How to Listen: 11 (Mindfulness Essentials) - Softcover

Nhat Hanh, Thich

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0984627111 ISBN 13: 9780984627110

Verlag: Parallax Press, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

Listening with compassion can solve our most pressing issues—across global politics and interpersonal relationships and within our own hearts and minds.

In How to Listen, Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh demonstrates how deep listening is a fundamental building block of good communication. But perhaps more fundamentally, listening is central to our practice, a basic ingredient to strengthen our capacity for mindfulness, concentration, insight, and compassion. Learning how to listen with equanimity to life itself, we generate insight into the true nature of our deep connection to all things. And from this place of understanding—when we know that we aren’t separate—our capacity to listen deepens even further. 

With clear and gentle guidance from Thich Nhat Hanh, we learn how truly listening—to ourselves, to each other, to Mother Earth, and to the many “bells of mindfulness” that are available to us in each moment—is the foundation of our practice, an expression of love, and a solution to our deepest and most urgent large-scale conflicts. 

All Mindfulness Essentials books are illustrated with playful sumi-ink drawings by California artist Jason DeAntonis.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Thich Nhat Hanh was a world-renowned spiritual teacher and peace activist. Born in Vietnam in 1926, he became a Zen Buddhist monk at the age of sixteen. Over seven decades of teaching, he published more than 100 books, which have sold more than four million copies in the United States alone. Exiled from Vietnam in 1966 for promoting peace, his teachings on Buddhism as a path to social and political transformation are responsible for bringing the mindfulness movement to Western culture. He established the international Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism in France, now the largest Buddhist monastery in Europe and the heart of a growing community of mindfulness practice centers around the world. He passed away in 2022 at the age of 95 at his root temple, Tu Hieu, in Hue, Vietnam.

Jason DeAntonis is an award-winning polymathic Bay Area artist, known for his fine carpentry and detailed woodwork. He has also worked in sculpture, costume design, glass blowing, painting, printmaking, and book illustration. His work has appeared in Parallax Press books Mindfulness in the Garden and the Mindfulness Essentials series, among others. He lives in Berkeley, California.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

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.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Parallax Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0984627111
• ISBN 13: 9780984627110
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Zeichner: DeAntonis Jason
• Anzahl der Seiten: 128
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar