Myron Eshowsky is a mediator, shamanic healer, and community trauma healer. Author of Peace with Cancer: Shamanism as a Spiritual Approach to Healing, he was the first to be covered by a U.S. health insurance plan specifically for spiritual healing. Watching his own father struggle with and ultimately succumb to cancer deepened his commitment to explore the spiritual, physical, and environmental terrains of illness. Born with congenital severe hearing loss, he spent years developing and recognizing skills for being in the hearing world -- and came to appreciate how much the skill of listening is core to the process of peacemaking and healing. He listens with his heart and something he calls intuition. In the healing practice he conducts, he listens to what is going on in this world and also to the other world, the spirit realm that requires a type of going in and connecting where he hears everything perfectly.

Some of the nuggets that stood out from the call ...

• You know, we are all working on ourselves to be better human beings but you know, I do think that it starts with the idea that we have to quiet our minds. To be honest, we have to quiet our minds. We need to learn how to move slower. And my general experience is that we don't know how to move slow.
• There’s a lot of in-speaking that happens naturally, with people we are close to. And that’s part of listening too. And those skills happen when we learn to be curious about how somebody else communicates, how do they imagine the world, how do they perceive things? Because their way of perceiving, we actually pick up on it. But we don’t really take the time to really notice it.
• There’s the core belief that everything is alive and everything has a spirit. So if I sat with a tree and I just listened, I will hear something. And if I sat with a rock and I just listened, I will hear something. All these are things to me that we can do to practice just listening. But listening requires that we suspend judgment, suspend the idea that we're making it up. Just being curious.
• If we really believe that we are all interconnected, if we really believe that we are all of the same oneness, then the choice really is to extend kindness and welcoming, in any way that we can. To me that is the main thing that we can do right now, to express that sincere spiritual act of welcoming the stranger and being open to values we bring, to ride the surf, so to speak.
• When we know a place, when we we are in relationship with a place, if we take care of it, if we are in relationship with that place, if we sing to it, if we play to it, and if we listen to the place, it can come back, it can come back.
• I think one must know how to stay calm, how to stay centered, how to keep your sense of your own power in yourself and to not give it to fear.
• But when you are exposed to a lot of trauma, then you have to do the best you can at staying present and understanding that sometimes the best thing you can do is just listen. You don't have to know what to do, you can just listen and be present with another human being because so much of it just needs to be shared
• One thing that I think is particularly helpful from the way I work, is to really take time in nature. To really get away from the hustle and bustle in our lives, and to be in nature because nature has a way of healing us and teaching us and connecting with us.
• I think it is important that you start from a place of never taking on a challenge that is bigger than you can handle. I studied Aikido and in Aikido, if the challenge is more than you can handle, if it’s more than you can stay centered in, you back off. And I think that it is really important to know your own limit. I always say that I really feel that Spirit will give us the challenge that we are most ready for.

Lots of gratitude to all the behind-the-scenes volunteers that made this call happen!