiving come what may.
 
 
 And from this line, vantage point zero, they moved. There were ten lines in
 front of zero and ten lines behind. They allowed their hearts and bodies to
 move them to the place on the scale which matched their degree of resonance
 with the question. And between each question they returned to vantage point
 zero. Not long after the weekend, I received a letter from one of the
 Sisters. She ended by saying she would carry the experience with her for the
 rest of her life.
 
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 Article by JANMARIE CONNOR Illustrations by ANANYA PATEL
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