Listening Across Time Zones, Listening Across Hearts
- Sharon Gubbay Helfer
- Jul 25
- 3 min read
Updated: Aug 21
By Sharon Gubbay Helfer, Ph.D., Compassionate Listening Facilitator
Looking back on the last three Intro to CL series I have facilitated over Zoom, in 2024 and 2025, I am struck by the diversity and richness of our participant pool. The sessions that started at 11 am for me here in Montreal were enriched by participants from: Sofia Bulgaria, Tororo Uganda and North Lebanon (all 6 pm); Tblisi, Georgia, (7 pm); Hyderabad, India (8:30 pm); and all around Canada and the US, including Alaska (7 am!).
Participants were moved to show up at our sessions by a broad range of motivations. Some expressed a deep concern about the world with its intensifying polarizations; they wished to find ways to respond constructively rather than reactively to these. For some, there was an urgent need to find personal resilience while surrounded by active political violence. A number of people from coaching, mentoring, therapeutic or peacebuilding contexts came looking to increase their skillsets. Some of these were planning to go further and seek certification as CL facilitators. For others, the motivation was more intimately personal, having to do with current family tensions, or recent grief, or simply to be more present and aware in relationships with self and others. Others felt the call from a deeply spiritual place.
Over the course of just six 2-hour sessions these groups of strangers, coming from widely different backgrounds, time zones and life circumstances were able to co-create a space of trust and respect in which to share their personal truths with honesty, vulnerability and a sense of solidarity. For this I credit our elegant CL toolkit, our five core practices, as well as the guidelines that help create a safer space, and the series of teaching exercises designed to engage individuals with self and others. As I have always said, these are skills you can learn in a weekend and practice for a lifetime. Certainly, I call on the CL toolkit every day to help me deepen and broaden my experience of life. I also note with pleasure that our community exists within an ever-expanding ecosystem of other like-minded organizations focused on healing personal and collective wounds, upholding ethical values and cultivating maturity. Three such leaders I have been lucky to study with recently are Thomas Hubl (https://thomashuebl.com/about/), William Ury (https://www.williamury.com/) and Bayo Akomolafe (https://belonging.berkeley.edu/othering-belonging-conference/bayo-akomolafe). Hubl and Ury with powerful consistency center deep listening, compassion and the ability to adopt a witnessing position as the core competencies required to transform conflict. All three competencies are part of our elegant CL toolkit: “Cultivate Compassion”, “Listen with the Heart” and “Cultivate the Fair Witness”. Since I first encountered Bayo Akomolafe, I have been impressed deeply by his insistence: “The times are urgent … we must slow down!” And then I recall, yes, we teach that too, with our longstanding guid eline: “Slow down to the speed of wisdom.”
If this all sounds intriguing, there is still time for you to register for the upcoming series."
Dr. Sharon Gubbay Helfer is a professional oral historian specializing in life stories and a researcher/practitioner in the area of difficult dialogues and listening skills. Following a Ph.D. in Jewish Studies focusing on Montreal’s Reconstructionist Synagogue (Concordia U, Montreal), she carried out postdoctoral research in Jewish-Catholic dialogue at the Université de Montréal. This was followed by work on the major Oral History Centre project “Life Stories of Montrealers Displaced by Wars, Genocides and Other Human Rights Violations” (Concordia), where her contributions included creating a Palestinian Canadian Life Stories pilot project. Dr. Gubbay Helfer is a certified facilitator with the Compassionate Listening Project and with the Compassionate Integrity Training curriculum. She has offered Compassionate Listening workshops and Circles to participants in the US, Canada, Europe, and Israel. Sharon is also a multimedia artist and dancer, exploring embodiment and dimensions of the unspoken. Visit her website here for more info.
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