There is No Greater Gift than Listening -4 Sharing and Listening

There is No Greater Gift than Listening 

Vol. 4 Sharing and Listening

By Steve Beckow

Posted on March 31, 2024

This fourth and last volume in this series looks at what is most valuable to listen to – a share.

A “share,” as it was known in the growth movement, is a deeper self-revelation than ordinary conversation.  It aims at the person being known to others, at a deeper level than like/dislike.

Deep listening invites deep sharing and deep sharing is what unveils the truth that sets us free.

Here then is a chapter on how sharing equalizes us because, whether we’re a prince or a pauper, we feel the same feelings and probably have many of the same thoughts.

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Download There is no Greater Gift than Listening V4 Sharing and Listening here: https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/There-is-no-Greater-Gift-than-Listening-V4-Sharing-and-Listening.pdf

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All Shares Are Born Equal

March 6, 2009

A “share” happens when I tell the truth about myself. That truth may be a felt truth, a believed truth, a known truth, a perceived truth, etc. What one share holds in common with another is its relationship to the truth – my truth.

I use “shares” as the major tool of my emergence. I use my shares to strip off layer after layer of the onion of self-protection until what is left is nothing but transparency.

I retreat from sharing when I feel my survival, or the survival of anything with which I identify, seems at stake. The more I’m into survival, the less I share, unless I break through (i.e., emerge).

Usually when I haven’t shared, the reason is the same: I fear you. I fear what you will do to me. I fear giving you information about myself. I’m protecting myself from you.

A share is not a download of factual information. It is not a scientific assertion. It is not the “truth” about someone else. A share is the truth about me, from me, to you. Your share would be the truth about you, from you, to me.

My share is neither more nor less important than yours. As far as I’m concerned, all shares are born equal. Shares are the great equalizer. King or commoner, everyone has a truth to tell. I seldom tire of listening to your truth.

A share is only “verifiable by me.” I’m the expert on what I’m feeling inside this rental unit. You may know my habits, my acts, my opinions, but you’ll probably never know the truth for me.

And even if you think you do, whether or not that is actually the truth for me is something only I can say. Even if I lie, I remain the last word on what the truth really is for me.

Where I’m at with my life is where I’m at. It is neither better nor worse than where you’re at with yours. All of us go through the same steps from God to God. Some of us were released as sparks earlier than others. But all travel the same general road to the same specific Destination.

If I’m in Seattle and you’re in Chicago, if my time zone is Pacific Standard and yours is whatever it is, what difference? The same with shares.

Something shared is past. Release comes only from the next share. The value that I receive from sharing is not something I can put in a piggy bank. Yesterday’s share is gone.

Everything now rests on the share of this moment.

I know when I’ve shared the truth because I feel release. The truth has set me free. I know when I haven’t shared the truth because I feel stress. Moving away from the truth has further bound me.

My share, to be of any value, does not rip your face off. Since a share is about myself, staying with myself is one sure way to see that harmlessness prevails. Sharing maximizes harmlessness. If my sharing harms, there is no value to it.

Sharing takes me away from blame-based communication by centering my attention on me. I hear your share. I acknowledge it and mirror it back to you. Then I respond with how it is for me.

After a while, I no longer mind your business. The increasing release I feel from sharing captures my attention.

Hopefully you will no longer mind my business too, but the bigger gain is simply for me to keep on sharing no matter what you do.

Shares have their time and place. The traffic cop and the bus driver may not want to share with me. Air traffic controllers do not share with each other. I wouldn’t want a medic to collapse in tears at the sight of suffering, sharing how it is for him or her.

The President may, on occasion, not want to be transparent for the good of the nation. Not all the world’s business can be conducted through sharing, although an increase in sharing probably wouldn’t hurt.

Emergence is the name of the game for me. Your emergence is what I’m here for (mine too). I am a space to receive your share and in which the truth of mine arises.

https://goldenageofgaia.com/spirituality/communication-sharing-and-listening/all-shares-are-born-equal/

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Download There is no Greater Gift than Listening V4 Sharing and Listening here: https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/There-is-no-Greater-Gift-than-Listening-V4-Sharing-and-Listening.pdf

Steve Beckow

• goldenageofgaia.com/

 

 

Leaving the Cycle of Conflict

There is No Greater Gift than Listening 

Vol. 3 Leaving the Cycle of Conflict

By Steve Beckow

Posted on March 30, 2024

Credit: verywell.com

I’m reissuing Leaving the Cycle of Conflict as a volume in the There is No Greater Gift than Listening series.

Let me post one of my favorite chapters from that book.

I have to say that the cycle of conflict, in my estimation, is the greatest affliction of relationship that I’m aware of and it’s a hidden killer because very few people see what they’re doing.

Bringing this pattern of behavior to public attention fulfills a childhood promise to myself. I wanted the world to know about the domestic abuse happening in my home. And now it does.

And here’s the solution – in this and the other books on listening. The parts I haven’t covered I know others will.

Notice when you read it:  how people rejoice when a couple gets back together again but no one focuses on what’s causing the splits; how we “become” our parents; and how we never seem to learn and nothing seems to change.

 

I was talking yesterday about the cycle of conflict and breaking free from it. Let me pick up there again and start with some background.

Carousel of Tears

I spent my first fourteen formative years on this carousel of tears I call a cycle of conflict.

It was a never-ending loop which usually ended in divorce. I’ve seen very few people trapped in the cycle of conflict who emerged with their relationship intact. And they don’t know why because they “always got back together again.”

Back then, we not only had no insights into how to end the conflict; we couldn’t even see its cyclical nature.

Becoming Our Parents

Having seen the cost to my family of the cycle of conflict, I made myself a promise that I would stop the family inheritance, the intergenerational transfer that Michael once called “legacy behavior.”

But I mentioned to you earlier that the legacy behavior was the only movie I had in my head.

When we “become our Father,” what really is happening is that we’re reaching back into our memory banks and bringing forward as our mode of behavior the only movie all of us have – what our Dad or Mom did.

And we don’t see what we’re doing for the same reason we may not pay attention to what’s happening in our world. We’re busy doing other things.

That’s how we become our parent.

Just that one matter alone – not becoming our parents – takes a high degree of awareness and an unwillingness to respond automatically in order to break the pattern. And, no, I’m still down here in the trenches on these matters, working away with everyone else.

Never Seem to Learn and Nothing Changes

Another feature of the cycle of conflict is that we never seem to learn. Instead, we seem to focus on and congratulate ourselves for getting back together again.

For me, getting back together again is a significant event but it’s not the significant event.

The significant event is recognizing that we’re caught in a cycle of conflict that only ever brings heartache and resolving to exit it.

So long as we fool ourselves that reconciliation is the big win, we may not do the work to break the cycle.

Everyone promises not to do it again and off we go, not communicating or communicating unproductively. The same issues arise. The frustration begins and is worse because we thought we had the issue handled. All it takes is a spark.

Is this not the theme of countless Hollywood movies?

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Download No Greater Gift than Listening V3 Leaving the Cycle of Conflict here: https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/There-is-No-Greater-Gift-than-Listening-V3-Leaving-the-Cycle-of-Conflict-R3.pdf

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“Right/Wrong Not a Way Out,” Aug. 19, 2023, at https://goldenageofgaia.com/2023/08/19/347152/

Steve Beckow

• goldenageofgaia.com/

 

 

There is No Greater Gift than Listening - 2 How to Listening

There is No Greater Gift than Listening 

Vol. 2. How to Listening

By Steve Beckow

Posted on March 29, 2024

I’m listening

I’m so excited about this book that I’m jumping about in my seat as I post this.

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

All my life, I’ve valued listening. My soul-contract design team must have wanted this because I chose to be born the runt of the litter, to whom listening from the male side did not come easily.

Listening from the female side came very easily. I was amply gifted by my Mother. Everything I learned about listening I learned from trying to understand what it was she did that made her so beloved by her circle of friends.

From my experience as a grad student in Sociology, listening to other people as part of my small-groups studies, I know what a gift listening is.

I’ve seen people get the source of an ancient or a nuclear issue in their relationship and weep.  I listened to one person for eight hours. It was miraculous.

On the other hand, I’ve also seen people not let each other finish a sentence. And later they complain of having an empty life. Not surprisingly.

Listening is what’s seemingly lacking in our society. We promote bodily pleasures, but not the deep inner pleasure that comes from being heard.

An interesting side note was that, when I had a watershed spiritual experience, I had it because of something that arises from listening.

I’m referring to my vision of the purpose of life, which occurred on March 13, 1987. (1)

As I drove my car to work, I said to the universe, if people’s lives are a puzzle and, when it’s solved, the puzzle becomes a picture, could it be that life itself is a puzzle and, if so, what is the picture that life is?

Boom! The car went black and I was staring at an inner tableau or movie of the total journey of an individual soul from God to God.

The journey from God to God that all of us make

I emerged from that experience knowing that the purpose of life is enlightenment. (2)

For me, being given this experience was the highpoint of my then-active career as a promoter of listening. My work life took me in different directions and here we are.

But I’ve never lost the special place in my heart that those years of restorative listening brought, as well as the years with enlightenment intensives, which also revolved around listening.

A note on logistics. This book is a combination of posted articles and extracts from a manual on listening.

There may be some repetition that I haven’t caught. After the Reval, I’ll hire an editor to remove it. Right now, my priority is getting the message out. Very soon, with the advent of the emergency broadcasts, there may be a great number of us who need listening. And many of us who wonder how to do it.

I hope this book will supply that need.

I look forward to the years when our feeling of a lack of love is endlessly and forever filled to the brim with love. I predict a time and space will arrive for immensely-rewarding conversations, with speaking and listening equally balanced and equally supportive.

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Download There is No Greater Gift than Listening – Vol. 2. How to Listen here:  https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/There-is-No-Greater-Gift-Than-Listening-V2-How-to-Listen-R5.pdf

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Footnotes

(1) For the rest of the experience, see “Ch. 13. Epilogue” in The Purpose of Life is Enlightenment at https://goldenageofgaia.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Purpose-of-Life-is-Enlightenment-3.pdf

(2) The purpose of life is that God should meet God in a moment of our enlightenment. And for that purpose was all of life, all the universes, all matter (mater, Mother) created.

Steve Beckow

• goldenageofgaia.com/

 

 

There is No Greater Gift than Listening

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.

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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

• goldenageofgaia.com/