Last weekend I participated in a two-day 5 Rhythms, dance meditation, workshop in the Memorial Hall here in Paekakariki. Throughout the weekend we were encouraged to notice, listen to and follow any movement that naturally emerged within, and to express ourselves from that place.
A few weeks ago someone who had participated in a Speaking Circles explained that the process of the circle, and being in Relational Presence, had deepened her understanding and practice of listening, taking it to a completely different level and quality.
And recently I was reading a passage from a biography of the actor and M*A*S*H star Alan Alda. In it he wrote:
“When I started out as an actor I thought: ‘Here is what I have to say, how shall I say it?’ On M*A*S*H I began to understand that what I do in a scene is as important as what happens between me and the other person. And listening is what lets it happen. It’s almost always the other person who causes you to say what you say next. You don’t have to figure out how to say it.
You have to listen so simply, so innocently, that the other person brings a change in you that makes you say it, and informs the way you say it.
Eventually I found a radical way of thinking about listening. Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you. When I’m willing to let them change me, something happens between us that’s more interesting than a pair of dueling monologues…or a speech.
Like so much that I learned in theater this turned out to be how life works too.”
I am listening into a different experience of Christmas as it approaches – warm, long summer days and nights, an emerging abundance of fresh fruit, cool refreshing ocean, the magnificent blaze of crimson pohutukawa tree, jandals (flip-flops!) and barbecues - and I am allowing all that is different to change me.
Overlooking Paekakariki Beach - Who and what will you allow to change you as you sit and listen?
Seasonal Blessings, be it summer, winter, autumn or spring
Sally
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Listening
When I am facilitating people to practise Relational Presence I invite them to be there and listen from a place of positive regard and availability, to others and to themselves. Listening from this place allows ease and clarity. This quality of listening is unattached to content, though it hears and is impacted upon by the content. It is expansive and accepting, though it gives none of the usual social cues of encouragement or validation.
We may notice thoughts of judgement and the urge to re-assure as we listen, and we can become skillful at simply noticing these urges without acting on them. What then emerges is a spacious listening. A listening that allows the words of an other to flow over and through us and our own to emerge naturally, from a more authentic place of knowing.
Sometimes people who have known each other for many years, couples or friends, participate together in a speaking circle and find that the quality of their relationship is deepened and enriched when they listen to each other from this more spacious and receptive place. This discovery both surprises and moves people.
Effective communication is a two-way process. Presence listening is the basis of authentic speaking. When you listen with an easy availability, and your attention is on seeing the best in the other person, you begin to experience others differently. Genuine connection is created naturally. And when you listen to the silence as well as to the words, you allow others to find their own authentic presence and to share it.
An inquiry and a question:
What is it to be available and to come from a place of positive regard?
What do you see, hear, feel, smell and taste from this place?
Deep Cove, Doubtful Sound, from Wilmot Pass. The beautiful and plentiful sounds of silence.
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“”To listen fully means to pay close attention to what is being said beneath the words. You listen not only to the ‘music,’ but to the essence of the person speaking. You listen not only for what someone knows, but for what he or she is. Ears operate at the speed of sound, which is far slower than the speed of light the eyes take in. Generative listening is the art of developing deeper silences in yourself, so you can slow our mind’s hearing to your ears’ natural speed, and hear beneath the words to their meaning.”— Peter Senge
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Vocation – A Calling that I Hear
In his book ‘Let Your Life Speak – Listening for the Voice of Vocation’, writer, teacher and activist Parker J. Palmer reflects on an old Quaker saying, ‘Let your life speak’. He describes that, as a youth, he thought these words meant achieving the highest truths and values. Living his life and vocation from this place became an act of will. Over time, however, he came to see that his willful pursuit of vocation was an act of violence toward himself, because it was something forced from without rather than grown from within. Acting from this place brought pathology, not the wholeness he was truly seeking.
He came to realise that the words, ‘Let your life speak’, meant something else, and I quote, ’Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.’
Vocation then is not an act of will but an act of listening. Vocation, rooted in the Latin for “voice”, means a ‘calling that I hear’.
Palmer’s writings have resonated deeply for me as I have listened to my life telling me who I am and what truths and values are at the heart of my identity. And I was struck, at the end of facilitating my first Speaking Circle in Johnsonville, near Wellington, last week to hear myself saying, ‘I believe in people taking their place in the world. I believe in people discovering their authentic expression. And I believe in people sharing who they are, and making a difference’. These are the truths and values at the heart of why I do what I do and who I am.
When you listen to your life:
What does your life intend to do with you?
What truths do you embody? What values do you represent?
My footprint - Paekakariki Beach
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“Listening is a magnetic and strange thing, a creative force. The friends who listen to us are the ones we move toward. When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand.”
— Karl Menninger
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