How to Listen
by Thich Nhat Hanh
2024 · Parallax Press · 128 pages
In How to Listen, Thich Nhat Hanh (1926–2022) demonstrates how deep listening is a fundamental building block of good communication and one of the foundations of mindfulness, meditation, concentration, insight, and compassion. Learning how to listen with equanimity to life itself generates insight into the true nature of the deep connection to all things. From this place of understanding—knowing that one is not separate—the capacity to listen deepens even further.
With clear and gentle guidance, we learn how truly listening—to ourselves, to each other, to Mother Earth, and to the many “bells of mindfulness” that are available to us in each moment—is the foundation of this practice, an expression of love and a solution to our deepest and most urgent large-scale conflicts.
Thich Nhat Hanh was a world-renowned spiritual teacher and peace activist. Born in Vietnam in 1926, he became a Zen Buddhist monk at the age of sixteen. Over seven decades of teaching, he published more than 100 books, which have sold more than four million copies in the United States alone. Exiled from Vietnam in 1966 for promoting peace, his teachings on Buddhism as a path to social and political transformation are responsible for bringing the mindfulness movement to Western culture. In 1967, he was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King. He founded the Van Hanh Buddhist University in Saigon, the School of Youth and Social Service and the international Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism in France, now the largest Buddhist monastery in Europe and the heart of a growing community of mindfulness practice centers around the world. He passed away in 2022 at the age of 95 at his root temple, Tu Hieu, in Hue, Vietnam. [Text Source: Parallax Press]
“Listening deeply to another is a form of meditation. ”
