Thich Nhat Hanh on the Art of Deep Listening and the 3 Buddhist Steps to Repairing Relationships – Marginalian

One fact that never fails to amaze me: Despite the great cultural changes and leaps in knowledge through the ages, the human brain — that sprawling, wandering mind that controls behavior that we call human nature — has remained largely unchanged over the past hundred thousand years. How humbling it is to think that what is intellectually true for our ancestors – who, due to lack of knowledge of astronomy as a proper frame of reference for planetary motions, interpreted eclipses as acts of God and comets as omens of fortune – is true for us.

The defining circumstances in which this tendency manifests itself today may be different, but they manifest the same – especially in our relationships with other people, where a large part of the correct reference to the inner reality of the other person is invisible to us. It helps to remember that between our feelings and anything in the outside world that causes the flow of thought that we call emotions – any difficult situation, any painful event, any hurtful action of another – there are a number of possible causes.

One truth I've learned about life is through the power of life: When we're hurt in a relationship, when we're wandering in a buzzing maze of making sense, the explanation we choose to be right often has more to do with our fears and vulnerabilities than it has to do with the reality of the situation; almost always, that definition is incorrect; almost always, the meaning of truth has more to do with the fear and vulnerability that creeps up on the other person invisibly to us.

So, rational and conversational creatures that we are, we go through the real world in a dream of our own making, responding not to reality but to the stories we tell ourselves about what's true – stories that are imperfect and terribly wrong, stories about what we do and don't do, stories whose cost is communication, trust, love. That's why without the help of interpretation and without sincerity – your vulnerability, your courage, your kindness – all relationships become a mass of unspoken anger based mainly on misunderstood goals, and they fall apart.

A great Buddhist teacher and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh (October 11, 1926–January 22, 2022) offers a three-step remedy for this basic human tendency in one part of his slim, powerful book. Fear: Essential Wisdom for Weathering the Storm (public library), who also gave us his warm wisdom on the four Buddhist terms for turning fear into love.

You write:

Most of our suffering comes from wrong ideas. To get rid of that hurt, we have to get rid of our negative perception.

Whenever we see another person taking action, he notes, we must always be aware that there may be a number of invisible motives behind it and we must be willing to listen to understand them better – not just because of the trust of self-reflective interactions that make up the Golden Rule, in the hope that others will be equally willing to misunderstand our ideas and our wrong ideas with our wrong idea. and an important way to take care of yourself:

When you make an effort to listen and hear the other side of the story, your understanding increases and your pain decreases.

Half a century after folk philosopher and psychologist Erich Fromm detailed the six rules of selfless listening and understanding, Hanh offers a three-step process for correcting the wrong perspective in relationship conflict and emerging victorious in deep love:

The first thing we can do in these situations is to admit internally that the images we have in our head, what we think happened, may not be accurate. Our practice is to breathe and move until we are calm and relaxed.

The second thing we can do, when we are ready, is to tell the people we think have hurt us that we are suffering and we know that our suffering may be caused by our wrong perception. Instead of coming to another person or people to blame them, we can come to them for help and ask them to explain to us, to help us understand why they said or did those things.

There is a third thing we need to do, if we can. The third thing is very difficult, perhaps very difficult. We need to listen very carefully to the other person's response in order to truly understand and try to correct our own opinion. Through this, we may find that we have become victims of our own wrong ideas. Chances are someone else has been a victim of misconceptions.

Part of why this is so challenging to the Western mind, with its seemingly self-righteous self-righteousness, is that we grow incredibly insecure in the hope that we're wrong and feel indifferent to the fact that we've been wrong. In a culture that embraces who we are and what we know and what we stand for, Eastern meditative traditions can be modest in their gentle, steady practice of releasing the grip of selfishness and removing the fist of righteousness into an open hand of acceptance.

Using two powerful Buddhist practices that enable this release – deep listening and loving speech – Hanh writes:

If we are sincerely willing to learn the truth, and if we are able to use gentle speech and deep listening, we are more likely to be able to hear the honest opinions and feelings of others. In that process, we may discover that they also have misconceptions. After listening to them fully, we have the opportunity to help them correct their wrong ideas. When we face our pain that way, we have the opportunity to turn our fear and anger into opportunities for deep, honest relationships.

This, you see, applies to romantic relationships, politics, family and workplaces – in other words, to all arrangements of one mind that begins an emotional, terrifying effort to be known and understood by another.

Considering the ultimate goal of this process, he adds:

The purpose 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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We all know that we are not the only ones who suffer when there is a difficult situation. The other person in that situation also suffers, and we are partly the cause of their suffering. When we realize this, we can look at the other person with compassionate eyes and allow understanding to blossom. With the arrival of understanding, the situation changes and communication becomes possible.

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

Just after writing Fear: Essential Wisdom for Weathering the StormHanh has placed this understanding at the center of his current teachings on how to love — an understanding that renews Alain de Botton's soulful wisdom of what makes a good conversationalist. Perhaps Walt Whitman, writing about the rush of happiness, captured this well when he told us that the secret is to “do nothing but listen,” to hear the song of life – which is the song of love.