The most basic and powerful way to connect to another person is to listen. Just listen. Perhaps the most important thing we ever give each other is our attention…. A loving silence often has far more power to heal and to connect than the most well-intentioned words.
Interpretation
Listening is a crucial way to connect with others, often more powerful than words.
This quote emphasizes the profound impact of listening in building connections between people. It suggests that offering our full attention, even in silence, can forge deeper relationships and provide healing, highlighting that sometimes our presence and attentiveness speak louder than any words could.
In practice
In a workshop discussing effective communication, one might quote this to illustrate the importance of active listening.
Helping, fixing, and serving represent three different ways of seeing life. When you help, you see life as weak. when you fix, you see life as broken. When you serve, you see life as whole. Fixing and helping may be the work of the ego, and service the work of the soul.
In this culture the soul and the heart too often go homeless. Listening creates a holy silence. When you listen generously to people, they can hear the truth in themselves, often for the first time. And in the silence of listening, you can know yourself in everyone. Eventually you may be able to hear, in everyone and beyond everyone, the unseen singing softly to itself and to you.
At the deepest level, the creative process and the healing process arise from a single source. When you are an artist, you are a healer; a wordless trust of the same mystery is the foundation of your work and its integrity.
Grieving allows us to heal, to remember with love rather than pain. It is a sorting process. One by one you let go of the things that are gone and you mourn for them. One by one you take hold of the things that have become a part of who you are and build again.
Life is known only by those who have found a way to be comfortable with change and the unknown. Given the nature of life, there may be no security, but only adventure.
How strange to think that great pain may be impermanent. Something in us all seems to want to carve it in granite, as if only this would do full honor to its terrible significance. But even pain is blessed with impermanence... p 259
There had not been this many words sounded in our house for a long time, and it was going to take a while to clean them out.
The act of forgiveness takes place in our own mind. It really has nothing to do with the other person.
I think a lot of the time in films, men get roles where they create their own destiny and women are just tools, supporters for that.
Run a hand through your hair, like the white boys do, even though the only thing that runs easily through your hair is Africa.
I think that women of color use social media to make our voices heard with or without the amplification of white women. I also think that, many times, when white women want our support, they use an umbrella of 'women supporting women' and forget that they didn't lend the same kind of support.
Children wish fathers looked but with their eyes; fathers that children with their judgment looked; and either may be wrong.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.