By Penn Garvin, Lois Passi, Wade Lee Hudson
Penn Garvin, an activist and organizer living in rural PA recently wrote the following:
How to Listen:
(1) Put aside your own beliefs and enter into new territory as an anthropologist
(2) Watch your reactions to what you hear – when do you get angry, defensive, scared, etc. – try to understand how you are being triggered
(3) Try to listen for what is the anger, fear, etc. underneath what the other person is saying – don’t just listen to the ideas, policies, “what we should do” that they are saying
(4) Validate with the other person anything that you can – don’t be fake because people sense that – but are there things being said that make sense to you even if you don’t agree and maybe there are things being said that you agree with in part
(5) Don’t try to work anything out or agree on anything at first – just be able to feed back to the person accurately what they have said to you so that you both know that they have been understood.
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Lois Passi, a Unitarian Universalist living in PA who works with her local United Way to end poverty, recently included in one of her sermons the following:
•Old and New Brain:
The old brain’s job is to detect threats to survival, and to respond to those threats either by fighting the enemy, fleeing from the enemy, or if neither of those is possible, hunkering down and enduring (fight, flight or freeze responses)….