Listening

This is a note about peoples’ sharing re their listening experiences between Parts I and II of the workshop, before we got into the “Speaking Turn” side of things last night.  My favorite part of this work, by far, is listening to peoples’ testimonies about what’s been working or not as they practice with listening.

I want to raise a cautionary red flag about your attempts at listening. Please consider that “taking on” listening as a daily practice in our non-listening culture (Dan didn’t see any listening out there with anyone) is much more difficult than you think it is.  Really.  This is going into the belly of the beast.  I mean who is plugged in enough to listen to “party chatter” at a barbecue?  The tiniest successes have to be acknowleged for what they are, as true miracles. 

So when I coached Coz that she wasn’t listening to her guests’ sharings, and she “got it” immediately without being defensive, that is a success. Or, if you realize after a conversation that you didn’t listen, that is a major success. It is a huge accomplishment to realize after the fact, that you might have had a whole conversation without listening to someone.  That realization is the success in learning how to listen.  Give yourself a pat on the back for the awareness, and just work on having it sooner and sooner in conversations. 

Look at the supremely difficult conversation Mary was in with her co-teacher about the “missing” child. So much was going on for Mary, especially that she has a certain responsibility as age-group leader for the staff, and she actually tried to listen!  Imagine that.  Her listening might not have been the best, so she didn’t get the “Yes,” and she remembered to be a listener!  I say, WOW, for that.  GO MARY!  What an amazing success that was.  So I saddened myself listening to Mary seeing her interaction as a failure.  Please, please remember how difficult this is.  And Dave and Elisabeth — imagine being able, even for a short time, to be able to be as generous as they were with each other within an otherwise not-so-hot conversation with so much at stake?  I say that was INCREDIBLE! 

Please acknowledge every awareness, every tiny step forward, for exactly what it is — a miracle on the path.  Thank you for your energy and your intentionality around this work.  I am thrilled to be part of this new conversation.  Thank you, Stephen, for seeing the worth and creating Salon for our practicing.  Thank you Rula for pushing Stephen to create that.  Thank you Coz for supporting me to bring this brilliant stuff out of my closet.  It’s so clear to me that every one of us is a contribution to to what we have and where we are headed.  Thank you all who participated in our first “Where Love Lives: Fear-Less Conversation.”

 In gratitude and love, Ed

Good morning!  Whew, I am still full from our conversation yesterday — as if I overate a delicious meal.  Thank you all so much for participating with so much honesty and openness  — it was wonderful to see everyone so comfortable with each other in so short a time.

Interesting about the “honesty.”  I had the good fortune of having Jason and Katie sleeping at my house Friday and Saturday evenings.  I told Katie this morning that I believed her opening comment in introducing herself as “…5 months sober” set the tone for our entire group for the day.

Then I was having a conversation with Katie and Jason about sobriety and my own addictions, because I wanted their advice (which, of course, they weren’t allowed to give!) and an amazing conversation developed out of Jason listening to me.  I’ll share that in another blog entry.  I had 2 very powerful new learnings about listening.  I keep being amazed at how much I keep learning, every day, about something I know so much about.

Anyway, thank you all for engaging in the listening conversation with me and Coz.  It was a day that was everything I dreamed it could be — and more.  I can’t wait for our Thursday evening session to find out how things are going for you, and I can’t wait to be in an on-going blog conversation with all of you who are moved to participate, and I can’t wait for the next “Where Love Lives” workshop.  Thank you for helping me make my dream come true.  Dan, if you are reading this, I know it won’t mean much to you until I write either my Listening book, or my My Body-Your Body book, and having you at the workshop will live inside of me forever.  I’m so grateful to have you in my life, much less as my son.  How can’t I be grateful every second of my life for that? I love you more and more every day.

Hope to hear from some of you.  Good luck.  If blogging isn’t your cup of tea, and you’d like to continue the Listening conversation and your experiences with me via email, that would be great.  Just write to me, and if something seems worth sharing with the others on the blog, I would ask your permission.

Clint Eastwood used to say in his movies to the bad guys who were considering fighting him, “Go ahead. Make my day.”  Your coming to the workshop not only made day, it made my life.

Ed

Often, a speaker reaches a different place of understanding inside him/herself after having had a chance to speak with the help of a good listener.  Does action result from that new place?  It is a key “so what?” question about listening.  Was the listening simply a nice exercise for the speaker, a “feel good?”  Or was the self-expression meaningful in the sense that the speaker’s opportunity to find or to clear up something important will lead to action?

Ed

I just returned from the gathering where the family received the friends and community.  At the end of the line was a young teenage girl who I didn’t recognize.  She held out her hand and introduced herself to me, “I’m Kate, Peter’s oldest daughter.”  I looked into her eyes, and the enormity of the loss washed over me.  I just looked at Kate for a moment, and feeling totally lost about it all in my own heart and spirit as I stood in front of her, saying nothing I hugged her.  Sometimes that’s the best or only listening you can do.

Ed

I am going to a funeral today.  Sudden death of a young (that words is relative coming from a 65 year old) man who was one of the most well-respected, most loved members of our community here in Ithaca, New York.  He was up cutting a tree and fell.

What does one say to someone who has experienced such a loss?  “I understand.”  “I’m sorry.” “At least he was in our lives for a time” ” He gave so much to so many — you must be so proud and grateful for who he was.”  None of that works, of course.  What do you say to his wife, his two young children, his dozens of brothers and sisters in the extended family?  What do you say to help with the grief of the hundreds or thousands of people who knew him?

I assert that all we can do is listen.  What else is there to do but to understand.  Understanding is the help, not trying to find something to say to make someone feel better.  Being listened to, and being understood is what helps someone in grief.  It sure might not feel that way sometimes, especially if they start to cry even harder.  So sometimes listening becomes a counter-intuitive act of faith — believing that something is right even while it doesn’t fix something up, make things happy.

What has to come out of our mouths, then, to someone who is grieving such a loss has to be something like, “You probably can’t even describe this loss in words” “Must be so hard to even think of going on without him” “All of a sudden, he’s gone” “What a ripping out of such a huge piece of your life” “You don’t care why it happened or how it happened — you just want to take back that it happened.” “It’s all got to feel unreal to you right now, that it didn’t really happen.” “You don’t see how you are going to go on without him.” “You don’t want to go on without him.”  Anything like that which we feel in your heart-of-hearts is what the person might be experiencing.

Fixing up and making happy is to help our own feelings, not the feelings of the person in grief.  It is not so easy to be in the presence of another’s pain.  We want to get rid of it.  But that is not to help them, it is to help us.  Listening is not about us.  Listening is about being in the service of the speaker.  That is the gift.

Ed

“Restorative Justice” is a relatively new concept in the criminal justice system.  The offender and a member of the victim’s family sit across a table from one another, usually many years after the crime.  The purpose is to help the victim restore some sense of sanity to his/her life after the devastating loss.

I watched the process on a program called “Face to Face” on MSNBC, where a 37 year old man faced the sister of man he senselessy and without provocation murdered 21 years ago.  I was struck by a strong, absolute emptiness present in that conversation.  There was nothing the offender could say that would leave the victim feeling “understood.”  What do you say to the sister of a man you shot and killed when you were 16 years old just because you felt like acting out the inner violence you felt and wanted to express?

He was pretty quiet as she spoke and asked him questions like “Why?” “What were you feeling in school that day knowing what you were about to do?” “How do you kill someone you don’t even know?” “What do you think about every year on January 16?”

Sometimes this process is transformative for either or both victim and offender.  In this case it wasn’t.  The sister maintained a fierce anger about who the killer was and what he did.  As I watched the process I realized that the best the offender could do in that case was to listen.  Even that wouldn’t make a difference, but at least the victim might have some sense of being understood.  Maybe listening for a few minutes in a conversation like that would be the start of something that could take years, if ever, to accomplish.  It just all seemed so hopeless to me.

What can we do to heal the regular relationships in our lives where there has been some kind of emotional murder?  Can listening be an opening to reach all the hurt and pain?  And if it could, what would it require from the person (in this case the murderer) to listen, and only listen,  when he/she has so many feelings to express as well?  Whew.

Ed

I just had a fascinating conversation with the Program Director of a local childcare center in Ithaca.  We were talking about the listening and the speaking turns, and about a goal of getting her staff at the school to  listen . . . . all the time — whether it is to an angry parent or to a distressed 4 year old or to each other during staff meetings or to a spouse at home.

Understanding the concept, she asked thoughtfully, “Can we become too conscious?”  She mentioned two friends of hers, a married couple who are totally committed to being responsible communicators to each other and to their professional clients, and to being conscious and present in their lives in each moment.  She said her friends are never “off.”  They prepare and plan their difficult conversations.  They are respectful all the time no matter who is talking to whom or about what is being said.  She said she can almost hear their minds going “CLICK-Step #1, CLICK-Step #2, CLICK-Step #3″ whenever she speaks with either of them about anything.

She said it’s a little disconcerting, and her question to me was about the possibility of life becoming too methodical with such a high commitment to conscious communication.  Is there any fun in that?  Is there joy present if the emotions are so tightly under control?  What if we got every staff member at the school to operate at that high level of consciousness with each other all the time?  Imagine anger always being dealt with productively and cleanly.  Imagine no sniping behind peoples’ backs.  Imagine speaking directly to people about their problem behavior and not having to deal with their defensiveness and reactivity?

Would that be boring?  Lifeless?  Empty?  Or would it be delightful and incredible?

Ed

Following is an email message from a good friend who knows how to listen.  He felt terrible that he forgot to listen in an important conversation with me:  I defined for him my difference between success and failure in this work:

Stephan’s email to me:

I felt a missing as your car went down my driveway.  A missed opportunity for me to listened, or considering the limited time you had available, a missed opportunity for me to schedule an appointment with you when time allowed so that I could offer my listening.

Please accept my apology for being not present to your discomfort and feeble attempt to fix the situation.  You deserve much more from me then that and it pains me that I fell so short.
When you need to speak, I promise to be present and listen.

My EMailed Response:

WOW . . . you really took that missed opportunity pretty hard and you are committing to being different with me in the future.

Thanks, that’s great.  I love your commitment to me and to the listening process, and I want you to know I see things a little differently.  You recognized pretty soon afterward that you missed that listening opportunity with me. That recognition is the necessary first part of the process of success.  So I don’t see that as the “falling short” you describe.  I really have it be successful, to recover a conversation and see what could have been different.  That recognition can happen within the conversation, immediately afterward, a day or a month later, etc.  And as soon as it’s noticed it can be recovered:  Hey, Ed, I didn’t listen . . . if you still want to talk, I’d love to give the conversation another shot.”

Also, I noticed that you weren’t listening — and I could have reminded you — that is our job with each other, right?  So, I have an equal part in that responsibility.

During a long car ride, I was listening to a conversation between two friends. The speaker, a person who is almost always quiet and laid back, starting screaming and ranting about her sister.  It was the loudest, most uncensored voice I’d ever heard her use.  She was furious.  I thought to myself, Wow, great opportunity to listen and find out what all the anger was about and maybe clear up an issue that I knew has been bothering her for quite awhile.

Before I could start listening, the speaker’s friend began responding with many of the 14 reactions.  In my opinion, her goal was to get her friend quiet and rational, to move her toward problem solving.  That is always what this speaker’s friends do with her, and always, as evidenced here, the problem does not go away long-term.  The friends’ non-listening  “works,” temporarily as it did here — she calmed down almost immediately and then headed in the direction her friend was taking her, agreeing to have a direct conversation with her sister.

The point of this blog comment:  When they were done, I suggested that listening would have been a better option during the tirade than the logic that was used.  Both defended the process they used:  “We’re friends and we have a special rapport for our communication,” “You don’t always have to listen.” etc.  Those kinds of comments imply that the the non-listening friend consciously chose not to listen in the conversation, and that the speaker was aware that she was not being listened to.  My observation was that neither was true.  The non-listening friend did not say to herself, Well, I could listen here but I don’t think that would work very well in this case. That would have been fine.  There are many reasons to choose not to listen.  That is not the issue.  The issue is that we need to acknowledge our unconsiousness in order to begin being more conscious.  That’s the first step.

Ed

Had some ideas about listening over the weekend:  the necessity of it, as we enter a time in history when conventional religions and institutional frameworks may not be able to provide either security or coherence about human life, death and how we are to live.  We’re in a time where things-as-we-knew-them are disappearing.  Our world is being undermined due to economic, environmental and ethical collapse.  Atrocities, war, genocide have metastasized over the planet.

Exoteric, fundamentalist and dogmatic religions offer people a sense of security through belief systems and community.  But what happens when religions become corrupted by hatred, literalism, exclusion, or scandal?  Then we realize that they are MAN-made.  The bible and all the holy books are written by men, then interpreted for the next thousand years by a host of other men, each with their own agenda and choice of meanings in translations.  Religious leaders–those priests & preachers who mediate between the person and their god–presume to know what, by definition, is impossible and fruitless to know; i.e., the term “god” if it means creator or supreme being, is beyond our descriptions and concepts.

Here’s my question:  Can we turn to each other and see the “god” within the other instead of somewhere out there?  As things collapse, so will the religions and their institutional clones.  What does that leave us with?  Only each other.  But, how can we benefit from, and connect with, each other so that ALL OF US thrive, and not just a few dominant ones?  I think the only way is through listening, the kind Ed teaches:  a listening that is NOT just paying attention so I can feed it back, but a “you” (other) focus that censors my own reaction.  The kind of listening that Ed stresses delves into deeper & deeper levels of the speaker, to help her discover her inner vision, or that “longing of the heart” for something nobler, more compassionate and creative.  This deeper dimension of the speaker, when expressed, is a gift that benefits not only her, but the listener and the community.

Kathleen