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Hello everyone, I've been thinking a lot about listening recently, after having been introduced to Jill Stauffer's amazing and challenging book 'Ethical Loneliness'. Drawing on her background in both law and philosophy, she considers in a very deep, thorough and compassionate way how essential good listening is in healing conflict and trauma in the world, and how institutions and individuals who are most dedicated to listening can easily, and often, create circumstances in which people are essentially unheard. The 'ethical' in the title relates to our responsibility to set aside our usual, habitual ways of listening so that the person who is speaking can experience being fully welcomed. When we demand, even silently, that the speaker makes sense to us, or is courageous, forgiving, entertaining, sorrowful, confirming or any other way we long for them to be, we lay out a space in which speaking is not only often made very difficult, but in which the speaker can feel abandoned. And if the speaker is traumatised, or in the midst of great difficulty, our very way of listening only adds to the abandonment. What Jill Stauffer does so brilliantly is show us how much of our own way of shaping the world we have to set aside as listeners in order to listen well, how much practice it takes, and how much it helps to know ourselves - our patterns, habits, and the everyday stories about ourselves and life we live in - in order to do this. Listening, of course, is a foundational discipline in all human relating, and our ability to listen well to the ordinary life of those around us - filled as it will be with both joys and hurts - is part of the path to making families, communities and a society that can support life. We're learning from Jill Stauffer's work just how much attention and care it takes to do this. Below are some resources that we hope might support you in your own inquiries on this topic.
Warmly,
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