Deep Listening

"The practice of deep listening consists of keeping compassion alive in your heart the whole time that you are listening. You do not listen in order to judge, criticize, or evaluate. You listen for one reason alone: to offer the other person a chance to express him- or herself. That person is going to say things that irritate you. He or she might express disapproval of you, heap blame on you, say things that are false. You have to be ready to listen to anything. You have to say to yourself, "I'm listening to this person not to criticize or judge him. I'm listening to give him a chance to express himself, to provide him with some relief--that's all."

Excerpt from You Are Here, Thich Nhat Hanh, p. 62

See The Blue Sky

"Albert Camus wrote a novel, The Stranger, in which his character, Meursault, is condemned to death. Three days before his execution, he is able for the first time in his life to touch the blue sky. He is in his cell, he is looking at the ceiling. He discovers a square of blue sky appearing through the skylight. Strangely enough, a man forty years of age is able to see the blue sky for the first time. Of course, he had looked at the stars and the blue sky more than once before, but this time it was for real. We might not know how to touch the blue sky in such a profound way. The moment of awareness Camus describes is mindfulness: Suddenly you are able to touch life." 

Excerpt from True Love, Thich Nhat Hanh, pp. 16-17

I took this picture at Knox Farm (East Aurora, NY) yesterday during a long walk. 

Developing a Listening Exercise

Listening is a sociological skill. We can all improve our listening ability. If given the opportunity to concentrate and listen carefully to others, maybe we can be better listeners. This semester I plan to try a listening exercise. One way to do this would be to pair up students and have them chat about prompts like these:

1. Describe a pet and what your pet means to you (if you've never had a pet, would you want one some day?) 
2. Details about a job you’ve had
3. What's something in your life that is stressful?
4. A hobby or activity in your life
5. What’s a value you have, or a family value, that’s important to you?
6. Is there an area in your life you’re trying to improve?

Whatever the questions are, we would pair back up a few weeks later to revisit these questions and to see what people remember from their conversation. The spirit of the exercise is to practice deep listening. Maybe we'll recognize we too often "half listen" in daily conversation or come in and out of conversations. We can't be perfect listeners all the time, but surely we can improve. 

Thoughts? Ideas? 

Home Improvement, Forever

I don't know when I started watching HGTV. I'm not sure I ever want to watch HGTV, as in "I really need to watch a home improvement show, or a show about flipping, or a show about house hunting." I watch it because it's on. It's convenient. I watch it for filler, similar to my viewing of Food Network. These channels are on all day, with reliable content. I have to be careful not to consume too much Food Network. The shows make me hungry. If I'm bored, and there's nothing on (which is most of the time), I tend to flip back and forth between these channels. In the past few years, I've cut back on my Food Network viewing, and probably have watched more HGTV than say 4-5 years ago. But I don't stay on HGTV too long. After all these years, I can still fantasize about living in a newly remodeled home with an amazing yard. It's easy escapism. Sure, I'd like to have a killer pool and perfect landscaping. Or two full bathrooms. Or a home office. But the structural limitations of our home makes these things unlikely. Plus financial limitations, lol. Whatever our budget affords us (or doesn't), the song remains the same: HGTV suggests there is always something to do to your place, that there is always something to change, that updating your living quarters is valuable. You can also look good doing it! You might even make money doing it! It certainly suggests that the condition of your apartment, or home, is not good enough. Even if you love it and don't leave it, something must be improved. You can't possibly be happy with what is. Hmmmm. 

There's Crying in Baseball

One year ago, we were in Myrtle Beach for a baseball tournament. We played some very talented teams from Florida and South Carolina. Maybe the best team we played was from Massachusetts--they had a kid who could throw a curveball that our team couldn't hit. It was hot, very hot, around 90 degrees each day. It was also the end of the season. My kid, a small for his age 11-year-old, was already tired with it being the end of the season. He still loved playing games, but you could tell he was tired and that his body needed rest. The heat and the pressure of playing better teams was a lot to endure. First game, he struggled at the plate, and couldn't get a hit. At the end of the game, he was exhausted, and he cried. A lot. He'd cry over the years at age 8, 9, 10, and 11 when playing baseball. So would other kids. You'd see kids cry after striking out or making an error or getting thrown out. What the secret is to handling your kid crying, I'm not sure. I nor any other parent that I've noticed seem to have the secret sauce. Your kid is upset, they perceive themselves as failing, they might cry. We'd try to explain to kids that it's hard to succeed in baseball. We can say things like "If you get a hit 2 or 3 times out of 10 in baseball, that's success" or "MLB players strike out and make errors!" but it doesn't make kids feel better. They want to succeed and it's hugely frustrating for them to strike out or to "fail" in other ways. 

I think that was the last time my kid cried at baseball. I've observed a big difference between 11 and 12 years old. I haven't observed much crying from kids this year. Sure, you still see it once in a while for the same reasons--striking out, getting thrown out, booting a ball, getting hit by a pitch--but it's much less common and doesn't last as long. Kids are more able to move on more quickly. I notice I can reason with my 12-year-old in a way that I couldn't in previous years. It makes sense to him now that he can't hold onto a "bad" at bat and that he has to have a short memory when something doesn't go his way. You can't carry over a "bad" at bat to the field, and you can't get stuck on what went "wrong" in the last at bat. You try to learn from an unsuccessful at bat, but you don't obsess about it. I try to teach him to stay in the moment and be confident in the here and now. 

It's never easy to see your kid upset and parents seem flustered when their kid is crying. I can't claim to have always known what to do in such moments. We can aim to be compassionate, understanding,  supportive, and patient. 

Loving Friendliness

"The meditation center where I most often teach is in the hills of the West Virginia countryside. When we first opened our center, there was a man down the road who was very unfriendly. I take a long walk every day, and, whenever I saw this man, I would wave to him. He would just frown at me and look away. Even so, I would always wave and think kindly of him, sending him metta. I was not phased by his attitude; I never gave up on him. Whenever I saw him, I waved. After about a year, his behavior changed. He stopped frowning. I felt wonderful. The practice of loving friendliness was beginning to bear fruit. 

After another year, when I passed him on my walk, something miraculous happened. He drove past me and lifted one finger off the steering wheel. Again, I thought, "Oh, this is wonderful! Loving friendliness is working." And yet another year passed as, day after day, I would wave to him and wish him well. The third year, he lifted two fingers in my direction. Then the next year, he lifted all four fingers off the wheel. More time passed. I was walking down the road as he turned into his driveway. He took his hand completely off the steering wheel, stuck it out the window, and waved back at me.

One day, not long after that, I saw this man parked on the side of one of the forest roads. He was sitting in the driver's seat smoking a cigarette. I went over to him and we started talking. First we chatted just about the weather and then, little by little, his story unfolded: It turns out that, several years ago, he had been in a terrible accident--a tree had fallen on his truck. Almost every bone in his body had been broken, and he was left in a coma for some time. When I first started seeing him on the road, he was only beginning to recover. It was not because he was a mean person that he did not wave back to me; he did not wave back because he could not move all his fingers! Had I given up on him, I would never have known how good this man is. One day, when I had been away on a trip, he actually came by our center looking for me. He was worried because he hadn't seen me walking in a while. Now we are friends."

Excerpt from Mindfulness in Plain English, Bhante Gunaratana, pp, 179-180

Touching Life Deeply

"When you contemplate the full moon, if you are thinking then the full moon is not there and you are not there either. This is because thinking prevents us from living deeply in the present moment in our everyday life. When you are drinking water, drink water, drink only water. That is meditation. You must not drink other things, such as your worries, your plans--wandering around in the realm of your thoughts. Thinking prevents us from touching life deeply. I think, therefore I am really not there."

Excerpt from: Thich Nhat Hanh, True Love, pp. 86-87