Peter Hwosch believes Compassionate Listening is the first step to solving conflicts.

While visiting Israelis and Palestinians, Hwosch heard a man advocating violent action that shocked and angered him.

But then the man talked about his own life.

“The stories from this man’s mouth were painful and heart-wrenching,” Hwosch said. “I had an epiphany: if I’d had this man’s life, I might make his choices. His rage has nowhere else to go. “

At the same time, he emphasizes that compassionate listening does not condone abuses.

“The information you receive from compassionate listening will be more to the heart of what’s really happening under the surface conflict,” he said.

Working to spread compassionate listening’s teachings energizes Hwosch in every way, as a musician, teacher and filmmaker. A former Indianola resident, Hwosch is familiar to islanders as a musician.

He returns on Thursday as filmmaker of a documentary about a peace camp in the former Yugoslavia, where he taught compassionate listening to war-scarred youth. And on Saturday, he is a musician on another stop of his spring tour of the Northwest to raise money for this seventh year of the camp.

His folksy original songs with acoustic guitar are imbued with compassionate listening. His song “Nobody Knows” says “an enemy is one who’s story we’ve not heard, an enemy is one who’s humanity has been obscured, at the heart of every act of violence is an unhealed wound.”

Hwosch is a project director and trainer for the Compassionate Listening project, an Indianola-based nonprofit.

Based on the teachings of Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hahn, and further developed by Quaker activist Gene Knudsen Hoffman, the skill provides tools to help reconcile parties in conflict by helping each side understand and acknowledge the suffering in the other – that is having compassion for our enemies.

Hwosch says through training, a person learns to understand their own emotional triggers and “separate fact from emotional content in the story.

“Conflict isn’t the real problem, but a symptom of the real problem,” he said.

True reconciliation – whether at the individual or national level – needs to include all parties, and participants need to hold compassion for each other.

Hwosch hopes compassionate listening will break that cycle.

In 2002, he taught the program to young people on all sides of the Balkan conflict at the Seedlings of Peace Summer Camp, in Latinovac, Croatia.

In Hwosch’s documentary “Beyond These Narrow Borders,” to be screened tomorrow night, the viewer hears about each child’s war experiences and follows them around the camp.

The ultimate goal of the camp in Hwosch’s eyes is “to break down the old paradigm we have to approaching conflict.”

* * * * *

Listen up

Peter Hwosch shows his documentary “Beyond These Narrow Borders,” about youth participating in the Seedlings of Peace Summer Camp in former Yugoslavia with post-film discussion, at 7:30 p.m. March 17 at the Bainbridge Library.

He and Kathryn Mostow will perform original songs with acoustic guitar at 8 p.m. March 19 at Island Center Hall. Proceeds benefit the Seedlings of Peace Summer Camp. Suggested donation is $10. For more information about these events, see www.hwosch.com.