A Pathway to Deepening Friendship
- TCLP Staff
- 2 days ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 19 hours ago
By Alanna Faust, Compassionate Listening Facilitator-in-Training, and Isabella Ranieri, Practice Group Participant
We're sitting on the bricked terraced edge of a Berlin city pool, full of life and yells and bodies visible for the first time in nine months. The sun is setting lazily directly in front of us. I'm shielding my burn-prone skin under a baseball cap. My Abruzzo-born bestie Isa has her (somehow already) bronzed cheeks oriented directly toward the light, toward the warmth of the last rays, toward the optimism of summer.
Isa and I have been friends for just short of four years now, since we both moved to Berlin for a Master's program in Intercultural Conflict Management. She from the small, beautiful city of Zagreb, me from my hometown in the desert Southwest of the US. Four years is simultaneously monumental and minuscule: significant in what we've both learned during this time, and a drop in the bucket of long-term friendship.
One of the reasons this friendship feels so precious is Isa's fearlessness, and the ways she has taught me (and many of us!) to embrace and show up for ourselves. We're different in many ways—Isa wears her heart on her sleeve, I keep mine a bit more tucked away. Isa is able to be loud, exuberant, and fully herself almost immediately; I tend to be more reserved at first. We are similar in the ways that matter, though—both of us feel things acutely, care deeply about community, strive to engage in the hard, messy work of humanness, love to laugh loudly and dance recklessly, question the status quo, dream about possibilities, and believe in the beauty of surprise.
As we sit there in the waning summer light, the conversation meanders from militant feminism to human nature to our shared struggle with scheduledness, eventually settling into a rumination on our Compassionate Listening practice group. I say "our" because, as I'm sure every facilitator reading this can attest to, a group is co-created. As the CL Facilitator Trainee, I was the holder of the space, responsible for the structure and for establishing safe boundaries. Together as a group, though, we created the tenderness. It was due to the participants and their bravery, Isa very much included, that we were able to create such a safe and connecting space.
Isa asked me how I was feeling now that the ten weeks had concluded. I let out a big sigh. "Relieved," was the first word that floated out of my mouth. "And sad," I added. Both remain true. I will miss the weekly reminder to ground a little deeper, take a couple of extra-long exhales, look into the eyes of another person, and convey, "I've got you." And really, "we've got you."
The premier gift of the practice group, for me, was the added depth and intimacy it brought to my friendships. I was lucky enough to be part of a practice group made up of friends and close acquaintances (who, after ten weeks of sharing space together, have solidly and wonderfully moved into the friend zone). Not only did I get to listen to them share about parts of their lives that were new to me, but we now have another way of connecting and a shared language for engaging in emotional and difficult conversations.
These practices trickle into our social lives. If I notice myself feeling unmoored and in need of tethering, I might say to Isa, "Can you just listen to me talk for five minutes and offer a few reflections?" Or if she's telling me about a challenge at work, I can more confidently identify the values that might be motivating the actions of the people involved. We have another framework for understanding each other and a shared structure for helping us center the relationship and the care during moments of turbulence.
As a person living in an environment where I am responsible for creating my own support network, the trust we built during those ten weeks is invaluable. Trust that there are people to catch me if and when I fall. Knowledge that if one of my friends is struggling, they will trust me, and trust us, to show up for them. Hosting the practice group was a lot of work, but as with most things worth doing, I don't regret the effort. Especially when I'm dancing along the Spree on a warm evening, looking into the faces of my dear friends and thinking, "We might just be okay."
Hi, my name is Isa. Isa with the soft S, as Alanna likes to pronounce it, or Isa with a buzzing z-like sound, like my Croatian and Italian families call me. When I moved to Germany, my hair was curly and my tongue sharp. These both flattened over time, but I proudly hold onto my lazy and passionate Southern-Europeanness characterised by a weakness for cappuccinos, a total disregard for linearity and predictability, and a nostalgia I, somewhat embarrassingly, insist on calling Mediterraneostalgia: tinged with the smell of Adriatic pine trees and the sounds of a people who are a little too loud, a little too expressive, a little too alive.
I never felt at home in the houses where I grew up, I looked for home for so long, getting sidetracked—as teenagers do—and forgetting to turn inwards. But what if maybe turning (only) towards oneself for a home isn’t exactly what we are supposed to be doing?
When I feel lost, my foundations shaky, I know that coming back to the sea after months away will remind me of my roots, and that the awe of a sunset behind the Kornati Islands will soothe some of the grief of having missed out on a thousand more.
But it is when I so viscerally fear abandonment, rejection, and when I struggle to find even the faintest trace of self-worth, that my friends show up and remind me of the importance of community. My friends will see me, steady me and show me I am worthy of love—we are worthy of love. My friends will walk me back home.
There’s nothing quite like feeling seen and held by a community. No material possession or career achievement will ever feel that good. My friendship with Alanna, who is a load-bearing wall in my community, feels like a testament to this. It’s so special because it stands as a living threat to an establishment that would rather have us isolated and disconnected from one another.
I think human beings are designed to resist discipline, and there’s something about the two of us together that feels particularly devoted to this freeing belief. Something about us is wild and joyfully uncontainable. What I love SO much about our friendship is the spontaneity and authenticity it leaves space for. The feeling that when we talk, first of all, we could go on forever, and second, it’s just us being—against any set plan, and the limits of time and space. It’s like we found the recipe for magic.
It has become normalised to organise our weeks around waged labour and self-optimisation, our sense of community gradually weakens, almost like cells solely programmed for individualisation. The Compassionate Listening practice group created a space for slowing down, taking deeeeeep breaths, sharing the ordinary and the extraordinary, centering and grounding ourselves, so as to offer what sadly feels like a rare gift these days: presence, both to ourselves and to one another.
On most Tuesdays I would leave work feeling depleted, capable only of mechanical tasks, unable to connect with other humans, craving nothing but solitude. More often than not, I resisted the idea of going. And yet, because I made a commitment to this group, I showed up every Tuesday for the entire duration of the course, and every single time I left feeling grounded, replenished, and seen. One of its most beautiful collateral effects has been the deepening of friendships and the emotional safety that now thrives between us.
The Compassionate Listening practice taught me how to witness without judgement, how listening with curiosity and care can support someone’s understanding of the story they are telling, the values and needs underlying it, and even make way for a broadening or shift in perspective. It was also challenging. Putting yourself in the shoes of someone you struggle to understand and decipher their motivations while elevated and in conflict, is no easy task.
At a time when it's hard to stay optimistic in the face of atrocities across the world, testing out ways of living and relating that challenge the architectures of oppression behind them is a courageous act. Compassionate Listening lets us feel, on a somatic level, how alive those architectures still are in our relationships, workplaces, and politics. Domination isn't inherent to us; our systems have simply long rewarded it over collaboration and care. If we can't abolish these systems within our own relationships, we will only reproduce them when the chance comes to build something different.
We need to learn how to apologise without falling apart; how to repair as though we were worthy of love, because we all are; how to offer presence without the urge to fix or jump to conclusions; how to sit with discomfort when we mess up; how to give and receive criticism; how to unlearn individualism and the illusion that reason alone can save us; and how to trust that we need one another to survive, to heal, to create, and ultimately, to prosper.
It felt like in Alanna’s living room we could begin practising exactly this.
Thank you, my dear friend, for inviting me to be part of the Compassionate Listening cohort this Spring. I trusted that you would hold this space skillfully and responsibly, creating the fertile ground for a little magic to happen—for us to soften, show up as we were, and experience those tiny, precious moments of shifting and transformation. And of course, you proved me right. <3
Friendship, like Compassionate Listening, is part commitment, part embodied flow, part spiritual practice. Both with the power for transformation. Friendship can be an opportunity to connect with a deeper universal thread, a shared aliveness, the “inter-being.” For me, it is a beautiful chance to look into the eyes, and the insides, of another person and feel somehow one. Every time I facilitate or participate in a Compassionate Listening space, I am awed that so many people are willing to prioritize connection despite the exhaustion of our work lives and the never-ending list of personal to-dos. People who will happily carve out two hours of their precious time to sit in a circle and listen to one another. I am so grateful these are the people I get to call my teachers, co-conspirators, fellow dreamers, friends.
Alanna Faust & Isabella Ranieri met in a Masters in Intercultural Conflict Management program. Alanna is the Operations Manager at the Compassionate Listening Project and a soon-to-be Certified Compassionate Listening Facilitator. Isabella works at MiKK International Mediation Centre for Family Conflict and Child Abduction and as a freelance mediator. Both are based in Berlin, Germany.
Curious about becoming a Compassionate Listening Facilitator? Learn more here! And sign up for our upcoming Info Session on Saturday, July 25.
Comments