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The Lost Art of Listening
It can be said in general that most people no longer
know how to listen—either to one another or to themselves.
Though most of us have ears that can hear very well, we do
not actually know how to use these ears to listen. Listening
has indeed become a lost art.
To be sure, there are many who teach listening skills for
education and business. In a classic and informative article
(“Listening to People”) written in the 1950s and published
by the Harvard Business Review in 1988 in a collection
entitled People: Managing Your Most Important Asset, the
authors (Ralph G. Nichols and Leonard A. Stevens) remind us
that whereas the average speech rate of the majority of
Americans is around 125 words a minute (and, of course,
comparable numbers would hold true for other languages as
well), the human brain processes words at a much faster
rate. When we listen to someone speaking, therefore, we are
asking our brain to slow down dramatically in relation to
its ordinary speed. This means that we are left with a lot
of spare time for thinking, “and the use or misuse of this
spare thinking time holds the answer to how well a person
can concentrate on the spoken words. … A major task in
helping people to listen better is teaching them to use
their spare thinking time efficiently.”
Deep Listening
The relationship of thinking to listening is an
important subject, and one that the authors go into in great
depth in relation to developing better listening skills. In
this essay, however, we will keep this relationship in mind
but our emphasis will be slightly different. Our emphasis
will be on listening as a way of self-knowledge and
self-transformation. Our emphasis will be on what Thich Nhat
Hanh calls “deep listening.”
Deep listening has to do with the very essence of our
relationship to ourselves and others. Deep listening
requires love and understanding. From the perspective of
self-knowledge and self-transformation, to listen deeply
means to make ourselves fully available to what is actually
taking place at the moment both in and around us. This is
only possible, however, when we are inwardly quiet, alert,
and sensitive, when we are in a state of receptivity. Deep
listening requires a balance between activity and passivity.
It requires us to empty our minds without losing them. It
requires us to find a "middle ground," a space in ourselves,
where the vibrations of life can enter and be reflected in
our consciousness without discrimination, where the forces
coming from both outside and inside can be experienced
without attachment, fear, interpretation, or judgment.
Deep listening actually begins at the very instant we
realize that we are not listening, when we see clearly how
our “identification” with our thoughts, feelings, or
sensations interferes with what is being heard. At that
moment, if we continue to be sincere with ourselves and do
not react with inner criticism, we realize that there is
something in us—a deeper level of silence, a deeper "self,"
a witness—that can include our own thoughts, feelings, and
sensations in the process of listening. We also realize that
this deeper silence comes into play only when we can
confront the truth about ourselves without any judgment. It
is this inner silence that will not only allow us to hear
the subtle nuances of what is being said but will also bring
us to a central, more-balanced place in ourselves. For if
our attention goes too far outside ourselves we begin to
react to the events around us too aggressively, whereas if
it goes too far into ourselves we fall asleep or dream. In
both instances we lose touch with the subtle dance, the
moving interaction, of inner and outer impressions that
sustains our lives.
Opportunities to Experiment
Our day provides us with many opportunities to
experiment with listening. From the moment we wake up in the
morning and our thoughts and emotions begin to propel us
into various activities, to the numerous discussions we have
at work, to the intimate conversations we undertake with
friends and loved ones, to our own thoughts about the many
aspects of our lives—we can study listening in many
different ways.
One exercise, which is always useful, is to sit quietly when
you can with closed eyes and simply turn your auditory
attention inward. Try to listen not only to sounds reaching
you from the outside world, but also to the various sounds
of your own body and psyche. Include the various sensations
and tensions that are speaking to you. Listen to your
thoughts. See if you can actually "hear" them emerging out
of silence. It is important, however, not to categorize what
your hear. Simply listen to everything without
discrimination.
Another exercise is to try to listen to yourself as you
speak to others. The aim here is to listen to yourself as
though you were a stranger whom you wanted to learn more
about. For you are a stranger. We are all strangers to
ourselves. And when we are confronted with strangers in whom
we are interested, what do we do? We listen not only to
their words, but also to their intonations. Consciously or
unconsciously, we notice where their voice is coming from:
is it coming from up high in themselves, their throat or
even the top of their head, or lower down from their solar
plexus or belly? We also watch their movements and gestures.
We try to "feel" their atmosphere. In this experiment we try
to perceive all of these things—but in ourselves. As you
listen to yourself in this way, of course, you will see just
how much your attachment to your habitual thoughts and
feelings interfere with the process of listening.
Letting Go of Expectations & Interpretations
Real listening requires inner relaxation. To listen to
ourselves and others means to let go of our own
psychological expectations and interpretations and to allow
our attention to move in new, spontaneous ways in ourselves,
to move toward the unknown. It means to let go of the habits
of mind and feeling that block this "free" movement of
attention and channel it toward the known. Such habits
include, for example, thinking that we know how someone is
going to finish their sentence. (We may well know the words
they are going to use, but while we’re thinking about these
words we probably won’t hear the subtle meaning they give
them.) Real listening means first of all to observe and then
to find a way to free ourselves from the mental and
emotional noise that arises automatically during the “spare
time” we have for thinking, no matter what value we may give
to the noise of these thoughts and emotions. Real listening
demands that we open ourselves to the deep, underlying
silence in ourselves, the ground of our own being, and
realize that it is only this silence that can truly listen.
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