The Gift Of Being Heard

So This past week,

A friend of mine attended a community event for the first time since the pandemic.

And afterwards,

She confessed to me that she felt like she just wasn't quite sure she knew how to quote people anymore.

It was like somehow during this extended period of isolation,

She'd almost completely lost her ability and her mind to speak or to listen or even to communicate at all really.

And this got me to thinking about what the Buddha taught us about our speech and our listening skills,

Which is that we really do need to practice them.

So it's just like anything else that we want to do well,

Like playing an instrument or learning how to draw maybe.

In order to get better at communicating,

We really do need to have a strong ongoing dedication to practicing and honing our skills around this.

In fact,

According to the teachings,

These skills are so important that the practice of mindful or what is often called right speech is one of the main spokes on the wheel of the Dharma or the Noble Eightfold Path,

Which of course means that we can't get very far along in our development without it,

Without these skills.

Though of course,

What's also true is that unless we're the Buddha or have somehow managed to become enlightened,

Not a single one of us has yet mastered or perfected this.

And I find that so incredibly helpful to remember that we are all absolutely not alone in our insecurity around our communication skills.

We all struggle with it,

Which is why it's a practice.

In the Pali language,

The term for mindfulness is Sati,

S-A-T-I,

Which means to recall,

To bring to mind,

Remember,

Recollect,

Be mindful of,

Which means that as part of our practice,

We are being asked to really nurture a strong ongoing awareness of all of our communications and at the very least make sure that we're not causing any harm either to ourselves or to others.

But what I find so interesting is that while our tendency is usually to worry quite a lot about what we should say,

Our ability to listen is what actually defines the entire practice of right speech,

Our ability to listen.

In fact,

Good listening is the ground or the soil of any good communication.

It's literally rooted there.

It gets its nourishment from there.

So the idea is that nothing,

Really nothing can grow well in barren soil.

And honestly,

Whenever I find myself with someone who really seems to know how to do this well,

Someone who knows how to give me their full attention or their nonjudgmental,

Caring,

Empathetic,

Full-bodied presence,

I just feel like I'm in the presence of such a rare gift.

It's almost priceless,

Really,

When someone can listen to you that fully.

And right now,

As we're all continuing to go through this incredibly difficult time in our history,

I also think it's something we all desperately need to be heard and seen and held in loving,

Caring presence.

And so I thought I'd spend some time in this talk visiting this practice of mindful listening and exploring how we can not only recognize it more often,

But how we can offer it out to others and also to ourselves.

And by the way,

That last part actually,

Being able to offer this listening to ourselves might be the most important aspect of our practice,

To give ourselves our own nonjudgmental,

Caring,

Empathetic,

Full-bodied presence so that in turn we can better offer that same kind of care out to others.

As the great Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh once told us,

You have lived with yourself your whole life.

We think we already understand who we are,

But unless we have listened deeply to ourselves with compassion and curiosity and without judgment,

We may not know ourselves very well at all.

I think that's so true.

So I want to spend some time exploring what this good listening might look like and how we can use our practice to nurture and develop it.

But before I do,

I thought it might be really helpful to explore what it looks like when we aren't listening so that we can become more aware of what's happening when we're not truly being there,

Either for ourselves or for those that we're communicating with.

So as a practice,

It can sometimes be so useful to make a true effort to become more aware of when someone maybe isn't truly being there for us,

When they're not listening well.

Because when we can shed some light on this and really sense and remember how it feels when someone isn't offering us their full attention,

It can motivate us to want to learn to become even better listeners because we'll have more of an awareness of just how frustrating and painful and maybe even harmful this can be.

A really easy and good way to begin to notice that someone maybe isn't listening to us is by becoming aware of their body language.

For instance,

Maybe you've experienced talking to someone who's busy looking at their cell phone while you're trying to explain something that's maybe important to you.

Or maybe you've found yourself talking to someone who keeps looking around the room instead of meeting your eyes.

Or maybe you've experienced someone doing some sort of task or just maybe fiddling around with something while you're talking,

Which again means that they quite literally are not seeing you.

Just last week actually,

As I was thinking about this topic,

My husband and I were sitting on the couch after dinner.

We had a pint of Ben and Jerry's that we were going to share.

And because I was sharing and talking,

I decided to hand-bread the ice cream first.

And after several minutes of deeply digging into it in a kind of concentrated silence,

He finally looked up at me and said,

With all sincerity,

You know,

This is actually a great way to get your spouse to listen to you for more than a minute or so.

Except of course,

When I asked him to repeat what he just said,

He said he couldn't quite remember.

Though in all fairness,

He's actually one of the best listeners that I know.

In any case,

Along with the physical clues that can show us that people aren't listening to us,

There are,

As you might imagine,

An endless number of verbal clues that can let us know that we just aren't being heard.

And here I thought I'd mention five of the main or more common ones that we might start becoming more aware of in our lives.

And by the way,

All of these verbal cues that I'm going to mention are often also called listening stoppers.

Because not only do they clue us into the fact that someone isn't listening,

But they also have the tendency to make us want to shut down or maybe stop sharing altogether.

As we go along,

You might notice also that they all have a similar underlying theme,

Which I think will likely become more obvious as we go on.

So the first verbal clue that's kind of easy to spot is when someone denies how we're feeling.

So for instance,

Maybe you've told someone that you're feeling sad or angry or hurt or anxious about something.

And the person you're talking to tells you that you either don't or maybe shouldn't feel this way.

And the verbal clue here might sound something like,

No,

No,

Stop.

You shouldn't feel sad or worried or there's no reason to feel angry or sad,

Et cetera.

This is so problematic because whether or not there's any truth to the reason that you're feeling the way you do,

The reality is that in the present moment,

The feeling of anger,

Sadness,

Frustration,

Anxiety,

Whatever it is,

Is true because it's what's here,

Which means that it's real.

And instead of being denied or pushed down or away,

Our emotions deserve to be heard and felt and acknowledged.

And usually what's happening when someone denies our feelings is that they themselves are feeling uncomfortable about what is being expressed.

And they want us to either put it away or to maybe feel some other emotion that's maybe easier for them to experience or to be with.

Another classic way that people often show us that they aren't listening is when they sort of start interrogating us,

Either during or maybe after we've shared something.

And you'll know that you're being interrogated in this way when the question or maybe the questions themselves are feeling a bit intrusive or maybe inappropriate,

Mostly because they've taken you away from whatever it was that you were actually trying to express in the moment.

When this happens,

What can clue you into your sense of not being heard is a feeling of being shut down in some way and maybe frustrated about suddenly being asked to take care of the other person's needs.

So for instance,

Instead of being able to express what you were trying to say,

You might find yourself spending time answering this person's questions or explaining yourself.

And I need to confess that I actually became aware of how I was doing this exact thing this week myself to a dear friend.

She was sharing her fear with me about the possibility that she might need to move out of a house that she really likes.

And instead of listening to her,

I found myself getting excited about the possibility of her living somewhere that I thought was really exciting.

And then I found myself asking her all sorts of questions about this other place instead of listening to her fear,

Which very thankfully I realized was upsetting her and I was able to stop and apologize.

So that one's an easy one to do,

Maybe not so easy to catch sometimes.

A third and very common way that people let us know that they aren't interested in our version of our own lives is by giving us unsolicited advice,

Which as a confession might be one of my very least favorite things in the world.

And I know I'm absolutely not alone in this.

Whenever I've offered to talk on mindful listening over the years and asked for a show of hands from anyone who likes unsolicited advice,

Only once in all the years that I've been teaching did someone raise their hand.

And even then what we established was that what the student appreciated was solicited advice or advice that they'd specifically asked for or sought out.

So apparently not a single one of us likes to receive volunteered advice.

And yet what's also true is that almost all of us tend to do this in some way or the other.

The problem is even though we may believe our intention is good when we're offering our advice,

If the person in question isn't a child and our opinion has not been sought out,

What we're essentially saying to someone is that clearly you don't know how to deal with your own life or your own personal life choices,

But I have the answer for you.

And of course this can sometimes just feel awful and diminishing and frustrating to be on the receiving end of this,

Especially if maybe someone does this often as a kind of habit.

A fourth way that people show us that they aren't fully there for us or for our stories or our feelings is when they take something that we've said and quickly turn the conversation around to themselves.

And again,

This one is tricky to catch sometimes because it can often just feel like the flow of conversation has shifted somehow.

But you might also start to notice a sense of being somehow unfinished like,

Hey,

I felt like it was my turn and now suddenly it's yours again,

Or like anything you say about yourself is simply being used as a jumping off point and you actually never really feel like you've fully finished sharing.

You don't have that sense of completion.

A very similar listening supper to this one is when someone interrupts us.

And this can be in mid-thought,

Mid-sentence,

Or maybe even at the very tail end of a sentence,

Which again we may not have been given the chance to fully finish.

And of course we just naturally feel unheard whenever this happens because the message is that the person that we're talking to really is not interested in what we have to say,

But is simply waiting to reply.

As the author Stephen Covey once so wisely noted,

Most people do not listen with the intent to understand.

They listen with the intent to reply.

Unfortunately though,

When this kind of interruption happens often,

Maybe throughout an entire conversation,

It can sometimes just make us want to stop talking altogether,

Mainly because it's become so clear that what we have to say is not being valued.

And I also want to mention just one more verbal listening stopper because it's one that can not only make us feel like we're not being listened to,

But actually as if we're not even there.

This is when someone dominates too much of the time in a conversation or maybe rambles on through a variety of different topics without pausing for any input or reflection or sharing from us for maybe 5,

10,

15 minutes,

Even longer.

And when this happens,

You might start to sense that you've in some way become invisible and are just serving as an ear for the other person's own inner dialogue.

Again,

Here,

You might really feel like you literally are not being seen.

And so,

As I mentioned earlier,

You may have noticed that there's a common theme or a thread that underlines all of these kind of listening stoppers.

And that is the theme of self or ego,

Which as we all know is exactly what we're trying to work with or maybe to loosen our grip on through our meditation practice.

This strong sense of self,

Of course,

Is also exactly what creates so much of the dissatisfaction,

Our suffering or dukkha in our lives.

And it's also exactly what contributes to our inability to fully be there for another person to be present with them fully.

And the difficulty is when we're not grounded in the present moment and the narrative or the dialogue that's happening in our own minds is so loud or dominant,

It tends to drown out all the other voices that are seeking to be heard.

It's like when we're trying to listen to the news and someone else is busy voicing their very boisterous opinion about the news,

Very difficult to listen.

And in the same way,

We can't listen to the news of others when our minds are so busy voicing their own news along with our own strong opinions about that news.

And what's complicated about this is that if we're honest,

We might admit that we ourselves very frequently do not want to listen to our own boisterous opinions about everything either.

So for instance,

We might begin to notice that our thoughts can often be repetitive or anxious,

Or we can find ourselves reminiscing about all the things that went wrong or fearing all the things that could go wrong,

Or maybe telling ourselves how wrong we are or how wrong other people are or how wrong certain situations are and on and on.

So given this,

Our tendency is actually to want to distract ourselves from these thoughts and the emotions that come along with them by trying to drown them out.

And of course,

We can all do this in endless ways.

Some of the common ways we might do this is to maybe notice that we're more off than not listening to the TV or the radio or to a podcast instead of just being there in the silence.

Or maybe we're constantly distracting ourselves with social media so that we're not listening to our own minds.

Or maybe we're distracting ourselves with other people and their needs or their lives and wondering how we might fix them or how they could be doing it better.

Or maybe we find ourselves distracting ourselves with all the things that we consider obligations that actually might not be obligatory or even necessary at all.

Right now,

You might even take a moment just to consider what are the most common ways that I tend to keep myself distracted?

Or maybe what things serve to keep me from being with myself or listening to myself?

The problem is whenever we're distracting ourselves to avoid listening to ourselves,

It just makes it that much more difficult to really listen deeply to anyone else.

So for instance,

We might start to notice how often we want to distract ourselves from whatever another person is saying or expressing.

Or we might notice how often we become judgmental or irritated,

Impatient,

Argumentative,

Or bored when we're in conversation with other people.

We may also start to notice how often we feel the need to offer suggestions about how to fix or make better.

So this type of noticing is actually one of the main ways that we can start to practice mindful listening.

Because when we start to become more aware of all the ways that we distract ourselves,

Either from ourselves or from others,

We can make a very conscious effort to put those things down or aside and become even more quiet and try to really listen to what someone is trying to express or even to what we ourselves have been trying to say or express to ourselves.

Because of course,

In order for us to learn how to really listen well,

We first need to learn how to do this for ourselves.

And happily,

Our formal meditation practice is a perfect place to do this because it involves stopping all of our other activity and spending some extended time in silence with ourselves,

Just being with ourselves,

And most importantly,

Of course,

Listening to ourselves.

And by the way,

We don't need to restrict this just to our formal meditation practice.

We can do something like take 5,

10,

15 minutes or longer,

Maybe just a minute even,

Just to sit down with ourselves and be quiet.

Maybe listen to the rain or watch a bird or look at a flower,

Listen to our hearts,

And just allow ourselves to spend some quiet time alone with ourselves.

This is such a simple thing and you wouldn't think that it would be such a hard thing to do,

But as the 17th century philosopher Blaise Pascal once said,

All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

And honestly,

I tend to believe that this is true in some way.

In any case,

However we do it,

As we sit in silence and listen,

What we're practicing is being with all the feelings and emotions and thoughts that are arising within us when we finally do stop and finally listen to what we've been saying to ourselves.

What we are absolutely not trying to do is to somehow escape our thoughts and emotions,

Maybe by going to some blissful non-thought place.

What we're practicing is how to be with all of these things,

With our thoughts and emotions and bodies,

With kindness,

Compassion,

Joy,

And ease,

So that we can meet them in the same way in our daily lives.

This is what we're practicing.

What this means is that our practice of listening should always and forever involve a strong,

Sincere attempt to offer ourselves our own kind,

Warm-hearted,

Non-judgmental presence and understanding,

Or our metta,

Our loving kindness,

Our karuna,

Compassion,

And upekka equanimity.

This is how we are being asked to practice always.

As the theologian Paul Tillage once said,

The first duty of love is to listen.

The first duty of love is to listen.

Or as Thich Nhat Hanh tells us,

We need to listen to both ourselves and others with quote,

No blame,

No reasoning,

Just understanding.

If you understand and you show that you understand,

You can love and the situation will change.

This is just incredibly important because if we're listening to our own minds and hearts with any kind of aversion,

What we're doing then is training ourselves to listen to both ourselves and others with aversion and judgment and very likely a strong urge to fix.

Instead,

Again,

Our practice is asking us to allow,

The word allow,

Whatever arises within us to be heard without judging it or shutting it down or running away and especially without trying to fix it.

The writer Parker Palmer reminds us,

If we want to support each other's inner lives,

We must remember a simple truth.

The human soul does not want to be fixed.

It wants simply to be seen and heard.

And yet,

As we all know,

This is usually exactly what we're struggling with,

Isn't it?

With judgment,

Either of ourselves or of others.

And just for a moment,

You might think about what happens to a conversation when there is judgment.

With judgment,

There tends to be a sense of not being heard or seen or understood,

Which is of course what we all want.

And so there's inevitably hurt and then maybe a defensiveness or maybe even a complete shutting down when there's judgment.

In the extreme,

This might even lead to a shutting down or cutting off of a relationship because honestly,

None of us wants to be judged,

Especially over and over and over because it's just so painful.

And yet again,

If we're honest,

Isn't this the way we so often relate to ourselves?

The truth is that we all tend to be so hard on ourselves.

So what we're being asked to do is to practice with this by again,

Trying to work on being nonjudgmental and becoming more and more willing to just be with all of our messiness and to listen to ourselves with friendliness and respect so that we're not cutting ourselves off from ourselves.

And of course,

The more we practice being with ourselves in this way,

The more we gradually learn to do this with other people in our lives as well.

And by the way,

The practice of Metta or loving kindness does not at all mean that we need to love something.

So we don't need to love our difficult feelings or thoughts or even that person that we're disagreeing with.

Metta,

Unconditional friendliness means that we meet and welcome the thoughts,

Feelings,

And even that difficult person with our respect,

Again,

With a kind of unconditional friendliness and a willingness to respectfully open our minds and listen,

Even if,

And maybe especially if we feel somehow hurt or angry.

With mindful listening then,

We are not being asked to agree.

We're simply being asked again to listen,

To receive,

And to make an effort to understand with kindness and even to open up to another possibility,

To another person's reality.

The author and researcher,

Brene Brown tells us this.

He says,

In order to empathize with someone's experience,

You must be willing to believe them as they see it.

And that's how you imagine their experience to be.

And so when we are listening to another person,

What we're doing is giving them our full,

Friendly,

Embodied presence and setting aside our own judgment by meeting them exactly where they are.

The spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle writes about this listening this way.

He says,

When listening to another person,

Don't just listen with your mind,

Listen with your whole body.

Feel the energy field of your inner body as you listen.

That takes attention away from thinking and creates a still space that enables you to truly listen without the mind interfering.

You're giving the other person space,

Space to be.

It is the most precious gift you can give.

And again,

In order for us to listen this way with our whole bodies,

It's so helpful to explore this during our formal meditation practice.

So we do this so that when we're in conversation with someone,

For instance,

We might use our mindfulness or our sati to remember over and over to consciously feel our feet on the earth and our sit bones and to really ground ourselves in the present moment in our bodies,

Embodied.

We can also remember to notice the breath and sense what's happening.

Is the breath relaxed or restricted or tight when you're in conversation with this person?

We might also remember to sense whatever emotions might be flowing through us and just noticing them again without needing to act on them.

And of course,

Can also notice our thoughts or that second conversation we're having in our own minds.

And then just like we do in our meditation practice,

When we can let go of that narrative and return again to the breath,

We can return to being with this person into whatever it is that they're sharing as if they are the breath that we are trying to concentrate on.

We can also practice relaxing,

Which means we can consciously calm our bodies and our breaths and maybe notice when we feel like speeding up or running and then again,

Consciously drop our shoulders,

Slow down and breathe.

We can also practice really focusing or concentrating again,

Just like we do in our formal meditation practice.

So for instance,

When we're in conversation,

We can make a strong effort just to not fidget or multitask or walk around or pick up our cell phone.

We can concentrate on what that person is saying.

We can also practice becoming more connected simply by making eye contact,

Which means not looking around or at something else and then maybe allowing ourselves to stay with and feel the possible uncomfortableness of that,

The intimacy that arises with looking someone in their eyes.

Finally,

We can also make a very conscious effort to give the conversation some spaciousness.

This might take the form of pausing for a few breaths after someone has shared instead of just jumping right in maybe or even over.

Then we can offer this pause,

It can give each person time to process and reflect and maybe even open some space for something new to arise or maybe for an unfelt emotion to finally show itself in the pause.

And I know for many of us offering this kind of pause in a conversation can sometimes feel a bit scary,

Like maybe we're falling off a cliff.

But in practice,

It can show the other person that we really care about what's just been shared.

As the late teacher Ram Dass once said so beautifully,

For someone deeply trapped in a prison of thought,

How good it can feel to meet a mind that hears,

A heart that reassures.

It's as if a listening mind is in and of itself,

An invitation to another mind to listen to.

How much it can mean when we accept the invitation and hear the world anew.

So finally,

As it seems we've come to the end of our time,

I wanted to offer a short meditation on the practice of listening,

A short reflection.

So if it's available to you and you're ready,

I'd like to invite you to somehow start to settle.

You might,

If you're sitting down,

Start to settle into your chair,

Maybe close the eyes.

If you're walking or driving the car,

You might make an intention to just become more embodied and feeling the bottom of your feet.

Maybe if you're walking and feeling the act of walking,

Just becoming more embodied.

Maybe taking a nice deep breath in,

Slow breath out,

Letting go.

Maybe a couple of rounds of these on your own.

Getting in touch with the breath,

Relax the body and the mind.

You might even add a slight smile to the corner of the eyes and the lips,

Not as a way of covering anything over,

But again,

As a way of bringing a sense of kindness to whatever's here in the mind,

Body,

Heart,

Then being our own loving presence in this way.

You might even listen to what your body might be expressing in the moment.

Maybe it's feeling tired or heavy,

Anxious.

Maybe there's some pain in the body.

Maybe there's a sense of being relaxed.

Just notice again,

Whatever's here,

Just listen and let be.

Still breathing.

You might take a moment to consciously relax or soften some of the tighter parts of the body.

You might start with the whole area of the face.

Imagine the skin around the whole head and face softening,

Forehead smooth,

Eyes soft,

Cheeks,

Jaw.

Still breathing.

Might notice the neck and shoulders,

Letting the shoulders drop.

Might notice the tummy.

See if you can soften here a bit as well.

You might notice your hands,

Whatever the hands are touching.

Just noticing,

Allowing the center of the palms to soften and open.

Still aware of the breath,

Softening even more with each exhale.

As you're ready,

I'd like to invite you to consider,

Is there some issue that someone maybe wants to talk to you about that maybe you just don't want to hear?

Some issue someone wants to talk to you about that maybe you just don't want to hear?

Or maybe it's something that you would like to talk about to someone,

But you are in some way avoiding that conversation.

This might even,

By the way,

Take the form of a conversation you need to have with yourself that maybe you're avoiding.

You don't want to listen to yourself in some way.

Just consider one of those things.

As you're considering this,

You might ask yourself or notice,

What happens in the body when I even consider this topic of conversation with myself or another person?

What happens in the body?

Noticing the body,

Maybe naming the emotion or a feeling that arises.

Maybe noticing the breath,

Noticing what happens in the tummy or the heart.

You might even now consider,

What am I believing about this conversation that might be preventing me from listening or speaking?

What am I believing that might be preventing me from listening or speaking?

Then you might consider,

What happens if I say something like,

Maybe so,

Maybe not to my beliefs?

What happens if I say something like,

Maybe so,

Maybe not to my beliefs?

You might now consider,

What would it be like to stay rather than flee from this conversation?

What would it be like to stay rather than flee from this conversation?

Would it be possible to stay with the physical sensations or emotions that might arise with as much kindness and compassion as I can generate?

You might ask yourself,

Would it be possible to be with myself through this conversation as well as the other person with as much kindness and patience as possible,

No matter what thoughts or emotions might arise?

You might ask,

Would it be possible to meet this conversation and this person with as much unconditional friendliness,

Respect,

And patience as possible?

Now you might even consider,

What might the outcome of this conversation look like if the seed of intention was to connect,

To create a kind of mutual understanding,

Even with myself?

What happens in the heart when you consider the possibility of this kind of opening to reflection,

The possibility of a new understanding?

And finally,

With the eyes still closed,

I invite you to listen to these words from the poet William Stafford,

Who writes,

Next time what I do is look at the earth before saying anything.

I'd stop just before going into a house and be an emperor for a minute and listen better to the wind or to the air being still.

When anyone talked to me,

Whether blame or praise or just passing time,

I'd watch the face,

How the mouth has to work and see any strain,

Any sign of what lifted the voice.

And for all I'd know more,

The earth bracing itself and soaring,

The air finding every leaf and feather over forest and water,

And for every person,

The body glowing inside the clothes like a light.

Namaste and blessings.

I hope you enjoyed this talk.

These talks are always offered freely so that no one is ever denied access to these teachings and your support really makes a difference.

Dhanah is an ancient Pali word meaning spontaneous generosity of heart.

If you feel inspired to offer Dhanah,

You can do so by visiting my website at www.

Mindfulvalley.

Com.

Thank you so much.