When I get quiet and really listen, what I often hear is . . . static.
Clarity often hides behind many layers of distortion.
It is not always accessible at first blush.
Yet static moves in patterns.
If this vague notion flows to the left, that’s different than if it moves to the right.
It’s possible to feel into confusion and know that it’s more like ‘this’ than ‘that’
- even before knowing what ‘this’ is.
When I sit and listen to people’s stories, I keep track of the details, but I also notice the moments when the current seems to shift. Before I know what it means, I wonder about it, which reorganizes the way I listen.
The stories we tell each other are often well known scripts because we have told them so many times. Yet memory is an experience in the present moment.
How is this story being told right now?
As I listen, I ask how fresh or stale the story feels, even if I've never heard it before.
I notice if this storyteller seems to move towards his story as he tells it or if he seems to move away.
Often I can’t be sure, so I will ask about it.
The other day a man told me a story about a mystery in his history, when he passed into an unknown place which took a long time for him to return from.
He said it felt like he was talking about someone else.
What’s it like to talk about yourself as if you are talking about someone else? I asked him. This was a question he hadn’t considered before.
In my practice of listening, I have learned that questions serve to reframe attention. Long before any answer is found, I adjust my eyes and ears and heart. I recalibrate my wondering to the depth of what the questions asks.
To ask about a parking spot changes the way I pay attention to the road. To ask what it’s like to speak of myself as if I was a stranger changes the way I look in the mirror.
To do these things with a curious witness can powerfully magnify the prominence of subtle details. Sometimes a small deviation on the surface points to a deeper breach that has not yet been seen.
In this conversation, I asked this man, a father, to imagine an episode in the future of his son. There we discovered a mode of how he might relate to a young man that he hadn’t allowed into the story of his past mystery.
Playing with this new possibility, he listened again to his present moment experience of memory and heard something new.
And he felt his body move.
As his posture changed so too did his present moment vision of the future where he had imagined how the pattern of past events might echo again. After retelling the old story anew, he now listened differently to the future.
“Confidence” was the word he used to describe the new tonality.
It can be both a blessing and a curse to have an absolutely unique point of view.
Strangely, this paradox is becoming more and more common. Perhaps you know exactly what I mean. Perhaps you know it in your bones.
This is a time of rapidly dissolving norms. What we once assumed about the world is no longer a good guess. Try saying “May God be with you” to a dozen different people and see what kinds of answers you get.
I recently spoke with a man who has lived in Ireland, England, Egypt, Myanmar, India and elsewhere. A math wizard, a community builder, a former Christian, a hip hop aficionado. He sees what others can’t see, a blessing and a curse.
When we listen to each other these days, we must engage in the art of translation, even if we all appear to be speaking the same language. We have to hear words we understand, but also hear that the speaker understands them differently, patiently waiting for an opportunity to clarify.
Coming closer to each other in the exchange of words is often facilitated by the willingness to stay in one place and keep turning over the same soil. This requires patience that not everyone possesses.
Dropping assumptions about what is “right” or “wrong” makes it easier to listen, makes it easier to resonate together, to discover the feeling of “rightness” that comes only when you and I constellate ourselves just so.
We won’t find this location if we think we are the only ones here.
The truth is that our words take on a life of their own as soon as we speak them. Our conversation itself is an organism with its own needs and desires. It tells us something more than what each of us knows, if we are willing to listen.
When I listen to a story unlike anything I myself have ever lived through, I have to stretch my imagination in new directions. I use what I find to remap my own body, to change the resonant chamber that your voice enters into.
When you make your life into a work of art, not everyone will understand you. Likewise, for you to understand others can become a trickier thing. The gap between us can feel like both a curse and a blessing.
Yet, if we embrace listening as a creative practice, the range of personalities we can come into connection with becomes increasingly rich and rewarding. The wide spectrum of humanity on offer these days is a dazzling buffet of flavors and colors.
Rather than shy away, I prefer to dig in.
I used to think that listening was something I did with my ears. I’ve since come to understand that listening is something I do with my whole being, my whole life.
When I’m driving, there is a relationship between the movement of traffic, the rain on the windshield, the windshield wipers, my heartbeat and my thinking.
When I sit with my ex-wife, there is a relationship between the words I don't say, our conflicting accounts of historical events, the muscles in my throat and what I think she is thinking.
When I finish a task and don’t yet know what I’ll do next, there is a relationship between my wakefulness, my self-worth, my world view, my most recent meal and the latest headlines I’ve read.
Listening involves every fiber of my being if I am truly listening.
While I know that, most of the time, my listening does not take all of these layers into account, I’m quite sure that, all of the time, all of these layers shape the way that I listen.
When I listen deeply, I also listen to the quality of my listening.
Sometimes I listen to music.
Sometimes I listen to a person’s voice.
Sometimes I listen to the tonality of my uncertainty.
Sometimes I listen to the sensations of my body.
Sometimes just one spoken phrase changes the way I listen to every other thing.
Sometimes listening means fiercely inhibiting my impulse to speak. Sometimes listening means inhibiting inhibition in order to hear what sounds will come out.
With the soles of my feet, I listen to the shape of the ground.
With the muscles of my eyes, I set the tone of my listening to a ray of sunlight.
With the spring of my step, I listen to the way my body makes rhythm into movement.
Sometimes I don’t listen.
Listening begins when I notice I’m not listening.
Then, if I’m alert, I can listen to my memory, just now, of what not-listening sounded like. Maybe I’ll glimpse what attracted my listening away from the here and the now.
Sometimes listening makes me uncomfortable. Continuing to listen means accepting that discomfort.
If I listen even more deeply, I may hear the sound of my willingness, or resistance, to feeling discomfort.
My capacity to love is my willingness to listen.
The quality of my love is the depth of my listening.
My love’s longevity is my willingness to listen to the depth of my listening, to notice when I’m not listening and renew my commitment to listening, again and again and again.
August 2025: Deep Listening sessions
If there's some question you'd like to get below the surface of, to sort out signal and noise so you can see your situation with more clarity, I'd love to listen with you.
These sessions can also be used for somatic inquiry to unlock more ease of movement, better breathing, more comfortable posture and an overall sense of feeling more at home in your body.
I'm offering deep listening sessions on a pay-what-you-want basis, this month only.
As a nervous system and somatic coach and educator I really appreciate what you're sharing. Listening is a concept we explore deeply through the body, through our nervous systems, through relationship. Thank you for sharing. I appreciated this different view of listening.