Compassionate Listening


Book Description

For over twenty years, Gene Hoffman engaged in efforts to seek out the deep, psychological causes of violence and to help bring about healing and reconciliation through a process she named "Compassionate Listening." This carefully edited collection of her writings sheds light on Gene's approach to peacemaking and conflict resolution, and invites readers along on a spiritual journey that she aptly calls "a peace pilgrim's progress to inner healing." This 2nd edition features a new forward by Leah Green, founder of The Compassionate Listening Project.




Deep Listening


Book Description

World-renowned restorative yoga teacher Jillian Pransky came to the practice of yoga to heal herself. For much of her life, she subscribed to a relentless work hard/play hard mentality, burying parts of herself beneath the pursuit of busy-ness and accomplishment. It wasn’t until a devastating personal loss and health crisis thrust her into suffocating anxiety that she stopped racing around. As she began to pause and examine her actions and emotions, she found herself able to unlock deeply seated tension in her mind and body. Since then, Pransky has been devoted to studying and teaching mindfulness practices, deep relaxation, and compassionate listening. In Deep Listening, Pransky presents her signature Calm Body, Clear Mind, Open Heart program―a 10-step journey of self-exploration that she’s taught around the world. Derived from the techniques that healed her, the practice of Deep Listening invites you to pay close attention to your body, mind, and heart. You’re taught how to tune inward and relax into a state of openness, ease, and clarity. This is the new frontier in integrative wellness—mindfulness designed for healing. Pransky doesn’t ask you to “be your best self,” or “do more!” She asks you to “be here” and “do less.” She guides you gently through the stages of Deep Listening, from being present and noticing your tension to welcoming what you discover with softness and compassion. She integrates tools like guided meditations, journaling prompts, and restorative yoga poses to help you regard yourself with kindness and curiosity. Immersing yourself in the practice of Deep Listening will allow you to nurture your own well-being.




The Compassionate Connection: The Healing Power of Empathy and Mindful Listening


Book Description

“This book explains not only the healing power of compassionate human connection, but in the most accessible and practical ways, how to cultivate our capacity to create that connection and thereby empower others to find their best selves.”—John Makransky, author of Awakening through Love All of us have an innate capacity for compassion. We recognize when others are hurting, and we want to help, but we’re not always good at it. There is another way. In The Compassionate Connection, Dr. David Rakel explains how we can strengthen our bonds with others—all the while doing emotional and physical good for ourselves. As founder and director of the University of Wisconsin Integrative Medicine program, Dr. Rakel discovered that we become the most effective helpers when we use the tool of human connection. Drawing on his own research and practice, as well as thirty years of published studies in medicine, sociology, psychology, meditation, and neuroscience, Dr. Rakel "stacks the deck" in favor of healing and introduces the concept of bio-psycho-spiritual authentic awareness. Not only are our bodies and minds connected, but also it has been scientifically proven that our capacity to feel beauty, awe, and compassion enhances our health and wellbeing. In The Compassionate Connection, Dr. Rakel provides an innovative approach to enhancing health in others and strengthening relationships through the art of connecting. These tools guide us to improve our connections—whether between doctor and patient, husband and wife, parent and child, or boss and employee—and live with clarity, wisdom, and good health.




Compassion


Book Description

Do you turn away from your own physical and emotional pain? Do you withhold empathy or give yourself away when witnessing another’s pain? Do you lash out or withdraw when you feel that someone has harmed you? Is it possible to learn to respond to rather than react against what feels unbearable? Drawing on her experience as a Buddhist practitioner and teacher, Christina Feldman asserts that it is possible, but only if we turn, time and again, toward compassion, which she describes as the "innate, natural condition of our hearts." She says, "You do not need to be a saint to find the grace and transformative power of compassion; you need only to be willing to pay attention to pain and its cause and to commit yourself to its end." She offers techniques for developing the capacity to hold adversity, loss, and pain—with love. Her guided meditations will teach you to cultivate and sustain compassion for the blameless, for those who cause suffering, for those whom you love, and for yourself.




Listening Well


Book Description

Are you a good listener? How well do you really know the people around you? A capacity for empathic understanding is hard-wired in our brains, but its full expression involves particular listening skills that are seldom learned through ordinary experience. Through clear explanation, specific examples, and practical exercises, Dr. Miller offers a step-by-step process for developing your skillfulness in empathic listening. With a solid basis in sixty years of scientific research, these communication skills are not limited to professionals, and can be learned and applied in your everyday life. Instead of assuming that you know the meaning of what you think you heard, empathic listening lets you develop a more accurate understanding and prevent miscommunication. Empathic understanding can help to deepen personal relationships, alleviate conflict, communicate across differences, and promote positive change. The author also discusses skills for expressing yourself clearly, and for strengthening close relationships and friendships. Through empathic understanding you have access to life experience far beyond your own, and over time, listening well and deeply becomes a way of being, fostering a compassionate and patient acceptance of human frailties--those of others as well as your own.




Radical Compassion


Book Description

One of the most beloved and trusted mindfulness teachers in America offers a lifeline for difficult times: the RAIN meditation, which awakens our courage and heart Tara Brach is an in-the-trenches teacher whose work counters today's ever-increasing onslaught of news, conflict, demands, and anxieties--stresses that leave us rushing around on auto-pilot and cut off from the presence and creativity that give our lives meaning. In this heartfelt and deeply practical book, she offers an antidote: an easy-to-learn four-step meditation that quickly loosens the grip of difficult emotions and limiting beliefs. Each step in the meditation practice (Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture) is brought to life by memorable stories shared by Tara and her students as they deal with feelings of overwhelm, loss, and self-aversion, with painful relationships, and past trauma--and as they discover step-by-step the sources of love, forgiveness, compassion, and deep wisdom alive within all of us.




Listening


Book Description

A vital and comprehensive starting place for understanding the key concepts, this book explores 177 diverse types and styles of listening named in academic scholarship to date. This book is an encyclopaedic-style synthesis of existing literature related to listening styles and types. Through online academic resource curation and literature review synthesis, this key reference work offers a deep dive into the interdisciplinary foundations of listening. By providing a brief descriptive overview of each of the identified listening styles and types as well as the inclusion of key scholars related to them, this book challenges assumptions about “listening” as a singular communicative activity and offers students and scholars alike a place from which to draw key listening concepts. No other text has attempted to bring together previous listening scholarship in this expansive interdisciplinary way. This book promotes both the field of listening itself while also expanding opportunities for students of many disciplines to embed listening scholarship in their knowledge and practical application. The first of its kind, Listening: The Key Concepts is an expansive, state-of the-field exploration of listening scholarship that can be used as a guidebook for undergraduate and graduate students in Listening, Public Speaking, Interpersonal Communication, and Intercultural Communication courses as well as other related disciplines.




Compassionate Conversations


Book Description

The definitive guide to learning effective skills for engaging in open and honest conversations about divisive issues from three professional mediators. When a conversation takes a turn into the sometimes uncomfortable and often contentious topics of race, religion, gender, sexuality, and politics, it can be difficult to know what to say or how to respond to someone you disagree with. Compassionate Conversations empowers us to transform these conversations into opportunities to bridge divides and mend relationships by providing the basic set of conflict resolution skills we need to be successful, including listening, reframing, and dealing with strong emotions. Addressing the long history of injury and pain for marginalized groups, the authors explore topics like social privilege, power dynamics, and, political correctness allowing us to be more mindful in our conversations. Each chapter contains practices and reflection questions to help readers feel more prepared to talk through polarizing issues, ultimately encouraging us to take risks, to understand and recognize our deep commonalities, to be willing to make mistakes, and to become more intimate with expressing our truths, as well as listening to those of others.




Listening with My Heart


Book Description

"In today's hypercompetitive world, kids often internalize the message that their worth is attached to their accomplishments and that messing up is something to be ashamed of, rather than a normal part of life, which can lead to critical self-talk. Listening with My Heart reminds us of the other golden rule--to treat ourselves like we would treat a friend. When we do this, we are practicing self-compassion."--




The Five Keys to Mindful Communication


Book Description

Good communiation is essential to any healthy relationship, whether it's between spouses, family members, friends, or co-workers. In this book Susan Chapman, a marriage and family therapist and a longtime meditation teacher, explains how mindfulness can be brought to bear in the way we speak and listen to each other so that we can strengthen our connections and better accomplish our goals. Drawing on Buddhist principles and on her training as a psychotherapist, Chapman explains how the practice of mindfulness—learning to become fully present in the moment—makes it possible for us to listen more deeply to others and to develop greater clarity and confidence about how to respond. Chapman highlights five key elements of mindful communication: silence, mirroring, encouraging, discerning, and responding, and she dedicates a chapter of the book to each. Other topics include identifying your communication patterns and habits; uncovering the hidden fears that often sabotage communication; staying open in the midst of difficult conversations so that we can respond wisely and skillfully; and learning how mindful communication can help us to become more truthful, compassionate, and flexible in our relationships.