Category: Mediation

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Holistic Mediation Law Practice Mediation

Three Basic Types of Mediation

Most people seeking mediation services for the first time are doing so in search of less contentious, more cost-effective solutions to conflict.  The threshold factors in assessing whether a particular situation is ripe for mediation are the readiness, willingness, and ability of all parties directly involved in the conflict to open and listen to divergent points of view, and actively participate in arriving at a negotiated resolution to conflict.

Types of Mediation

The active participation of parties in crafting an optimal solution to conflict is the primary distinguishing characteristic of mediation versus formal litigation in the courts.  In court, the parties direct all communications to a judge and/or jury who then unilaterally decide how a case will be resolved.  In mediation, the parties assume a far more active role in crafting the solution to conflict.

Though all types of mediation share this fundamental distinction from adversarial litigation in the courts, three specific types of mediation have emerged: (1) Facilitative Mediation; (2) Evaluative Mediation; and (3) Transformative Mediation.  Each of these mediation types differ along primary dimensions including the needs of the parties, the role of the mediator, and the overriding goal of mediation.

Facilitative Mediation

At a basic level, interpersonal conflict arises when two or more people have different interpretations of a factual scenario that has arisen in the past.  Some conflicts (e.g., an accident) have involved perhaps a single event, while others (e.g., a marital relationship) have unfolded over perhaps a course of several years.  These past situations become problematic to one or more parties when they are interpreted in a way that violates thought-driven notions of how the other party or parties “should have” conducted themselves during the past event or series of events.

In many cases, these ideas of what “should have” happened in the past violate deeply held notions that have become an integral part of one’s perceived “self.”  To the extent this is the case, a party will manifest a strong interest in protecting that sense of self and will react defensively, and often aggressively, when other parties involved in the conflict attempt to justify, or merely explain, their past actions.

These dynamics involving self-protection manifesting in defensive reactions may demand a neutral intermediary who can effectively diffuse this tension to a point at which direct, constructive exchange between the parties becomes possible.  In this case, the mediator assumes a facilitative role in fostering constructive communication between the parties.  This role is at the heart of facilitative mediation.

Evaluative Mediation

In a second category of mediation, the challenges standing in the way of a negotiated resolution have less to do with interpersonal dynamics between the parties, and are more related to a lack of clarity in likely future outcomes of the relative positions held by each party.  In evaluative mediation, the role of the mediator draws on his or her professional expertise in being able to provide parties with a more clear understanding of the legal merits of their respective positions.

Evaluative mediation is more commonly invoked in situations involving complex factual scenarios.  In such cases, the parties lack a clear mutual understanding of what arguments are likely to be successful or unsuccessful under currently prevailing case and statutory law and/or legal doctrine.  With clarity provided by the evaluative mediator, the parties hope to reach a level of clarity that will position them to negotiate a resolution to their dispute that avoids more costly and contentious adversarial litigation.

Transformative Mediation

Transformative Mediation is available to parties who are interested in seizing the transformative potential inherent in conflict, and using that potential as a springboard for person and/or spiritual growth.  Parties explore these higher ideals in transformative mediation in addition to resolving the practical and legal aspects of their underlying dispute.

As was alluded to earlier, factual scenarios tend to rise to the level of “conflict” when they are interpreted in a way that violates one’s conditioned notions of “right or wrong,” or “good or bad” and other dualistic notions that may contribute to one’s core sense of self, commonly referred to as “ego.”  The transformative potential inherent in conflict begins with an understanding that these dualistic notions are the result of learned conditioning that in most cases long precedes that salient factual scenario giving rise to the current conflict between the parties.

In this way, conflict manifests a unique opportunity for parties to challenge and transcend many core beliefs that one may come to view as having significantly limited his or her past experiences, as well as adversely tainted past interpersonal relationships.

The transformative mediator will work to create a mediation environment in which all parties can feel safe and comfortable enough to feel, articulate, and explore the antecedents of, and reactions to conflict on a deeper level.  In so doing, parties will often come to realize that the way and/or degree to which they have reacted to other parties is actually the result of habitual reactions acquired in response to situations that occurred much earlier in life with little or no temporal relationship to the current conflict.

A skilled transformative mediator works with parties to heighten their understanding and awareness of learned conditioning and habitual reactions.  In so doing, parties walk away with the heightened realization that their current decisions and future actions need not be dictated by long-held learned conditioning.  In these ways, parties leave mediation with significantly heightened self-understanding, as well as an experienced sense of freedom resulting from the loosened grip of formerly long-held, entranched beliefs.

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Holistic Philosophy Law Practice Mediation Mindfulness

Put Away The Adding Machine

Much of suffering can be tied to some deeply conditioned notion that we have some fundamental baseline of “happiness.” When some event, stimuli, or phenomenon is interpreted as “bad,” “unpleasant,” or “painful,” we almost instinctively engage strategies to obtain something we interpret as “good,” “pleasant,” or “pleasurable,” to return our condition to this baseline.

Such an orientation toward experience gives rise to endless efforts towards “evening the score” or attempts to stockpile “positive” experiences in an unconscious and misguided attempt to insulate ourselves from feared “negative” experiences.

Obviously it makes evolutionary sense that we would be wired to seek out pleasurable experiences and invoke motivation to avoid dangerous and unpleasant outcomes. This basic instinctual motivation becomes problematic, however, when we come to view almost all life stimuli through a pleasant/unpleasant, good/bad lens. We come to move through life with a mental adding machine. When an event is interpreted as “loss,” we may immediately seek to change our experience or outcomes to even the score and again return us to baseline happiness.

Mindfulness practice can help us more clearly identify this scorekeeping tendency, and heighten our ability to meaningfully connect to present-moment experience apart from our cerebral judgements about this experience. When events and stimuli are simply experienced without this layer of judgement, they are never problematic. They may feel unpleasant, but this feeling quickly dissipates. There is no problem, and our lives our not further complicated and made more unpleasant as the result of misguided efforts to even the score.

Legal conflict almost always involves deployment of the adding machine of one or more parties. Because of this, conflict may present an optimal opportunity to become more acutely aware of our tendency to keep score. Mindfulness practice in the midst of conflict can help parties let go of their adding machine and connect with their present-moment experience. In so doing, they become far more aware of their conditioned tendencies to approach life through an interpretive lens that may be leading to experiential difficulties.

Holistic law practice actively integrates mindfulness to help clients seize the transformational opportunities inherent in conflict. To learn more about holistic law practice, visit http://www.Holistic-Lawyer.com, or call Holistic Lawyer Michael Lubofsky at (415) 508-6263.

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Holistic Philosophy Law Practice Mediation Mindfulness

The Importance of Mindfulness Exercises in Holistic Law Practice

The mind seems to incessantly scan the environment for problems to solve.  This active intellectual engagement with our environment likely served to ensure our survival as a species over millions of years as immediate physical dangers routinely confronted us in more primitive times.

The mind seeks problems to solve largely within the parameters of cause and effect.  Problems arise, however, when the mind latches onto a situation over which the individual lacks causal influence.  When facing such situations, one can and usually will become quickly frustrated insofar as he or she is attempting to solve a problem that is largely insoluble in an intellectual, analytical mode.

At times such as this, including times of interpersonal conflict commonly present in legal disputes, a real need arises to move beyond analytical thought and towards a wisdom arising not out of intellectual analysis, but out of a felt connection with all of life in the present moment.

Mindfulness exercises, often including meditation practice, cultivate and strengthen one’s ability to access this wisdom beyond analytical thought.

This is why holistic law practice incorporates mindfulness exercises as a necessary component of successful conflict resolution.  Insofar as parties remain locked into an analytical, thought-driven orientation to conflict, they will work – consciously or unconsciously – to reframe the issues in a way that is “intellectually manageable” and solvable largely through the exercise of personal influence.

Often, this is like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole.  The frustration resulting from this type of activity over a prolonged time period, in no small part, explains why tension between parties in traditional adversarial litigation tends to escalate over time.

Clients with no prior experience with mindfulness practice or meditation often understand, in theory, the value of a more holistic approach to legal conflict, but wonder how to cultivate a more grounded and less thought-driven approach.  Mindfulness exercises incorporated in holistic law practice often begin with guided attention to the breath, body, or other somatic experience.  Within a few sessions, and with some daily practice, clients report the arising of a sense of connection to present-moment experience fundamentally different from their previously narrow thought-driven orientation toward experience.  It is this constrained orientation that has left them feeling frustrated and perhaps helpless.  With some sustained practiceS, clients begin to identify potential solutions to conflict that transcend their constrained self-interest.  At this point optimal, transformative solutions to conflict become possible.

To learn more about incorporating mindfulness in law practice, contact Holistic Lawyer and Mediator Michael Lubofsky by visiting http://www.Holistic-Lawyer.com or by calling (415) 508-6263.

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Holistic Mediation Mediation

Mediation: Often Not Just the Best Solution, the Only Solution

Defensive and aggressive reactions to conflict most often arise because of an inability to be heard and understood. At the heart of most conflict lies some core issue that, if recognized, acknowledged, and explored, would provide the seed for peaceful, optimal resolution, truly in the best interests of the parties and more broad societal context in which they live. Often, the failure to identify and explore these core issues will keep the parties locked into a dualistic, adversarial posture that will serve to escalate the conflict.

Whether a conflict involves one spouse not taking out the trash, a neighbor making too much noise, or a violent attack by a religious faction, one party to these activities feels on some level that they are not being heard – that core beliefs or concerns that they harbor are not being sufficiently acknowledged.

Our predominant adversarial model of “justice” overwhelmingly operates in a way that allows no exploration of underlying precipitants of conflict. Attorneys are specifically trained to elicit “facts” from clients that they will then apply to the law in crafting a litigation strategy. Unfortunately, a client’s recitation of “facts” in reality often constitutes a “story,” and excludes subconscious motivations of one’s behavior.

In order to begin exploring these less salient motivations of one’s behavior, an environment must be created that fosters an air of openness, respect, and trust so that individuals can become willing to explore and articulate underlying thoughts and emotions that may have led to, or exacerbated, the conflict. The structure of a courtroom, and the nature of civil procedure and rules of evidence, are antithetical to the creation of an open environment in which litigants might otherwise feel safe in exploring more sensitive thoughts and emotions.

By contrast, among the benefits of mediation are ground rules specifically laid to establish an environment of respect. Sharply honed listening skills and ability to empathize will help an experienced mediator quickly begin to create an environment conducive to the exploration of more vulnerable thoughts and feelings of the parties. Not bound by rules of procedure and evidence, the parties can begin to articulate what is truly important to them. Often what comes to the surface are thoughts and feelings of which the parties themselves were consciously unaware. The seeds are then sewn for the crafting of a solution that can truly address the core needs of all involved.

One might say that any solution falling short of this process is really no solution at all.

To learn more about the benefits of holistic mediation, contact Holistic Lawyer and Mediator Michael Lubofsky at (415) 508-6263, or visit http://www.Holistic-Lawyer.com.

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Holistic Mediation Mediation

Mediation Versus Litigation: Addressing a Larger Societal Problem

Within a wide swath of civil litigation can be found a common denominator: The tendency of people in contemporary American society to sidestep responsibility for their own happiness and well-being, instead looking toward external factors to blame for undesirable outcomes or consequences.

Almost by definition, our predominant adversarial model of civil litigation encourages, cultivates, and solidifies blame.  For example, in filing an initial complaint to initiate a lawsuit, a plaintiff is basically required by procedural rules to allege facts that establish on their face what a defendant or defendants did wrong.  The plaintiff is then required to set forth a request for relief stating how these alleged improper or wrongful acts caused harm or loss.  Nowhere at this initial pleading stage would a plaintiff acknowledge any affirmative role that may have contributed to the harm of which he or she is complaining.

It is only at a more advanced stage of pleading that an adverse party may file a “Request for Admissions,” which would prompt a party to acknowledge that his/her/its actions or inactions may have contributed to the problem at hand.

So it often seems in a more broad societal context.  We seem conditioned to focus on external factors to explain our problems (and much of our happiness).  Many would maintain, however, that such thought-driven notions that attribute happiness or lack thereof to external factors are largely delusional.  Such a misguided orientation may go far in explaining why litigation “victories” resulting from the adversarial process seldom produce an enduring sense that the conflict has been resolved in any sort of optimal fashion.

In contrast, holistic law and mediation works to help dissolve defensiveness and entrenched conditioning to the point at which participants become better able to see through their misguided preconceptions.  They are then better able to objectively assess their acts or omissions that may have contributed to the current conflict.  At the same time, the cultivation of an empathic environment by the holistic lawyer or mediator facilitates this process as participants feel more understood and less judged for “mistakes” or “misunderstandings” that my have contributed to the conflict.

To learn  more about how holistic law and mediation can facilitate optimal, sustainable conflict resolution, contact Holistic Lawyer and Mediator Michael Lubofsky at (415) 508-6263, or visit http://www.Holistic-Lawyer.com.

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Compassion Holistic Divorce Holistic Mediation Mediation Mindfulness

The Transformational Potential of Mediation

In conducting more than two dozen mediation sessions in Alameda County Superior Court, what is most glaringly apparent is the extent to which mediation participants enter mediation with all-defined, hardened positions.  Moreover, these individuals almost always are convinced that their interpretations of some event or events that have taken place in the past are the “correct” or “right” interpretation, and that the opposing party is simply “wrong.”

Through extensive mediation training and experience, a professional mediator becomes increasingly able to identify when a participant appears “locked into” a position, and then employ sensitive listening and empathic skills that may soon begin to loosen the grip of tightly-held, heavily egoic, positions.  It is the dissolving of these firmly held positions that begins to shift a mediation focus from positions to interests.

Freed from the grip of ego, one can begin to entertain an increasingly expansive notion of “interest” to transcend one’s “self interest” which may have predominated at the outset of the mediation.  “Interest” can then begin to more fully encompass a spouse, a family, a community, or even all of life.  In this way, mediation can serve a transformational function as a springboard for previously untapped solutions that transcend self-interest and serve to move the participants, as well as society at large, forward in more sustainable ways.

To learn more about how mediation might work for you, contact Meditator and Holistic Lawyer Michael Lubofsky by calling (415) 508-6263, or by visiting http://www.mindfulaw.com.

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Holistic Mediation Mediation

Mediation versus Litigation: The Answer Becomes Clear

Where holistic law practice has at its core wisdom borne from a grounded sense of being, it is only within the mediation forum that individuals are afforded the freedom and flexibility to access this wisdom and have this wisdom guide participants toward optimal dispute resolution.

In contrast, formal litigation imposes strict rules (e.g., rules of evidence) that ultimately ensure that disputes are settled based largely on objectively verifiable events.  By definition, admissible evidence excludes intuitive knowledge and other phenomenon arguably behind the realm of human thought, including compassion and empathy, as salient factors to be considered by the parties when attempting to fashion a remedy to a dispute.

While litigating parties may, individually, evoke and consult with unverifiable sources of knowledge such as intuition, compassion, etc., in determining his or her individual litigation strategy, the litigation process itself is designed to eliminate discussion and consideration of such factors when both parties are together before the tribunal.  The parties are thus denied the opportunity to reevaluate their respective positions in light of inner wisdom accessed and articulated by other parties with what litigation would deem “adversarial interests.”

From an evolutionary standpoint, it is understandable that interpersonal dispute resolution grew into a system that basically extracted emotion and unverifiable feelings from the equation.  It is not difficult to imagine that in a lesser evolved form, such emotion and visceral sense was likely to lead to chaos and physical violence.

It is also conceivable, however, that as a species we have evolved to a point at which we are beginning to recognize truth as lying beyond thought and objectively verifiable facts.  Holistic law practice, by helping clients disidentify from learned conditioning and habitual reactions, can facilitate heightened access to this inner wisdom.  A properly orchestrated mediation forum can ensure that the inner wisdom of all interested parties is elicited and properly considered in sculpting optimal dispute resolution.

To learn more about holistic law practice and its applicability in the mediation context, contact Attorney Michael Lubofsky at (415) 508-6263 or visit http://www.mindfulaw.com.