Thank heavens there is never a point where we can know everything! So listen IN, listen BEYOND, listen DIFFERENTLY and see for yourself what emerges as you listen with intention.
Growing up I had always thought that listening was just something I had to do as part of a normally functioning, polite interaction with others, mostly involving me listening to adults. I’d get told off by teachers for not listening well enough, so I probably didn’t have a very good relationship with listening at the start and I certainly never knew anything about how to listen with intention.
Soon after, I arrived at that place where I realised I could also listen to my own thoughts… that often didn’t go too well either.
Breaking the boundaries of listening
But over the past few years the horizon of listening has expanded well beyond what I ever imagined possible. In fact I’ve been on a pretty mind blowing listening adventure where I’ve been testing the limits to see if I could go even further afield with listening.
To listen with intention improves the end result:
Since my work is so much about listening I focus on it a lot. A few years ago I even noticed while making a visual harvest that the quality of my visual work had less to do with artistic skill (though they get better with practice) and much more to do with the way I listened. When I chose what I LISTENED FOR the picture that followed somehow got infused with the intention of that listening.
Mostly our listening is colloquial; we generally focus on our own thoughts and agendas, to what’s right here, and the words of others are like static, “out there” interrupting our train of thought. Quite funny!
Opening up the Listening Field as I listen with intention:
But this idea about HOW I might listen intrigued me because it seemed to open up a much wider, more interesting field, so I started to play with it and it turned into a bit of an adventure! It actually changed the whole game of what I had been taught communicating was all about (but that’s for another post!)
I would set my intention for listening to someone by choosing firstly what I was going to listen FOR. As I began, I would open up to receive their sound waves never knowing where this listening would lead, just knowing that it would lead somewhere that might reflect back and open the minds of participants, and perhaps they’d discover something new in their own process.
So instead of listening FOR INFORMATION, I would choose to listen FOR the POTENTIAL or listen ON the EDGE of what was being said, or listen JUST BEYOND the periphery of it all where something unseen and new was cooking.
So here’s the invitation:
⭐ How would you like to listen?
⭐ And how many ways could you listen?
Finish the sentence:
⭐ You could listen TO…
⭐ You could listen FOR…
⭐ You could listen PAST…
⭐ You could listen ABOVE or BELOW….
⭐ You could listen INTO…
⭐ You could listen BEYOND…
⭐ What will be radically changed by the WAY you have listened differently?
⭐ What new thing will catch you by surprise?
⭐ HOW will you listen to that new thing?
PS: try holding your response a few seconds longer than you normally would, as you wait notice what’s going on in the space in-between?