Tara Brach - Listening to the Song – Part 2

Episode Date: July 31, 2025

Listening is more than a communications skill, it is a capacity that awakens our awareness. And given our current times, this capacity is essential if we are to navigate the great divides that separate us from our inner life and others. As we learn to listen inwardly, we begin to understand and care for the fears and vulnerability that ask for our attention. And as we listen to others, that same intimacy emerges. In this two-part series we examine the blocks to listening and the practices that cultivate this essential domain of human potential. Our focus is both on the transformational power of listening in our personal lives, and also the necessity for deep listening if we are to bring healing to our wider society.  In this talk, Tara explores: listening as a spiritual path that heals wounds and deepens connection with ourselves and others. how to quiet the "dense forest" of thoughts to meet others with presence and care. practical ways to stay present—using anchors, pauses, and self-coaching in conversations. how compassionate listening helps others feel seen, restoring a sense of aliveness and belonging. listening as a bridge for reconciliation, revealing our shared humanity and capacity for healing.   https://www.tarabrach.com/listening-to-the-song-part2-2/

Greetings. We offer these podcasts freely and your support really makes a difference. To make a donation, please visit tarabrock.com. Namaste. Welcome friends. Thank you for being here. This is the second part of a two-part talk on listening. And I thought I'd begin with a question, which is, when was the last time that you felt truly listen to and not just being heard but fully received. Like your words, your tone, your very being was met with presence and care. And as we reflect, we can sense it's pretty rare, yeah? And yet, when it happens, something shifts. We soften, we feel seen,

we begin to trust. Listening is one of the simplest human acts and one of the most powerful. It has the capacity to dissolve walls and to heal wounds and really to open us to new possibilities in our relationships and in our own hearts. And listening deeply, especially the moments that matter the most, it's not easy. We get distracted. active, we get defended, we listen to argue, we listen to fix, or we don't listen at all. You know, you've probably heard the one-liners like my partner says I have two faults,

not listening and something else. And when we really look to the source of so much of our woundedness as humans, it's others not paying attention, not attuning. And so many have found that if our caregivers didn't listen to us, we're not so good at listening to our own hearts, our to others, our to what's really calling for attention in our world. So, part two of our exploration today, it's about the inner work of listening, how to coach and invite ourselves to stay present and curious and open and do that even when the waters are rough. Because the truth is that learning to listen, it's not just a communication skill.

It's really a spiritual path. And it can change the very way we live and that we love. So I hope you find this of value. Thank you, friends. This is the second part of a two-part series on listening. and really how to deepen our practice and paying attention, to listen with what St. Benedict calls the ears of the heart. And really, it's how to create that intimacy,

listening to our inner life, listening to each other, to our living earth. So I, this week, asked Facebook friends to share some of their wisdom about listening, I'll be weaving, that in. We got some wonderful responses. I learned a lot. I'll say I share some. And the talk's really organized around some of the key questions I've gotten about listening over the years. We'll start with a cartoon of a man and a woman on their first date, and his thought bubble is saying, I can't think of anything to say. She must think I'm a total bore. Her thought bubble. A man who actually

listens to me. I think I'm in love. So you might remember from the last class, one of my favorite images or metaphors is of our life as a fountain and that when we're clear, when things

are moving, really our soul can express into words and actions who we are. But when we haven't been listened to, debris clogs us up and and we get kind of withheld, and then what comes out isn't really what we mean and what we care about and what we feel. And so when we offer someone listening, it's a way of, because we all have some debris, of dissolving some of that debris,

so the who they are can flow through more clearly. It's an amazing gift. It tells someone you matter when we listen. So I often think of it if tens of thousands of us just had that heightened commitment to listening more deeply, there are ripples in this world that are so beautiful and so possible. And I know that most people think listening is a good idea and that some of you even might have, after the last exploration, said, okay, I'm going to do it, you know, and then realize that after the fact that you had meant to listen and you just completely spaced out or you got distracted

or you got reactive and something happened or you just couldn't resist getting in what you wanted to say. It's such a habit to have wanting to put ourselves into a conversation that we don't often create a space. One writer-Fran Leibowitz says, the opposite of talking isn't listening. The opposite of talking is waiting. We're waiting for somebody to be done so we can say our things. This is from Winnie the Pooh. If the person you are talking to doesn't appear to be listening, be patient.

It may simply be that he has a small piece of fluff in his ear. I was going to rename these talks, removing the fluff. of. So we do have this incessant inner dialogue and the same training that we do in meditation to come really home to ourselves is the training we do for listening, coming back into presence so we can actually be here for others. One friend from Facebook says, what really helps me in listening better is to empty my own mind completely of any thoughts, expectations, fears, or judgments, whenever I begin the process of listening, I try to become the space that is listening and not the self that is listening. That's beautiful, and it's profoundly challenging.

Martha Postal Wade, wonderful poet, reminds us to make a clearing in the dense forest of your life. Make a clearing in the dense forest of your life. And that's really what we're asked to do if we want to listen to each other, is to kind of make a clear and make room for the other being to express. So it starts with becoming aware of the dense farce and not making that any sort of a judgment. That's why it's such a powerful phrase in a poem. And we all know that we get all clogged up. There's a lot of fluff.

So the first step of training in listening is to start noticing, okay, it was pretty dense. There wasn't a whole lot of space for this other person. So our ongoing training and listening is a regular meditation practice. It's to be able to sit and then notice all the dizziness and start, it's not like the thoughts should go away, but just start being aware of how much. is going on in your mind. And it's just the noticing of the thoughts that begins to create the space of freedom. You recognize you've gone off on a thought train.

Okay, okay, thinking, thinking. And you kind of reopen it again and listen to the sounds that are right here. Feel your breath again. Okay, I'm back. Now, while our emphasis is going to be listening more to each other, a powerful way to cultivate listening is by listening to sounds. It's one of the most beautiful ways you can practice with a meditation is just to start really paying attention to the sounds that are there

because as you listen the sounds, you start sensing the space they're happening in and the silence that's listening. A woman, I know, introduced meditation to Monaster, Surrey School children. There were seven to 11-year-olds. And one of the things she did was she had a gong, and she said, here's what I want you to do. I want you to listen to the sound. And just follow the sound and watch where it goes. Just bring an interest to that. And she says, if you watch or follow, you might get closer to God. Well, a young boy did it.

He had that experience in class, and then he told his mother about the experience, and his mother then relayed to this teacher what he had said. And here's what the little boy had said. He said, well, when I watched and listened to where the sound went, I didn't get closer to God. I was God. It still gives me the goosebumps when I think of that, that we become the awareness itself that's listening.

we become the silence that's listening. So if you'd like to close your eyes, you can experiment a little right here. So listen and with interest, just watch where the sound goes. One of the beautiful things about listening to sounds is that you begin to sense the space they're happening in so that if you continue to listen right now,

and sense even the most distant sounds. And you might notice that they don't really seem like they're inside your body. It's hard to sense inside and outside. Noticing how sounds are just known by awareness. They're happening in the space of awareness, in that vastness. And that which knows sound is such. It's a silence. It's listening. So when we're really listening to each other,

there's a deep quietness that's possible that makes a space. But often, as you know, the dense forest is there. So at first we have to just notice that that's happening and just have the intention of quieting, even more than just what we call the dense forest, as we're listening to others, all the old habits of personality jump forward. We quickly get stirred up, so it's harder to rest in that really open, receptive being. And that's okay.

In other words, the idea is not to judge ourselves for them, but just to get interested, what would it be like if we were more intentional about getting quiet and being the space, the silence, the presence for another person. Now, if you'd like to open your eyes, you can. And the first question I'll bring up that I get very regularly is, I mean to listen, but I forget, how do I even remember to listen? That's about it. That's the most basic one.

And that's where I think it's really useful to assume that on your, path, on your spiritual path, or whatever you consider your path, that listening is a very central core commitment to both be able to listen inwardly and to others, because it's the essence of intimacy. You cannot be intimate with yourself and another person if there's not some capacity to listen. So that's the first thing, is just to choose it as an intention. This is part of what I'm practicing. In Asia, they call it my sadna, my spiritual practice. To choose the head, to practice it like a practice where you actually choose somebody you're going to practice listening with. If you say, I'm going to listen, I'm going to be the silence that's listening to everybody,

it's not going to happen. And it just won't. You'll be all scattered and won't happen. And you'll feel like you fail. Choose somebody. You might have someone in mind right now. that a person's a regular part of your life, that you're just going to lean in a little more with that intention. Choose ahead and anchor, something that can help bring you back to presence when you inevitably wander. It could be your hands,

feeling the energy in your hands, or feeling your whole body. For some people, it's their breath. For some people, one of the anchors or ways is to look at the other. a person's eyes. And I've shared many times that I look at the color of a person's eyes. This is not easy to do when you're on the phone. So I don't do it then. But you know, when you're with a person, actually look at the color of their eyes because then you're starting to look

into the windows of the soul and something will wake you up. So pick an anchor as ahead of time and pick some self-coaching phrases that can, you can kind of talk yourself into presence a little if you're wandering. Like sometimes I'll say something like, okay, I'm here now and I'm listening, and my friend is speaking. And I have all the time in the world because we always have the sense

we don't have time. There is time right now. And I'm hearing who this person is behind the words. So there's a real kind of intention in your coaching. So do some, you know, set your self-coaching phrases in advance. And then right before our conversation, set your intention. May I be here? May I be here? And notice when you leave, when you leave,

pay some kind attention to what's going on inside and then reopen, coming back. And last but not least, hold it with interest, with humor, and with forgiveness, because inevitably you will forget and you'll interrupt and you'll be rehearsing what you're going to say, or you're, you'll get reactive. And then if that makes you feel like you're failing, then it won't be a fun kind of a sob, and it'll just be another thing you're not doing well at. So really make it a kind of interesting adventure.

Because I promise you, if, let's say, after this reflection that we're doing together, you have several degrees more of intention to listen, your life will become more interesting. it gets more interesting really so another question that comes at me I want to listen but the other person isn't open with me

okay you know how there's that kind of imbalance like you want to be listening but the other person's just kind of talking about you know real superficial and it kind of reminds me of that Sylvia cartoon some of you might have heard this so Sylvia's in the guise of a fortune teller. And a woman comes up to her and says,

I need you to guide me. My husband won't talk about his feelings. So Selvie goes, what else is new? But she looks into her crystal ball. And she goes, in 2020, men will start talking about their feelings. Within moments, women everywhere will be sorry. So a challenge in listening is that others not speaking in the way we want them to for us to listen to.

We're not getting a good listening experience. They're not being open. They're not being honest. They're not being deep, you know. So there's this subtle level of judging that comes in. And so our intention can be very benign. We're looking for deeper contact, but there's still an agenda. I want to listen and have a good thing happen.

And I noticed this with one woman who desperately wanted to turn around her relationship with her teenage daughter, and she had read books about how to listen and how to draw your teen out and so on, but nothing was working for her. In fact, every time she tried out things, her daughter would rebutfer, it was like, don't try that thing with me, you know, and felt like her mom was too probing and so on. And so when we looked at it, I said, before you can really listen to her, there's something going on. on in your dense forest that wants your attention. And this is the truth for most of us.

If listening's not working, there's something going on inside us that's kind of creating static. And so the first step is to do that, you turn and pay attention to what's going on inside. And what's going on inside for her is she had this feeling of separateness and distance and this pain that she doesn't really know I love her. That was the pain of it that she felt her about her didn't really know she loved her.

And so then, you know, as with rain, you know, recognize and allow that, recognize as R, A is allow, investigate and feel that clench in her heart. And then she called on her future self. That's the end of nurturing. And she, you know, her future self, basically, her wise and loving self said, trust your love for her. Don't worry about what you think she knows. Trust your love. Feel it and trust it. And just send her love. So for a while she didn't try hard to be a good listener. She just said, yes, I love my daughter. And then she sent her loving, kindness, blessings. And she lightened up. She didn't have this need for her daughter to know something by being a good listener. Does that make sense? Then her daughter, her daughter had been, was a senior,

I went to college, but then every time her daughter would come home from college, they totally connected, they talked up a storm because she had dealt with the dense forest, her own anxiety about how, what kind of a mother she was being. So be aware of the good listener agenda because that itself can get in the way. Take care of the inner first. Another key tug that takes us from listening is that there's a sense and this is one that we've talked about some, there's not enough time. That sense of there's not enough time and I'm wondering how many people here have noticed that with listening, that that time pressure, that, that time pressure stops you from listening. Anybody? Not this group. I can see the hands going like this.

Let me share with you a story that really has impacted me a lot. This is from tattoos on the heart, which is a book I highly recommend. And so the this is a Jesuit priest working with Latino gang members. His name's Greg Boyle, Father Greg Boyle, the most violent part of Los Angeles. And he's in his office in this story. It's between morning mass. He just ended that, and he's about to do a baptism.

He's running late. He has about seven minutes still he has to do the baptism. And a woman walks into his room. Her name's Carmen. and she's a heroin addict gang member, occasional prostitute, often seen defiantly storming down the streets, usually shouting at someone. So she just sits down in his office and jumps right into talking.

I'm going to read you from what he writes. I need help. She launches right in Brash and something of a no-shit sister. Oh, she says, I've been to like 50 rehabs unknown all over nationwide. She smiles, her eyes, wander around my office and she studies all the photographs hanging there. She multitasks and her inspection of the place doesn't derail her stream of consciousness rambling. The family will arrive for the baptism in five minutes. I went to Catholic school all my life. Fact. I graduated from high

school even. Fact. Right after graduation is when I started to use heroin. Carmen enters some kind of trance at this point and her speech slows to deliberate and halting. And I have been trying to stop since the moment I began. Then I watch as Carmen telt's her head back until it meets the wall. She stares at the ceiling and in an instant her eyes become these two ponds, what are rising to meet their edges, swollen banks spilling over. Then, for the first time, really, she looks at me and straightens. I am a disgrace. Suddenly, her shame needs mine, for when Carmen walked through the door, I had mistaken her for an interruption. This sense that real kindness is only possible when we are willing to stray from our course of purposeful

trying to get the next thing done. And I share this because we're so often in the trance of on my way somewhere else. And if that's the reality we're living in, then we really can't hear someone. They're in the way and there isn't enough time. And as one person wrote, life is what's happening. When we're on our way somewhere else, we miss out. So it's very difficult to sustain attention and the more we're stressed, the less we're here, the less we're

present. One friend wrote this, multitasking is possible. Multifocus is not. We just can't be there. So how many of us have ever, ever been on a phone call and at the same time then email? Don't raise your hands. We don't have to confess at that level. But we know, right? And it's only, the pull to multi is only getting stronger. I mean, we're online and fragmented so often. We always have these things coming in. It's very hard to have that listening to the gong and that space of presence and becoming the silence that's listening.

Not easy in this culture. I can say for myself that, you know, one time I'm remembering in a very simple way working and having a scheduled call and I, okay, I put down my work and got on the call and sensing how much, I wanted to be back doing the work I was doing and feeling this anxiety in my body. And the practice for me has become, and this is where the dense sparse comes in,

is to know that I have to make the U-turn and breathe with what's there and then re-resolved to be here. Like, re-chews, I'm here. This matters. There's time. So not to do email, not to try to multi. I do water plants while I'm on the phone. And I announce it so nobody will think I'm peeing or something.

Okay, so the idea here is reconnect with intention. Just keep reconnecting with your intention. Remind yourself of why listening matters. Because if you're listening because you feel guilty or obliged, it won't be sincere. I love the story of one minister talks about giving a, a sermon on a Sunday, and he says, I heard two teenage girls in the back whispering and giggling and disturbed me. So I interrupted the sermon. I announced sternly, there are two of you back there that haven't heard a word that I've been saying, and that quieted them down. Then he says,

when the service went over and he was greeting people, the front door, there are at least six adults that apologize for not listening. He promised it would never happen again, you know. guilt. So the reality is that we have to remember how come it matters to us. We have to remember what a difference it makes when we actually listen to someone. We listen and it benefits us because there's the integrity of presence. We really come home to ourselves. We make a clearing in the dense forest, which is beautiful. And it's a blessing to another. Rachel Naomi Remen, who's one of my favorite teachers, writers.

She's a wise woman, Mench. In her book, Kitchen Pable Wisdom, this is another high recommend book. She described the head of the Department of Family Medicine in some teaching college. and what a type of a person he was. And the particular story that I loved was of one patient that would come to see him once a week. And she was a homeless woman.

And she'd make this steep climb up to his clinic. She actually was, you know, I was once a month that he'd see her. And when she got there, her speech was kind of rambling and erratic. and so on, eccentric, but he was in trouble by that, and with his usual grave courtesy, he welcomed her to his consulting room and listened to the details of her difficult life and tried to ease whatever he could of her burden. Well, after he had been seeing her for some while, he became aware that she sometimes came to the hospital when he wasn't there. Others would report it. The clinic nurses were puzzled. At first she seemed, and some mysterious,

way she'd know it wasn't her day to see the doctor. And what she'd do is she just would stand by his consulting room, stand on the threshold, and slowly and deliberately she'd place a foot inside and then pull it back and then a foot inside and pull it back and after a while she'd be satisfied and she'd go away. This is what Rachel Remen writes. She says, the places in which we are seen and heard and cared for are holy places. They remind us of our intrinsic goodness and worth. They give us the strength that go on. They may even eventually help us transform our pain into wisdom.

So the places that we are heard are holy places. And it really is the atmosphere of holiness that you can feel it's suffused with presence. there is healing possible. So we remember, if we want to really show up and listen, we remember how come it matters, and that regardless of how much another person listens, when we're present, it creates a bridge, it creates a connection. This is from Nick Penna.

He says, you can listen anywhere. Your mind might not want to go. If you can listen, You can find answers to questions you didn't know. If you have listened, truly listened, you don't find yourself alone. Nick Penna is in fifth grade. Pretty good. If you have listened, truly listened, you don't find yourself alone.

Okay, big question. How do I deal with listening when there's conflict? How is it when we're like really disagreeing can we listen to each other? We know it doesn't happen out in the bigger world. We know that what we're experiencing right now is the not listening going on. How do we do it? How do we change that? If someone's being critical, if they have differing political views,

or someone's telling you something that brings up your judgment or dislike. So what happens? And what we know is that when we get into conflict and stress happens, the aperture kind of narrows and we're really not able to take in much. I saw one in the New Yorker, one cartoon, a couple's arguing and he's saying, yeah, well, the Dalai Lama never had a deal with your whining. So one of the questions people ask me often is, how do I be open and listen, but also take care of myself? and that's kind of what I want to be exploring. How do we not be defensive of another person's being manipulative or self-serving or attacking us?

So the first thing is that in this training to listen, if there's a place where you feel someone's being disrespectful or causing you harm, that's not a place to practice maybe. You know, that's, if somebody's, If there's harm, then you need to protect yourself, and it may not be a place to be open or even be engaging. So this is something that takes some wise discernment, a sense, is it healthy to be in conversation. But if you feel able, if you feel resilient, if you feel that you want to stretch yourself, let's explore how then you can create a clearing.

And one of the tricks is to ahead of time, you know, especially if there's a way, this is a repeating situation with somebody, create a clearing ahead of time. In other words, ahead of time anticipate what gets triggered, make the U-turn. Now that when I say U-turn, what I mean by that is if somebody, if you know you're going to talk to somebody and they're going to say something that makes you feel like you're doing a bad job and you're not good enough and something's wrong with you because that's a real common one. you talk to them, make the U-turn, meaning turn your attention from them doing that to what it

brings up in you, and feel it, and breathe with it, and bring kindness to it, and do some self-healing with it. In other words, bring your own wisdom and kindness to reassure and comfort and calm yourself. So you create a little bit of that clearing of presence ahead at a time by taking care of your own unmet needs. That is a key piece to being able to enter into a conversation that's triggering and have a little more space. When it's two people talking, it's really good to have an agreement to take a time out for clearing a space. There's some really wonderful research done by John Gottman. He works a lot with couples and he did a experiment where he had couples talking and talking about subjects that would bring up a lot of

stress and conflict. And he had them wired up in some way to measure different activity in their brain, except the wiring was fake. And at one point he said, oh, things aren't working, I have to fix the equipment. And he'd do that right when they reached a peak of having, you know, really being at odds with each other. So they had to take a time. out. So they, I'm just separate rooms for 50 minutes. And then he got them back together, okay, fix the equipment, resume. But it turned out that they were much more resilient, much more space, much more able to work out whatever was going on. Now, they hadn't meditated. They didn't make a U-turn and clear their, you know, bring loving kindness to their own

at needs. They just took 15 minutes, which as it turns out, taking any time away from the trigger, our system has some resilience that it can begin to calm down on its own. Imagine if you take that time out and you actually do a real meditation with yourself, a lot more resilience. Whether we are facing a situation where there's conflict or whether we have an agenda or whether we're just distracted or whether we're feeling time short, there are many different reminders that can help bring us back online, so to speak, that can help to recreate that clearing. And I wanted to take some moments to read a little bit of the kind of community wisdom that came my way this week from friends online on how we can do it.

it. So you might just hear this as a kind of a listening poem, sit back, relax. I try to imagine that person when they were young, seeing that innocence in their eyes as a way of bringing my attention back to the world in front of me. I've learned to breathe out gently, relax my jaw and my shoulders, and lean back a little so I can take in the message and listen as though it was my in-need self talking. Curiosity. Being endlessly curious about people, nature, everything, can only continue by listening and becoming even more curious.

I have learned not to see myself as someone who needs to be the problem solver for those I love. The first thing I try to do is be slow to respond. Sometimes lingering silence encourages opening more deeply. I have learned that an immediate response has the potential to cut off deeper insight. I want to read that again because it's a really good one. The first thing I try to do is be slow to respond. Sometimes lingering silence encourages opening more deeply. I have learned that an immediate response has the potential,

to cut off deeper insight. Knowing no response is needed to be peppered back, most of us rarely require an oral response, having someone allow words to flow without interruption can be medicine, pausing, connecting to my breath, and looking into the other person's eyes. Another question that comes. What if the other is not creating a,

clearing or listening. How do you manage the judgment or frustration of not being heard back, wishing the other was a better listener? And I suspect some of you've been wondering about this, that you're going to take on this project of really trying to listen and you might have a partner or a friend or whatever that just doesn't meet you in that. And you're the one that's always creating the clearing and the deep forest and they're not. And sometimes, So the first thing to say is that in many, many instances, it is uneven. We don't all have the same capacity to listen. The capacity to listen is kind of like the capacity to tolerate and feel feelings.

Not everybody can. Some people were really wounded so intensely early on that it's actually dangerous to feel feelings and it's dangerous to listen inwardly and therefore it's cut off. So it's easy to blame others who are not listening well, but that only creates more of an atmosphere of tension and mistrust. Now, there's, if somebody feels like you're blaming them for something, that's the last thing that's going to happen is that they're going to listen better. So two remembrances are this, that we all have different conditioning, and blame

only creates a distance and that your listening can help another person learn to listen, as well as freeing your own being. It doesn't mean we have to resign to not having others listen. If there is some openness in another, we can explore ways to make it, to be there for each other. Just know that blame creates more fluff. That's kind of the equation here. So finally, on a societal level, because we've been talking about on an individual level, and the same exact principles that we're exploring, that we pay attention to where the inner fears and hurts are, so that we do some healing with that, and so we have more space for others,

that we learn the incredible pathway, of finding ourselves distracted and just bring ourselves back and saying, listen, I can listen, I can be here. That if it can be done with others, especially others of difference, this is the kind of opportunity to bridge that really makes for evolutionary progress towards peace. And I wanted to share a story that I now and then share, I wrote about it, I think, in radical acceptance, where there were teenage girls that were flown in from Israel and Palestine to a camp in rural New Jersey. And I think part of the reason I wanted to share tonight is because of a lot of the pain and angst around what's going on in the Middle East right now. And that this shows the other side, which is that if we put our attention to it, we can actually create bridges.

So this name of the program is building bridges for peace. And a group of teenage girls are thrown into this together in this camp in rural New Jersey, and have to live there together for several weeks or however long I don't remember. And during that time they examine all their beliefs and all their senses of their identity and all the things that really fueled estrangement and hatred and war. And initially in the program, the girls were. very mistrustful of each other. So it takes a while for them to start connecting. And they're trained in very basic listening practices of hearing something and saying back what you've heard,

you know, so that the other person really gets it that they've been heard. So at an early, at one of these camps, a Palestinian girl told the rest of the campers about how Israeli soldiers had barged into her family's house, beating up everybody, and then left without apology after finding out they were the wrong place. And so the facilitator asked an Israeli team to just say it, to repeat the story back, part of compassionate listening, in the first person, including the feelings of rage and terror, that she might have felt.

And after listening to the Israeli girl retell her story, the Palestinian girl began to weep and she said, my enemy has heard me. My enemy has heard me. And the two girls cried together and threw their time together actually became close friends. When they were all leaving, one Israeli girl put it this way. She said, if I don't know you, it's easy to hate you.

If I look in your eyes, I can't. So one of the promises of listening, and we have to practice in our individual life, but we also need to do it as groups of people with others, is that listening brings a proximity and an intimacy where we get beyond the surface mask of who we think others are. We get past the idea of an unreal bad other and it actually gives us the potential to see the humanness, the shared humanness, the vulnerability, the goodness so we can begin to move forward together. So this is the domain of reconciliation

and it's occurring around the globe and we need more of it. So we'll close with just a little practice of of listening that we'll be with right now. You want to just adjust how you're sitting. In the stillness, take some moments to notice wherever there's particular tightness or tension and see if there's a natural letting go that's possible.

Letting your senses be awake. Allow yourself to listen to the sounds that are right here. listening not just with your ears, but your whole awareness. And taking in everything evenly, letting it wash through. Sense yourself resting in the heart space that's listening. An openness, awakefulness, and a tenderness that's just listening. The sounds around you. And feeling the skin, your body, where you sense your body,

interfacing the space around you and then sensing that you can listen to and feel into your body you might imagine and sense that your awake heart is listening to your smaller heart to your smaller self and sense what might want to be known and heard right now you might listen to and feel the area of your heart

maybe there's something going on right now in your life that wants the listening attention of your own awake self, your more evolved self, your future self, resting in that listening heart space and listen inward and sense what might want attention right now. Maybe there's some fear or some sadness or some loneliness. The invitation of this listening heart space is to welcome and include whatever's here to offer a tender, clear space, to receive the life inside you.

What wants to be known right now, to be listened to? Whatever you notice, whatever emotion or mood, or whatever's been there that maybe hasn't been in conscious awareness. Let it be received in a very pure, open-hearted, listening presence. Notice what it's like to feel that parts of your own being have been received by your own high self, by this awake heart. Received, held, honored, widening the space of awareness to sense the beings in your life. you might sense someone in your life that you'd like to deepen your commitment to listening to.

And sense your intention to bring this awake, listening heart space to that person, to know there'll be natural reactivities and distractions. And that part of the training is to just notice them and come back again, keep re-arriving, very forgiving. re-arriving and bringing an interest in care, holding a space for another. In the sense as we do this together, so many of us deepening our listening attention, we create the kind of sacred space that can bring healing to our world. We close with a poem by John Fox.

when someone deeply listens to you. When someone deeply listens to you, it is like holding out a dented cup you've had since childhood and watching it fill up with cold, fresh water. When it balances on top of the brim, you are understood. When it overflows and touches your skin, you are loved. When someone deeply listens,

to you. The room where you stay starts a new life and the place where you wrote your first poem begins to glow in your mind's eye. It is as if gold has been discovered. When someone deeply listens to you, your bare feet are on the earth and a beloved land that seemed distant is now at home within you. When someone deeply listens to you, your bare feet are on the earth, and a beloved land that seemed distant is now at home within you.

Namaste, and thank you for your listening presence.