Listening is the ecology of being, Nothing shows off the quality of our love better than our listening skills and in essence listening is what keeps people together. People who listen to each other end up wanting to be and stay together for nothing connects us better than our listening to each others world of feelings and experience. Listening is love and love is listening, they are qualities of being that reflect each other perfectly. Love does not exist in human relationships without deep listening and yet we delude ourselves all the time about this for profound listening is something that few people have either experience or training with. Wherever
you find a poverty of communication Most people have no idea how difficult it is to listen well. Deep listening, until it becomes well modeled and anchored by an open heart, is an exercise in attention and by necessity hard work. Listening to the real meaning, feelings and being of another does not come easy or naturally to a mind full of itself. Listening takes will simply because we have to work to pay attention or strain against the prevailing winds of the cluttered mind that is just too noisy to hear much, to selfish or busy with itself to care. The will and the effort necessary for real listening to take place goes into keeping the consciousness clear while listening and this is difficult. The
most important way The quality of being most necessary for deep listening is the will focused through the art of paying ‘complete’ attention. A primary aspect of love, or the form that the ‘work of love’ takes most commonly is the application of attention. When we love something we pay attention to it. Putting together these statements leads us to the conclusion that the most common and most important way we combine love and attention is in our listening. It is certainly the most important way in which we demonstrate our good intention toward others. Attention and listening are both acts of will. And both imply a work against the inertia of the mind. Most people mistakenly believe that listening is a passive process that happens automatically thus there is no concept of it at all as something we need to either train or discipline ourselves to do. The roots of arrogance reach deeply into the psychology of listening, they clog our ears though the sound does get through. It is interesting to watch a demonstration of how the mind can block out all reception to the communications and feelings of another person without any awareness that this is happening. Most people assume that they are good listeners when in practice they are not. The pure heart is a perfect
listener; it is totally open and receptive and can feel the world of another through its
capacity of empathy and compassion. The mind on the other hand loves mostly to listen to
itself. It is usually so obsessed with itself it cannot get out of its own way. The heart
on the other hand can listen so deeply that it actually can penetrate into the inner world
of the speaker and merge temporarily with or become one with that person. The heart has an
ability to listen past the word level to the being level. The heart listens to the meaning
behind the words and thus avoids much of the confusion that is inherent in normal levels
of semantic dialogue. Empathy
marks the deepest halls of listening In fact there is no quicker way to find and enter ones own heart center than by tuning into and listening to the inner world of another. This is a great spiritual secret and was actually illustrated in the recent Robin Williams movie about Patch Adams; the interned mental patient turned illuminated doctor. His simple but rare illumination happened just on this point. He became aware of what happened when he would tune deeply into another's inner world by listening and caring enough to do so. And he saw clearly that the trained Psychiatrist did not listen at all. What he discovered was his own heart, the same heart that just loves to give, help and love. And the secret is: When
we enter and pay attention to another's inner world Listening is the straight and narrow path into the heart center that has enough love to pay attention because it wants to pay attention and has the will to pay attention because it loves to pay attention. This is the key, the heart loves others inner worlds for it has removed its sense of separation from those worlds. Love is what we feel when our sense of ego separation melts. It is the nature of the heart to care and to love and how else can or do we see, feel and experience people’s inner worlds but by listening to them. Yet where do we go or whom do we turn to learn how to listen. We had teachers who taught us how to read but no communication or listening teachers nor is there a course about it we can find in the phone book. Thus the world is full of leaders who think they know how to listen when in fact they really do not. They also have had no training and this becomes an especially large handicap when it is your job to listen to the needs of the people. Real
listening is a state of meditation Deep listening then is the process in which we actually journey inside the inner worlds of others. Listening allows us to experience what another person feels from inside him or herself. But we cannot have this "pure" type of perception without getting into a totally one-pointed state of concentration, that space where we can focus our attention and expand it out to include more of another’s being. This kind of listening can only happen if we are in a state of "meditation," meaning where our body is calm and our emotions and mind are peaceful, not churning around like a tornado. Mediation is actually a good training that prepares us for deeper levels of listening but "mirroring" is the fastest way to learn how to put the ego aside temporarily so we can hear the other person in depth. To
communicate everything and listen to the depth In one of the following chapters you will find a process called Mirroring and this is a communication and listening technique that was developed into a fine spiritual art form by Christopher Hills. His method of training his students was through the communication and listening arts. People find this approach to love most difficult because it confronts us directly and quickly with all of our resistance's to something as beautiful as real love. Communication and listening training is mostly absent in society and education simply because, people in general, on the deepest and most gut level, do not want to listen or change. The general lack of listening in life reflects the general and deep lack of heart and the lack of heart reflect basic lacks in love and trust. This is all a consequence of the separative state of ego consciousness that feels threatened and fears the differences that exist between one being and another. We
need safe non-separate environments in which communication There is nothing more provoking to our emotions and feelings than having our feelings go unheard. Non-listening destroys marriages fast yet people still do not pay attention to this basic life skill. Happy and successful relationships are marked with people who show each other that they are interested in listening to the other. When we risk a feeling, and it drops off into the thin air of non-listening, it leaves us with a very unwholesome feeling in the heart. It drives us quickly away from our vulnerability and into the more mental and separate spaces of the emotional mind where emotions get more violent and intense. In good fights between husbands and wives one calms the other with listening, understanding and empathy. Listening almost always will draw us closer to the heart and its vulnerable feelings where as non-listening will almost always have the opposite effect. The walls of Jericho, in the bible, really were walls of separation and division which are other words for uncaring and the distancing of beings from each other. In infancy the flashes of pain that come from rejection are the same as the pains of misunderstandings that arise from poor communication with adults. In practice we manifest uncaring in many ways but the most common way is through our inability and basic refusal to listen to others at any meaningful level. The walls of separation hang heavy between most people. Between bosses and their employees, between industrial lords and society. When these barriers hang like heavy wall carpets between husband and wife or between parents and their children, then we have a sadness that is most difficult to deal with in life for these separations penetrate to our deepest vulnerabilities. When it became evident in the early part of the 20th century that people needed to be taught how to drive and that they needed to be licensed ŽafterŽ demonstration of their skills, the roads became somewhat safer. We could not and would not tolerate complete anarchy on our roads yet we tolerate that in the area of communication and listening. If we stepped out into the road where cars were coming out at us from all directions we would pay attention but we are all standing in minefields of misunderstanding and miscommunications that hurt us deeply without active conscious awareness. To
listen is to suffer because we do not want to listen This is one of the first prose forms offered in HeartHealth, The Psychology of the Heart. These words offer deep insight into the very nature of what is wrong with egocentric human consciousness and why communication remains superficial. This prose implies a great deal. It ties listening, suffering and change into a tight mathematical dictum. We can see that people try to escape suffering by not listening, thus avoiding change, which is really impossible to do. It is the essence message of World Psychology that we are paying, and are going to increasingly pay a high price for our aggregate lack of listening. Because of our fear of change we have avoided confrontations with real problems and the end result is the same on global, environmental, economic and political levels as it is in personal relationships. In World Psychology we are looking for changes in our basic capacity for love and this translates on a practical level to changes in our basic listening capacities. Spiritual seekers who are interested in expanding their consciousness into higher more refined expressions of love should note that they will not get far if they skip over listening to what they need to change. The secret to meaningful change and the discovery of our true heart is found in our willingness to look at those things inside of us that we do not want to look at. We are not normally interested in looking at those parts of ourselves that we do not want to look at so we do not listen to life nor our friends, lovers or even children when they mirror these aspects back to us. There are just certain things that we simply do not want to see about ourselves because it is too painful. We don't want to suffer, so we do not want to look. Nobody likes to see his or her own weaknesses except the saint who gets high on it. When life tries to point things out to us we manifest our resistance to change as a lack of listening. All relationships begin a rapid death when people resist growth and change because that is when communication breaks down. Love gets destroyed when communication breaks down, and communications breaks down because people are not interested in real change or in deep listening. Our individual resistance to change is mirrored directly in our communication and listening habits. Closed, rigid unchanging people are not usually found to be good listeners for to listen is to open and change. If we do not want to listen to others because they are communicating about something that we do not want to see, we destroy the very thing that we so much want in our life, love. Even with our loved ones, we get tired and begin to resent what we feel is their lack of caring. Mirroring offers us a very powerful and direct movement into the depths of our hearts and beings whose very nature is love. Mirroring is the actual time and effort we take to learn and practice deepening our communication and listening skills. Our
capacity for love grows automatically Basic requirements for Mirroring are a true desire to learn to expand the heart and one's capacity for love. It demands a real appreciation and caring for the inner worlds of others. It expresses and needs a desire to feel and be with the fullness of another person’s inner world of experience. It means we want to spend the time and energy to give another person, who we care about or want to care about, the time and space to complete their communications, their expressions of thoughts and feelings without us interrupting, judging or rushing in to fill the silence with our advice. This practice requires our full-undivided attention. The Psychology of Listening Home Page Mirroring |