The Art of Listening
This week I’ve been contemplating the art of listening (for it really is an art) and it’s funny, whenever I contemplate something, it starts to come alive in my life.
Richard Rudd talks about this phenomena in his book ‘The Gene Keys’ and it is as though ‘God’ (insert whatever word works here: Allah, Buddha, Krishna, Universe, Source, Muse… I believe they are all one and the same) gives you an opportunity to see your contemplation play out in the real world.
Today, I was contemplating the difference between ‘listening’ and ‘hearing’ on my walk (walking helps, it’s as though I jiggle the thoughts out from the crevices of the mind) and understood that listening is the art of hearing with your whole body, with all of your senses, ultimately it is the art of presence.
Things I have listened to this week:
The waves on the shore at Penbryn beach.
A sound bath at Fron Farm.
The first bird song at dawn.
The sound of tea being poured in ceremony.
The gentle wind through dead sycamore leaves.
Rain, lots of it, it can be a very beautiful sound if we let it.
When I want to quieten the mind, I go to the ocean, the waves on the shore drown out the internal noise.
When I want to contemplate something, I go to the river, the running of water ensures no stone is left unturned.
And when I want to understand, I go to source, for this is where all the answers spring from.
A poem for the weekend, and for rain, and for a life unhurried.
Listening to the body
The body is talking to us all the time.
When we’re thirsty the mouth goes dry, when we’re hungry the stomach rumbles, if we’re tired the body gets heavy.
The question is not: ‘is my body talking to me?’ but ‘how do I listen?’
We can practise the art of listening on our yoga mats.
We can learn to listen to the mental chatter of the mind without becoming involved, without letting it carry us away…
We are no longer victims of our thoughts, we realise that we are not our thoughts but the observer of the thoughts.
We learn to listen to the body, which I describe in Yin Yoga as ‘finding the edge’, the point between going too far and not going far enough.
The difficulty is, there are sometimes two voices that come up, and they’re often opposing.
I’ll give you an example.
I’m in a yoga class and I go into a deep lunge, there is one voice that says: ‘This is too much, pull back’, there is another voice that says ‘I did this last week, I should be able to do it today, everyone else can do it!’
I then go into a crow pose, one voice says ‘I can do this, I have the strength’ another voice says ‘You’ve worked so hard already, why not rest?’
Which voice do I listen to?
This is the challenge, this is the practice.
Sniffing out the ego, listening to intuition.
For me, this has been one of my greatest learnings, both on and off the mat.
I once wrote an article about figuring out the difference between my ego and intuition, if you’re interested you can find it here.
In it I wrote:
To drop from the mind to the body,
we have to get quiet.
The ego resides in the mind and shouts,
but our intuition resides in the body and whispers.