I am delighted to put into print these very personal lesson plans that have evolved over the last twenty-one years as I have explored the practice of compassionate listening with many groups and communities. And, I must add, the approach presented here is so unusual in comparison to normal teaching methods that it may need a little explaining.
Compassionate listening is a gentle and powerful way of intervening in conflicts. The goal of compassionate listening is not directly to resolve a conflict, but rather to awaken the hearts of the various conflict participants. If the conflict participants can come to see one another as human and to feel one another's sorrows, we advocates of compassionate listening believe, they will be able to resolve their conflicts. Without such deep, mutual empathy between the parties in conflict, conflict resolution efforts often result only in temporary truces, soon broken.
The process of arranging empathic encounters between conflict participants makes strong emotional demands on potential peace-evokers. Rather than pushing, enticing, threatening, or persuading, peace-evokers using compassionate listening have to create by their own centeredness a kind of forgiving and accepting emotional space into which the conflict participants can enter. Compassionate listening is an effort to be non-judgemental in a conflict, and to help each side be more compassionate with the other side. The listeners try to do this by embodying more compassion themselves. Compassionate Listeners invite, they do not compel. As Gandhi put it, "Be the change you want to see."
Although each of these lessons contains inspiring quotes, the purpose of the Compassionate Listening sessions is not simply to pass on inspiring information. It is about helping people learn to hold their own emotional ground in the middle of intense conflict situations. If we leap to the aid of whomever we see as the injured party in a conflict, we will not be of much help to the conflict participants in creating a new relationship.
Compassionate listeners bear gentle witness to the often painful feelings of conflict participants, and to the participants' struggles with some of the great issues of human life: forgiveness versus vengeance, self-interest versus generosity, and so on. Thus, we listeners need to be reliably in touch with our own feelings, and need to have given some thought to these kinds of issues, lest we be overwhelmed by the power of what we are called to observe. Each of the following lesson plans presents challenging content (about compassion, hatred, forgiveness, etc.) and then invites the class participants to listen to one another as each works to clarify thoughts and feelings about that topic.
I hope this kind of preparation will allow us to embody more of the patience, compassion and creative openness that the conflict participants need. And I hope these lessons will continue to evolve as more and more people around the world are drawn to practice compassionate listening.
Finally, in order to learn how to gracefully hold and discuss the pain and conflicts of others, this type of training asks people to share some (not all) of their own pain and conflicts. And, in order for people to feel safe about such sharing, I recommend that each training group agree to hold all its shared personal content as confidential -- not to be discussed outside the training group.
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