“When we get too caught up in the busyness of the world, we lose connection with one another – and ourselves.”
– Jack Kornfield
how to do it
Active listening and aversion cannot coexist. Active listening focuses primarily on self-awareness as the basis for listening to and communicating well with others. This may seem paradoxical, paying more attention to ourselves in order to communicate better with
others. Without clarity in our relationship with ourselves, we will have a hard time improving our relationship with others. We allow our biases and judgments to cloud our perceptions of others and how we see the world. We cannot perceive, receive, or interact authentically with others unless our self-relationship is authentic. Active listening involves being receptive to the mind, body, and speech, and listening to things we are typically deaf to.
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What it is
Aversion arises when you are faced with a stimulus that you strongly dislike or want to avoid. It lies at the heart of emotions like hatred, rage, fear, irritability, grumpiness, and annoyance. A revealing experiment is to notice how many times during the day aversion rears its head in one way or another: a twinge of annoyance when someone cuts you off during rush hour, or accuses you of doing something (even minor or trivial) that you didn’t do, or a loved one putting dishes in the dishwasher the wrong way. How many times do you get worked up about something that you have no control over? These humbling reflections can encourage us to reconsider our aversions. Non-reactivity is about awareness when aversion strikes and pausing before immediately reacting.
Mindfulness of aversion is healing because it offers us a way to at least momentarily dissolve the self-imposed straitjacket of automatic, unconscious reactions. A brief moment of awareness, even after the fact, allows us to see that we have choices in such moments. It reminds us that we don’t have to be a perpetual prisoner of aversion if we reflect on what just unfolded and whether we are better off for our emotional reaction.