Heard, Seen, Loved

One of our TSS Rovers Women’s team players, Sofia Farremo, signing an autograph for a young fan while standing in our supporters section at a TSS Rovers game this summer. Supporter culture at our club is HSL.

About 20 years ago, I first met Dr. Mark R. Jones. It was either at The Practice of Peace gathering or one of the Evolutionary Salons called at the Whidbey Institute on Whidbey Island, Washington. At any rate, Mark was an interesting presence. He sat in silence for most of the time near the room entrance as a kind of gatekeeper, watching the threshold and seeing what happened there. He occasionally played classical guitar and offered insights and reflections to anyone who sat and talked with him.

At some point, I heard the story about his work. He was a senior corporate executive, working in technology and defence-related companies for most of his career. He was also a long-time Tibetan Buddhist practitioner. He once visited the Dalai Lama and was challenged by him to build a practice of compassion based on the idea that “people need to be seen, heard, and loved, in that order.”

Mark took that work and built an approach to compassionate communication based on that heuristic. He called the work “hizzle” based on how he pronounced the acronym of heard, seen, and loved: HSL. I remember being taken by his description of what happens when people aren’t heard, seen or loved. If they are not heard, they shout and raise their voices. If they are not seen, they make a scene so you notice them, or they engage in bullying and toxic power dynamics. If they are not loved, they play a toxic game of approach and avoid that, which creates and then sabotages relationships and connections.

Mark’s insight was that these behaviours were signs of suffering and that when HSL was missing, “mischief occurs.” In this practice, he connected suffering to fear and offered the antidotes to these behaviours with a very simple and powerful way to let folks know they are heard, seen or loved.

To really hear, see, or love others, Mark insists that we have a practice in which we hear, see and love ourselves and become familiar with all of the ways we personally express fear and suffering when our own HSL is thwarted. It’s a practice.

I’ve used this insight for most of my career in situations where folks are exhibiting these fear-based behaviours. It has been a really useful shortcut and reminder for my own practice.

I was reminded again of how powerful this set of insights is when my friend and colleague Ashley Cooper shared some work she is doing to bring this work into the context of supporting parents of children, something at which she is incredibly gifted.

Mark’s work isn’t that easy to find online. His company, Sunyata Group is where you can find him as he is leading teams in creating Beloved Community. His HSL approach has been adopted and modified by the Liberating Structures crew (I believe Henri Lipmanowicz and Ashley were both at the same gathering I was at when we met Mark and learned about his work). Years ago, Phil Cubeta wrote a bit about Mark’s work and included a workshop handout that Mark must have provided him at some point.