In Praise of Gene Knudsen Hoffman, Founder of Compassionate Listening

Gene Knudsen Hoffman, the originator of Compassionate Listening as a practice, died peacefully on July 19, 2010. Gene was a mother and grandmother, international peacemaker, counselor, Quaker, poet, actress, writer, teacher and so much more. She was a remarkable individual who influenced many during her lifetime. 

Gene was my treasured mentor from 1996 - 2004, until her mind rejected coherent patterns of recognition and communication. Even though I lost her years ago, her death has touched me deeply. 

Over the past two weeks I've been sifting and reading through a huge file of her letters, transmissions, and articles. Carrying around my three-inch thick “Gene file” like a precious jewel, I have been amazed at her voluminous outpouring and sharing. Some people never find or recognize their mentors in life. I am grateful that I found Gene, and that we both recognized the nature of our relationship. (Photo of Gene and Leah by Carol Hwoschinsky, 1997)

In the early 1990s, I was leading citizen delegations to Israel and Palestine for the Earthstewards Network. I felt frustrated that my work seemed to be adding to the polarization of the conflict in a part of the world where I had lived, and that I loved so dearly. I brought participants from the United States who were mostly pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli. Almost everyone seemed to be caught up with side-taking. I was seeking a new framework for my efforts and continued to be drawn to the field of reconciliation. I found the framework I was looking for in Gene's articles.

Gene had begun her international listening work in the 1980s in the former Soviet Union. After Glasnost, like many working in the citizen diplomacy arena, she turned her reconciliation efforts to Israel and Palestine. As a young peace activist, I came across Gene’s articles and pamphlets regularly. We were both members of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (F.O.R.), an organization she joined in 1952 and had worked with intimately. We both began our listening work in the Middle East in 1990 and had overlapping interests.

I finally called Gene in the spring of 1996, and invited her to join my next delegation and teach us how to practice Compassionate Listening with Israelis and Palestinians. Gene and I met the following week in Oregon. Despite our forty-year age difference, we discovered an instant “soul sister” connection that bridged the generation gap. It seemed that with every subject we discussed, we found another nest of connections. We knew and loved the same people, the same projects, authors, and ideas. We shared similar experiences and feelings about our activist histories, and the "enemy making" we experienced in the peace movement. We acknowledged the challenges of working with our own self-righteousness.

Gene immediately agreed to come with me to the Middle East that November. She also felt that Richard Deats, former Director of F.O.R. and then editor of Fellowship magazine, would be ideal for the delegation. Richard was an expert in nonviolence whom Gene had wanted to introduce to Yasser Arafat, founder of the Palestine Liberation Organization.

From the day we met, Gene had a mission to educate me about her reconciliation efforts, and most specifically, her “Compassionate Listening” work, and I had an equal hunger to absorb her transmissions. After our first delegation together, it was clear that she recognized me as one who would carry her work forward.

Gene writes about our partnership and our mutual commitment to reconciliation: “Sixteen years of one-on-one listening passed. My journeys resulted in more articles, more explanations, but no converts, as far as I knew. Before Leah, no one else had wanted to work with me because they said I didn’t advocate for anything. When you advocate, you pick a side and you have enemies. I didn’t take a side. When people asked me who I was advocating for, I told them, ‘I’m advocating for reconciliation.’ “
(excerpt from: “A Lifetime of Global Peacemaking: An Interview with Gene Knudsen Hoffman,” The Mindfulness Bell, 2002, and her 1997 essay, “An Enemy Is One Whose Story We Have Not Heard”)

I was the eager recipient of Gene’s typed notes, letters and articles on Compassionate Listening, Love, Forgiveness, Anger, and post traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD). She sent hand-written letters outlining details of our shared projects and practical applications. She sent notes and cards about her favorite books, and quotes and teachings from various teachers she admired. Two of the people she considered her closest mentors were Adam Curle, Senior Quaker Mediator, and Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist Monk, peacemaker, and poet.

It was F.O.R. who had sponsored Thich Nhat Hanh’s first U.S. and international speaking tour in 1966. Gene wrote, “I was so interested in this young Buddhist who had so much to contribute to peace. In 1985 I went for a month to Plum Village, his center in France. While there, he asked me to organize his first retreat with Vietnam Veterans, which I did. Thay, as we learned to call him, is particularly strong and powerful in his teachings on reconciliation. The international program I founded, Compassionate Listening, is based on his teachings.” (from the Mindfulness Bell)

Gene helped me secure funding to produce a film of our second Compassionate Listening delegation in Israel and Palestine – this time for Jewish participants only, including religious leaders. We dedicated the film, Children of Abraham, to “Gene Knudsen Hoffman, Compassionate Listening Pioneer.” In early 1999, shortly after the release of the film, Gene began to receive so many invitations to screen the film that she thought she would have to hire someone to help her. She wrote that she was “overwhelmed, but of course thrilled” to watch the active spread of Compassionate Listening. (In the same letter, she encouraged me to lead delegations to listen to Milosevic and Saddam Hussein.)

Gene developed a Compassionate Listening curriculum in 1998 and began offering classes in Santa Barbara. The following year, I began to offer Compassionate Listening trainings in the U.S. with a different training model. Neither of our trainings focused on the Middle East. By this point, we were teaching what we called the “pure practice” of Compassionate Listening in the U.S., which was applicable to everyone in daily life. Several times, Gene, our Training Director Carol Hwoschinsky and I would gather with our growing community of Compassionate Listening practitioners for special weekends to deepen our collective understanding and practices. (Gene’s curriculum is included in her Sourcebook on Compassionate Listening, referenced at the end of this article. You will find our calendar of trainings here)

Despite Gene’s intention of being a full partner in the non-profit organization (we had changed the name from Mid-East Citizen Diplomacy to the Compassionate Listening Project), she eventually came to terms with her limitations and wrote to me that her traveling days were over. She asked to remain on the Board of Directors as “Co-Founder, and originator of Compassionate Listening.”

In 2002, I founded the Jewish-German Compassionate Listening track with my German friend Beate Ronnefeldt, a trainer of Nonviolent Communication. In the last letter I received from Gene, dated April 10, 2004, she thanked and honored me for pioneering the Jewish-German work, which she called “thrilling” and “an ambitious undertaking.”

Gene had thanked me profusely those last two years for this project - a testimony to her passion for Jewish-German reconciliation. In her work in Israel in the early 1990s, Gene had researched and written extensively about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder among Jewish Holocaust survivors in Israel, and the role of PTSD in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She had interviewed Israeli psychologists who were considered experts in the field, and published articles and a pamphlet on the subject called “No Royal Road to Reconciliation.”

Those of us who study, practice, and teach Compassionate Listening can continue to learn much from Gene’s articles and essays. We practitioners have a powerful lineage, and our work is infused with Gene’s research, study, and practice in the art of reconciliation.

She was a pioneer in a new field, always seeking to clarify and challenge her fellow peacemakers. In a letter from Gene to a fellow colleague, dated June 3, 2000, Gene writes:
“About nonviolence: I question whether a gospel of nonviolence will save us. I think we have the doctrine, but not the necessary respect and concern for the unhealed suffering of oppressors and other violent people. It seems we rarely consider listening to them as a possibility for wider understanding. Instead, we have Nuremberg laws, and kill or otherwise destroy perpetrators through vengeance. We forget that Gandhi spent much of his time with his ‘enemies,’ listening to them and learning how to love them. I think it was his loving truth which was grounded in his respect for them as human beings that enabled them to set India free.”

In August 2001, Gene wrote to me: “I think I’ve found a motto we can all use as the subtitle of ‘Compassionate Listening’ on publications, stationary, and brochures. I think it expresses in a ‘nutshell’ what we are doing. It’s the title of one of my essays – ‘An Enemy is One Whose Story We Have Not Heard.’ What do you think of that?”

I love to think about Gene’s delight, knowing how far her work has traveled, and how many thousands have embraced her understanding of listening to those we consider the “other” or our “enemy.” Anthony Manousos’ book about Gene has brought her life and teachings into the hands of thousands (I've referenced Anthony's book below. You can also read his beautiful tribute to Gene.)
We at the Compassionate Listening Project have taught all over the world at conferences, universities, churches, synagogues, mediation centers…with untold numbers of individuals integrating it into their own work and projects. We have taught Israeli and Palestinian peace leaders over the past decade, and in 2003 we created an Advanced Training and Facilitator Certification track in the U.S. We now have 23 facilitators with almost half that number currently working towards their certification. As a non-profit organization, our key challenge is having adequate staff to keep up with the requests for training.

The Compassionate Listening Project extends our loving arms to Gene and her family during this time of loss. We offer our deep respect and gratitude for all she gifted to us and to the world.

I honor you, Gene, for your remarkable lifetime quest in service to personal and collective healing. Thank you for your love, belief and investment in me personally, and in our wider community of compassionate listeners. You are and will remain the founder of Compassionate Listening, and the birth-mother of a movement.

With great love for you,

Leah
Executive Director, Compassionate Listening Project

To learn more about Gene and her Compassionate Listening work, I highly recommend reading:

Compassionate Listening and Other Writings, Essays by Gene Knudsen Hoffman, Quaker Peace Activist and Mystic;
Edited, with introductory biography, by Anthony Manousos Click here to learn more about the book.
 
Sourcebook on Compassionate Listening
Click here to download Gene's free sourcebook.
 
Gene’s essays: Click here to read. 
  
Gene’s memorial will be Sunday, August 8, at 2pm at La Casa de Maria (800 El Bosque Road, Santa Barbara 93108).

Life near the Gaza Border

Life and Trauma Treatment near the Gaza Border

(photos by Leah Green and Ellen Greene - below, Gaza Wall and Border)

On June 3^rd, our Compassionate Listening delegation visited Shaar HaNegev Psychological Services Center, located at Sapir College in Sderot (near the Gaza border). This is the most important psychological center in the Northwest Negev for those suffering with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). They also have an educational unit that works with the schools, kindergardens, and preschool children, including physiotherapy and occupational therapy.

Tvi, Fajerman, Senior Clinical Psychologist and General Director

There are 230 therapists working in this project. We’re studying a lot about what happens here. We have no access to Gaza, we tried – we wanted to help train trauma specialists there too, but we are denied access. We know that the suffering in Gaza is more than here.

I work here at the Center in Sderot, but I don’t live here. So at night I am safe. Sometimes we have questions, what does it mean to work in this kind of psychotherapy - sometimes you’re with your client working and suddenly you have a rocket alarm…all the therapists and all the clients and all the staff run into the shelter and have very interesting meetings and discussions there.

When the rockets fall, and you go to the site and try to help, you also pick up “Acute Stress Response.” What happens with those who help? The helpers run to the site – with an illusion as if they are totally safe. Five years ago a person was wounded and we saw that the helpers returned with a feeling that they really helped a lot, and that it was something they were removed from. We had a meeting a few days later, and I asked them how this experience was for them. And suddenly some of them started to cry. We see this phenomenon that the helper becomes “superhuman” and loses all fear as they are helping. We work with them to return them to their normal state – the first step is to realize that they suffered too.

We think a lot about ongoing trauma…The situation that we are in is not like September 11^th in the United States - one very traumatic event, and you treat people for post traumatic stress. Here, there is no “post” – it’s ongoing traumatic stress disorder. I treated a 4 year old, and in one of the last sessions, there was a rocket attack. She jumped, and she looked at me, and I kept my balanced attitude. Just seeing the mother or the care-giver staying calm, the child will stay calm too. We accomplished wonderful work with this family, and one year later, a Qassem Rocket fell on their home and destroyed part of the home. The next year a third rocket fell and wounded the father. At times like this I ask myself, what am I doing? How can I help when there is no end to the trauma?

Or Tal, Staff Psychologist

I’ve worked here for six years. I have two small children. I live in Kibbutz nearby.

I had an experience here a year ago, during the war in Gaza. In the war, every time when I met with parents and children, I really identified with them, but not totally, because at 3:00pm or 4:00pm I would go home and be safe, since I do not live here where people have experienced the worst of the rocket attacks. But we received bullet-proof vests and helmets and it was clear to me that I would continue my work – continue coming to the center.

I was in the car driving when a rocket alarm went off. My kids were asleep in the car. I had 1 minute to get to a shelter (here at Sapir College, you have 15 seconds to get to a shelter, just to show you it matters where you live). In that one minute, I had to choose what to do. You have no control of what will happen. I was screaming at my 5 year old to wake up and I took my small son into the house. This was a very crucial experience for me, not just to empathize with the people I work with, but to feel it in my entire body. After that, there was no question that I can identify with what people go through here…

Shimona, Educational Psychologist

I started working here 8 years ago and as of 6 years ago, I now live in a kibbutz close to the Center. It’s terrifying when the rocket alarm goes off. It literally says “red color, red color….” Even small children, age 2 or 3, know that they have to get to a shelter. When I look at my children, in a way it makes me feel proud, but in another way, I have to ask myself hard questions. Why am I living in a place where I’m exposing my kids to this danger? In the difficult times, as I’m driving in my car, or walking along a street or in a park, literally every 200 meters, the thought comes to my mind, “if the alarm goes off now, where will I run to?” Depending on where I am I may have 15 seconds or a minute. So it’s a constant process in my mind.

I don’t want to talk about politics – I know the Gazans suffer much more than we do…

Three years ago, I gave birth to a child. I also had a 6 year old. I was near a safe place in a park when the rocket alarm went off, and I had 15 seconds to get to a safe place. I had a 1 month-old baby. What will I do? I told my friend “Take the baby” – I knew my friend knew what to do. And then I ran again to my older child to see that she was safe, but I knew I was out of time. It was the worst ten seconds in my life. I know it sounds strange, but those ten seconds confirmed my decision to stay and live here. I don’t think I can explain exactly why. For me, it confirmed that there is no safe place – it’s an illusion we try to tell ourselves in life – that we can create safety.

At the beginning of our work here, we taught guided imagery with the kids. We told them to “go to a safe place,” and the kids would say, “but there is no safe place.” So we changed the language to a “calmer place, when you feel good about yourself.” When I accept that there is no true “safe space”, I am forced to see that this moment is all I truly have. I can bring love and beauty to the world in every moment. Living here reminds me of my higher purpose – I want to love, to do good in the world.

The main problem here is the ongoing trauma. Sometimes we’ve had 50 qassem rockets per day. We have no theories for ongoing trauma. So we’re inventing it. The rocket alarms started 5 years ago.  

I had a patient recently who was 5 years old – she lived in Sderot, the most frequently bombed city. She wouldn’t use red in her paintings or in her language, because the alarm literally screams “Red alert, red alert”. So she had to block out the word “red” entirely.

In my psychologist’s hat, I can look and feel strong, but it’s a very different story as a mother. Being a psychologist can give me a feeling of safety and strength. I have a role, a helper…but as a parent, it’s completely different. When my young son was one year old, I picked him up during a rocket alarm and ran to a shelter. I was out of breath and panting. When we got inside, I looked at him, and he was panting exactly like I was. The kids mirror exactly what we do.

Why am I choosing to live here? Here, the community is highly important. As an educational psychologist, I believe that mental health is in community. There’s a sense of not being alone here. In difficult times for example, we prefer to eat in the park – we eat together. It’s less safe than to be at home, but we feel that sense of safety with each other. There are always people to talk with and share your experiences.

Many people live and also work here. It’s hard to always do the right thing in our jobs. There was a bomb alarm once, here at Sapir College where our Center is. Everyone knew where the rocket fell. Many of the teachers panicked and left their students and ran to their children, who are in day care or school here. The school needed so much assistance at that time. It’s not right to judge those teachers – it’s a natural reaction. Some of them were treated like traitors….we did a lot of work in the teacher’s lounge to bring healing to that situation.

When there’s a rocket attack, first, we go to the place of the attack. We help the people to vent – we let them speak - what were they thinking; what were they doing…what were they wearing. Next, we help them to normalize their experience – letting them know that whatever they did was okay – yelling, crying, peeing in their pants, etc. Saying it’s okay. If they are teachers, we talk about what they might expect to happen with their students, down the road. Often, the ones who used to talk a lot, now become silent, and the quiet ones become talkative. We tell them what to expect and what to look for.

I wanted to assist people from the Gaza strip who wanted to come for trauma training. They even asked me if I agreed to take part in it. But we were prevented from doing this.

PTSD is a felt sense of being injured or in danger of death. Israel is not safe in general. If I live in Jerusalem, there could be a suicide bus bombing, and if I live in the north, I could get hit from a Hizbullah rocket from Lebanon. You find a cavalier attitude – “drink today, we have no idea what will happen tomorrow.” We know that much of this comes from the experience in the holocaust and the famine and hard times in Europe and even here in the early days of the country.

In Sderot, very old kids, sometimes teenagers, want to sleep with their parents. We used to say, that’s wrong. Nowadays, we’ve changed our minds. It’s okay for your kids to be with you for periods of time, but we recommend that they sleep in a mattress next to the parents, not between the parents. We do what we can to make things easier...