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THE MINDFUL SOCIETY  Mindful Divorce
By Barry Boyce Mindful divorce may sound like a contradiction in terms, but that’s
what Judge Michele Lowrance tries to practice in her courtroom.
Lowrance, a former divorce lawyer who has been a domestic-relations
judge in Cook County, Illinois, since 1995, doesn’t teach meditation
from the bench, but she does apply her experience as a Buddhist
meditator in guiding the couples who play out their struggles in her
courtroom. After years of watching the techniques Lowrance used
bring about better outcomes, her deputy and clerk encouraged her to
write a book. Lowrance told me that The Good Karma Divorce teaches techniques
that enable people to move through divorce “without cauterizing their
wounds and putting difficult emotions into deep freeze. It helps them
give forgiveness a chance.” Although some forty percent of
marriages in the United States end in divorce, it is still treated as
an aberration. Hence, people are ill prepared for it and do it poorly,
often damaging lives for a very long time. After ten years, about a
third of the people “are still in full combat,” Lowrance says, “and the
effect on children is devastating.” The court system is not
designed for healing, Lowrance says, yet healing is one of the main
things divorce needs to be about. One of the central methods she
developed is having the parties write a list of their fears and their
aspirations. The very act of writing can be an act of mindfulness,
Lowrance discovered, and it can defuse emotionality. Once they’ve made
the list, the parties begin to work with the fears one by one, reaching
agreements to mitigate them for each party. “They are practicing saying
yes, to opening, to seeing the other’s viewpoint. When they’ve resolved
about 90 percent of the fears, and the most difficult ones are left, I
ask them whether they’re willing to throw out the 90 percent they’ve
come together on in order to emerge the complete winner on the
remaining issues. You’ve created a recipe for saving your family, your
children, for creating a template to lead a better life. You want to
throw that out?” Ultimately, Lowrance is working toward apology
and forgiveness. People want to avoid disharmony and struggle, Lowrance
says, but when it emerges in life, as it inevitably will, one needs to
go deeper. “Divorce is just another of life’s crises. It can be a
metaphor, in fact. When life brings us difficulty, we tend to want to
come up with our own neat package of simplistic truth—‘She ruined my
life,’ etc.—but the world is complex, chaotic, not black and white. In
order to end up with a neat package you have to buy into a storyline
that suits the way you want it to be. Your storyline may end up
strangling you. If you appreciate how karma works, you begin to look at
the bigger picture, and the pain you experience can help you reorient
how you approach the rest of your life.” Lowrance discovered
Buddhist practice on a trip to Bhutan at about the time she started on
the bench. She started attending retreats led by Thich Nhat Hanh, and
she’s inspired by the Dalai Lama, who says he never enters a meeting
with an adversary before seeing himself in their shoes. “Every day,
before I go onto the bench, I meditate on being in the situation of
those in my courtroom.” This practice is key to helping people move
from recrimination and suppressing emotions to forgiveness and healing.
Lowrance credits Buddhist practice with giving her the
perspective needed to do her work effectively. “Buddhism remodeled all
of my perceptions, all of my emotions. In my professional life, I swim
in a swamp of negativity. Buddhism taught me never to come from a
visceral emotional place without purifying thought, putting it through
a lens that sees everyone’s humanity. I’ve become a judge who’s not
judgmental.”
Originally published in the January 2010 issue of the Shambhala Sun.
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