SIM's Thursday evening sittings from July through December will focus on Listening and Understanding As Meditative Practice. The evenings will be structured to review the core practices and supporting meditative psychology we've been studying during the last year, and apply them directly to this theme. This approach is in keeping with our commitment to explore the application of meditative awareness to the realities of daily life.

Listening is a critical life skill. Skillful listening can create an environment that supports understanding, conflict resolution, reconciliation, and healing. It can make us feel cared for, heard, and seen. It can enhance any activity that involves relationships with others — family dynamics, friendships, intimacy, education and learning, community and institutional life, and business transactions.

Listening is also one of the most ignored, underdeveloped, and misunderstood life skills. Unskillful listening can create an environment that leads to misunderstanding, conflict, separation, and hostility. It can make us feel devalued, disrespected, and harmed. It can diminish any activity that involves relationships with others.

And most of us, of course, see the problem as the inability of others to listen carefully and understand.

The implications of this information are profound. Skillful listening and understanding are preconditions to skillful decision-making, problem-solving, relationships, conduct, and speech. If we take action based on an impaired or distorted understanding of any situation, our efforts will be plagued with difficulties from the beginning. Only when we listen fully can we hope to know what should be done, how we can help, and what will be skillful.

During the coming months, we'll use our Thursday evening gatherings to explore a number of questions: What is skillful listening and understanding? Why is it frequently difficult to listen skillfully and to understand what is being communicated? What are the specific obstacles to listening, and to understanding? Why do we think we are good listeners when, in fact, we are not? How can we transform listening and understanding into an ongoing, every day practice of meditative awareness?

We'll begin by exploring the historical role of listening in the development of Buddhist psychology and the central and functional role of listening in the practice of Insight (Vipassana) meditation. We'll look both at formal and informal models of practice with particular emphasis on listening as a meditative practice in everyday life. We'll then move to the exploration of specific practices we can all use to begin investigating the role listening and understanding plays in our individual lives and assess the skillfulness and quality of our current listening and understanding skills.