Welcome,
in this edition of our newsletter you’ll find:
🌱 Exploring the role fear plays in creating personal and social divisions
💧 Establishing a daily mindfulness practice with Tara Brach and Jack Kornfield’s 40-day introductory course that is completely **free**
🪴 Food for thought on communalism by bell hooks
Enjoy!
Your noe team
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🌱 Planting Seeds
In this section we share thoughts and concepts around empathy that have inspired us and made us think.
The Security Dilemma - Connecting Through the Fear that Divides Us
Had we built bridges, not walls.
A reflection on the security dilemma by Nada Elbohi
The security dilemma is a classic theory of international relations and politics. The term was first coined in 1950 by John Herz and further developed and analyzed in the academia of international relations. It stipulates that when one state or country takes measures to increase its security (for example, through building armaments or forming new alliances), it leads other states to feel more afraid for their own security. In response, other states increase their own military strength to protect themselves.
At the core of the security dilemma lie a few assumptions:
Survival and self-preservation are core needs for states.
Without a ‘world government’, each state prioritizes self-protect and maximizes its security.
There is a distrust between states, meaning that when one state arms itself, other states feel insecure because they do not know whether the former state’s armament is for offense or defense.
This dilemma is founded on feelings of fear and insecurity that drive states to build defenses and military protection. While striving for peace, the security dilemma results in states investing more in military than cooperation. We have seen this in the real world very often, and most recently, in Russia’s purported reasoning for its invasion of Ukraine. On the one hand, Russia claimed that NATO’s eastern expansion threatened it, prompting its attack. On the other hand, NATO asserts that it is a purely defensive alliance.
While the security dilemma shapes international relations, it is also applicable to our own interpersonal relations. If we zoom in on one-to-one relationships, we find that human defense mechanisms are rooted in fear and insecurity and can often result in conflict and division. They stem from feelings of threat, anxiety, or guilt. While defense mechanisms, first described by Freud and now integral to psychology, are developed to protect the conscious mind and ego, many of them are unconstructive and can harm interpersonal relationships.
Examples of harmful defense mechanisms include denial, projection (placing your own difficult feelings or qualities onto others), displacement (taking feelings out on others), and suppression (intentionally keeping unpleasant information from your conscious mind). How can such mechanisms impact relationships? They derail from honest, open, and vulnerable communication that helps foster understanding and connection. This is also because defense mechanisms prevent the individual from experiencing their own feelings. So, often times feelings of hurt or sadness can be misconstrued and conveyed as anger. Nevertheless, there are constructive defense mechanisms such as sublimation where one converts unacceptable impulses into healthy outlets.
Taking into consideration inter-group relations, we see the security dilemma similarly influencing community dynamics. For instance, in the book ‘No Bad Parts’ by Richard C. Schwartz on the internal family systems model states “Your protectors only see the protectors of others”. This further affirms the security dilemma’s applicability on personal and inter-group levels. It emphasizes that a group’s perceived security is impacted by other groups’ defense measures, and highlights that survival and a sense of security affect relationships on a micro-level.
Whether on a national and international, community, or personal scale, fear and insecurity play a large role in shaping interactions. Through active listening and empathy, we can learn to move beyond fear and connect through open communication and vulnerability.
As the Lebanese poet Khalil Gibran wrote:
“Between what is said and not meant, and what is meant, and not said, most of love is lost.”
💧 Watering the Mind
In this section we share updates from the noe team and concrete offers that allow you to build emotional intelligence and resilience skills.
Mindfulness Daily - A 40-day introduction for free!
Practicing emotional intelligence requires that we are aware of our own thoughts and feelings. How can I respond to another person’s feelings, if I am not even sure what I am going through? Mindfulness allows us to become aware of the states we experience - the thoughts in our heads and the feelings in our body.
Psychologist Tara Brach and meditation teacher Jack Kornfield have compiled a 40-day introductory course to mindfulness that you can access for free. Each session takes around 10 minutes and offers valuable insights into the practice as well as a guided meditation, allowing you to establish the daily habit of practicing.
🪴 Vines of Community
In this space we foster connection and inspiration by sharing stories, poems, and thoughts of community members.
This month, Rimma chose the following quote from bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (1999):
While communism has suffered political defeat globally, the politics of communalism continue to matter. We can all resist the temptation of greed. We can work to change public policy, electing leaders who are honest and progressive. We can turn off the television set. We can show respect for love. To save our planet we can stop thoughtless waste. We can recycle and support ecologically advanced survival strategies. We can celebrate and honor communalism and interdependency by sharing resources. All these gestures show a respect and a gratitude for life. When we value the delaying of gratification and take responsibility for our actions, we simplify our emotional universe. Living simply makes loving simple. The choice to live simply necessarily enhances our capacity to love. It is the way we learn to practice compassion, daily affirming our connection to a world community.