The Power of Listening
Listening deeply to another is a form of meditation. We follow our breathing and practice concentration and we learn things about the other person that we never knew before. When we practice deep listening, we can help the person we’re listening to remove the perceptions that are making them suffer. We can restore harmony in our partnerships, our friendships, our family, our community, our nation, and between nations. It is that powerful.
We Need to Train
We must listen to the other person so that they have a chance to express themselves. We try our best to listen, but after a few minutes we can no longer continue; their speech touches the pain, violence, and anger in us. At first, we vow that we will give the other person a chance, even if what they say is unjust or difficult to listen to. But because of the violence, fear, pain, and anger in ourselves, we cannot listen for more than five minutes; we want to react, shout back, or run away. We have lost our capacity to listen with compassion, and we need to train so that we can listen again.
Listening to Ourselves
Before we can listen to another person well, we need to spend time listening to ourselves. Sometimes when we attempt to listen to someone else, we can’t hear what they are saying at all because our own strong emotions and thoughts are too loud in us, crying out for our attention. We should be able to sit with ourselves, come home to ourselves, and listen to what emotions are rising up, without judging or interrupting them. We can listen to whatever thoughts come up as well, and then let them pass without holding on to them. When we’ve spent some time listening to ourselves, we can listen to those around us.
Understanding Our Suffering
When we listen deeply to ourselves, we can understand ourselves, accept ourselves, love ourselves, and start to touch peace. Perhapswe have not yet accepted ourselves because we don’t understand who we are; we don’t know how to listen to our own suffering. So, we must first of all practice listening to our own suffering. We must be with it, feel it, and embrace it in order to understand it and allow it to gradually transform. Perhaps our own suffering carries within it the suffering of our father, our mother, the whole line of our ancestors, or a whole country. Listening to ourselves, we can understand our suffering—the suffering of our ancestors, our father, and our mother—and we feel a sense of release.
Copyright © 2024 by Thich Nhat Hanh. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
