elcome back to Integral Justice Warrior, a monthly series with Diane Musho Hamilton and me, Corey deVos, where every month we will take a close look at some of the most challenging cultural issues and fault lines of our time — as well as the communication skills we need in order to heal these shared wounds and begin to close the gaps between us.

Diane and I are joined in this episode by Gabe Wilson and Kim Loh, co-authors of Diane’s new book Compassionate Conversations, in this far-ranging discussion about growth, empathy, dignity, and integrity. Join us as we unpack one of the primary polarities at the core of Diane’s book — the polarity between sameness and difference — and how we can draw upon both our uniqueness and our commonalities in our pursuit for social justice and our efforts to reduce suffering within us, between us, and outside of us.

One of the wonderful things about Diane’s book is that it doesn’t just offer a better way of thinking about controversial subjects like privilege, fragility, power, oppression, political correctness, and the many other battle lines of our culture war — it also offers profound transformational practices around things like shadow work, disarming defensive states, managing and resolving conflicts, communicating more skillfully and authentically, and working with powerful emotions that stem from trauma, anger, and grief. In other words, it helps people to do the inner work required to engage these issues with more empathy, more resilience, and less reactivity.

We also discuss how Diane’s book is acting as a sort of “Trojan horse” that not only helps introduce integral thinking and the integral sensibility to postmodern audiences, but can also help integral individuals to more fully own and overcome whatever anti-green allergies they may still be holding on to.

Finally, we enjoy a fascinating discussion about healthy and unhealthy versions of political correctness, and how this has simultaneously helped transform our culture for the better while also allowing certain cultural frustrations and resentments to pressurize beneath the surface of sanitized language for too long, until the lid was finally and explosively blown off in recent years — a repressed and unintegrated resentment that both set the conditions for, and was catalyzed by, the rise of Donald Trump.

We hope you enjoy this very special episode of Integral Justice Warrior, and that you will join us for our next live discussion. You can find the show schedule, and instructions on how you can participate in the live shows, over on Integral Live.