To truly listen is a gift for all,
writes Luke Bache
T
o be heard is one of the most healing acts there is.
Nothing to be fixed. No judgement passed, or advice
given. Just being felt and held. Just being seen so the
true answer can dance out from within.
Listening with your whole body can be a very curative
act. It is something that may feel quite unnatural to us when we start
to practice as it is usually radical to what we have been practicing
previously in our lives.
These I believe are three common ways of ‘listening’:1) ‘listening’ whilst looking/scrolling/swiping at a phone
2)^ ‘listening’ whilst thinking about a ‘brilliant’ response. (Usually
resulting in the ‘listener’s’ awareness going into their frontal lobe
and they get a certain glazed look in their eyes!)
3) ‘listening’ and then immediately responding with a fixing commentNumber 1 is far too common and as speakers we all know how this
one feels. Terrible! As is number 2, which I believe means we are
never really hearing each other fully as we are caught up in our own
response! Number 3 is more subtle and can often be heard as a
complaint in relationships: “He is always replying with ways to fix me.”
Solutions can be beneficial, but they can often leave the listener with
a feeling of not being heard.Therapeutic listening: the practice
If you are the listener, take your whole awareness to just below your
belly button.
Drop your breath here and keep breathing from this place. In many
wisdom traditions this is a sacred place of being embodied, present
and the source of intuition. Western medicine seems to be backing
this up too, showing this area in the belly to have around 100 million
neurons. This is the site of implicit memory, a feeling memory,
that unlike the explicit memory in the head, gets more and more
intelligent with age. We want to go out of the ‘thinking’ mind in the
head and move to the ‘belly brain.’
Therapeutic listening is therefore a radical act of hearing someone
fully. It is a way of listening, where the listener doesn’t interrupt,
doesn’t think about a response and sits being open, grounded in the
belly. There is no need to be a fixer. See if you can sit empathically
and listen with your whole body. Keep relaxing with the outbreath
so that your nervous system can stay calm and keep softening into
your lower belly.
Whenever a thought comes up in the head, see if you can smile
to it, let it pass and stay in the belly.
After doing this practice more and more you might start to
see how your relationships naturally deepen and how the answer
is usually within the speaker and this way of listening helps it
naturally bubble up to the surface. Try it for 30 days and observe
the results!^For information on Luke Bache and retreat details
visit: urtruenature.comBeing heard
om spirit
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