By Susan L. Brooks 

Toward the end of November 2025, I had the great honor and pleasure of facilitating the opening session of the ADR Research Forum. The theme I chose was Transforming Conflict from the Inside Out: Exploring the Inner Work that Supports Our Outer Work. I introduced several approaches emphasizing the need for researchers and practitioners in the field of alternative dispute resolution, which I prefer to think of as conflict transformation (shoutout to John Paul Lederach), to engage in ongoing, deep, and critical self-reflection to ensure their efforts are effective and contribute to positive social change. 

As a follow up, I want to offer here what I have called the “Four Rs”: Relational Consciousness, Radical Acceptance, Realignment, and Repair. In other writings, I have discussed these ideas and practices as ways of embodying what it means to repair the world, or Tikkun Olam as it is known in the Jewish tradition. Repairing the world requires us to engage in daily and lifelong practices that can contribute to our own healing and heal our relationships, and have broader ripple effects that ultimately can heal the larger systems and even whole societies we inhabit. 

The first R stands for Relational Consciousness, our interconnectedness and interdependence with all beings. Much of my scholarship and teaching has focused on promoting what I call relational and wholehearted lawyering, an interdisciplinary framework consisting of habits of mind and tools we can cultivate to help us engage in meaningful conversations across differences in order to generate new and creative possibilities. We can bring relational lawyering into the work of conflict transformation by pursuing our roles as researchers and practitioners in ways that affirm all participants’ mutuality and connection rather than contributing to greater separation and disconnection. Using the term relational consciousness reminds us that being relational in our professional lives can only happen if we bring those practices into every interaction and every aspect of our daily lives. 

The second R stands for Radical Acceptance, a term I learned from the work of Tara Brach. The two components of radical acceptance are awareness, the ability to see clearly what is happening within us, and compassion, which Brach describes as embracing fully whatever is present, including our pain and our desires. Radical acceptance includes the ideas of approaching ourselves and others with unconditional friendliness and accepting that everyone carries within them elements of brokenness along with the things that make them shine. This combination is what truly makes us whole and is an intrinsic part of our shared humanity. By practicing self- compassion, we strengthen our ability to see the light in others and the living world around us. 

The third R stands for Realignment, which we can also think of as return. The premise is that we all have a great amount of innate wisdom, including all the knowledge we have accumulated from our lived experiences. Many challenging aspects of our society and culture create separation within and among us that often leads us to distrust ourselves and the wisdom we carry. When we forget our interconnectedness, our path, and our inner voice, we become distrustful toward others, which leads to further disconnection, pain, and even cruelty. The good news is that we can always “re-turn” or turn again toward to our core values and aspirations of how we want to behave toward others and how we want to be in the world. Importantly, the practice of return is always available to us regardless of how far we have strayed from the values connected to relational consciousness. The more we can accept this process of forgetting as part and parcel of what it means to be human, we are engaging in the practice of radical acceptance, which in turn helps us come back into realignment. 

The fourth and final R emphasizes the importance of the work of Repair. Taking action toward repairing historical and ongoing harms is an essential part of conflict transformation at the personal, interpersonal, and systemic levels. In other words, we need to take concrete steps toward repair to heal ourselves, our relationships, and our world. The idea of repair brings to mind the work of Isabel Wilkerson, author of the book CASTE. Wilkerson compare the current conditions of systemic racism in the U.S. to purchasing an old home. When we buy an old home, of course we are not responsible for having created all the challenging issues that come along with that purchase. And yet, it is still fully our responsibility to address every one of those concerns. If we fail to address what is broken, we are the ones who suffer as much if not more than anyone else. 

Speaking more broadly, all of us who are alive today throughout the world are not responsible for originally bringing about our current injustices connected to the history of oppression and marginalization of certain individuals and groups. And yet we must embrace and act on our responsibility to take concrete steps to address oppression and marginalization wherever we can. This notion of repair reminds us that we need to pursue conflict transformation as a habit of mind and practice in our everyday lives. Even if we do not experience ourselves as being immediately impacted by injustice, unless we take an active role in the work of repair, the foundation of our house, and, indeed, our entire global society, will be in danger of collapse. 

I want to close with these lines taken from the poem and song called Anthem by Leonard Cohen. They speak to how by doing our inner work and embracing the wholeness of who we are along with acting in alignment with our values toward everyone we encounter in our work and lives, we make a meaningful contribution toward repairing the world.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in. 

Author Biography

Susan L. Brooks has over three decades of experience as a creative educator, scholar, facilitator, and presenter in the areas of experiential and community-based learning, professional development, and cross-cultural communication. She recently retired and has been appointed Professor of Law Emerita. Professor Brooks received a Fulbright Global Research award to study culturally sustaining forms of conflict transformation, including restorative justice, mediation, and facilitated dialogue. She holds a J.D. as well as a M.A. and B.A. in clinical social work, and is a licensed attorney, mediator, trained restorative justice facilitator, and a certified yoga and mindfulness teacher.