There is this secret about compassionate listening, IT HEALS! Every time you listen to someone, you pave a path through which they listen to themselves. Through the listener, sometimes the speaker touches the strings of the listener’s heart. Compassionate listening is the solution, I believe, of all the problems in the world. Every soul is carrying so much inside, a pile of negative, toxic and undoubtedly self-harming emotions; all this is killing and ruining the consciousness in unconscious ways.
All they want is a compassionate heart and a honest Non-Judgmental ear to listen. Imagine if we could just listen to each other keeping aside our filters of stereotypes, biasedness, we won’t even realize how we make this world a better place to live in. This whole baggage of emotional damage of the unrest in the world causing unrest in individual lives, unloading the inner heaviness through love result in the lightness of soul. The stability is spearheaded is each one’s life through the magic which compassionate listening does. Filling peace into other is a way of keeping peace within ourselves.
My job requires a lot of traveling, every day I travel the same route, meeting and seeing same faces of people in metro, sometimes passing smiles to every soul I encounter. From all the stories, I still have a story in my memory- An old man whom I meet often on my way back home. I have been noticing him unconsciously. Every time he open up with a stranger and start sharing the same story and incidents of his life with people, like the things he is really proud of or the things he hated would have not happened to him, EVERYTIME SAME STORY WITH OTHER PERSON HE KNOWS NOTHING ABOUT and surprisingly people listen to him, giving an honest ear to this man and his life experiences.
“You can call it compassionate listening. You listen with only one purpose: to help him or her to empty his heart. Even if he says things that are full of wrong perceptions, full of bitterness, you are still capable of continuing to listen with compassion. Because you know that listening like that, you give that person a chance to suffer less. If you want to help him to correct his perception, you wait for another time. For now, you don’t interrupt. You don’t argue. If you do, he loses his chance. You just listen with compassion and help him to suffer less. One hour like that can bring transformation and healing.” ~Thich Nhat Hanh
Even if people we are listening to say things in wrong perceptions, listening with compassion aids in correcting their perception and to suffer less. Compassionate listening help in relieving the suffering of other person, help in emptying the hearts, turning into positive transformation of souls.