Let Go & Listen

I have a bad habit of thinking that I know what is best for other people. I am confessing this sin because I think it is a character defect that many share with me....if there is one thing I have learned in my 53+ years it is that I am not so unusual. I am just the same as everyone else, even if I'd like to think I'm completely unique.

When I project my expectations of how things should be onto someone else, I am failing to recognize the talents and gifts dwelling within the other person. That means that I am negating their uniqueness as an individual and expecting them to fit my mold. How can I really know what lies within another- their potential, their desires, dreams and ambitions- unless they tell me those things? When I am so busy telling them what they should be doing, in effect trying to fix them, or even thinking those things silently, I am not listening to the person and what they are trying to tell me. My mind is closed.

Letting go of my agenda and listening...I think those are the keys to compassion and unconditional love.

LISTEN. When I listen, I am hearing what the other person is saying to me and the dialogue that constantly chatters away in my mind is turned off and not criticising. If I ask a question, it is just to clarify something the talker said that I do not understand. It is not a question meant to lead the speaker in another direction....the path I think they should be on. No giving advice unless specifically asked to do so and then use words sparingly.

"An essential part of true listening is the discipline of bracketing, the temporary giving up or setting aside of one's own prejudices, frames of reference and desires, so as to experience as far as possible the speaker's world from the inside, step inside his or her shoes. This unification of speaker and listener is actually an extension and enlargement of ourselves, and new knowledge is always gained from this. Moreover, since true listening involves bracketing, a setting aside of the self, it also temporarily involves a total acceptance of the other. Sensing this acceptance, the speaker will feel less and less vulnerable and more and more inclined to open up the inner recesses of his or her mind to the listener. As this happens, speaker and listener begin to appreciate each other more and more, and the duet dance of love is begun again."  --M. Scott Peck, MD

In his book, Let Your Life Speak, Parker Palmer says: "The key to this form of community involves holding a paradox- the paradox of having relationships in which we protect each other's aloneness. We must come together in ways that respect the solitude of the soul, that avoid the unconscious violence we do when we try to save each other, that evoke our capacity to hold another life without dishonoring its mystery, never trying to coerce the other into meeting our own needs."

Amen Brother Palmer. For when all is said and done and boiled down to the essence, what I believe is going on when I try to tell someone else what they should do, or even silently ridicule them, is fear. Fear that someone else will try a different approach than mine and thus call my way of being into question. If others are doing what I am doing then my way of doing things is okay, right? If the road is crowded with fellow travelers then obviously I'm going in the right direction, aren't I?  Fear of uncertainty, inferiority, insecurity....fears that I allow to define me, for fear is natural and even healthy. I can't get away from having fears but I can try not to live out of the fear. Instead I want to choose compassion- opening my heart to the experiences of the other person, truly listening, and allowing that person to define themselves, just as I expect to choose for myself. May it be so for all of us as we swim in this holy water called life.