How to Listen [Paperback]

Listening with compassion can solve our most pressing issues—across global politics and interpersonal relationships and within our own hearts and minds.

In How to Listen, Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh demonstrates how deep listening is a fundamental building block of good communication. But perhaps more fundamentally, listening is central to our practice, a basic ingredient to strengthen our capacity for mindfulness, concentration, insight, and compassion. Learning how to listen with equanimity to life itself, we generate insight into the true nature of our deep connection to all things. And from this place of understanding—when we know that we aren’t separate—our capacity to listen deepens even further. 

With clear and gentle guidance from Thich Nhat Hanh, we learn how truly listening—to ourselves, to each other, to Mother Earth, and to the many “bells of mindfulness” that are available to us in each moment—is the foundation of our practice, an expression of love, and a solution to our deepest and most urgent large-scale conflicts. 

All Mindfulness Essentials books are illustrated with playful sumi-ink drawings by California artist Jason DeAntonis. We have here another quiet, useful publication in “The Mindfulness Essentials Series” of small books by Thich Nhat Hanh, produced by the nonprofit publishing house founded decades ago by the Zen master. ... This book is organized into very short chapters — each one or two pages of a pocket-sized paperback. The second of these is titled, “We Need to Train” and includes this explanation of how important and elusive true listening can be in our lives:

We must listen to the other person so that they have a chance to express themselves. We try our best to listen,l³,