Mindful Interpersonal Listening

Disclosers appreciate listeners who are active and empathic, but how do we listen in an active and empathic way? At a fundamental level, active and empathic listening requires an ability to attend to the present moment and an awareness of the other. We propose mindfulness as a metacognitive mechanism through which social connectedness can be cultivated by active‐empathic listening. In this chapter, we present conceptualizations of listening and interpersonal mindfulness. We then explore their relevance to self‐other connectedness and the transition from mindfulness to meaning in a listening context. Finally, we present a process model of active‐empathic listening grounded in Garland's Mindfulness‐to‐Meaning Theory (MMT).