Listening with the Heart: A Guide for Compassionate Listening

Listening with the Heart: A Guide for Compassionate Listening is a concise, practical, and timeless approach to reconciliation between individuals and communities in conflict. This guidebook draws from practical applications and spiritual principles to provide myriad community applications, insights, techniques, and principles to help Compassionate Listening practitioners of all experience levels improve their relationships, enrich their internal lives, and contribute to peaceful solutions in a world where they are sorely needed.

Listening with the Heart teaches how listening deeply to ourselves, to one another, and to our heart assists us in hearing the essential human qualities underneath the words, rhetoric, and strongly held positions. The appendix is rich with exercises on how to develop skills for Compassionate Listening, a practice based on the principle that hearing each other's story reveals unhealed wounds and allows for mutual compassion and understanding, bridging the ineffable with the practicalities of relationships. When these skills are applied, they offer the opportunity to heal most of our pressing issues of the day.

This book is an ideal companion piece for Practicing the Art of Compassionate Listening by Andrea Cohen, Leah Green, and Susan Partnow, which offers an introductory-level curriculum and practical how-to guide for practicing Compassionate Listening. This excellent supplement to the CL curriculum brings both psychological and spiritual resources together in a deeply practical approach to mediation and conflict resolution.

"The finest alternative to a world of war... a masterpiece of social artistry"

- Jean Houston

"Listening with the Heart inspires hope in this time of grave troubles"

- Gene Knudsen Hoffman