Neurosis is the old word for depression and anxiety.  To suffer is to bear something unpleasant, something painful.  M. Scott Peck’s book “The Road Less Traveled,” begins with the sentence, “Life is difficult.”  These ideas illustrate a point I find to be very important:  when we do our legitimate suffering – i.e. feel our way through a difficult change, when we turn “toward” the pain of whatever life has brought us, and bear the pain, we change.  The outcome of that change is wisdom.  Wisdom is respect for the sacredness and mystery of life and what it is to be alive.  With wisdom comes compassionate knowing.  When we turn away from suffering, we cheat ourselves and those around us of badly needed wisdom.

There is tremendous suffering in the world.  The communities we live in, many are suffering the basics of hunger, to the complexities of bereavement.   We need each other to help one another bear these sufferings.  This is the essence of love.

My approach to opening deals with possibilities – moving through a metaphorical doorway, from one state of being to another.  This can be accomplished in different ways.  I recall Goldstein and Kornfield, in their book on meditation, “Seeking the Heart of Wisdom,” stating mediation opens us to that which is closed.

My primary work is social relationships where openings occur through conversation, and interaction. Sometimes exchange is intentional, and structured – sometimes spontaneous, sometimes both.  Nevertheless, when we dialogue we travel together.  Where the talking and listening started, took us somewhere else.  We pass through an opening.  What fosters openings?

Otto Scharmer’s ideas in his book, “Theory U,” deserve our attention.  In pages 11 through 13 (and elsewhere) he denotes “four basic types of listening.”

The first type he calls, “downloading.”  The essence of this type of listening is habit.  In other words, my habitual thinking just says, “Yeah, I know this already,” and that is as far as it goes.  The second type he calls, “object-focused,” or “factual.” In his description of this type he uses the word “attending.”  Having used this work myself for sometime, I take it to mean to be “present to,” what is being shared.  However, this level of listening lacks depth.  This is so as we are “hearing,” from where we are — my judgments, inner filters, ME.  The third type of listening Scharmer offers is deeper and most present in psychotherapy and high level process consultation.  The root of this type is empathy.  In fact he refers to it as “empathic listening.”  Empathia means to “feel with,” the speaker.  The old adage, “walk a mile in his shoes,” carries this notion. Finally, the fourth type of listening he calls “generative listening.”  We move beyond empathy to “communion,” or “grace.”  We may be speaking, but listening is beyond words.  It is an energetic exchange or dance between or amongst souls.

I believe the third and fourth levels of listening cultivate opening.  In my work, I often invite clients to risk their truth (inner life) with myself or other(s).  When one does this, one feels, heard, seen and validated by the listener — this “opening,”  often leads to healing and intimacy.  And, this would be at Scharmer’s third type or level.  Intimacy as an outcome equals closeness, affinity, leading to trust.

Finally it is Scharmer’s fourth level of listening, “generative listening,” that fosters what one of my old psychologist friends called “organismic,” change — meaning the whole (body, mind, and soul — individiually and collectively).  Let us support Otto Scharmer and his colleagues efforts to deepen the expansion of these ideas and they’re living enactment.

Vaclav Havel stated in 1994: “I think there are good reasons for suggesting that the modern age has ended. Today, many things indicate that we are going through a transitional period, when it seems that something is on the way out and something else is painfully being born. It is as if something were crumbling, decaying, and exhausting itself – while something else, still indistinct, were rising from the rubble.”

Since 1994, so many things have fallen apart, and continue to do so daily. As I write the world economy is in shambles, as well as other micro and marco social systems and institutions.  Transition is the keyword: changing from one way of being to something different.

Adam Kahane, in his book “Power and Love: A Theory and Practice of Social Change,” brings us the wisdom of Martin Luther King and 20th Century theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich to our contemporary attention. For instance, Tillich defines power “as the drive of everything living to realize itself, with increasing intensity and extensity.” Tillich defines love “as the drive toward unity of the separated.”

For millennia we have been in relationship with the Divine, or Great Mystery of the origin of life in a mostly a passive way. Now it appears we are shifting from passive to active, or even “interactive.”

Nevertheless, when these contacts occur, I encourage you to listen. When we listen, we are giving the gift of attention to the speaker. This is profoundly simple, yet potentially transformative. We all know what it feels like to be “heard.” When someone truly devotes attention to our words, ideas, notions, etc. we, the speaker wants to share more. To tell and tell and tell. What happens in this process is an opening – an opening to the inner world of the speaker. From that inner world comes the new: innovation.