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Pepperdine | Caruso School of Law

Practical Mindfulness: Clear and Calm in the Heat of Conflict

Faculty:  Rachel Wohl and Len Riskin

 

This course will provide new practical tools for remaining focused, calm and present, even in the heat of conflict. You will learn the basics of mindfulness meditation and "Taking STOCK," a practical technique that enables conflict resolution professionals and others to continually integrate mindfulness into their work and lives. 

We all aspire to provide high-quality service and to derive satisfaction in the process, but often face barriers to fulfilling such aspirations. Stress, our fast-paced lives, conflicting demands, anxiety, burn-out and other challenges distract us from bringing our whole selves to bear upon our work and our lives, even when we are trying to do so.

Mindfulness, a systematic method of paying attention, deliberately, in the moment, without judgment, can help us gain awareness of our mental and emotional processes, our habitual reactions, and their manifestations in our mind, body, and breath. Such self-awareness opens the door to developing ourselves in ways that will enable us to be more skillful and to get greater satisfaction from our work and our lives.

What you will learn:

  • The basics of mindfulness meditation, a systematic method of moment-to-moment non-judgmental awareness, which develops both calmness of mind and body and deep insight into the workings of our minds and hearts

  • To deepen self-awareness and be kinder to yourself and others 

  • To recognize and manage reactions to conflict based on Internal Family Systems theory

  • The Taking STOCK technique, which you will practice to integrate and maintain mindfulness in various negotiation and dispute resolution roles

Rachel Wohl, JD, is a mediator and attorney who teaches conflict resolution and mindfulness meditation classes, nationally and internationally.  She is the president of Conflict Specialists International, LLC.  Wohl was previously the director of the Maryland Mediation and Conflict Resolution Office and is adjunct faculty at the University of Maryland Law School. She received the Association for Conflict Resolution's Mary Parker Follett Award for Innovation. She co-chaired the ABA Dispute Resolution Section's Task Force on Improving Mediation Quality and was a founding board member of Mediators Beyond Borders (MBB).  She is currently working on MBB capacity-building projects in the Czech Republic and Cambodia. Wohl has been meditating for over 20 years and recently coauthored "Mindfulness in the Heat of Conflict: Taking Stock," published in the Harvard Negotiation Law Review, vol. 20.

Leonard L. Riskin is Harris H. Agnew Visiting Professor of Dispute Resolution at Northwestern University School of Law and Chesterfield Smith Professor of Law at the University of Florida Levin College of Law and previously, he was C.A. Leedy and Isidor Loeb Professor of Law at the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Law, where he also served as Director of the Center for the Study of Dispute Resolution.  He studied at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (B.S., 1964), New York University (J.D., 1967) and Yale (LL.M., 1974). He served as a trial attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice Land and Natural Resources Division, and as general counsel of the National Alliance of Businessmen, both in Washington, D.C. He has been a visiting professor at a number of law schools including the University of Michigan.