Tara Brach - Listening with an Awake Heart

Episode Date: July 25, 2012

2012-07-25 - Listening with an Awake Heart - Listening to our inner life and each other is the grounds of healing, intimacy and love. This talk explores the challenges to offering a listening presence, and the qualities of open receptivity and interest that nourish true communicating. Please support this podcast by donating at www.tarabrach.com or www.imcw.org. Your donations allow us to continue to freely offer the teachings!

title tonight of our talk is listening with an awakened heart. And you might have predicted it from the meditation, some of you that know me well. I try to gear our meditation some to the theme. And I guess I'd like to ask you a question first, which is how many of you have an intention in your life to listen well? How many is that a conscious intention? Can I see by hands? Okay, that's a lot of us. That's a lot. How many of you feel like you have a good way to go? The same hands, okay. It's not easy, is it? We go into a very quick trance, even with the best of intentions,

as soon as we're with each other, and get, usually there's these strong habits of being preoccupied, having an agenda or being self-conscious or rehearsing what we're going to say. It's not so easy, I know. And really, when you think of it, learning to be present in communications, listening well is as profound and challenging a training in presence as any other form of meditation. I mean in a way when we're just sitting we have a lot of inner distractions

but we in some ways at least partially sometimes pull ourselves away from all the externals not so when we're with each other so it's challenging and I think of it as with any great art any spiritual unfolding

that it takes a deliberate practice That's the languaging of more contemporary languaging saying that we need to put in our thousand plus hours because we're really, it has to do with neuroplasticity. We have very deeply grooved habits of how we relate to each other and we bring in all of our needs to prove ourselves as somebody or to come up with the right thing or to defend ourselves. We bring that into our communication.

So we have these groove patterns, and how do they change? You know, we have to be able to pause and with some intentionality, contact in a deeper way presence, our body, our heart, and speak from that. And it's hard to interrupt what really is a kind of tumbling forward that we're in most of the time. Have you noticed that? that many moments were in some way leaning forward, tumbling forward. So it takes intentionality.

For most of us, even though we have the intention to practice listening, we don't do it too much, unless we're in some formal training, you know. So I find that really what grabs us is suffering, that it's when all of a sudden a relationship hits the skids, you know, we hit that major conflict with our teen or our partner and I are in a standoff you know we're just not our in some way we're we're with a colleague there's a real hostility that's built and somehow that suffering builds enough so that we realize or else our therapist tells us you have to you have to be more intentional in how you're listening because it really comes down to listening now most of

of our meditation training you can consider as inner listening. That we, because we're so hypervigilant, we fixate our attention on all the things around us that might either be dangerous or have something to offer us, including our thoughts. But we don't offer a listening presence to our inner life. So we don't necessarily pick up until maybe way later that we've been feeling,

lonely are that there's a longing that really wants attention or a sadness. So we're not intimate with ourselves in those moments. So I'm thinking of the different realms now of where this listening is so critical and we know it with any mature relationship that we have to be able to listen. And we also are coming to realize that anywhere there's conflict, whether it's between governments or between races or religions or ethnic groups, if we don't have the capacity

to listen and understand the fears, the concerns of the, what seems like other, will never have the kind of understanding that can reduce the fear and create a sense of harmony. So we need it. We need it.

our social world, we need it in our interpersonal world and we need it intracecically with ourselves. We need to know how to pause to step out of the busyness and pay attention to what's here. Now one of the challenges is that as much as we need that our culture is more ADD, more attention deficit than ever before. Along with speed is loudness. There's a lot of distraction. They say that, And there's an international, let me see what I wrote down, it's an international organization for listening that has these statistics. Well, whatever the name of it is.

Our attention spans about 22 seconds, which is why commercials have to get shorter and louder and more colorful than ever. Have you noticed that? I mean, and movies, we know that. You know, the frames are just shorter and punchier because we lose our attention. How many of you know what it's like to be on the? the phone and resist multitasking while you're on the phone. I mean, how often are we, we don't have to do hand raises on this. And I'm talking about not just going to pee. I'm talking about

being online and going shopping while you're having a conversation. You know, it, I know you know. Right. And so everything in our environment's clamoring for attention and it's getting louder. The newspapers are louder. The radio's louder. You know, everything is like clamoring for attention. And then, of course, we've got our own inner busy at us, our ways of being preoccupied and racing. So it's very hard to be in a conversation and really arrive. It's hard.

So what I'd like to explore in our time together in this class, really is what does it mean in this? moment to listen deeply. I mean, what does that really mean? What stops us? What's really getting in the way? And how can we cultivate our capacity to really be here for ourselves and each other? And what I'd like to invite you to do, because I think it'll make a difference, is choose one person in your life that you would like to deepen your connection with by listening in a more fully present way. Just pick one person as you listen tonight so that as we do little, you know, reflections and so on,

you can explore that person. But even beyond tonight, if you want to practice and it takes a kind of commitment to practicing, it takes a commitment and if we try to make it too broad, like, okay, I'm going to leave, here and I'm really going to pause and whenever I'm with anybody I'm going to get into a deep listening space. It won't happen. You'll just feel like you're failing and that's not a good setup. So pick one place that you want to practice and that'll keep it a little more focused and a little more possible to start deepening your skills. Okay? Okay, so what does it mean in this moment to listen? You might consider that. What does it really mean?

There's a friend of mine who was at a Montessori school, 7 to 11-year-olds, doing a brief kind of class or meditation with them. And the way he did it was he had a gong, and here's the gong for now. He had a gong, and he said to the kids, what I want you to do is just hear it and follow the sound and watch where it goes. He said, just with interest, watch where it goes. rose. Okay? And he says, if you watch, if you follow it, you might get closer to God. So he did it and he played the gong and they listened. And then he found out afterwards,

because one of his friends' children was in the class, that she relayed the conversation afterwards and the little boy said, well, when I watched and listened to where the sound went, he said, I didn't get closer to God. I was God. I was God. And Think of it. What happens when we become fully present? We become presence itself. Not closer to present, we're presence. We become that, that beingness. So on the day that I had a talk that involved a gong, I forgot my own gong. So you might close your eyes and listen to this one. Just listen and follow the sound and sense where the sound goes, continuing to listen. And as you do,

you might sense a listening presence is perhaps the closest template for awareness itself. There's full listening. There is boundless kind of space for whatever arises. Completely receptive. Can you sense the space that's listening? It's like an open sky. And when there's listening, there's also an active engagement, an awakeness. So it's open and awake. Now, if you'd like, you can open your eyes. But as we revisit this, just to keep in mind those two qualities, it's kind of yin-yang where we sense that there's both this open receptivity and this engaged awakeness, and they both together make for a listening presence. Okay?

Now, what we then ask ourselves is, you know, well, what's the challenge? And in a way, meditation's been likened to listening to music. You're not trying to get to the end, right? When you're listening to music? I mean, that would be silly. Why would you turn on a song so you could get to the end, right? You're there to just be, you know, just to let it move through you. And so there's no goal to, there's nothing you're adding.

nothing you're taking away. If you're really listening to music, you're just being. You're just spontaneously recognizing what's appearing. And meditation and a listening presence is the same. The challenge is that we have huge conditioning to do anything but just be. We have huge conditioning to in some way try to control what's happening, not just that radical allowing. So how does our conditioning play out? We start looking at it. We quickly have to assert our selfness into situations rather than just hanging in that open openness.

And in the communication, how do we do it? And if you think about it, our shared reality breaks down because rather than that openness that doesn't interfere with what we're taking in, that openness that can sense the truth of what your communication, or the truth of reality, we add on our interpretation. We take it through our own filter and we add on and project what's going on.

That's how we break communications. One of my favorite examples, just to say that when I talk about breaking communications, I'm talking about in some way that we're still engaged, but we're not, really on the same wavelength. We're not really speaking and understanding each other. So the challenge that goes on, if we think about it in traditional Buddhist terms, there are three conditionings that take us away, that have us break communications, break connections. One of them is wanting, we're wanting something different so we can't just listen. of them is aversion. We don't like what's happening, so we have to control. And the third

is neutrality. It doesn't matter to us, so we just, okay? So let me take them one at a time. And again, I'm going to invite you to think of whoever you're wanting to deepen communications with and sense, now how is this, is this what's between me and listening with an away cart? because that's the inquiry what is between me and listening with an away card now when there's wanting sometimes it's wanting something from that person

and sometimes you're wanting something that has nothing to do with that person right but when there's wanting you can ask yourself am I wanting for that person to experience me in a certain way I mean how often are we talking with someone and even listening to them

but in some way we're wanting them to have a certain experience of us. Is that familiar? It's rare when it's not there, okay? It's rare when we're not attached to having them have a certain kind of experience of us. And sometimes it's really strong. Sometimes we're really wanting their approval or wanting them to think we're helpful,

wanting them to think in some way we're interesting. So that's one inquiry, is to sense, are we wanting the conversation to go in a particular direction? Are we wanting some affirmation, some result? What are we wanting? Now, sometimes the wanting that pulls us from presence has nothing to do with that person. Okay. Sometimes it may be that we're just wanting to do something different at that moment, that we're wanting to be with someone else, we want to have something to eat. You know, we just don't want to be there. So check it out. Sense for yourself. there's wanting of anything how that pulls us away from that pure presence that

really is what lets intimacy happen. That's one approach is the wanting or one thing that gets in the way. The second aversion. Now we know what it's like when it's with that person. If you're in some way feeling threatened by somebody, very hard to have an open listening presence, right? This is a Some of you might remember the Maxine cartoons. And this one says, guess which four words a woman can say to scare a man out of his wits.

Okay? And then the first frame you see Maxine coming in and she's dressed up like a firefighter and she's saying, our house is burning. And her husband's reading his paper, he goes, mm-hmm. Next time she comes in and she's, you know,

it's like she has a big octopus that's grabbing at her. And she says, the Martians have landed in her husband's reading, goes, mm-hmm, oh really? Then she comes in, she's like a doctor, and she goes, you have terminal cancer. And again, he goes, that's nice, honey.

Last frame, she says, we need to talk. Ah, no, I don't want to die, no, no. So he goes crazy. So bingo, you got it. We need to talk, right? So when there's fear, when in some way having a real, contact with somebody is threatening, listening, it's like we're in fight-flight. We're not open.

We're tight. So then you might ask yourself, you know, with the person you're considering. Is there some fear? Is there something you're organized around that's keeping you from that openness? Just consider. Is there some fear you won't have the right response? some fear of another's judgment or some anger or dislike of how that person's behaving. So you can't just listen. Sometimes there's boredom. Sometimes there's kind of a defendedness that we feel the person's going to ask too much of us. There's a story I've always loved of postmaster General G. Edwin Day

and he describes his strategy to get a long-winded person off the phone. and he says he's on the phone and when he's in the middle of a sentence he hangs up he says, because who would hang up on themselves, you know? So this is his way of getting off the phone. So we have strategies for distancing.

One person writes the process of dying starts at birth and it accelerates at dinner parties. So we're afraid of boredom, you know. Now often the aversion doesn't have to do with the particular person. And I want to take some time with this piece that I found is particularly a big one that gets in the way, which is we, many of us, go around with a chronic sense of not

enough time, just in our lives, there's not enough time. I mean, it's in our nervous system that there's not enough time. That in some way we're racing towards the finish line, we're going to miss out on something or not be prepared for something. not enough time. So then what happens when that energy and that fear is brought into a communication? There's a sense of this is getting in the way. The other is more of an obstacle. How often have you found yourself in some way trying to get out of talking?

There is a beautiful story that I found And this priest is describing how he does masses at these probation camps on Saturday morning. And then he goes back and he does these baptisms and weddings and so on. And this is called From Tattoos on the Heart. Beautiful book. So he describes stopping in the office between things. he's on his way to a baptism. He doesn't have much time.

And then a woman in her 30s walks through the door. I immediately glance at the clock hanging on the wall. I check how much time I have left before the baptism, and I'm already lamenting that I probably won't get to all the male. I find out later that the woman's name is Carmen. She's a recognizable

figure on First Street, and yet this is her first visit to Homeboy. Now, just to back up a little, the homeboy is this industry that's set up for Latino gangs in Los Angeles where they have the most violence of any gang violence anywhere and this whole book is about the power of compassion of reaching these young people and helping them from a life of violence so he goes on he says Carmen is a heroin addict a gang member street person occasional prostitute

and a champion, paleonera. Now I'll read you what he says. He says, I need help. She launches right in, brash and something of a no-shid sister. Oh, she says, I've been to like 50 rehabs. I'm known all over nationwide.

She smiles. Her eyes wander around my office, and she studies all the photographs hanging there. She multitas, 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. In 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 tilts 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, she really looks at me and straightens. I am a disgrace. Suddenly, her shame meets mine. For when Carmen walked through the door, I had mistaken her for an interruption. Do you understand? There's a saying that to be kind, we must swerve often from our path. I feel like that's for me one of the key mantras almost. Because we so regularly think we know where we're going and we're on our way somewhere and we're trying to get there and here just becomes a quick pass-through point

and any of the beings in our life that are here are not the beings that we're going to be. to be hanging with. So to be kind, to offer a listening presence, we have to start having that commitment that says pause. Don't let this moment be an interruption on the way to something else. This counts too. In this moment, it's an amazing radical cutting through when we get it that it's this moment now. It's not like our our Our freedom's going to come when we're done with class. We've practiced meditation for five years and gone to the retreat.

And then we're going to have, ah, illumination. It's only when our minds keep remembering. This is it. And when I say this, I really mean this, like this moment. Can we come home together right now? And listen to the moment. And listen to our hearts. And listen to the space that's here,

whether we're here in this room or we're listening in another country, just listen to the space and feel the presence. So it's a thing about stepping out of an old habit of being on our way and really remembering, reconnecting. Listen now. Be here now. The most basic fear that is between me and listening with an awake heart when you ask that question, if you really look deeply, is that in a moment of pure listening presence, the self-sense dissolves.

If you're listening fully, there's no one home. There's just a space of wakefulness. If you imagine a situation where you're with somebody and they're talking and you imagine letting go of all the thoughts, all the planning, you know, all the judgment, just letting it all go, letting your whole agenda go and just listening. A few things happen. One is if that really, if there's really a letting go, you get, oh, there's just space and awakeness, maybe tenderness. But what you also get is then there's this kind of clutch

that wants to come back again and start thinking again and start coming up with ideas and get ready to respond because if there's nobody home, we might do it wrong. There's still a sense I need to be here to make it work out. This is the most fundamental clinging that the Buddha described as this basic primal urge to keep on reconstructing a self. Does that resonate? The sense of I need to be here.

And there's fear when we're not familiar with letting go, we face a layer, a deep layer, of fearfulness. That's okay, it's really natural, but it's useful to know about it. in something and I says, okay, just hang out with that a little. Don't so quickly grab for the ideas and thoughts and prepare your response. It kind of gets interesting. It's a bit of an adventure to just pause and just open to how it is. It's very radical. We don't do it much. We really don't listen much in that way. The practice of listening is in a very deep way, starting to recognize this ongoing selfing that interferes. And I don't say selfing in a disparaging way,

but this ongoing tendency to try to reassert that there's a person here that needs to be approved or wants to prove or control, just to notice it. Just notice. As long as that's going on, we can't listen to understand. So we can't really pay attention and sense, well, What is this person really saying? Who is here? Where's it coming from? What's really going on? We can't listen for that

because our attention has narrowed into the wanting self or the controlling self or the fearing self, right? So it's only when we start loosening the grip of that selfing that we can actually notice the truth. So I am touching on both the yin and the yang of listening presence. There's letting go of that.

so there's that openness and in that openness, that engagement that wants to know what's true. And our habit, our defensive habit, instead of wanting to know what's true, is assuming we already know. We're with somebody and we make all these assumptions rather than, as I think as T.S. Eliot said in the cocktail party, let this person be a stranger. You're meeting them for the first time in this moment. It's a mystery But we make our interpretations And our interpretations cover over what's real

And we all do it As soon as somebody starts talking We use the filter of our own experience Oh yeah, as a mom I know what that one's like Or whatever it is There's a cartoon of Henry the 8th And one of his wives And there's a mediator with them

Right Okay And the mediator is saying to Henry you say off with her head but what I hear is I feel neglected the next frame is you see a headless mediator right

you got that wrong so we make our interpretations so the key is to listen without controlling with that receptivity that really wants to know this is the way Mark

Nipo puts it he says to listen listen is to lean in softly with a willingness to be changed by what we hear. Let me say that one again. To listen is to lean in softly with a willingness to be changed by what we hear. This is the undefended heart. So give you a chance. We'll take a pause together to allow the person you were considering.

bring that person to mind, allow yourself to consider the circumstances that you have conversations with this person. So you actually bring your attention to some, a real life kind of situation, what might be going on. And if you sense as you bring mindfulness to this relationship that there's some conflicts, some strong wants or fears, just let that be. there so you can really deepen your attention right now. Because you're asking this question again, what is between me and listening with an away card? What stops me? You can just scan a little. If the person's talking, is there something you're wanting? Is there a way you're wanting the conversation to go? Some way you're wanting the person to experience you? Are you wanting

their cooperation. Or is just something you're fearing. As you're listening, are you fearing this person's judgment or that they're going to get away with something, that things they're going to get their way if you just listen? Imagine what would happen if you really put down any agenda and just listen. What bad could happen? You might notice and reflect on when you're in a conversation with this person,

what are the ways that you distract? What are the ways that you get in the way of listening? In other words, do you find that you go off into other thought trains and don't pay attention? Do you try to steer the conversation? Do you ignore certain things? Do you plan your response? Are you making interpretations? So again, just to notice your strategies of trying to defend or get what you want.

And again, you might imagine, well, what would it be like if I just put that down for a little bit? And as you explore, you might just sense your intention to bring this into awareness when you're talking, to bring whatever you're noticing more into consciousness, sense your intention to connect. Keep that awareness, this atmosphere inside you as you continue to listen because I'd like to, and feel free to open your eyes if you'd like. I'd like to touch in now to what is the healing that happens when we offer a listening presence?

Because there's a really huge impact. In the simplest way, I feel like when we offer a listening presence it creates an atmosphere of love and safety. It said that attention is the purest expression of love. Our attention is the purest expression of love. So when we have a listening presence and there's not a self-in going, and there's just that space and that kind of tender, wakeful,

engaged, what's true for you? That is a very pure atmosphere for just nourishing another being. There's a friend described this. A friend asked, was talking to his son. He said, I asked Ali what he thinks his heart does. This young son's named Ollie. And his answer was,

it's in my skeleton and it makes people say hello. There's something about when we offer a listening presence that it brings out other people. And my favorite metaphor for this that I share when I talk about this is of a fountain. and that our being is like a fountain, like this life is this creative dynamic expression of awareness. That it's just awareness in its just dynamic way. And it has all different flavors of intelligence and love and creativity.

And when we haven't been listened to, when there's not the mirroring, the understanding, the safety, that fountain gets clogged up. So rather than expressing our beingness from that source, that purity, that awareness, there's a clogging up and some of it comes out, but it comes out a little torched and twisted and certainly not with its full aliveness and freedom and brilliance and beauty. So a lot of us go around with clogged up inner fountains, right? Because we haven't been listened too well, you know? And I want to add that we haven't listened well to ourselves,

because meditation is a way of unclogging the fountain. Okay, does that make sense? We're doing inner listening, but this is about how we offer a meditative listening presence to others. And so what happens when the fountains clog, the way a person will speak or express themselves, will sometimes sound stagnant or contrived

or packaged or routine, because they're not kind of coming from that freshness. It's more murky. Sometimes it'll seem nervous or speedy, you know, just different ways. There's no silences because there's no connection with what's inside.

So when we listen, we're inviting a kind of connecting and coming from source and that fountain can begin to flow and it allows people to start expressing a deeper truth for them and to shine. But it doesn't happen all at once.

Sometimes when we offer a listening, intention, we first get the different layers that have been kind of caked and muddied up. And so it takes patience, a kind of interest in a willingness just to be, and acceptance of that. The story that I'll share on this, which is a story that'll be in True Refuge when it comes out in February, and it's the ones that most touched me, was a woman who had done a workshop and had listened to this metaphor and was very intentional about her listening capacities. And she, her mother was her person, just like I asked you today to think of who. Her mother, Audrey was a well-known writer, wealthy, successful, brilliant, and very narcissistic woman.

So much so that her daughters, once they graduated from high school, tried, moved so they could be thousands of miles away from her and barely ever visited her. She treated her, the mother treated people as these kind of orbiting satellites to reflect her, whatever. And some people were willing to do it and she'd regaled them with stories. She was a very compelling person, but after a while it could be tiring. For this woman, she decided she was going to, she had a conference nearby where her mother lived. She decided she was going to spend some time with her mom and practice and see what was possible. And during their time together when she would listen to her mother, she'd feel a lot of resistance and a lot of judgment. So the first part of listening, because her mother was doing her thing, was to bring a lot of listening,

presence, and compassion to her own resistance. In other words, if you're going to take on this incredible adventure of listening, make sure that it's got a very, starts with a very self-forgiving, self-compassionate kind of an intention because of course you're going to have reactions. That's a given. So the first thing she did is just forgive that she was feeling resistant and judgmental and annoyed and so on. And as she brought kindness to her own experience, she kind of softened and she started being able to say, okay, whatever comes out, I'm just, there's just a space for it.

she describes it that sometimes she got panicky because she kind of regress into being the kid that was suffocated and overwhelmed and had no existence other than as a kind of mirror for her mother but she said that after some time after she kind of was compassionate with herself she started to bring some humor about it

and she could breathe and forgive her own reactions and say okay space there's room for her even though it's a huge amount of room, there's room for her, whatever comes out. And she would coach herself. She'd say, now, what is happening? And she'd say, my mother's talking. I am quiet. There's endless time.

I hear it. Every word. And what is beyond the word. I hear who she is. And these are some of the coaching pieces. And I think they're really powerful. What happens when we say, there is endless time. I mean, we have such a sense that there's not enough time just to say there's time for this.

There really is time. It's a choice. I'm listening. I hear every word. I hear what is beyond the words. I'm listening into who she is. It gets interesting. So as it got interest more for her, that listening became deeper.

She began to hear her mother's desperation as if she was saying over and over again, I'm here, I'm here, I'm here, I'm here. It's like this desperate asserting that she existed. I'm here and I matter. And so the more she took in her mother's pain, the more she softened, of course, with care. And so it was through her presence that she was able to communicate back,

I'm listening and you matter. Very, very real communication. I'm listening and you matter. And her mother started to relax. there started to be longer pauses between stories. And her mother sat back more in her chair, slowed down, seemed more reflective. So several days before she was going to leave, her mother began to tell her that she felt alone and unappreciated. So this is again, this fountain's unclogging and now she's beginning to name her vulnerability,

which is a phase in it, right? Okay. So she said, I feel alone and unappreciated. And this is when Kate, the daughter, responded really honestly and she said, Mom, it's because you don't listen to people. And her mother froze, but she didn't get defensive because Kate had been so present. She had offered such uncritical sympathy. She had established trust and safety that her mother trusted her words.

So her mother wanted to know more. She said, please tell me I need to know. And Kate explained how for her and her sister, for their dad, now for her stepdad, she said, when you don't listen, people feel like they don't matter like they're not known. And it's true you can't know them if you don't listen, you can't be close. So her mother looked at her with a sorrow that really pierced her heart. She got through and something changed. You know, maybe the pain of alienation broke down her defenses.

but she knew she needed to change and she started to listen and fast forward after her sister joined them for the holidays and was bore witness and said that for the first time in her life she felt like a real

person at home that she existed and so there's this shift and it shifted also with this woman's relationship with now her new husband that they had because they had stopped doing things together They kind of were on parallel separate paths, long dinners and evening walks that had ended shortly after their marriage.

There is a real power that this woman found in being able to hang out with it. I used this story. I wanted to share this story because it's not always as hard, but it can take real patience. And yet it's the most power. powerful healing, I know, to offer this. It's really offering loving presence to another. By clearing that space of our own, I want it this way, I don't want this, and just quietly taking another in. So at the beginning, I was talking about the different domains that listening heals in and that it clearly, in our relationships with each other, to take

turns listening. When I work with couples, it's that process, especially when there's a conflict of just let one person speak. If the other can just listen and say back what they hear so that the person speaking feels heard, something softens, something opens. And if we take turns doing this, we start coming towards understanding. When there's understanding, fear goes down. When fear goes down, trust emerges. Adrian Rich says, an honorable human relationship that is one in which two people have the right to use the word love is a process of deepening the truths they can tell each other. It's a process of deepening the truth they can tell each other. It's important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation. It allows you.

us to tell the truth? It has to be safe enough. There has to be a space of listening presence. So this is on a personal level. In terms of around the globe, if we truly want to respond to the cycles of violence, we need to train ourselves and then train others to listen to each other. It's the only way. It's the only way that we can break down the unreal other and the cycles of hostility. And to me the most beautiful example of it is the truth and reconciliation hearings. It's just such a powerful example. Many testified to the atrocities. They endured under apartheid and they spoke of the healing that came by giving verbal testimony and being listened to. I mean, that's amazing. This is the most horrific torment and loss and that

there's a possibility of healing when we're listened to. And when it happens in a society, to me, that is the evolution of consciousness, bearing witness to that. One young man who had been blinded when a policeman shot him in the face at close range said, I feel what has brought my eyesight back is to come here and tell the story. I feel what has been making me sick all the time is the fact that I couldn't tell my story. Listening creates relationship. There's nothing that exists in isolation, but our pain is when we perceive we're separate, and listening creates the connection.

So we've been exploring, you know, how it's this pathway to connection, and I wanted to read you a short poem by Nick Penna called Waiting in Line. He says, when you listen, you reach into dark corners and pull out your wonders. When you listen, your ideas come in and out like they were waiting in line,

your ears don't always listen. It can be your brain, your fingers, your toes. 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. Okay?

If you listen, you don't find yourself alone. Listening is the pathway to intimacy. If we can pause and listen inwardly, we become intimate with our own being. If we can listen to each other, we find out who we are together. So I think of it as a sacred art. And as I mentioned, like any art,

it takes a kind of dedication to practice. close tonight with just a brief again practice in this listening. We begin with listening to the words of Mary Oliver. What can I say that I have not said before? So I'll say it again. The leaf has a song in it. Own is the face of patience. Inside the river there is an unfinishedable story. And you are somewhere in it and it will never end until all ends. Take your busy, heart to the art museum and the chamber of commerce, but take it also to the forest. The song you heard singing in the leaf when you were a child is singing still. I am of years lived so far 74 and the leaf is singing still.

I am of years lived so far 74 and the leaf is singing still. So in this stillness, opening the senses, listening to the sounds that are in the room, listening to the silence, seeing this world of sound wash through you, be that open, empty heart that sound and sensation in life can move through, live through.

Can you sense the silence that's listening right now? Fastness that's all happening in, tenderness, tender openness, that's listening to the thoughts, the sounds, the silence. You might imagine bringing this listening presence into conversation, communication with a particular person, just having the intention to contact this open, wakeful presence, to pause and then pause again and again,

letting go into this open, empty heart that's just listening. May we awaken into that presence that listens to our own hearts, that presence that listens to each other, to our earth and our world. May this serve the healing of all beings, the awakening and freedom of all beings. Namaste. The talk you just listened. to has been freely offered. If you'd like to make a donation, learn more about my schedule, or about programs offered by the Insight Meditation Community of Washington,

please visit either my website, which is tarabrock.com, our IMCW site, which is IMCW.org. Thank you very much.