Take the Victory

I don’t know about you but I have found Giving The Victory an extremely difficult practice. If fact I have more or less completely failed at it. The thing is, while I can let the other person have the last word, inside, I still think they are wrong and furthermore feel I have now taken the moral high ground. And then when it comes to imagining giving the victory to a rightwing politician, like Nigel Farage, I can’t even fake it.

This has caused quite a lot of conversation between Philippa and I. Philippa has pointed out that there are many of us who habitually give the victory to others but are doing so, not from the perspective of a bodhisattva, but rather as a symptom of our core wound. Think here about avoiding conflict, placation, not wanting to cause a fuss or the difficulty of plainly stating our own needs. In these cases, giving the victory is just more of the same old thing and if we really want to bring our core wound into greater sight and challenge its compulsive quality, then rather than giving the victory, we might try taking it. So finding ourselves in some form of conflict, not just giving in but rather striving to win and when doing so tolerating the uncomfortable emotions this may engender. This sounds mad at first, and I remember the first time I realised that winning could be a problem. Two sports commentators during Wimbledon were discussing whether a new female tennis player, who had reached the finals, could bear the anxiety of winning. They thought not and they were right, it took a second go the next year to achieve this additional skill. Taking the victory was initially just too difficult for her. And here’s a thing: children who have had a strong, healthy attachment to their parents are OK with competition while those who have not are not.

Listening to others within our small Sangha several really interesting insights emerged. Philippa realised that one problem with giving the victory to someone she was in conflict with meant that she stepped back from her engagement with them, her attempt to mend or build bridges. This makes sense to me because it's well known that when we fall into discord with someone it requires some form of active reparation before accord is achieved again. Just stepping away without the reparation leaves the whole process in stall. Another person had the stellar insight that being in conflict was a means to differentiate themselves from others. It created the sense of a hard edged separation, a sense of an individual self. This is really profound because to do this reinforces the basic delusion that we are isolated individuals floating around in a Universe of other things - the very delusion that the whole of Buddhism seeks to dissolve. Noticing this fearful contraction, being present with its felt sense and releasing it, is to work directly with the obscurations to our buddha-nature.

My own investigations also revealed that what I sought within a relationship wasn’t what felt like a top down or bottom up relationship with another person but one that was on equal ground. No one on top or below. I think the good side of this links to Philippa’s point that for a relationship to remain a relationship it requires openness and communication and not just stepping back and being quiet. However, I do wonder if this doesn’t miss the point. Both giving the victory, or taking the victory, each in their own way require that we feel vulnerable and this for most of us is exactly the feeling we want to avoid. However, Pema Chödrön so values vulnerability that she sees it as a quality of the awakened mind - calling it the ‘soft spot’ that is our buddha-nature. This opens up a whole new idea. What exactly is happening when we give the victory? Is it that the other person can walk away feeling they are the victor or rather, is it we giving ourselves a chance to experience the soft spot that Pema is describing? I think probably the latter. Giving the victory and possibly also taking the victory opens us to places of defended vulnerability in ourselves and it is our bringing kindness and presence to these places that is the task of wannabe bodhisattvas. Doing this for ourselves may then enable others to do it for themselves also. And of course, from a deeper Buddhist perspective, this also begs the question, who exactly is feeling vulnerable because when we really look very closely we find that at the centre of all the swirling thoughts and emotions there is actually no separate and unchanging person there.

So is Giving the Victory a practice we are going to give up on because it is just too hard? No. Several people in our small Sangha discovered that when we give the victory - really give the victory, be vulnerable - it’s not defeat we experience but a tender love. There is something really special here. Could it be that what they discovered is that what is beneath all the conflict of this painful world is the loving kindness of our buddha-nature?

NW. Huge thanks to everyone who made this blog possible. 20 February 2026