Practise deep listening and loving speech

Listen to someone you are in conflict with only to understand them, and speak only what is true and able to help.

Warum es wirkt

The fourth of Plum Village’s Five Mindfulness Trainings, Loving Speech and Deep Listening, commits a practitioner to compassionate listening and to speech that is true and inspires confidence, joy and hope, in order to promote reconciliation between people, groups and nations. It echoes an early discourse in which well-spoken words are timely, true, gentle, beneficial and loving. The mechanism is relational: a person who feels heard tends to defend less, and an undefended person can change. Laboratory experiments on high-quality listening point the same way, finding that being listened to without judgment reduced speakers’ social anxiety and the extremity of their attitudes.

So gehst du vor

1. Choose one person you are in tension with, and one conversation where your only aim is to understand how they see it.
2. While they speak, listen without preparing your reply; if you feel the urge to correct them, breathe and keep listening.
3. Reflect back what you heard and ask whether you have it right, before saying anything of your own.
4. When you speak, test each thing against the five qualities: is it timely, true, gentle, beneficial, and said with goodwill?
5. If anger rises, say you need a pause and come back later, as the training asks, rather than speaking from it.

Evidenz

The training’s wording is on the Plum Village Five Mindfulness Trainings page, and the Eighth and Ninth of the Fourteen Trainings develop it for community life. The five factors of well-spoken words are in Aṅguttara Nikāya 5.198. Itzchakov, Kluger and Castro’s four laboratory experiments found that high-quality listening reduced speakers’ social anxiety and defensive processing, increased awareness of their own mixed views, and decreased attitude extremity. (mechanistic)

The experiments are short laboratory studies of a related modern listening practice, measured on the speaker; they do not test the Plum Village training or its effect on long-running conflicts. Deep listening is not a duty to stay in a conversation that is abusive.

Quellen

• Plum Village. The Five Mindfulness Trainings (revised 15 June 2022), with an introduction by Thich Nhat Hanh. plumvillage.org.
• Plum Village. The Fourteen Mindfulness Trainings of the Order of Interbeing (revised version presented by Thich Nhat Hanh, February 2012). plumvillage.org.
• Sujato, B. (trans.). Well-Spoken Words (Vācāsutta, Aṅguttara Nikāya 5.198). SuttaCentral.
• Itzchakov, G., Kluger, A. N., & Castro, D. R. (2017). I Am Aware of My Inconsistencies but Can Tolerate Them: The Effect of High Quality Listening on Speakers’ Attitude Ambivalence. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 43(1), 105–120.

Häufiger Fehler

Listening quietly while privately building the case you will make the moment they stop — the practice is listening to understand, and the other person can usually tell the difference.