listening with love

(Taken from “The Art of Listening with Love” by Abraham Schmitt)

Listening with love transforms what it loves. To listen totally means that one takes another’s whole life into one’s being and cares for it.

When I listen with love I open myself, my life to another person. I ask him to come in just as he is. No disguising is necessary from me.  Now, for once, he need not put on a mask or distort anything. I say to him that he is a unique human being and that I will value all he can entrust to me. He can now fully reveal his inner world and I will receive the whole person by listening. The door to his inner world is his words – his own description of how he experiences it. My door to entering that world is by listening. When this is done, something very meaningful happens.

An interpersonal transaction of this depth can happen only if it is done with love. It is far too risky for anyone to expose his inner life unless he has the absolute assurance that it will be used solely for his good. Love is the only guarantee one can give. It is when I really operate on the law of ultimate love that I can give someone the assurance that I will do nothing else with his life but what is for his greatest welfare.

People intuitively measure the depth of love of all persons in all interpersonal relationships. If love is felt to be genuine, they will reveal much. If it is lacking, they will then say nothing important. They may even disguise and distort what they say so as to protect themselves from being mutilated by what they are sharing. But love opens the way to the full depth of another person.

Love will never hurt what it loves. Another person’s ultimate good is the lover’s final goal. With love as the dominating motivation in life, one goes down to the hurt, the agony, the deformity of another human being in order to heal, to correct, to bring comfort.

In actual practice, listening with love is an art. I find it expedient to be constantly communicating my caring to the one who is talking. At times it need only by a simple affirmation like, “Yes, I see” or “Go on, I am with you”;  but my voice must carry empathy.

At times it is necessary to restate the words that I hear to convey the assurance that I heard it all.

On other occasions it is more appropriate to ask for more feelings, with expressions like “That must have been painful!” or “How could you endure it?”  or simply “Oh! That is beautiful.”

Then there are times when the speaker cannot put into words his own heart’s cry.  It is blatantly obvious to me so I will respond cautiously with, “What I hear you saying is ……… “  Then I pick up all the parts of the many sentences, as if they are pieces from a jigsaw puzzle, and with the help of the individual I put them together. This can bring about a startling revelation or insight that was not known before.

Listening on this level is a creative art. It means that the fragmented pieces of a person are brought together into a single meaningful whole. A new life is born at that moment.