The Sacred Art of Listening: Forty Reflections for Cultivating a Spiritual Practice / Edition 1

by Kay Lindahl

Overview

Hearing and listening are two different things. Learning to listen—really listen—requires sacred practice.

The Sacred Art of Listening guides you through forty practices of deep listening—to our Source, to ourselves, and to each other.

Inspiring text and contemplative artwork combine to communicate the three essential qualities of deep listening—silence, reflection and presence. They demonstrate that the key to healthy relationships and spiritual transformation can be as basic as practicing the art of listening.

You will learn how to:

• Speak clearly from the heart
• Communicate with courage and compassion
• Heighten your awareness and sensitivity to opportunities for deep listening
• Enhance your ability to listen to people with different belief systems

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781893361447
Publisher:	TURNER PUB CO
Publication date:	12/01/2001
Series:	The Art of Spiritual Living
Edition description:	1ST SKYLIG
Pages:	160
Sales rank:	320,735
Product dimensions:	7.90(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Kay Lindahl, the founder of The Listening Center in Long Beach, California, is author of How Does God Listen?; Practicing the Sacred Art of Listening: A Guide to Enrich Your Relationships and Kindle Your Spiritual Life and The Sacred Art of Listening: Forty Reflections for Cultivating a Spiritual Practice. She is coeditor of Women, Spirituality and Transformative Leadership: Where Grace Meets Power (all SkyLight Paths).

Kay Lindahl is available to speak on the following topics:

• The Sacred Art of Listening
• The Power of Listening
• The Transforming Nature of Listening
• The Lost Art of Listening
• Is Anybody Listening?
• The Importance of Listening for Health Care Professionals

Table of Contents

Part One: The Beginning

Your Invitation 3
The Circle of Life 6

Part Two: Practicing the Sacred Art of Listening

1. Qualities of Deep Listening
Listening for essence 11
2. A Sacred Art
Listening as spiritual awareness 14
3. Using Silence
Listening to access your stillpoint 17
4. Learning from Experience
Listening for new possibilities 20
5. Communion
Listening to communicate 23
6. Rituals
Listening for meaning 26
7. Dialogue or Discussion
Listening for context 29
8. Seeking Common Ground
Listening to appreciate 32
9. Common Values
Listening for connection 35
10. Presence
Listening from your heart 38
11. Conversations of the Heart
Listening for soul 41
12. Creating Safe Spaces
Listening with love 44
13. Self-Expression
Listening with humility 47
14. Practicing Peace
Listening to understand 50
15. Creating Harmony
Listening for integration 53
16. Delving Deeper
Listening for insight 56
17. Simple Sharing
Listening for experiences 59
18. Love in Action
Listening as caring 62
19. Hearing Nuances
Listening for each voice 65
20. Slowing Down
Listening to reflect 68
21. The Voice Within
Listening for change 71
22. Assumptions
Listening for clarity 74
23. Learning from Passion
Listening for vision 77
24. Contemplative Prayer
Listening for guidance 80
25. The Agenda-free Conversation
Listening with openness 83
26. Cultural Differences
Listening without prejudice 86
27. Attention
Listening for perspective 89
28. Hospitality
Listening as a gift 92
29. Focus
Listening for the holy 95
30. Engage First
Listening beyond appearances 98
31. The Challenge of Change
Listening creatively 101
32. Relationships
Listening for deeper connections 104
33. The Gift of Solitude
Listening to the silence 107
34. Practicing Reflection
Listening for the questions 110
35. A Sacred Meeting Place
Listening through prayer 113
36. Recognizing Intolerance
Listening for your humanity 116
37. Patience
Listening with intention 119
38. Harvest Time
Listening with gratitude 122
39. Being Yourself
Listening with authenticity 125
40. Being Complete
Listening beyond the past 128

Part Three: In Closing

Listening in Your World 133
Principles of Dialogue 134
How This Book Was Created 136
How the Art Was Created 137
Acknowledgments 138
Source Notes 140

Editorial Reviews

"The lost art of listening is found in The Sacred Art of Listening. The work of Kay Lindahl could assist you to find your spiritual path."
—Pauline Oliveros, composer/performer and founder of Deep Listening®

“This elegantly profound book will help lead us to a more enlightened time when the listening ear, not the penetrating eye, will be our primary symbol of understanding. The Sacred Art of Listening will help us create harmony within ourselves as well as with all around us.”
—Brooke Medicine Eagle, author of Buffalo Woman Comes Singing and The Last Ghost Dance

“This is a truly beautiful book, and a powerful one—opening us in an effective and practical way to wondrous new depths of human living. So much in so few pages, true wisdom.”
—M. Basil Pennington, OCSO, coauthor of Finding Grace at the Center: The Beginning of Centering Prayer

“I like the insight that life is too often defined by meetings instead of meeting. We need both at the same time. The Sacred Art of Listening, in its wise and reflective way, tells us how. Read, ponder and inwardly digest it.”
—Malcolm Boyd, poet/writer-in-residence, Cathedral Center of St. Paul, Los Angeles

“The Sacred Art of Listening unlocks multiple doors of separation and allows the reader to enter into realms of authentic and clear relationships.”
—Rt. Rev. William E. Swing, Episcopal Bishop, Diocese of California; founder and president of the United Religions Initiative

From the Publisher

LISTEN …

If you take 1 thing away from this profile of Kay Lindahl, today, it should be this: She's the woman behindThe Sacred Art of Listening. As Editor of ReadTheSpirit, a well-thumbed copy of Kay's book has been a part of my own collection of essential reading for more than a decade.

At this point in her life, Kay is a highly respected interfaith and cross-cultural teacher and a tireless professional in knitting together diverse networks of women and men. She regularly crisscrosses the country in her work, although she is primarily based in Long Beach, California. (That's just south of Los Angeles, where she also serves on the board for the "Four Chaplains" memorialon the Queen Mary.)

Given that brief summary of her life, you might wonder: Why isn’t her book about the sacred art ofteaching… orspeaking… ororganizing? She embodies all of those skills, after all. The answer is that she discovered years ago—thinking about her many experiences with groups: "The art of listening was the main skill that was missing for most participants." Let me repeat that: She found that most people who are drawn to diverse dialogue groups have a real problem with—listening. Is that conclusion making you smile and nod? Recognize that truth? Kay did, early on, and created this marvelous interactive book onThe Sacred Art of Listening, subtitled:Forty Reflections for Cultivating a Spiritual Practice. You can move through the book’s meditations at your own pace, skip around among the 40, go back and reread them—and use them in your own group.

However, unlike many of the authors we profile in our cover stories, Kay Lindahl is not a household name nationwide. Among her accomplished goals as a listener, teacher, organizer, writer and an activist promoting diversity, she has not pursued celebrity.

So, today, rather than a typical author Q and A, as Editor of ReadTheSpirit magazine, I’m going to share with you …

Four Things You Need to Know about Kay Lindahl

1. You can meet her.

She’s presenting one of the workshops in the August 10–13 North American Interfaith Network (NAIN) 2014 conference in Detroit. Last year, this influential gathering was held in Toronto and, this year, it will be hosted at Wayne State University in the historic heart of Detroit. If you care about the future of interfaith relationships on this continent—and around the world—you’ll plan to attend this NAIN event in August.Here is the NAIN-Connect page where you can register right now. The final schedule of events has not yet been published, but this conference will be jam packed with: workshops, inspiring and challenging talks, plenary sessions to discuss future projects, some off-site tours exploring the history of religious diversity in the global crossroads that Detroit represents. Most importantly, NAIN is a gathering of remarkable men and women like Kay Kindahl—and including a number of ReadTheSpirit’s authors as well. If you decide to attend NAIN, please email us [e-mail] let us know you’re coming.

2. She is a master of creative collaboration.

As publishers ourselves, our ReadTheSpirit staff is working in 2014 to dramatically expand the way we collaboratively create books. We are impressed that Kay helped to gather a circle of friends to create an award-winning book that we also highly recommend,Women, Spirituality and Transformative Leadership: Where Grace Meets Power. Here is a shortened version of the story behind that book …

FROM THE BOOK:This book was born out of a deep curiosity about the current pattern of women’s spiritual leadership in North America and profound excitement about the possibilities that lie before us as women of faith and spirit. … The four editors of this book met at the Parliament of the World’s Religions in Melbourne, Australia, in December 2009. This Parliament was buzzing with feminine energy. People everywhere were talking about Earth-based spirituality, the Sacred Feminine, feminine principles, the full inclusion of women, women’s leadership and the critical global issues facing women and their children. Sprinkled liberally among the more than 6,000 attendees were little pink buttons with the question, "What happens when women lead?" …

Our global experiences at the Parliament inspired us to learn more about women’s spiritual leadership in our part of the world—North America. … The four of us created a new organization in 2010—Women of Spirit and Faith—with a commitment to core principles that model a different way of working: shared leadership, collaborative practices, circle processes, deep listening, mindfulness and compassionate action. The organization exists to invite the many brilliant threads of feminine spiritual leadership into relationship and to support emerging patterns of transformation. …

The next step was holding a retreat later that year for 25 women spiritual leaders from the United States and Canada. Leaders representing diversity of age, geography, ethnicity, spiritual orientation, and communities of passion came together for three days of dialogue and inquiry focused on the potential for collaboration among the many organizations and networks represented. … This conversation expanded in April 2011 with a larger gathering. … More than 150 women from across the United States and Canada came together in San Francisco to experience many diverse expressions of spiritual leadership.

This process drew together the writers—and the emerging ideas—that formed the book,Women, Spirituality and Transformative Leadership, finally written by more than two dozen different women and published by SkyLight Paths.

Here at ReadTheSpirit, we receive proposals for new books nearly every week—almost always by single writers planning to create books by themselves. That’s the traditional role of an author—a lone writer in a room somewhere. At ReadTheSpirit, we published our first collaborative book in early 2010, calledFriendship and Faith, which featured dozens of women co-authoring a book. We’ve been encouraging collaboration ever since. Soon, ReadTheSpirit will publish our first comic book,Bullying Is No LaughingMatter,which is a convergence of dozens of cartoonists and comic artists. We believe that such innovative, cooperative books hold great promise as effective tools for building stronger, healthier communities.

So, we celebrate Kay Lindahl’s skills in this area—and we invite you to learn more from her by coming to NAIN in August and by buying a copy of her book, now.

3. She’s a certified listening professional.

Kay is certified by theInternational Listening Association, which is the leading professional group for promoting the study, development and teaching of listening. Kay also has apersonal website, where you can explore her work. It’s an unusual little website with slowly moving words about listening that scroll across her home page—plus a series of links to read more about what she describes as “my work”—the “Listening Center.” In an interview, Kay talked about this program:

KAY:The Listening Center is the name of my work. It’s not a physical place. It’s the name of my professional work. In 1991, I started doing a meditation practice. I quickly became acquainted with centering prayer and that has been my practice every since. That has given me a deeper, richer relationship with God. I was trained byBasil Penningtonand knew him well.

My denomination is the Episcopal Church, but I consider myself a very progressive Christian. About the same time I was exploring meditation and centering prayer, I also founded a local interfaith group. We got together so we could talk and find out more about each other and, right away, we found that we needed dialogue—and we especially needed to find out what works in listening to others. We wanted to avoid either debating or trying to convert.

My husband and I had moved to a new community and we realized that there was no Episcopal church nearby. We ended up being spark plugs to have a church founded in our community and the first gatherings of that church were in our home. I became very engaged in this fledgling church and the bishop at that time,Bob Anderson, came to visit us. We became friends and we would meet often. This was in the mid 1990s and we would meet and talk about centering prayer and dialogue and the start of this new church. He asked me to do a weekend retreat with clergy on prayer.

As we got to planning this, it became clear that there were three things: Listening to God, which is centering prayer, listening to others, which is the dialogue process, and then as we planned this we realize that we also wanted to talk about listening to Self. I was generating exercises and ways of presenting these three areas. The retreat was very effective. Bob and I did it one more together. It was effective again. As my mentor, Bob urged me to keep doing this. So the Listening Center came up as a way to do this work since 1997.

4. She believes this is a transformative moment.

If you haven’t already been enticed to learn more about Kay Lindahl, consider this: She believes firmly that this is a moment of historic, transformative change around the world. In our interview, she said:

KAY:So much is happening right now—and very quickly in many many places! I see a lot of people interested in finding new ways to approach all the challenges we face in our world today. There’s a lot of chaos in the world. You can’t be blind to that. But I see a groundswell of action and activity and thinking that’s going on. I see more and more of it. This is bubbling up now. This is a transformative moment and I am very hopeful about whatever is coming next for humankind.

I am seeing a great deal of movement and interest across North America, but I am also talking worldwide. I have great hope for the work being done around the world bythe United Religions Initiative(URI). Through URI, I am hearing about people doing amazing work in the Middle East and Asia and other parts of the world as well. Some of the work is just mind-blowing—fueling my hope that we are onto a major transformation of consciousness on our planet. I know it. I can feel it emerging.

Care to learn more about URI?

The link above goes to URI’s homepage online. There also isa Wikipedia overviewarticle about URI’s work.

Care to read more about global peacemaking?

ReadTheSpirit hosts the website Interfaith Peacemakers, coordinated by global peacemaker Daniel Buttry and featuring a rotating series of inspiring profiles of men and women who dare to cross boundaries in pursuit of peace.See what’s new on theInterfaith Peacemakersfront page today.

(Originally published atwww.ReadTheSpirit.com, an on line magazine covering religion, spirituality, values and interfaith and cross-cultural issues.)

- See more at: http://www.readthespirit.com/explore/4-things-need-know-kay-lindahl/#sthash.SRPwOrPr.dpuf

Read the Spirit

Surely one test of belief is its application in everyday life. Restoring the sacred to the daily art of communication is an oft-overlooked avenue of practice, but one that finds its voice in this slender, substantive volume. Lindahl, the founder of the Listening Center in Laguna Niguel, Calif., summons us back to "the possibility of Listening as a key to peace in the world." For her, "listening is far more than hearing words"; it is a sacred art that requires reflection, illustration, meditation and practice. These 40 meditations are exercises in mindfulness that entreat us to slow down and practice silence, contemplation and presence with ourselves, others and God. The brief passages can be read superficially with little gain, but quieted learners can find gems among them about commitment, humility and favoring integration over balance, to name a few of the themes. Hand-drawn ink mandalas by Amy Schnapper complement each passage and should prove helpful to practitioners who might need a visual anchor while contemplating Lindahl's various themes. The meditation that is prescribed here feels Eastern, but the volume will be of great use to many types of readers, regardless of beliefs. The closing section, "Principles of Dialogue" (nine guidelines on listening to other people), crystallizes the tenets lovingly explored in the previous pages. The book is not large in size, but it is potentially powerful in application. (Mar.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Lindahl is the founder of the nondenominational and omnifaith Listening Center, an institute dedicated to the skill of listening to others, and this book is a reflection of her work there. Her gentle conclusions and recommendations, including such notions as "suspend status" and "honor silence," are desirable in many circumstances, and Lindahl skillfully gives them a religious overtone; her work is ably supported by Schnapper's mandala-like illustrations. For most collections. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

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