How to Learn the Art of Listening in a Noisy World
I wasn’t born knowing the art of listening
Listening is not a skill that is fully developed at birth. On the day I was born the first thing I did was speak my truth with gusto while hanging upside down in the air. No words, of course. Just an announcement that I had arrived. And listening wasn’t even an option.
I may have heard someone say “It’s a girl” and there were probably sounds of monitors and people moving around uttering various commands, but I didn’t come into this world prepared to listen.
I was born to talk.
And talk I did.
In the following few years, I was encouraged to speak and enlarge my vocabulary, with adults clapping their hands with each new utterance beginning with ‘Mama’ and evolving to “Mine!”
I am sure my first verbs were likewise self-focused “Give me. Hold me. Feed me”.
Then one day, without a lot of warning, I heard my parents say, “You aren’t listening to me! Pay attention!”
Wait a minute! Now I am confused. I thought talking was what I was born to do.
Everyone got so excited when I could string more than three words together, that I never practiced listening. I heard things, of course —encouragement and judgment, many shouldas and oughttas, and it seemed like everyone had an opinion.
By the time I reached adolescence, I learned to turn down the volume on all these outer voices and began to hear more inner voices. These also included a lot of judgment, worry, fantasy and questions.
I understood that listening was important, but listen to what?! To whom?! How do you choose?
Hearing is not listening
Listening does not happen automatically like breathing. Listening is a skill that I am still practicing. And listening is definitely not the same thing as hearing.
We learn by trial and error. The voices of our friends and family often echo the loudest, followed by authority figures.
We listen to popular music and are influenced by the voices on TV, social media, and if we are lucky, the voices of beloved authors and gurus. I realized recently that I am more hard-of-hearing than I thought.
There is nothing wrong with my auditory function.
It’s the ability to discern messages from subtle vibrations received by my heart that I struggle to hear with clarity.
Being hard-of-hearing is not limited to elderly people with auditory impairment. Teenagers do not hear words of caution, yet they have an especially keen perception of words of temptation. So it is as we age. What we hear is in part a function of what we listen to and partly what is playing the loudest in our environment.
What do I find myself listening to?
- The voice of desire yammers non-stop. (“Here, have a bite; you need a new pair of shoes, and while you are shopping, get that book you wanted to read.”)
- Voices of my inner selves, the joker, saboteur, and prophet, inner voices who work to protect me from perceived dangers. (“You aren’t going to wear that, are you? Keep it up and you will have no friends. Blah blah blah…..”)
- The voices in my environment. (News, gossip, and opinions.)
I really don’t want to listen to these voices but there seems to be no off switch.
Or is there?
What keeps me from listening to Mystery?
Whether you call it listening to God, your inner muse, or the Universe, there are messages of guidance, wisdom, and inspiration that are a lot quieter than the voices of desire, judgment, and shoulds. Nevertheless, I have a thousand reasons for not hearing these divine words in the course of my day.
• I think ‘I’ve heard this all before’
• I fill my heart and ears with distracting voices and sounds
• I want to be ‘doing’ instead of listening
• I resist taking the time to ‘be still and know’
• I am afraid of what I may hear
Why is listening so important?
I love what Thich Naht Hanh had to say about listening:
You listen first of all in order to give the other person relief, a chance to speak out, to feel that someone
finally understands him or her. Deep listening is the kind of listening that helps us to keep
compassion alive while the other speaks, which may be for half an hour or forty-five minutes.
During this time you have in mind only one idea, one desire: to listen in order
to give the other person the chance to speak out and suffer less.
This is your only purpose.
How do I practice listening?
If my purpose is to hear another person with this depth, how then do I learn the art of listening? How do I turn the volume down on the noisy chaos that is full of advice and opinion when someone else is speaking?
Ways I practice…….
- I spend a few minutes every morning ‘listening’ to the silence around me.
- I listen to holy words in texts in a process called ‘lectio divina’.
- I listen when I am caught up with beauty in the natural world.
- I listen through my camera
- I listen through poetry, writings, art, and music.
- I listen without speaking, interrupting, or daydreaming when another person is speaking.
This last form of listening is what Thich Nhat Hanh taught and is the most important form of listening we can practice. It is this listening that heals, that connects us to a source outside of ourselves, that gives us a purpose for living.
And it takes practice.
[PHOTO CREDITS from UNSPLASH: newborn by aix-style; Listenin-in-red-by-Larry-George; listening-by-vitolda-klein; Conversation-by-Etienne-Boulanger;boy-listening-by-Timothy-Eberly]
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