The Art Of Deep Listening

Human nature has remained virtually unchanged for the past hundred thousand years. How humbling to consider that what is cognitively true of our ancestors — who had knowledge of astronomy as the correct frame of reference for planetary motion and we had to learn it all over again.

Our nature manifests just the same — especially in our interpersonal relationships, where so much of the correct frame of reference that is the other person’s inner reality is not visible to us. It helps to remember that between our feelings and anything in the external world that causes our emotions. Any difficulty, painful event, any hurtful action of another, there lie myriad possible causal explanations.

When we are hurt in a relationship, when we are spinning in the blooming buzzing confusion of trying to understand, the explanation we select as correct has more to do with our own fears and vulnerabilities than it does with the reality of the situation. The true explanation generally has more to do with the fears and vulnerabilities roiling in the other person, unseen to u

And so, sense -making and story-telling creatures that we are, we move through the real world in a self-generated dream, responding not to what is real but to the narratives we create about what is true.Narratives at best incomplete but worse injuriously incorrect. Ideas about what we do and don’t deserve, stories which cost connection, trust, love. This is why without the generousity of true interpretation and without candor — the vulnerability of it, the courage of it, the kindness of it — all relationships become resentments based mostly on misapprehended motives, and so they fail.

The Buddhist teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh offers a three-step remedy for this elemental human tendency in a portion of his slender, potent book Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm (public library), which also gave us his warm wisdom on the four steps to turning fear into love.

Thich Nhat Hanh:

Much of our suffering comes from wrong perceptions. To remove that hurt, we have to remove our wrong perception.

Whenever we see another person take an action, he notes, we must remain aware that there could be a number of invisible motive forces behind it and we must be willing to listen in order to better understand them — in the hope that others would be just as willing not to misunderstand our own motives by their perception and interpretation of our actions, and because correcting our wrong perceptions is a basic and vital form of caring for ourselves.

When you make the effort to listen and hear the other side of the story, your understanding increases and your hurt diminishes.

Half a century after the great humanistic philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm detailed the six rules of listening and unselfish understanding, Hanh offers a three-step process for correcting wrong perception.

The first thing we can do in these situations is to acknowledge that the pictures we have in our head, what we think happened, may not be true. Our practice is to breathe and walk until we are more calm and relaxed.

The second thing we can do, when we are ready, is to tell the people who we think have hurt us that we are suffering and that we know our suffering may have come from our own wrong perception. We can come to them for help and ask them to explain why they have said or done those things.

There is a third thing we need to do is listen very carefully to the other person’s response to truly understand and try to correct our perception. With this, we may find that we have been tied up with our wrong perceptions. Most likely the other person has also been prey to wrong perceptions.

Drawing on two powerful Buddhist practices that effect this release — deep listening and loving speech — Hanh writes:

If we are sincere in wanting to learn the truth, and if we know how to use gentle speech and deep listening, we are much more likely to be able to hear others’ honest perceptions and feelings. In that process, we may discover that they too have wrong perceptions. After listening to them fully, we have an opportunity to help them correct their wrong perceptions. If we approach our hurts that way, we have the chance to turn our fear and anger into opportunities for deeper, more honest relationships.

This, he observes, applies to romantic relationships, to politics, to family and workplace dynamics . With an eye to the ultimate aim of this process, he adds:

The intention of deep listening and loving speech is to restore communication, because once communication is restored, everything is possible, including peace and reconciliation.

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Any real peace process has to begin with ourselves… We have to practice peace to help the other side make peace.

With thanks to Maria Popover