“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and right-doing there is a field. I'll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass the world is too full to talk about.” These lines by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, a Persian poet and Sufi master from the 13th Century capture the essence of mediation and the role of the mediator.
However, if some of your experiences with mediation parallel some of ours, you will have parties in a mediation who claim their position is based on “principle”. They will express that position with expressions such as “It’s the principle of the thing” or that the other participant’s position “Is just not right”. Such issues in mediation tap into values disputes and encouraging parties to acknowledge deeply held attitudes or values is one of the most challenging features of mediation. If you can get them to acknowledge their own deeply held values and then have them acknowledge that the other party in the dispute may also have deeply held values, you will have overcome a substantial hurdle in the mediation process. In transformative mediation, acknowledgement is certainly a large part of the first goal of transformative mediation which is recognition.
However, it is not enough to just gain acknowledgement of these deeply held values, it is essential to try to move beyond acknowledgement to reach that field described by Rumi where understanding may result. Hopefully, acknowledgement will lead the parties to recognize that the position held by the other participant in the dispute is just as valid to that party as your own position is to you. If you can show each participant that the other has just as valid of a claim of “rightness” of their positions, you can move the focus to what this issue will look like in the future. You may need to have the parties project what this dispute (without an agreement) will look like in six months, a year or even five years. If you can move the participants beyond the rightness or wrongness of their current positions to a point in the future which allows them to work together, the door to reconciliation and understanding is open. In the field of understanding, beyond our individual positions, we can meet and come together.