Weekend workshop: The art of listening - an act of peace

The goal of this workshop is to connect people with the roles that listening and being heard play in their biography and to explore how they can use listening as an instrument of peace. The elements we will work with include sound experiences, biographical exercises, and dyads as a way of training a more artful listening.

In the first session we will look at early experiences with sound and music and how they form a foundation to people’s biographies.

In the second session our focus will be on the interpersonal dimension of listening. We will introduce the idea that there is often a disconnect between the youth and the older generation, where the youth are inspired by high ideas and ideals but lacking resources, and the older generation guards the resources they have built up over time. With a lack of artful listening skills, the older generation tends to say: the youth is the future! which places all the responsibility for action on their shoulders. Without access to the resources needed to implement their ideas and ideals, the fire of the youth can fizzle out – the potential is lost. With artful listening the older generation can come to see the youth not as the future but as their living past. They can actually start to listen into their past by listening to the youth. With that they take back their own responsibility to form a future. On the other side, the youth can hear into their future reflected in the stories of the elders. Doing so, they develop artful listening skills themselves and become role models in their future.

In the third session we will connect listening to the higher senses of language, concept and the I in the other. Through these higher senses, we come to see not only the other as a striving human being, but this striving force also in ourselves. In this encounter the seeds for peace take root.