Deep listening

This week I finished Difficult Conversations, my first Continuing Studies course of the season. It was a two-day class that asked us to bring our full authenticity and awareness to a room of strangers and share the vulnerability and fears that arise when we wish to connect with another, but don't have the means to cross the abyss of conflict and separation.

One of the fascinating pieces of information our facilitator, Paul Mohapel, PhD, shared with us was that we only use about 35% of our brain to hear and understand words in conversation. The remaining 65% is up for grabs. Most often we use it to layer judgements on the other person in what they are saying, wearing, how they took our parking space last month. We draft grocery lists or think about what we'll have for lunch or carefully plan how we are going to respond to what they just said, holding onto the thread of our thought lest we forget and don't get to speak our precious words. In the meantime we have stopped listening and have indentured ourselves to that other side of the abyss, still not fully connecting, not fully engaging in this most human of interactions.

Another possibility ripe for exploration is to use that 65% for listening with our full being, opening every cell and neural pathway to be present, to wonder what the speaker is feeling, what judgments they may be facing, how we may be curious to find out more about them and the gift of words they are sharing with us.

Listening is the bridge to our interconnection. It is the skill we need the most yet sadly is the one least likely to be honoured and practiced. It's a strange irony that education offers us tools in the exact opposite order in which we must use them to communicate effectively with each other. In school we are first taught how to read, then how to write, how to speak in front of others, but we are never taught how to listen. The written word is but a blink on the timeline of human presence on this planet, yet it has taken on a superior veneer at the expense of the ancient skill of listening in a profound and life affirming way.

Poet, author and Continuing Studies facilitator, Mark Nepo's new book, Seven Thousand Ways to Listen, offers us a path to listening not just to other people, but to our nature, our calling, our interdependence with all. It is about the work of being, the work of being human, and the work of love.

To learn more about deep communion and the art of listening, join us this month and several times next year for Non-Violent Communication: The Language of Respect and next July for another offering of Difficult Conversations.

Tess Wixted
Continuing Studies Associate

Visit us at cstudies.royalroads.ca.

Image credit: Microsoft Images