Effective Listening: Connection, Empathy, & Mutual Growth

— Effective Listening is an online healing community dedicated to everyone getting to thrive in this life as themselves. A truly supportive environment is essential for humans to thrive. In order to co-create a better world, we need to learn and practice the art of "Effective Listening." By learning and practicing Effective Listening, we create a supportive environment and empower each other toward self-actualization.

Valeria interviews Ilya Parizhsky — He is the founder of Effective Listening, a group process that creates one on one listening partnerships for mutual healing and transformation. 

He holds a Masters in Drama Therapy from the California Institute of Integral Studies, and is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California, Oregon, Colorado and Washington, DC, where he practices online couples and individual therapy.

Ilya is an expert leader of personal growth workshops and group processes, and has helped thousands of people heal and overcome restrictions to their authenticity. He devotes himself to staying at the cutting edge of the healing arts. He has trained in countless therapeutic modalities, and has taken part in tens of thousands of hours of experiential workshops, and thousands of hours of individual counseling, meditation, yoga, dance and movement, theater, and other self-actualization processes. He continues to vigorously pursue both personal and professional development, and can’t overstate the importance for therapists and healing professionals to do extensive amounts of both professional training and personal healing work in order to be authentically and skillfully available for others.

Ilya is also adept at simplifying and boiling down the essence of complex processes. Effective Listening is the culmination of Ilya’s wide-ranging experience and training, and offers an accessible synthesis of powerful personal growth techniques, borrowing from many different disciplines and modalities, but creating something truly unique.

In addition to his passion for therapy and healing, Ilya is also a performance artist and stand-up comedian, where he uses his life story and experiences to bring levity, light, and laughter to subjects as deep as the nature of consciousness and the meaning of life, and as silly as multi-lingual animal sounds. Ilya is also a proud father of two young daughters. He is a devoted husband married to his best friend and favorite person on the planet. And he lives in an Ecovillage, which he finds to be an ideal environment for his children to grow up, freely roaming and playing with friends.

Ilya has a deep longing and commitment to be of service, and to make the world a better place. He has developed Effective Listening as a means to that end. In his work as a psychotherapist, he is often confronted with the fact that humans need more than a therapy session once a week to thrive. We need a network of supportive skillful humans we can count on. The Effective Listening method is not therapy and is not meant to replace therapy. Effective Listening unleashes the awesome power and natural healing capacity that each of us has inside of us. It gives us a living network of people and a community of practice with whom to share and develop our dormant ability to give and receive love and build the collective resources to create a world that truly meets the needs we have.

To learn more about Ilya Parizhsky and his work, please visit: https://effectivelistening.org/ and https://www.ilyaparizhsky.com/