The Art of Listening

Creating spaces that allow for truth to surface.

The form of showing care that might be most needed in the world today is the willingness to learn how to listen. Deep listening happens when we are fully present and committed to understanding the other person's perspective. How often do we pay attention to the quality of our listening, either as we are listening, or afterward, as a kind of reflection? While it’s hard to quantify, it’s probably accurate to say not often, if ever.

Parker Palmer is an author and educator who is known for his work and writing on community and education. While researching my book on belonging, he spoke with me about the power of community to transform when it has the skills and a commitment to engage in deep listening. Parker found the kind of community he was looking for at Pendle Hill, an intentional community rooted in the Quaker tradition. For eleven years, beginning in 1974, he lived there with his wife and children. 

Unlike many faith-based communities, Pendle Hill attracted a diverse group of people from different lifestyles, backgrounds, and beliefs. Parker attributes this to the Quakers’ style of worship, which encourages authenticity and includes practices to help people creatively hold their differences. While living in this community, he learned new ways to be in relationship, and he came to understand the profound power of silence.

For Parker, community is a place to explore our deepest humanity, and this had been elusive in his earlier communities at University of California, Berkeley and, later, while community organizing in Washington D.C. 

Parker wanted to create a community that held values similar to what he found at Pendle Hill, where the people deeply cared for each other, while supporting each other’s uniqueness. In order to do this, he needed to create spaces where people could reveal and hold their differences creatively. Parker recognized that not everyone finds the intentional community lifestyle accessible or desirable. He wondered how he could cultivate the transformative aspects of an intentional community at its best and offer it to more people.

Parker founded the Center for Courage & Renewal as a way to take Pendle Hill on the road. Parker knew he didn’t want to have what he saw as a typical weekend community-building retreat. He had been on countless retreats where everyone gets inspired and has great vision while there, only to return home on Monday and return to business-as-usual.

Parker asked participants to make a more substantial commitment, coming more than once and for longer periods of time. The retreats would have non-hierarchical leadership, facilitators who offer general guidelines and teach skills that help build trusting relationships.

Participants in this temporary community learn to be more present, witnessing and listening deeply, not only to one another, but also to themselves. Only clarification questions are asked by those listening to prevent misunderstanding, confusion, or ambiguity.

There is a minimalist agenda, with a set of ground rules or principles that they call touchstones. Parker shared this as one of the most well-known touchstones: “There will be no fixing, no saving, no advising, and no correcting each other." He said, with humor, that following this ground rule removes from people all their favorite things to do: “So, it is a safe space for a very different type of relationship that evokes new capacities. We learn to practice presence with one another. We learn to witness. We learn to listen.”

“We have a conceit in Western Culture that just because we’ve said something, we know what it means. And that’s just not true.” Parker said, “People say the most amazing things without knowing it. We don’t often pause to reflect on our own important insights.”

Parker offered an illustration of this which occurred while he was facilitating a retreat with a group of physicians. During a probing conversation about death, one person spoke up: “The health care system that I work in has me right on the edge of violating my Hippocratic Oath two or three times a week.”

“When I heard that," Parker said, "I thought that in most situations, people would jump in and say something like 'that sucks' or give advice. And the power of what he had just said would have been lost.”

Because this group learned and practiced the ground rules – no fixing, advising, or saving – and could receive this message in respectful silence, the man spoke again after a long pause: “You know, that’s the first time I’ve ever said that out loud to a group of professional peers.”

Hearing this, Parker knew that the group had arrived at the kind of moment that is possible in vibrant communities. The group acted as a witness, which enabled this person to hear the truth from himself. And now that his truth was out there in the room between them, what was he going to do with it? Would he try to sweep it under the rug, or would he, in some way, try to reclaim his integrity as a physician?

What he did do after that gathering was to return to the healthcare system and assemble like-minded people. He now knew they existed because he had met some of them on the recent facilitated retreat. This new group met for several months before they strategically approached the hospital administration and asked for a penalty-free zone for reporting medical errors.

The status quo in the hospital where he worked, similar to the work environments of other physicians on the retreat, was that mistakes were ignored, swept under the rug, or covered up. The formation of the new group was a big step towards significant improvement in the system, promoting an environment of safety in speaking up rather than an environment of fearing blame. And it only happened because a physician practiced the skills of listening within a like-minded community and acted in alignment with his core values as a result.

After Parker gave this example, he reflected how in most communities he had known before Pendle Hill and still today, there wasn't the space to allow for people to arrive at their moments of truth.

When we practice the skills of listening and inquiry within our personal communities, we allow for each other's deepest truths to surface, which can have powerful consequences for living more authentically and purposefully.

Stay tuned for next week's essay, where we'll explore helpful practices and good questions to ask in order to better understand ourselves.