There was a season in my career where my job, in part, was to tell people they no longer had one.
The organization was in crisis. Leadership had identified roles to eliminate. My job was to carry those decisions to the people whose lives they would change. Parents. Breadwinners. Community leaders. Women I knew and respected. Some of them were my friends.
I was professional. I tried to be generous in those conversations. But I was also, underneath all of it, impatient, ashamed, and afraid. And the way I coped with that fear was to build a quiet internal case for why this was all necessary and deserved. I rationalized. I justified. It helped me get through the meetings. It also helped me avoid looking too closely at what I was actually doing to people.
That avoidance didn't make the suffering go away. It just meant I never fully accounted for it.
This is what privilege in action looks like from the inside. It's not always arrogance. Sometimes it's just the relief of not having to stay with what you've caused. I had the power to leave those conversations. The people I laid off did not have that luxury.
What asking for forgiveness actually requires
When I imagine going back to those individuals and asking for forgiveness, my first instinct is still self-protective. I want to explain myself. I want to be understood. I want to be seen as someone who was also suffering.
What I've learned through practice is that this impulse, while human, is not where forgiveness begins. It begins earlier, with your own pain.
When I hold that period with compassion first, when I let myself feel how hard it actually was without immediately defending my choices, something shifts. My heart gets roomier. It can hold more than my own experience. It can start to genuinely ask: what was this like for them?
Not rhetorically. Not as a step in an apology script. But as a real question I'm willing to sit with and feel into.
That's the sequence. Compassion for yourself first, not as permission to stop there, but as the prerequisite for genuinely accounting for what you caused. Then you can ask. Then you can listen. Then you can bow, not performatively, but in honest recognition of another person's full experience.
Holding conflict in a community
Good leaders know their people. That's the starting point for almost everything else.
Tara Brach talks about the power of proximity in her work on forgiveness. When you actually know someone, when you understand something of their life and what they're carrying, it becomes much harder to flatten them into a villain. This is why building real relationships within a community isn't just warmth. It's a structural resource for navigating conflict.
If I were holding a situation between two members of a sangha where one person had caused harm to another, I wouldn't start by mediating between them. I'd start by supporting each person in being with their own experience first. Real self-compassion, practiced with some consistency, creates the internal space people need before they can genuinely consider someone else's reality.
This usually means metta practice. Not as a shortcut to resolution, but as a slow, honest reopening to the recognition that everyone in this situation is carrying something. Everyone wants to be free from suffering. That's the shared ground. You build from there.