Law That Heals

Law that Heals

by Barbara Stahura

William van Zyverden was such a big fan of the “Perry Mason” television show when he was a kid that it inspired him to become a lawyer. Yet when he finally did graduate from law school, he knew he could not practice in the traditional way that encourages enmity and disempowerment. He saw how participants in that kind of system do not truly win if they lose their honor and dignity in the process. Furthermore, he knew that traditional law, based as it is on the notion of separateness, actively discourages healing.

So he practices holistic law, which meshes with his personal belief in individual responsibility within the Unity of all things. Holistic law encourages unity through compassion and forgiveness, not the separation that comes with punishment and blame. Understanding that nothing happens out of context, he helps his clients examine the process that brought them into contact with the legal system. He also encourages them to see the other side of the story -- a process that often opens their hearts to the suffering of the other people involved, and thus to forgiveness and a sense of peace.

He is the founder of International Alliance of Holistic lawyers, headquartered in his Holistic Justice Center in Middlebury, Vermont. The alliance currently has about 700 members around the world.

Science of Mind: What is holistic law?

William van Zyverden: It means a lot of things to a lot of different people, and that’s the beauty of it. The easiest way is to have people embrace the concept of holistic medicine. You don’t have cancer, you’ve developed cancer. It didn’t come out of context. Your lifestyle or your whole being has somehow embraced this cancer.

The same is true of internal conflict. No one does anything that upsets you. Something happens, and you’re upset about it. It’s internally generated. So as a holistic lawyer, I ask, “Why you? What is this doing for you?” From a spiritual point of view, I would say, “What is the opportunity for you here? Why has this come into your life? What are you here to learn?”

Everything happens in context. Nothing happens that didn’t come from a past that compelled someone to be where they are in the present and is also launching them into places in the future that are fixed and known. Not that we’re predestined, but your past really conspires to place you where you are. You’ve had a certain education and you tend to think along the lines that you were trained by, not along the lines that you know nothing about. So you’re more likely to be where you are than someplace else.

Other people would say holistic law is holy, spiritual, not just a horizontal continuum but a vertical continuum, and that’s fine.

What do you mean by a vertical continuum?

Horizontal is the one I just described. A timeline. But the vertical is that we are body, mind, spirit, and emotions. We are all those things. Looking at just the facts of the person is not enough. We really need to understand the emotions, the spirituality, and the intellect, versus how that interplays with the body. We are one life, and it’s now time to say no, there is no separation.

Isn’t the whole concept of holistic law too idealistic for most people?

No. The litigiousness or the non-idealistic part of our world is just a part of our world. Everyone has feelings and worries and stress, and that emotional part is so wonderful. It gets jealous and envious and thinks the only way out is to blame or punish someone, or sue somebody. But it’s a very small part of each individual. You can talk to people who are suing others, and ask them about their family, and they go, “Yeah, family’s great.” Ninety-nine percent of their life is non-suing.

When people are angry, they feel like being defensive is the only way out. But in their calmer, more relaxed times, they can see the options and the real plus in being compassionate and working things out. Someone who sues sees only one side or one way out. I think lawyers could help by challenging their clients and saying there is another valid side to this argument. I do it all the time. When someone comes to me and says, “I want to sue X,” I ask why. They explain it, and I say, “Tell me the other side. If you were the other person, what would you be feeling? What’s going on in your life? What are the possible reasons why you think you’re right?” I actually have them sit in a different chair because it gets them out of their place. It’s amazing to see how easily they can see there really are two sides.

Traditional law operates through adversarial disempowerment. Would you explain that?

The traditional adversarial system separates you from all other people, and so it really disempowers you. Once you feel like you’re right and everyone else is wrong, you have an us-them attitude, a survivalist attitude. It allows you to say someone is bad. It really plays into your ignorance. It takes you to those places where you’re mean and angry and jealous. You don’t want to be on the other side of someone carrying those attributes around. It’s very disempowering.

Can holistic law and traditional law coexist?

One of the nice things about holistic law is that it includes traditional law. It is the whole, and it contains the traditional approach as one option among many.

Holistic law looks at the shared interests of the parties and so is based on the metaphysical concept of wholeness and oneness. Can people who don’t have a metaphysical or spiritual outlook accept the holistic approach to law?

Of course. Again, we’ll go back to the whole. Traditional law depends on the illusion of separate interests. The anecdote I like to use is that two kids on the playground are fighting over an orange. The teacher says, “I’ll solve this” and cuts the orange in half and gives each kid a half. They’re still crying. She says, “Now what?” And the one kid says, “I wanted the seeds,” and the other one says, “I wanted the juice.”

That’s what holistic law points out. We think our interests are the same and that we are fighting over one thing. But when you start looking at underlying interests, you find that really what we’re fighting for is mutually exclusive and we can both get what we really want. We just don’t have a system that searches that deeply.

You ask your clients up front if they can take losing in the eyes of the world if it means they retain their dignity. Why is such a question necessary?

Because in the holistic view, losing in the short run may mean winning in the long run. But if you’re short-sighted, you don’t see that. If the client can allow a loss being better for them in the long run, even if they can’t understand it now or see it, they need to be able to answer that question to be able to release attachment to the outcome.

Now we get into a more metaphysical, spiritual point of view, saying that everything in the flow happens for the best. And the flow may mean you have to lose now in order to learn a much bigger lesson. And I’ve been through that a lot, both for myself and with clients.

One example is, you might need to feel like what it’s like to be in someone else’s shoes or to be humiliated in order to really understand what it’s like so you don’t do it again or don’t wind up on the other side.

I was sued once, and I was so angry that this client felt I had done something wrong. I had to have a lawyer and the other side had a lawyer, and it got really messy. I got physically sick through the process.

I ended up losing on a legal technicality that we just couldn’t overcome with the judge, and I finished that saying, gosh, I now know what it’s like being a client going through that. And I never knew before.

When I hear clients talk about losing sleep or how horrible it is, my old self would have said, “Don’t worry about it. It will work out in the long run, or losing is winning.” I had these great words of wisdom, which found no seat in the person’s soul because I wasn’t coming from experience. But now I share my experience about how terrible this felt, that I got physically sick, and clients nod their head, and the bond between us is much deeper than if I’d never gone through that myself.

Can holistic law work in criminal as well as civil cases?

Go back to the first question and my answer that everything happens in context. In every criminal case that I handle, I sit with my clients for two to three hours just talking about their life history. It’s amazing what learning and awakening they go through understanding how they got there. That this just didn’t happen, that this is a pattern throughout their lives. They’ve been able to see for the first time that their actions had a negative affect on other people. Instead of striking inward, which they’ve been doing and really beating themselves up from the inside, they strike out, which harms other people. But their focus is so selfish, they don’t recognize their impact on anybody else.

I’ve had conversations with thieves and aggravated assaults and people who have threatened violence and stalkers, and they don’t see their victims as human beings. And people who steal don’t see it as stealing from another person. The victims, on the other hand, take it personally. They have the symbiotic story on the other side.

One of the great things happening in criminal law now is that we are looking at the reparative -- the repairing -- rather than punishing. If the victim and offender meet and talk, they can learn that this wasn't done to anyone personally. They both heal as a result. The offender learns other ways to express the explosion that happens. It changes their lives forever, too. They understand that nothing happens in any one person’s life that doesn’t affect the whole of society. If that’s too metaphysical or spiritual, look at it as a community or family. There isn’t anything that you can say, do, or even think that doesn’t affect everyone around you.

Doesn’t holistic law take the position that blame shouldn’t be an issue?

We speak less of blame because blames implies right and wrong. Responsibility implies there are consequences to be accepted and played out. For every action there’s a reaction, but not necessarily one that people can blame you for. You did something that has consequences, and that can be your way of learning.

The International Alliance of Holistic Lawyers has a logo of Thema, which is the goddess of justice, and she’s holding up one scale and not two because justice is really about the individual and not about fairness or equanimity among many. It’s really the individual’s journey of taking responsibility and accepting the consequences, playing them through, learning the lessons, and moving on.

If we have been in a dispute and I don’t blame you, does that mean I forgive you?

They are so close. In order to not blame someone, you have to forgive yourself, and you can’t forgive anybody else until you’ve forgiven yourself. When you release judgment, you also see the greater picture. Your whole mindset changes. What you do and how you do it changes.

So, once you’ve stopped blaming someone else for your problems, you understand that you created your own problems. And you wind up embracing other people.

If you believe in blame, you believe there is both a victim and an offender. If you believe in forgiveness, you see that both of you are victims and offenders. And there were actions and reactions and consequences that both of you will play out, or not. It’s all up to you.

You have said that the bottom line on holistic law is that it allows people to be part of the solution instead of exacerbating the problem. How does that work?

Holistic law challenges the client to reveal who they are, if only to the lawyer. Law is the natural relationship between one event and the next. It’s why things happen. Things happen lawfully, not outside the natural occurrence. Like gravity. You let go of something and it drops to the ground. This is lawful activity. Once people realize that things are happening in sequence and that nothing is happening out of context.... A client says, “My life turned upside down today because of....” I say, “You think it only started last night? Take me back 20 years and let’s find the seed. Or five years ago or last week.”

You believe that holistic law wins all the time in the spiritual sense. Please explain that.

In a spiritual sense, there is no winning and losing. The soul learns regardless. It doesn’t care. It puts you in a situation and says, “What’s all this about?” Metaphysically or spiritually, you’re here for a purpose, to learn things, and you learn them and then you go on.

When you see something you want to do, or want to have, or want to experience, that becomes the next step in your life. Great! In order to take a step to the right, you have to refrain from stepping to the left. And you can never step that step again. In order to do something, you have to give something else up.

Our purpose here is always to discover who we are this time and find out what we’re doing. And when we fulfill that, we fulfill society. I don’t think our purpose is to be destructive. I think we go there because we are self-destructive, we are not doing what we’re called to do. I don’t think any of us is called here to be a murderer or to harm anybody else in any way. I think we do it out of our free will because we’re not willing to listen.

Holistic law is scary for some people because the real message here is taking responsibility for yourself and looking in rather than looking out. It’s very simple, but it’s very scary.

First published in Science of Mind, Sept. 2000. Reprinted with permission of the author. Barbara Stahura; stahura@earthlink.net