Listening with an Awakened Heart

Namaste beautiful ones! I hope this finds you happy and well.

I've been working on this post for a long time. The subject is so important to me and there was so much I wanted to say, it was honestly a challenge to write and include everything in a succinct manner. I really hope you like it and find the wisdom as helpful and inspiring as I did.

The theme of this post is listening: listening to ourselves and listening deeply to others with an open receptivity and interest that nourishes and allows for true communicating.

I'll start with a quote by Henry David Thoreau:

“Could a greater miracle take place than for us to look through each other's eyes for an instant?”

Several weeks ago, Tara Brach gave an amazing lecture on Listening with an Awakened Heart. It came at the perfect time for me as I was finding myself struggling to empathize with and show compassion toward someone in my life. My problem? I wasn't truly listening to that person.

Deep listening is like an art and it takes practice. 

There are many things that keep us from deep listening. We have habits of being preoccupied, or having an agenda, or being self-conscious or rehearsing what we want to say. Perhaps we have a need to prove ourself as somebody, or to come up with the right thing or to defend ourself. Finally, our culture is more ADD than ever before. Everything in our environment is clamoring for our attention.

The challenge is that we have huge conditioning to do anything but just be; to control what’s happening instead of just allowing.

How does this conditioning play out? We quickly have to insert our "self" into situations rather than just hanging in that openness. In communication, shared reality breaks down when we add on our interpretation, when we take it through our own filter and we project what’s going on. Instead of wanting to know what’s true, we assume we already know. We've all been in situations when our assumptions and our interpretations cover over what’s real. As soon as somebody starts talking, we use the filter of our own experience. “Oh yeah, as a mom, I know what that’s like” or whatever.

There are three conditionings that cause us to break connections.

-Wanting: Wanting something different, so we can’t just listen.
-Aversion: We don’t like what’s happening so we have to control. 
-Neutrality: It doesn’t matter to us.

When it’s wanting, sometimes it’s wanting something from that person and sometimes you’re wanting something that has nothing to do with that person. 

Maybe we’re wanting that person to have a certain experience of us. It’s rare when we’re not attached to having them have a certain kind of experience of us. Sometimes we’re really wanting their approval or wanting them to think we’re helpful or wanting them to think in some way we’re interesting. Ask yourself: Are we wanting the conversation to go in a particular direction? Are we wanting some affirmation, some result?

On the flip side (aversion), if in some way we're feeling threatened by somebody, it's also very hard to have an opening, listening presence. When there’s fear--when in some way having a real contact with somebody is threatening--it’s like we’re in fight/flight mode. We’re not open, we’re tight. Ask yourself: Is there something you’re organized around that’s keeping you from that openness? Is there some fear you won’t have the right response? Some fear of another’s judgment, or some anger or dislike of how that person’s behaving so you can’t just listen? Are you fearing that they’re going to get their way if you just listen? Or that they’re going to get away with something if you listen?

When you don’t listen, people feel like they don’t matter. You can’t know or be close with a person if you don’t listen.

The key is to listen without controlling, to listen with a receptivity that really wants to know. When we offer a listening presence, it creates an atmosphere of love and safety. Our attention is the purest expression of love. 

Listening is the pathway to intimacy. If we can pause and listen inwardly, we can become intimate with our inner being. If we can listen to each other, we find out who we are together. 

Finally, I'd like to recommend an article by Tara which talks about cultivating compassion, allowing for close connections and trusting our own goodness in relationships. It's called "A More Perfect Union."

Caroline