Gene Knudsen Hoffman is a remarkable woman, and this document is a report from the growing edge of a movement she has pioneered, nurtured and mentored.
Forms of compassionate listening have been practiced among Quakers and Buddhists for centuries, and among psychotherapists for decades. Gene is both a Quaker peace activist and a pastoral counselor, and she has achieved two great things over the past thirty years. First, she has taken the practice of compassionate listening out of the quiet environs of the Quaker meeting house, out from behind the closed doors of Therapy session, and on to the stage of the world's greatest conflicts. Her many trips to Russia and the Middle East have made her a legend in the peacemaking community. Second, she has popularized compassionate listening in a generous way that invites and encourages other people to take up this practice, develop it and apply it in new areas. This book is an expression of that generosity. Available for free around the world as an e-book, it includes both her lesson plans for Compassionate Listening Workshops and reports from Leah Green and Cynthia Monroe, two of her co-pioneers and creative colleagues.
Leah Green is Director of Mid East Citizen Diplomacy and organizes Compassionate Listening delegations to Israel and Palestine. Compassionate Listening embodies Gandhi's teaching that we must be the change we want to see. By listening to all sides in a way that acknowledges everyone's pain, these delegations help the Israelis and Palestinians grow toward listening to one another's pain, and hopes and dreams as well. Of course, there are powerful forces on both sides seeking to worsen the conflicts rather than heal the wounds. Only a practice grounded in something like the Quaker belief in the light of God residing in each person could keep alive the vision of possible peace in the face of all the violence and anguish into which the Palestinians and Israelis have stumbled.
Cynthia Monroe is a staff member of the American Friends Service Committee, living in Anchorage, Alaska. Over the past decade a serious conflict has emerged in Alaska between the indigenous peoples of Alaska who hunt and fish for survival, and the professional and recreational hunters and fishers who are drawing down the food supply available to the indigenous peoples. When the usual forms of conflict management (mediation, lawsuits) failed to produce results, Cynthia enlisted Gene's assistance in founding the Alaskans Listening to Alaskans About Subsistence Project. A new dialogue began that is continuing to this day and is transforming the context in which the conflict takes place. Compassionate Listening is not about resolving conflicts directly. It is about helping conflict participants see one another as human, which creates a new mental and emotional space out of which resolutions can emerge.
In this respect, Compassionate Listening represents the next step beyond "interest-based bargaining." Conflict resolutions based only on interests, even on the interests of all the parties to a conflict, are vulnerable to fall apart as soon as someone's material circumstances shift. What is needed is for the conflict participants to be able to identify with one another's sorrows and joys, to feel connected enough to one another to make the peace worth keeping.
In a word, only love will save us. But there needs to be a gradual "on-ramp" to that love, and a person's gradually deepening practice of Compassionate Listening is one such path, a path that Gene and her courageous partners-in-hope offer to a world clouded with violence.
I am honored to be a support person and web helper for this great team. We hope this sourcebook will empower you to bring the practice of Compassionate Listening into the conflicts in your community that cry out to be transformed.
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