Compassionate Listening
by Cfitter · 22 things on Twos
- Trick #1: follow our breathing while listening
- Trick #2: take care of how the other person’s suffering affects us
- If your breathing gets super short and suppressed as you listen to someone, 1st thing you gotta do is take care of your own breathing
- Before thinking about how to help the other person, before anything about the other person, take care of your own breathing first
- Trick #3: not interrupt
- When someone says something wrong, mean, hurtful, or prejudice, or something that triggers us, don’t interrupt
- Instead, protect yourself with the energy of compassion
- Remind yourself that you’re listening with one purpose: to let them open up and speak out
- Trick #4: keep your compassion alive the whole time of listening
- Do this by focusing on what’s BEHIND the words they’re saying
- Ask yourself "what's really going on here?" What's really behind these words?"
- Trick #5: create the conditions for good listening to occur
- Go outside, sit down for a coffee, or be honest with yourself that good listening cannot occur at this time
- There is no winning, no solving planetary problems without including everyone in the dialogue
- Imagine looking at the climate crisis indeed not as a crisis at all, but as a sacred moment in history when all of humanity can come together like it never has before
- We HAVE to come together, so let’s be optimistic about it.
- If we engage in deep listening, we realize that the thoughts, emotions, fears, worries that another person has are also in us. And if we can bond over the fact that we’re both scared and we both have worries, then that’s a fundamentally good connection.
- Embrace a “forward looking common responsibility that has to do with the future of the planet and the future of all human beings on the planet.”
- The truth of interbeing and impermanence is much more important than the views we stand for
- Words can create suffering or happiness - you choose
- When anger is present, be determined not to speak
- When you speak and listen, do it in a way that helps you and the other person out of a difficult situation