How to Listen

Listening with compassion can solve our most pressing issues--across global politics and interpersonal relationships and within our own hearts and minds.

In How to Listen, Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh demonstrates how deep listening is a fundamental building block of good communication. But perhaps more fundamentally, listening is central to our practice, a basic ingredient to strengthen our capacity for mindfulness, concentration, insight, and compassion. Learning how to listen with equanimity to life itself, we generate insight into the true nature of our deep connection to all things. And from this place of understanding--when we know that we aren’t separate--our capacity to listen deepens even further.

With clear and gentle guidance from Thich Nhat Hanh, we learn how truly listening--to ourselves, to each other, to Mother Earth, and to the many ＂bells of mindfulness＂ that are available to us in each moment--is the foundation of our practice, an expression of love, and a solution to our deepest and most urgent large-scale conflicts.

All Mindfulness Essentials books are illustrated with playful sumi-ink drawings by California artist Jason DeAntonis.

Thich Nhat Hanh was a world-renowned spiritual teacher and peace activist. Born in Vietnam in 1926, he became a Zen Buddhist monk at the age of sixteen. Over seven decades of teaching, he published more than 100 books, which have sold more than four million copies in the United States alone. Exiled from Vietnam in 1966 for promoting peace, his teachings on Buddhism as a path to social and political transformation are responsible for bringing the mindfulness movement to Western culture. He established the international Plum Village Community of Engaged Buddhism in France, now the largest Buddhist monastery in Europe and the heart of a growing community of mindfulness practice centers around the world. He passed away in 2022 at the age of 95 at his root temple, Tu Hieu, in Hue, Vietnam.

Jason DeAntonis is an award-winning polymathic Bay Area artist, known for his fine carpentry and detailed woodwork. He has also worked in sculpture, costume design, glass blowing, painting, printmaking, and book illustration. His work has appeared in Parallax Press books Mindfulness in the Garden and the Mindfulness Essentials series, among others. He lives in Berkeley, California.