The Purple Light: There is No Greater Gift than Listening

Thursday, March 28, 2024

There is No Greater Gift than Listening

Vol. 1. What is Listening?

By Steve Beckow

Posted on March 28, 2024

Runt of the litter? I chose it!

I’m so excited about this series of books that I’m jumping about in my seat as I post this.

I’m writing a series on listening in the hope that this now-seemingly-neglected skill becomes a cherished practice again in our now-global society.

The Source of My Interest in Listening

My interest in listening originally arose from my family position as “the runt of the litter.” I ended up feeling convinced that “nobody listened to me,” which became a script for me. While I can see a little daylight in that script in recent years, I’ve never lost my interest in or respect for listening.

I call the specialized kind of listening I do “restorative listening.” It aims to assist a person to emerge from an upset or issue. It aims to restore a person to a state of release after they’ve been triggered.

I’m not a therapist and restorative listening is not a therapy. It’s simply a choice to listen in a certain way with the object of helping to free a person from the memory of a traumatic incident.

I make no intervention of any kind in anyone’s life. I simply listen.

I think we take listening for granted. It forms the basis – or one of the bases – of many if not most therapeutic approaches like gestalt, encounter groups, psychodrama, rule reconstruction, Byron Katie, rebirthing, vipassana, Zen, est, Enlightenment Intensives (EIs), Self-enquiry, Vedanta and others.

My own study of listening was assisted by participation in some of these groups, most notably Cold Mountain Institute’s resident fellowship program, the est Training and Communication Workshops, and Enlightenment Intensives.

My listening was also affected by several other factors. One was my intention in sociology doctoral studies to become a group therapist, an intention that remained incomplete. But, for a year or two, I provided counselling services free to anyone I could induce to volunteer as a client.

It was during this time that I moved from selling solutions to clients to just listening.

At first I followed Jay Haley’s Problem-Solving Therapy. But no one was buying my solutions, They just looked at me as if I was nuts and continued with their story.

Finally I got that people wanted to tell their story. I stopped selling solutions and began to listen.

And listen and listen. In the course of it, people were experiencing release from troublesome upsets and issues.

I also felt some relief. It saved me always scratching my head, looking for new and better solutions. Here I was accomplishing what I had hoped to do – facilitate release – and all I was doing was listening.

I came to see the dance, the art form that good listening is. Very few of us take the time to learn the dance steps.

Moreover I had an unending curiosity about people at that time in my life. I could listen for hours. And listening was a new frontier. I loved to explore new frontiers.

Gone was the fifty-minute hour. Listening often took much more than fifty minutes and, if I did not stay the course, the value could be lost.

Moreover, many clients completely finished their business in one session and did not return. Any therapist who expects a long-term relationship with a client will be disappointed. Once the story was completely told and the insight gotten, the knot in consciousness was removed. No further work was generally needed on that particular issue.

When I was practicing listening in my grad program, I went on faith that the speaker would, if I listened well, arrive at their own solutions. And usually they did.

The longer I patiently listened, the deeper they’d go into their story. The deeper they went, the closer they’d come to the blocked experience that lay at the center of the upset or issue.

Later, my studies of listening proved invaluable when I presided as an adjudicator of refugee claims for eight years, as a Member of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada. Listening at those times was impacted by translation from another language into English and unfamiliar patterns of gesturing, spacing, timing, gaze, etc.

My Mother’s Listening

When I grew out of my status as the runt of the litter, I began to enjoy the wonderful experience of being listened to by my mother, Prue Beckow, in the way described in these pages.

This series of books is an acknowledgement of her ability to listen. I don’t remember a single thing she said. That’s partly because she and I spoke in Broadway musicals. “All I want is a room somewhere.” THAT I remember.

But the greater part was that she simply enjoyed listening. She’d say, “I’ll put on a pot of coffee and you can tell me all about it.”   Everyone loved her. Why? Because she listened.

She could be right down there with you through all your trials and tribulations. In her listening, she felt what you were feeling, almost empathically, getting it as deep as one could go.

Compassion—-> A feeling with. I call that being “a second Self.” When somebody listens to me that way, I’m able to get everything out on the table, all the pieces, all the chapters of the book. I see what the lay of the land is, what I’ve been missing or what’s eluded me for as long as it has. If I have a realization, a real piece of work will have been done, requiring both a speaker and a listener.   I’ve now had a sunburst of understanding, dawning awareness, an “Aha!” moment, a realization.

The pieces of the puzzle fell into place. The puzzle became a picture.

The truth set me free. And that untying of a knot in consciousness was made possible by good listening.

That’s a birds-eye view of what listening is to me.   But there’s much more.

And the more there is is the subject of this series of books.

Download There is No Greater Gift than Listening V1. What Is Listening? here: https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/There-is-No-Greater-Gift-than-Listening-V1-What-Is-Listening-R2.pdf

Steve Beckow