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— Sounds True Presents —
10 Days to Activate Revolutionary Love
January 22–31, 2021
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Day 5
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Listen
Teaching and practice with Valarie Kaur
Today’s teaching and guided inquiry help us understand why listening to opponents is worthwhile and when it is our role to listen. We’ll explore the challenges of listening, the gifts it can bring, and how to listen when it’s difficult.
Home Practice
1. Identify an opponent you are ready to listen to. You don’t have to start with the most challenging opponent. Imagine reaching out to them. If you are ready to call them, do it now. Remember, it won’t happen in one sitting. This is about sustained listening.
2. In your wisdom journal, write what you are learning about how to listen. What is challenging? How do you keep returning to wonder?
Remember, when we feel like we have reached our limit, wonder returns us to love.
Interview and live Q&A
with Van Jones and Sister Simone Campbell: “Listen”
Listening to our opponents is seeking to understand them. It is an act that preserves their humanity—and our own. Listening gives us the information we need to fight strategically against unjust systems and invite our opponents into transformation. In this conversation, Van Jones and Sister Simone Campbell join Valarie to reveal why deep listening is not only moral, but strategic in building bridges of understanding.
Moderated by: Melissa Ann Canlas, EdD
Session Highlights:
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What is required of us when we practice deep listening?
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Listening to our own bodies to know when it is safe to listen to our opponents
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Why we must risk being changed by what we hear when we listen
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Ways to practice listening
Van Jones
Van Jones is the CEO of REFORM Alliance, a CNN host and political commentator, an Emmy Award-winning producer, and a New York Times bestselling author. Jones has been a leader in the fight for criminal justice reform for more than 25 years. He has founded and led many thriving social enterprises, including the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Color of Change, and Dream Corps—a social justice accelerator that houses Dream Corps TECH, Green For All, and #cut50, which led the charge to pass the FIRST STEP Act, a bipartisan federal bill that the New York Times calls the most substantial breakthrough in criminal justice in a generation.
Sister Simone Campbell
Sister Simone Campbell is executive director of NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, which advocates for policies that mend gaps in income and wealth in the US. She is the author of the famous “Nuns’ Letter,” considered critically important in convincing Congress to support the Affordable Care Act in 2010. Sister Campbell has led six cross-country “Nuns on the Bus” trips focused on tax and economic justice, health care, immigration reform, and other issues. She is the author of A Nun on the Bus: How All of Us Can Create Hope, Change, and Community and Hunger for Hope: Prophetic Communities, Contemplation, and the Common Good. She spoke at the 2012 and 2020 Democratic National Conventions and has appeared on 60 Minutes, The Colbert Report, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.
Melissa Ann Canlas, EdD (Moderator)
Melissa Ann Canlas, EdD, is the director of education at the Revolutionary Love Project and a full-time faculty member in the School of Education at the University of San Francisco. Dr. Canlas’s research and teaching focus on issues of educational equity and human rights. As a lifelong educator, Dr. Canlas believes that education should be directed toward learning to love and care for one another as we build systems where every person can live in wellness and dignity.
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As we come back again and again to the importance of “wonder,” I’m realizing how many people in my life seem to lack any sense of curiosity or wonder … about the world, themselves, other people … I’m just not sure how any of this works with the millions of people whose response is “I don’t want to think about any of that right now.” For example, what if the “wound” my opponent is carrying is “toxic masculinity” and the sense of entitlement that comes from a lifetime of being male in a society that tells white males that they really ARE entitled .. . and that all non-white, non-male people are “less than” (and that any questioning of those assumptions is “discrimination” against them)? What do I do with that??
Thanks for providing ways of working with the concepts from your book. It’s a challenge, but I’m trying.
i have encountered this, also. I consider people who have lost their sense of wonder wounded. I use this idea to explain why people have irrational belief systems. I am not a big believer in both sides as often the choices are between right or wrong. Entitlement has certainly led to the anger i have seen in many white males who seek to blame others for their own life choices. I am a white, educated, middle class, etc. that truly understands the privilege I am granted by society. I try to remember this every day, especially when I encounter those white males of lesser means. It’s truly a massive undertaking mentally to deal with these folks, but I still make attempts. Peace!
Interview with Van Jones and Sister Simone Campbell nit available
Delighted to see you are tapping into elder wisdom with Sister Simone. Though only 75, she is in that place of the Journey beyond 70. And experience across the years instills wisdom if we are “seeing and hearing”. Go do small things in great LOVE. Go, “be” LOVE.
Thank you Valerie, again. I am so glad I signed up for the upgrade since I have not been able to listen to many of the other days. How and when will the transcripts be available? This is just what I needed today, to hear about listening and asking the questions: Who and when? Many blessings on our work as fellow human beings. as we do as you have been saying: appreciate the gift of today and imagine the most beautiful future possible.
Inspiring indeed!!Had I listened to my body a couple of years ago,probably I would’ve had a better understanding of life. But it’s never too late to learn,thank you for coming into our homes.