December 2014 Graduate Meeting

Video for this meeting:
The Art of Being Heard by Susan Piver [16 min]
The Sacred Art of Listening by Tara Brach [19 min]

    Right speech involves listening from the heart, that is, you give your full attention to the words of others and listen without judging, preparing a response, or comparing. Listening from the heart means that you listen with an attitude of compassion, kindness, and humility.
           - from Dancing with Life by Phillip Moffitt

    I do not know if you have ever examined how you listen, it doesn’t matter to what, whether to a bird, to the wind in the leaves, to the rushing waters, or how you listen in a dialogue with yourself, to your conversation in various relationships with your intimate friends, your wife or husband…
    If we try to listen we find it extraordinarily difficult, because we are always projecting our opinions and ideas, our prejudices, our background, our inclinations, our impulses; when they dominate we hardly listen at all to what is being said…
    In that state, there is no value at all. One listens and therefore learns, only in a state of attention, a state of silence, in which this whole background is in abeyance, is quiet. Then, it seems to me, it is possible to communicate.
    …real communication... can only take place where there is silence.
           - from J. Krishnamurti Online

    When … someone really hears you without passing judgment on you, without trying to take responsibility for you, without trying to mold you, it feels damn good… When I have been listened to and when I have been heard, I am able to reperceive my world in a new way and go on.  It is astonishing how elements that seem insoluble become soluble when someone listens, how confusions that seem irremediable turn into relatively clear flowing streams when one is heard.
           - from A Way of Being by Carl Rogers

           - from Non-Violent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg

    Good listening, by contrast, means giving open-minded, genuinely interested attention to others, allowing yourself the time and space to fully absorb what they say. It seeks not just the surface meaning but where the speaker is “coming from”—what purpose, interest, or need is motivating their speech. Good listening encourages others to feel heard and to speak more openly and honestly.
    Deep Listening involves listening, from a deep, receptive, and caring place in oneself, to deeper and often subtler levels of meaning and intention in the other person. It is listening that is generous, empathic, supportive, accurate, and trusting. Trust here does not imply agreement, but the trust that whatever others say, regardless of how well or poorly it is said, comes from something true in their experience.
           - from Deep Listening by David Rome

Closing Thoughts

           - Dag Hammarskjold

God, Speak to Me

"God, speak to me"
And the meadowlark sang
But the man did not hear.

So the man yelled
And the thunder rolled across the sky
But the man did not listen

The man looked around and said,
"God let me see you"
And a star shone brightly
But the man did not notice

And the man shouted,
And a life was born
but the man did not know.

So the man cried out in despair
Whereupon God reached down and touched the man.
But the man brushed the butterfly away and walked on.

- anonymous