Practicing the Sacred Art of Listening
A Guide to Enrich Your Relationships and Kindle Your Spiritual Life
-
- $18.99
-
- $18.99
Publisher Description
Poor listening leads to misunderstandings and lost opportunities.
Learning to listen well requires spiritual practice.
It happens at work and at home, with strangers and close friends, in heated debates and in quiet conversations—you hear someone speaking, but often you don’t truly listen.
Kay Lindahl’s highly respected workshops are attended by people from a broad range of backgrounds. Her first book, The Sacred Art of Listening, has been published to acclaim in North America, Europe, and Asia. Now she offers practical, easy-to-follow advice and exercises to enhance your capacity to listen in a spirit-filled way. Using examples from her own life and her work as a teacher of the sacred art of listening, Lindahl explores the nature and use of silence, reflection, and divine presence as foundational qualities of listening and shows you how you can apply these in your everyday life.
This valuable workshop-in-a-book examines the varied ways we are called to deep listening, including:
Contemplative listeningReflective listeningHeart listeningListening in groupsListening in conversations … and more
You will find yourself inspired to discover how different your conversations will be when you stop just talking and start really listening.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This is a companion volume to Lindahl's first book, The Sacred Art of Listening, which provided 40 short, distinct entry points into the realm of real listening. Here, she organizes her thinking around broader themes such as "contemplative," "reflective" and "heart" listening, three modes that she says can help us to listen deeply to the divine, ourselves and one another. Lindahl hopes that people can slowly strengthen their listening "muscles" and pull themselves back from the brink of non-communication. She explores the implications of listening to friends, family, co-workers and ourselves. Calling thoughtful attention to the myriad ways we share conversation, she delineates among the formats and intentions of debates, arguments, councils, consultations, discussions, dialogues, negotiations, mediation and chitchat. The spiritual value of being present while listening shines within her clear, guileless strategies. Each chapter offers concrete techniques to practice listening, and the "Daily Practices" section is filled with ways to restore loving kindness to language. She also has clear directions for "Interfaith Caf " etiquette, where lively conversation can spark lasting change among people of different faiths, viewpoints or life experiences. Similar to her first book, this is by turns both obvious and profound; on the whole, however, it has deep merit for all who want to reclaim the essential art of spiritual listening.
