Andrew Forsthoefel: The Transformational Power Of Listening - 012

03/28/18 • 59 min

At 23, Andrew Forsthoefel walked out the back door of his home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, with a backpack, an audio recorder and a sign that read “Walking to Listen.” He had just graduated from university and was ready to begin his adult life, but he didn’t know how. So he decided he’d walk and listen on a journey of 4,000 miles across the USA over the course of 11 months.

What started as a quest to explore and to listen to other's perspectives, quickly became a deep, introspective journey into his own self; his fears, doubts, joys, solace and loneliness. As he navigated his way across the US, having interactions ranging from the most ordinary to the most profound, he found a world that was a mirror of himself and a journey that was a pilgrimage of the soul.

Along the way, thousands of people shared their stories with him, often exposing their most intimate selves to a stranger who was deeply committed to listening. Those conversations were often tinged with threads of pain, be they from long-held divisions in race and class or from the moving stories of personal heartbreak and sacrifice. Each one provided Andrew an opportunity for deep listening and reflection, and within it the potential for profound inner transformation.

By the end of his journey, Andrew was a different person with a new perspective on what it means to come of age today. Having been transformed through the power of listening, his experience is a beacon of light to inspire others to step out into the world, connect deeply to others and find themselves in the process.

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Nancy Ellen Abrams: Finding A God That Could Be Real – 011

Many people today often feel dislocated and confused about the idea of God. Since Isaac Newton’s findings of the universe and the birth of the Big Bang theory, we’ve had a hard time reconciling scientific truths of the cosmos and what the major religions tell us about both the start of the universe and the role of God.

This incoherence between science and traditional views of God has left us without a creation story and a map of meaning for our lives that we so desperately yearn for as humans. Or has it?

Nancy Ellen Abrams, a philosopher of science, a lawyer and lifelong atheist believes she has found a new understanding of God that marries faith and fact. Having undergone a remarkable healing from an eating disorder, she set out to understand how and why believing in a higher power is not only beneficial but also deeply essential to our existence.

In her book, A God That Could Be Real, Abrams explores a radically new way of thinking about God. She dismantles several common assumptions about God and shows why an omniscient, omnipotent God that created the universe and plans what happens is incompatible with science—but that this doesn’t preclude a God that can comfort and empower us.

An absolutely practical, pragmatic and science-backed understanding of God is perhaps exactly what we need in this 21st century of global interconnectedness and challenge.

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Patrick O'Malley Ph.D: Making Sense Of Loss - 013

"Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch. A fearful thing to love, to hope, to dream, to be. A thing for fools, this. And a holy thing. Tis a human thing, love, a holy thing, to love what death has touched.” - Yehuda HaLevi

To love is the fiercest and most essential of human callings and in our loss, our grief becomes the mirror to the depth that love. When we lose a loved one to bereavement or separation, it is often the case that we feel swallowed whole by the vastness of that grief and the pain of the loss.

Making sense of this pain, weaving gold out of the suffering, is a delicate art form and an essential responsibility for us emerge with a deeper clarity, meaning and integration from our losses.

In exploring this process, the popular five stage model of grief emerged in the 1960s to help people comprehend their feelings. The model speaks of a chronological step-by-step process of denial, anger, bargaining, depression and finally acceptance. To find closure, it is posited that one must go through each of these stages, but not everybody fits this process.

Through his own tragic loss and decades of therapeutic practice, grief specialist Patrick O'Malley soon discovered that what we need to process these events and the unpredictable spectrum of feelings that accompany them is to create our own grief story. A narrative that helps tell the full sweep our of our loss, that encompasses all of our interiority so that we may be with it in its fullness.

In his book Getting Grief Right Patrick speaks of the vital healing power of story-telling to reframe grieving as an act of the deepest form of love. He invites us to explore grief not as a process of recovery, but as the ongoing narrative of our relationship with the one we’ve lost—to be fully felt, told, and woven into our lives.

In his own words: “Sadness, regret, confusion, yearning—all the experiences of grief—are a part of the narrative of love." When we learn to embrace these we create a compassionate environment for our feelings and a story that honours the loss and moves us forward in a deeper, enriched and vulnerable way.