Every Tuesday our Epiphany! series has a new posting on Positively Positive and today’s featured epiphany is from my interview with Dr. Mehmet Oz.
Many times we will have epiphanies about others’ epiphanies, which may seem obvious, but it’s something I’ve found people want to know more about this so it’s something I’ll be talking about more in depth in a new workshop I’m leading in April for En*theos Academy. (More information on that later.)
I have epiphanies about my life and about life in general all the time because of all the epiphanies I hear and work with. Dr. Oz’s epiphany has become particularly meaningful to me as the Epiphany project has progressed. As one of the producers for Dr. Oz’s YOU fitness videos, when I had serious interest in getting this project done, he was one of the first people I asked for an interview. His epiphany is about listening – truly listening to others and respecting their perspectives and beliefs, whether you agree with them or not, and the power that lies in doing that for both the listener and the person being heard. I discovered the true meaning of this as I listened to the hundreds of epiphany stories I’ve gathered. “Listening” is also the first step or state of being required to have an epiphany.
What if we could all listen like this, as Dr. Oz describes? What if we could all listen with open hearts and minds and truly respect others’ beliefs and world perspectives whether we agreed with them or not? What might this world look, feel, and be like if we were all truly practicing this kind of listening? It’s something to think about, especially in the current political climate we’re in where, most of the time, no one seems to listen or respect one another at all.
We can all start practicing this kind of respectful listening in our own lives, with our own friends, family, colleagues, and even people briefly met, and collectively, one person at a time, one day at a time, we will become a society that hits the goal of awareness that Dr. Oz speaks of.
The goal is to move from just knowledge, which is information,
to understanding, which is awareness.
~ Dr. Mehmet Oz
