No Justice, No Peace | Tricycle
Listening - and its corollary, silence - are two of the most basic ways Buddhists say practice helps them. Robert Burt, who teaches at Yale Law School and co-led the first meditation retreat there, says lawyers have trouble listening because they’re busy ticking off mental checklists that get in the way of their clients’ stories and because they cannot tolerate silence even for the short space it takes clients to gather their thoughts. Joseph Goldstein noticed the same thing among the law students he taught: For most of them, it was the first time they’d ever experienced sustained silence. “By the end of the retreat,” he says, “they had come to appreciate silence, both for its rejuvenating quality and for its clarity.”
