Listening as a discipline and practice came up at our church here in Bisbee, last Sunday, and I decided to post again a piece I wrote on listening back in 2009. I need to read this frequently, maybe once a week, to remind myself of how poorly I listen, and how much I need to change that. Listening can become a practice, much like meditation is a practice to Buddhists and others. Perhaps that's my New Year's resolution. Here's the piece:
Yesterday, on the Fourth here in Bisbee, 2009, we had a large crowd at our house, watching the parade, eating, and talking. It was a fun day all around and the fireworks last night were spectacular.
Our house is on the parade route in Warren, one part of Bisbee. When we lived in Bisbee for 10 years before, from 1996 to 2005, we lived in "Old Town" or old Bisbee up the road and on the canyon walls. Now we are down in the flatlands, still at 4000 feet or so in the high desert.
Part of the time during the parade I spent talking with an old friend who has lived in Mexico for a long time and I was asking her thoughts on whether and how I should proceed with my Spanish.
In the middle of this conversation two young people came in who were volunteering in the Bisbee area, gathering signatures for a single payer option like Medicare for All, and also working as volunteers on the border. They had been invited in by some of our friends outside watching the parade who saw them walking by. The couple had recently come from Atlanta where she had earned a master's in nursing at Emory. Of course when they mentioned health care reform, I was off to the races, bloviating about my own experiences and great wisdom in these matters.
It was quite a performance: me talk, you listen, and they were polite, pleasant and altogether too willing to let an old timer have his say.
And somehow later, when I wakicking myself for going on again, one more time, I recalled an exchange I had experienced several years back, an experience that taught me a new way of thinking of listening. I practice "focusing," sadly not enough, a method of meditation developed by the psychologist Eugene Gendlin at the University of Chicago over a number of years and outlined in his book Focusing in 1978.
Focusing is sitting quietly with a problem, waiting for a felt bodily sense of unease that, if we allow it to happen, can turn into a word and even more. The trick is to let the body and the brain lead us to an awareness that is already present in our body but one which we have not been touch with.
Focusing is usually listening to ourselves, to our bodies speaking. But there is another side to focusing and that is listening to others, and it can be equally shattering and moving. Focusers often work in pairs and the listener or the trainer is required to listen acutely or fully. Focusing with a listener is not required, however, but it is helpful. In truth, sitting quietly and waiting for a felt sensation is also a profound kind of listening and waiting.
I had mentioned in one session to my trainer that when I listen "fully" I tend to feel like I drop out of view and I resist it. My trainer reminded of my remark and tied it to my desire to be more present to Carole each day. My trainer was Cathy Pascal, LCSW, in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, a highly experienced teacher and trainer in Focusing who works with individuals and groups in classes teaching Focusing skills.
Cathy suggested that we focus on this fear of fully listening in my life, the fear that I will disappear. I thought we were going back to pick up a cold trail, but I had come to trust her instincts and I quickly said that my fear of listening was probably linked to my vanity, a vanity in striving to keep my concerns always front and center in any setting or relationship.
Yet when I focused something unexpected and revealing turned up.
When I focused on the bodily sense surrounding this vague and unnamed fear, I quickly noted that the fear was manifested by a felt sense of a 'lump' or 'fist' of 'deadness' at the center of my stomach, a lump of frozen flesh that seemed to be tied to the listening itself and not anything specific about the person I was listening to, like my wife Carole. Nor was it about my need to be the center of attention.
In focusing further I gradually became aware that listening intently in any situation set off a fear of losing myself, triggering a fear that by listening so completely I might go up in smoke. In giving myself over I would give myself up. Yet in physically grounding and identifying my fear I experienced a felt shift of ease, a 'soft awareness' that I was present when I listened fully.
Cathy, in reprising the session, noted that she said that she had found that my fear of intently listening as a kind of trap door that threatens to drop me out of sight (I had put it this way before focusing) was not her experience at all. Instead, the opposite was the case.
She said that when she truly and openly listened, she came alive, much more so than at any other time. She has found that by truly listening, instead of our selves dropping away, we drop into ourselves, into our truer and deeper self, a larger self that is not so defended.
This is an amazing insight, a bringing to the surface of another one of those false dichotomies that we (I) live with. I had caught a glimpse of that larger awareness in my own focusing sessions. I had believed, falsely, that if I give someone my undivided attention then I will drop out of sight if not out of existence altogether. But the truth is that when I listen totally, to myself or to others, I drop into existence.
I tend to forget this wonderful truth, a truth I need to remember and remember again.
One final point. Listening is a ubiquitous activity in all of our lives, one that few of us do very well. We listen with divided attention. But Focusing would have us change this, by encouraging us to listen not only because those whom we listen to deserve this kind of attention but also because we ourselves deserve this kind of attention.
In Buddhism you meditate regularly, religiously, to gain enlightenment and meditation is, for most of us, a very rare experience. But in Focusing you take a ubiquitous activity like listening and you learn to do it well and intently and in the listening you find yourself by attending to what is actually being said by another. This intentional attending is itself a kind of meditation.
That's a rather interesting difference between two approaches that share a faith in learning how to awaken ourselves from our daily sleepwalking with fuller awareness and attention.
One more thing: listening is a crucial theme of the spirituality found in James Carse's The Silence of God. Listenng deeply and attentively is how we find ourselves, our larger selves.
