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We are traveling to Dharamsala, India, next week for a two-week conference on Eastern (Tibetan Buddhist) and Western perspectives on resilience, trauma, and mental health. We are honored to have been invited to present our work, the Wellness Compass Initiative, yet we are most looking forward to listening to our hosts and learning about their unique cultural and religious wisdom and perspectives on enhancing resilience.
As we prepare to go to Dharamsala, we know that we will benefit much more from listening to others than from speaking. This is almost always the case, and so today’s column focuses on the importance of listening. It also concludes our six-part series on some of the core practices for enhancing our wellbeing.
Deep listening is powerful as it opens new doors of learning by helping us to understand our own needs, better empathize with others, and foster more meaningful connections. Thus it’s a practice that enhances our wellbeing in all aspects of life.
When we listen deeply to ourselves, we learn what we long for and, in turn, what part of our wellbeing might need attention. When we listen deeply to others, we enhance our relationships with them. When we are open to listening to those who are different from us, we build bridges of connection and understanding. Our spiritual wellbeing can also be nurtured and strengthened when we listen to what is sacred for us.
The more we learn to listen, the more we will learn from our listening.
This column concludes our season of weekly columns and podcasts as we will be taking a break for the summer. The column and podcast will return the first week of September.
Whether you’ve recently joined our community or have been with us since the inception of this column in 2008, we sincerely appreciate your engagement. Your responses have been invaluable in shaping our content. Thank you for ‘listening.’
We wish you all a wonderful summer. May it be a time full of wonder, deep listening, and learning.
We invite you to listen to this week’s 10-minute podcast episode that expands on the content of this column. To find it—click HERE, and you will be taken to our Wellness Compass website, where you simply need to push the “play” button to listen to the audio. Or you can listen in your favorite podcast app–just search for “Wellness Compass.”
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