Facilitation and Deep Listening: Opening Hearts and Minds
Posted on | August 17, 2009 | No Comments
Staying present and being open to others can create unexpected changes. I was honored this week to watch the magic of that approach.
I was traveling with a group of young people — a diverse group in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, political ideologies and all passionate activists. We were in a remote setting away from the noise, rhetoric and often impersonal world of Washington, DC to condcut a three-day meeting. A few of the group members were a bit spooked by being in such a desolate area. We met two young men who are responsible for the property where we stayed. The two young men appeared, on the surface, quite different from us and they looked at us with curiosity. The situation was ripe with the possibility of negative judgments.
On the second evening of our stay, the men came to take us on a boat ride. Hesitantly and carefully, they asked questions about who we were and what we did for a living. As the evening unfolded and the openness of my traveling companions became more apparent, the conversations deepened. I watched as one young man spoke so honestly of how different he felt from “us.” He tentatively named “who he was” by describing his affinities. I am white, I am a Christian, I am a Republican and so on. One of the women in the goup engaged with him very intently. She stayed present to him, just took in what he said, offered no judgments. In answer to each label he mentioned, which might have created a wall, she said, “Some of us call ourselves that” and left it. She didn’t defend, argue, advise or try to enlighten. She just answered looking directly at him with her heart open and spoke truthfully. He shared some deeply personal stories. As the evening ended, he thanked us. I watched in total awe as he reached out to hug the woman he had been talking to and asked to stay in touch. They exchanged cards. As he left, the woman said, “Wow, I love him.” As we all stood in admiration of how she had effortlessly opened her heart to someone so different from herself and who she could easily have judged negatively or rejected. Instead she chose to be in conversation, which led to hearts opening and greater understanding. It was a lesson to us all.
Where do you close off? Who and what are you unwilling to be with? How does your own closed stance separate you from others? How do those walls serve?
Try seeing beyond the labels and rhetoric to the heart. Just listen and open and see what walls can crumble. How much better would we be as humans if we could bring the walls of false separation down?
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