Use code SUMMERPRACTICE for a 25% discount on all On Demand Courses through August 31.

Receptivity: Deep Listening as an Antidote to Reactivity and Violence

With Deborah Eden Tull recorded on October 14, 2018.

Found our teachings useful? Help us continue our work and support your teachers with a donation. Here’s how.

In these hyped up divisive times, there is an ever-greater need for tools to de-condition ourselves from reactivity. The practice of listening – within ourselves and with others – is much more significant than we often acknowledge. The contrast of receptivity against the backdrop of a world conditioned to impose, label, judge, and solve, is the contrast between non-violence and violence. By learning to take life in from a place of compassionate neutrality, we shift from spectator to engaged participant. We shift from judgment to clear seeing. And from separation to interconnection.

Listen to the audio version below, or click here to download the mp3.

Discussion

Leave a Reply

Discover more from the Dharma Library

  • Spiritual Friendship: The Whole of the Path

    We exist within a web of relatedness. Much of our stress and suffering arises in relationships. The troubles of this world too, can often be traced to a breakdown in relationship; with ourselves, with one another and with the more-than-human world. More than ever, it feels vital to bring the benefits of meditation practice off…

    Read More

  • Nathan Glyde

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Nathan Glyde – Week of March 8, 2021

    This week’s topic is The Freedom of an Unassuming Mind.

    The Buddha used the image of a tangled and knotted thread to represent the complex roots of human suffering and distress. It takes sensitivity, persistence, and care to disentangle the tangle of ‘dukkha’. A tricky part of this is that our assumptions about the world radically shape the way the world appears, while remaining quite hidden to us. Fortunately, wisdom teachings and practices bring assumptions into view and support the untying of these unseen knots, opening us into a wide and free existence.

    Read More

  • Time and Timelessness: Finding Refuge, Finding Inspiration

    Certain moments, events and experiences open our awareness beyond the everyday to a sense of something more eternally present. Meditation points our attention to just this place, which the poet TS Eliot called ‘the point of intersection of the timeless with time’. Contemplating life from such a perspective we can often find fresh resources of…

    Read More

  • Meditating and speaking: simultaneously practicing Sila, Samadhi and Panna

    The communicative loop of listening and speaking forms a powerful karmic workshop. Language taps into our karmic archive, sankhara. It reaches other people and, if they are listening, there is mind-to-mind contact. Relational contact is intrinsically powerful because humans are intrinsically relational: when we engage together, our mutual responsiveness amplifies our efforts. Speaking and listening…

    Read More

  • Nirmala Werner

    Daily Meditation Recordings, with Nirmala Werner – Week of Nov 27 – 1 Dec, 2023

    This week’s topic is “Longing for Belonging; Becoming Intimate with Expansion and Contraction”. Although people are more connected than ever through technology, there seems to be a global trance of “not belonging”. In this week’s sessions we will explore how we separate from our own selves and from others, and above all how we can come home to all our parts and sink back into a sense of belonging.

    Read More